If you want to binge on all that is weird and puzzling in cutting-edge music, the London Contemporary Music Festival (LCMF) is the place to go. After a two-year break, it returned in June to one of those post-industrial spaces—this time the old fireworks factory in Woolwich—that are beautiful to look at but short on creature comforts. By the end of the evening my bench seemed punishingly hard. Still, it got me thinking: where is contemporary classical music heading?
Normally this festival gives a forcible reminder that modern music has an incredible profusion of styles and aesthetics, which can seem like joyful anarchy or depressing evidence that the world is going to the dogs, depending on your temperament. Over here are the neo-Dadaists who cheerfully mock the old classical pieties; over there the performers on turntables and laptops; in another corner the numerous followers of Philip Glass; in still another the composers who fancy being the next John Williams. None of these can lay claim to the centre ground, because there is no centre.
But when I reeled out of the penultimate night of LCMF, it struck me that modern music is going in a discernible direction. This was not because one style emerged triumphant. In fact, there were as many ways of making music as there were performances—some barely counting as music at all. There was a “symphony” by Ben Patterson that involved scattering ground coffee on the floor. There were the hyperactive experimental films of Japanese filmmaker Stom Sogo, a simultaneous assault on the ears and eyes. There was an aloof, abstract cello concerto from Tyshawn Sorey, an orchestral piece from Oliver Leith that sounded as if a romantic piece had been force-fed with mind-altering drugs, an enthralling live performance on turntables by Mariam Rezaei. In previous years, I’ve seen even more bizarre juxtapositions, with live poetry and Dadaist theatre stirred into the mix.
Faced with this mad profusion, you stop worrying about finding coherence and continuity. Instead you take what comes in a spirit of amusement or outrage or boredom. The setting encouraged this. We were constantly being ambushed by something from an unexpected direction. Just as an orchestral piece was finishing at the far corner of the space, something else would spring to life on the second stage to the left, and then after that the screen above our heads would suddenly be filled with blazing imagery. There was no time to peer at the programme to see what was happening—in any case it was too dark to read. So eventually one gave up the attempt to understand and accepted that the evening would be just “one damned thing after another,” in a good way.
Historically speaking, what kind of show offered 10 minutes of something, followed by another 10 of something completely different and with no apparent connection? Answer: the variety show. There are precedents for cutting-edge art being presented in this way. When the Italian futurist Luigi Russolo first performed his intonarumori (noise machines) for a London audience in 1914, it was during a variety show at the Coliseum. During the 1920s, music-hall and variety shows were the favourites of Jean Cocteau and Erik Satie; a ballet like Satie’s Parade is basically a series of “turns,” with no real dramatic narrative. Going back further, the courtly entertainments of the Renaissance and early Baroque eras were full of irrelevant scenes and dances, inserted between the serious drama.
As the years went by and the idea that art was something loftier and more serious than mere entertainment took hold, these insertions started to seem embarrassing. By the mid-Baroque they had vanished. “Turns” were all very well for vaudeville and music hall, but proper art should make sense. Another symptom of this increasing seriousness was a tendency for the various art-forms to be cultivated separately, each with its own academies and institutions: art galleries for art, concert halls for music. The concept of “pure music” arose, which exalted abstract forms above ones that were tainted with pictorialism or narrative. Symphonies and sonatas were rated far higher than ballet scores. This purist tendency reached its zenith with the modernist wing of classical music, where forbidding complexity was de rigueur.
However, the simple joy in the anarchic and inconsequential can never be repressed for long. I got a strong feeling here that the cult of “pure music” and high art was being laid to rest, or at least being given a hefty kick up the backside. Of course, it couldn’t be a complete revolution: some of the “turns” would have been booed off the stage of a real variety show. But still, one felt something new in the air. I reckon it’s time for LCMF to go the whole hog and offer strongmen and dancing girls. And some cushions on those benches wouldn’t go amiss.
