Ending on an up-beat
Given that everything has to have a millennial theme right now (my local DIY shop boasts a "millennium screwdriver"), it is hardly surprising that concert halls and record shops have been awash with end-of-an-era pieces. What's been lacking, surprisingly, are start-of-an-era pieces. None of the five "Millennium Messages" premiered late last year by the New York Philharmonic fulfilled conductor Kurt Masur's hope that they would "reflect the hopes and dreams we all have as we enter the next century... unified by the basic idea that we all want to live together in peace." The five composers (from Russia, Germany, England, the US and Japan), knowing that soothing bromides make bad music, fashioned more complex and ambiguous responses to the moment-much to the dismay of the Disney Corporation, which sponsored the event.
If Kurt Masur wanted wide-eyed optimism, he should have talked to the Chinese composer Tan Dun, who lives on his doorstep in New York. In fact Dun did write a World Symphony for the Millennium, although not for the New York Phil. And he had already proved his talent for affirmative music with a symphony to celebrate the handover of Hong Kong. He pressed all the right buttons then-children's voices to signify hope, ancient Chinese gongs the east, the orchestra the west, and so on. Despite its longueurs, the piece had a certain guileless charm about it. The new symphony lacks even that, and although it presses the same buttons (ancient meets modern, bright new dawn, joyous knees-up, cold north meets warm south) the only note struck is one of bathos. The movement called The East sounds like The Road to Morocco without the laughs, while At Sunrise sounds like Rolf Harris's didgeridoo.
Flattery and fluency
Good taste was at one time what musical modernism was trying to escape, although in the recent works of the elder statesmen of modernism-Berio, Boulez, Ligeti-you'd hardly know it. The music of the gifted 28-year-old Thomas Ad?s may share the "licked surface" of those masters, but it comprehends a rude, nose-thumbing energy as well, as his Grawemeyer prize-winning piece Asyla proves. The Grawemeyer is normally awarded to greying composers such as Birtwistle and Ligeti, and it shows how fast Ad?s has moved from wunderkind to big-league player. His rise mirrors that of George Benjamin, another Cambridge composer. But they have very different roots. Benjamin was the favourite student of Olivier Messiaen, that fulcrum of postwar modernism, and spent years writing computer music in Ircam, Pierre Boulez's hi-tech musical bunker beneath the Pompidou Centre. At every stage he has been nurtured by the modernist musical establishment, and still moves within it. Compare that to Ad?s, whose early exposure from the London Sinfonietta caused such a sensation that he flew that nest almost before he had landed in it. Now he moves in "normal" classical music territory. He writes pieces for symphony orchestras, opera houses and string quartets, not new-music groups with pretentious names. His music plays before enthusiastic halls of 1,000, rather than the standard few dozen new-music anoraks. Why? Above all because of its fluency. Fluency was under suspicion during the long reign of the postwar modernists. Those composers who had it, like Britten (a composer Ad?s reminds one of) were despised. The stammer, the long drawn-out silence, the welter of jagged sounds suggestive of some abstract order-all these were badges of sincerity. They also bewildered and humiliated the listener. For these listeners to hear, suddenly, a music which sounds modern-Ad?s is no populist or arch post-modernist-and yet where one thing leads so naturally to another, is like finding an oasis in the desert. Ad?s is flattering to listen to, the way a writer like Barthes is flattering to read. The sheer exuberance of the flow of thought is entrancing. Quite what the thoughts are, and whether their glitter really is gold or just tinsel, you're not sure. And therein lies the attraction. The mystery is all there, in the sensuous surface-which is what makes Ad?s, despite the rude shocks, the wonky quarter-tone pianos, the melting, shifting textures, a conservative composer.
Is the underground still chic?
Half the CDs reviewed in the last pre-millennium issue of The Wire, that essential accoutrement of the musically street-wise, seemed to be of underground bands of the 1960s and 1970s. But the notion that the underground is more "authentic" than commercial bands is now starting to seem out of step with late 1990s irony. As the 1999 "Meltdown" festival at the South Bank Centre proved, the most unlikely things can now be given the kiss of life by the ironic glance of post-modern pop, from Burt Bacharach to Nancy Sinatra. Not to mention classical music. The most sober of these smash-and-grab raiders on the classics is William Orbit, who until discovered by Madonna was just another audio geek, mixing samples on racks of gear in a house in Crouch End. Now he is a celebrity, whisked from one interview to the next in a Warner Music limo. His CD of remixes of short classical pieces at first seems wide-ranging-Ravel's Pavane and Vivaldi's Winter sit alongside G?recki and P??rt. But pretty soon you notice that what links them all-especially in these bleached-out, glacial, Orbit-of-Pluto arrangements-is a floating, mesmeric quality. It's all very tasteful, hushed, and dimly lit, like walking past a row of beautifully embalmed corpses.
