Huddersfield Contemporary Music festival
Cage and Stockhausen meet their match as the Huddersfield Contemporary Music festival hits 30
'The British may not understand music but they absolutely love the sound it makes.' So quipped Thomas Beecham, and he certainly put his finger on something. For while the conductor and one-time pillar of the British musical establishment was no friend of the musical avant-garde, one of its guiding principles has none the less been to liberate the sound music makes from the various kinds of 'understandings' with which it has been reined in.
It should be no surprise, on Beecham's account, to find that the British play host to one of the best-loved avant-garde music festivals, where musicians from all over the world come each November to witness the latest fruits of musical experimentation in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire. That said, with the festival reaching its 30th anniversary, this year's event had a distinctly retrospective flavour to it, with the closing event consisting of a modified recreation of a John Cage concert organised in 1958 by the artists Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns.
The original concert was a riot, the musicians protesting as loudly as the audience against the minute unpredictability of the Concert for Piano and Orchestra, an hour-long work in which the pianist struggles through 60 pages containing 84 different kinds of notation. The Huddersfield recreation, masterfully handled by Philip Thomas and the Apartment House group, was an altogether tamer affair, a reminder that much of Cage's output is, while still fresh, classic primarily in the documentary sense of that term.
The first part of the concert, though, revealed Cage at his lasting best - in particular the Webernesque miniatures of 1934's Six Short Inventions and 1943's muted She is Asleep - and the second part departed from the original by presenting six new compositions. Witty tributes from Alvin Curran and Philip Corner framed offerings from younger composers - short pieces by Markus Trunk and Claudia Molitor confirming that Cage's musical influence remains a powerful force ...
'The British may not understand music but they absolutely love the sound it makes.' So quipped Thomas Beecham, and he certainly put his finger on something. For while the conductor and one-time pillar of the British musical establishment was no friend of the musical avant-garde, one of its guiding principles has none the less been to liberate the sound music makes from the various kinds of 'understandings' with which it has been reined in.
It should be no surprise, on Beecham's account, to find that the British play host to one of the best-loved avant-garde music festivals, where musicians from all over the world come each November to witness the latest fruits of musical experimentation in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire. That said, with the festival reaching its 30th anniversary, this year's event had a distinctly retrospective flavour to it, with the closing event consisting of a modified recreation of a John Cage concert organised in 1958 by the artists Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns.
The original concert was a riot, the musicians protesting as loudly as the audience against the minute unpredictability of the Concert for Piano and Orchestra, an hour-long work in which the pianist struggles through 60 pages containing 84 different kinds of notation. The Huddersfield recreation, masterfully handled by Philip Thomas and the Apartment House group, was an altogether tamer affair, a reminder that much of Cage's output is, while still fresh, classic primarily in the documentary sense of that term.
The first part of the concert, though, revealed Cage at his lasting best - in particular the Webernesque miniatures of 1934's Six Short Inventions and 1943's muted She is Asleep - and the second part departed from the original by presenting six new compositions. Witty tributes from Alvin Curran and Philip Corner framed offerings from younger composers - short pieces by Markus Trunk and Claudia Molitor confirming that Cage's musical influence remains a powerful force ...
