first performances 89
After three such substantial and emotionally
wrought performances, the Birmingham
Contemporary Music Group’s matinee prom at
Cadogan Hall provided a well-needed palate
cleanser of sparkling miniatures. Ophiocordyceps
unilateralis s.l. by Shiori Usui teemed with
imaginative and quirky gestures, telling the
macabre story of a colony of ants being infected
by a parasitic fungus. A somewhat derivative
piece from Joanna Lee paled in comparison to
the beautifully wrought Wanderlied by octagen-
arian Betsy Jolas. Written for principal cellist
Ulrich Heinen in 2003, but only now receiving
its UK premiere, Wanderlied was an attractive
work with delicate colouring for the ensemble
and warm melodic lines for the soloist.
Bookended by two of Boulez’s best works
(arrangements of his epigrammatic Notations
and the sumptuous Dérive 2), this concert was a
display of new music at its best, with the highly
committed players of the BCMG shining under
the inimitable Franck Ollu.
Toby Young
John Luther Adams Across the Distance, Meltdown
Festival, Royal Festival Hall, London
John Luther Adams holds a unique position in
American contemporary music. His works are
as tinged with minimalist virtues as they are
rigorously experimental, offering sound worlds
that seem at once unearthly and welcoming,
unconventional yet accessible. At the core of
the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer’s work
lies a major concern with translating the tenuous
and illusory concept of acoustic and natural sonic
space into densely textured instrumental works.
Exploring the composer’s oeuvre, one senses a
deep fascination with acoustic phenomena; in
works such as the orchestral soundscape
Becoming Ocean (2012), and the percussion pieces
Inuksuit (2009) and Strange and Sacred Noise
(1997), the composer eschews any audible rhyth-
mic and melodic complexities in favour of serene
yet coursing sound masses and highly sonorous
ensemble textures.
In Luther Adams’s more experimental works,
large-scale attempts to marry the sounds of the
natural world with the ever-changing clamour
caused by daily human activity confirm the
ease in which these two worlds can effectively
be presented as an integrated listening experi-
ence. The composer describes his compositional
approach as stemming from ‘an ideal of sonic
geography – place as music, and music as
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place’.1 In this sense, his work could be seen
as a musicalisation of both natural and spatial
sonic phenomena heard in particular natural
environments; the ones from which Luther
Adams constantly draws inspiration are the
Alaskan and North American landscapes in
which he has lived for most of his life. Many
of Luther Adams’s works demand that public
performances are staged in outdoor settings,
serving to enrich what are already faithful deli-
neations of vast natural landscapes.
In August, the Southbank Centre hosted the
London premiere of Luther Adams’s Across the
Distance, a spatialised instrumental work
co-commissioned by Glasgow Life, Southbank
Centre and the East Neuk Festival – the latter
hosting the work’s world premiere earlier in
2015. The London performance was pro-
grammed as part of the Southbank’s annual
Meltdown Festival, curated this year by tireless
collaborator and experimental musical innovator
David Byrne.
Across the Distance forms part of a larger series
of pieces created with the intention of being per-
formed outdoors. The work is an open score for
64 French horns divided into smaller groups that
are located separately and move away from one
another, retreating into the surrounding land-
scape as the musical material develops and even-
tually dissipates. In July, however, a dismal, rainy
day brought the ensemble inside to the Royal
Festival Hall’s Clore Ballroom, each of the build-
ing’s staircases, walkways and mezzanine levels
becoming one of ten ‘stations’ occupied by per-
formers. Thinly layered pitches, microtonally
tinged unisons and unassuming spatial hockets
between the groups made for a stark and repeti-
tive layered fanfare, ultimately heralding nothing
but, in its 30 minutes, exposing the economy,
simplicity and subtlety so fundamental to
Luther Adams’s musical output. The simplicity
of musical material would have sounded more
clearly in a space less filled with the murmurs
of voices, and initially any musical silences swift-
ly drew one’s attention back to the bustling
soundscape of the Royal Festival Hall. The
accompanying cacophony of voices and foot-
steps, however, began encouraging a deeper
and more attentive way of listening. By the sec-
ond half of the work, the offset repetition of
pitches and upward-stepping fanfare motifs
began to sit comfortably within (and eventually
1
John Luther Adams, ‘Strange and Sacred Noise’, http://john-
lutheradams.net/strange-and-sacred-noise-essay/ (accessed 1
September 2015).
 90 tempo
merge beautifully with) the surrounding sound-
scape; this work, it seems, was intended not to
compete with the surrounding environment
but to meld with it, resulting in a rudimentary
and unimposing sound world defined by horn
calls swimming in an ocean of voices and
footsteps.
In this case, however, the audience and musi-
cians together form a unique type of unrefined
meta-instrument that would be near impossible
to control if strictly composed. With this acciden-
tal harmony between opposing sound sources in
mind, it seems pertinent to ask: did Luther
Adams expect that this work be sonically
strong-armed and at times crudely interrupted
by the surrounding soundscape? Did the com-
poser care deeply in which type of environment,
urban or pastoral, the work was performed? And
did such a situation take precedence when con-
sidering the creation of the work?
For the listener, being enclosed inside the
Royal Festival Hall, for all the composer’s efforts
at spatialisation, resulted in an experience charac-
terised by the chaotic rather than the expansive,
the frantic rather than the meditative. Across the
Distance may not fully have achieved the won-
derfully expansive quality so characteristic of
his more notable works but one felt that the
composer was inviting the listeners to pay
more attention to their environment, whatever
its ilk, simultaneously to critique and revel in
their own physical sonic activity as much as
they would a musician’s. In these terms, Across
the Distance proved an unrefined though unusual-
ly captivating work.
Cameron Graham
840 series, St James’ Church, Islington, London
They say London is dying (again): this time
smothered by affluence, its youth fleeing for
affordable refuge in the provinces, its culture
concreted over by the corporate Cyclops. As
far as new music goes, these are tough times
in the capital, for sure (where are they not?),
but the established ensembles and organisations
cling on like the tenacious buddleias on the
walls fringing suburban train lines, and here
and there new cracks appear in the pavement,
energetic wildflowers springing up through
them to take their chance in the light.
One such wildflower is the concert series 840,
the initiative of composers Nicholas Peters and
Alex Nikiporenko, launched in February 2015
and taking place in a church in the quiet
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backstreets of Islington. The emphasis is on
new, experimentally slanted work for small
instrumental groupings, mostly written by the
founders and their colleagues, and lightly contex-
tualised by more familiar names such as
Laurence Crane and Christopher Fox. Notable
too is the preference for groups of performers
not yet known on the new music circuit, fresh
out of college and eager to explore: one has
the sense of a nascent scene emerging here.
Inevitably the results can be somewhat uneven,
both in the performances and among the compo-
sitions themselves; the most impressive event so
far was the third in the series, given on 13 July by
the recorder quartet BLOCK4.
The concert featured five new works for
either Renaissance or Paetzold recorders, inter-
spersed with five iterations of Christopher
Fox’s The Feeling of Remembering, a modular
work whose premise is to set up a self-similar
material of irregular oscillations that may or
may not be exactly repeated at each hearing.
Beginning with a delicate, balletic rendition on
sopranino recorder, the iterations punctuated
the concert’s flow with their strangely insistent,
not-quite-fluent figurations, culminating in an
eerie duet for the ensemble’s lowest and highest
instruments, sopranino and Paetzold sub-contra.
The subtly in-between quality of Fox’s oscil-
lating material – poised between the naturalistic
and the artificial in both substance and shaping –
was exploited more roughly in Andy Ingamells’s
Long Piece, whose score was spread across the
width of the nave on a dozen or so music stands.
Here the oscillations occurred exclusively
between two Fs an octave apart, imitative of a
metronomic click-track and moving constantly
between different speeds and metres. The
players, entering the stage at different times to
stand at different places along the score, never-
theless played only in unison throughout, a fur-
ther restriction of musical means that served to
throw yet more emphasis on the choreography.
The idea had potential, but after a focused open-
ing the work lost its way, ringing changes whose
apparent arbitrariness was exacerbated by the
extreme paring-down of the materials.
There were harmonic economies of a differ-
ent sort in pieces by James Luff and Nicholas
Peters, both of whom restricted themselves to
working in a single mode. Luff’s piece for four
paetzold bass recorders proved as understated as
its title. The material was composed of simple
repeating cells of different lengths (a note or
two followed by a rest), overlaid and overlap-
ping among the four equal parts. Its floating
modality had a Phrygian tint that gave the