BY MYLES OAKEY, EUROPE CORRESPONDENT
PRS New Music Biennial 2019
Various artists
Hull, 12-14 July
“Well that was interesting,” an elderly woman commented to her friend, sitting a few rows down from me on the upper level of a double-decker shuttle bus. “It’s a lovely sound, isn’t it?” she added. The conversation continued between the two friends as they took pause, reflecting on what they had just heard. “She plays with those mechanical stops…” The clarifying statement was left open, paused in time, not unlike the music we had just heard.
Experimenting with the gradient between open and closed stops of the pipe organ, manipulating the flow of air, composer-performer Claire M Singer explores the nuanced and delicate range of potential harmonics. The Hull University Chapel was selected, not for its contemporary aesthetic but for the only pipe organ in Hull with mechanical stops and, luckily, just enough space for the London Chamber Orchestra to enrich Claire’s sonorous and expansive texture. Listening to Claire’s new commission gleann ciùin, the music felt like diving into the sound of a gleaming loch, sinking deeper and deeper. Like the woman on the bus, and many of us in the room, I hadn’t heard anything like it. In a world of constant noise, Claire’s music is place of calm.
Carrying a busload of peacefully zen Hull locals and keen New Music Biennial festival-goers, the shuttle made its way back to the centre of town. Some follow on with the back-to-back program, others take a break to wander through the streets. Past the front-facing coffee bar at Humber Street Gallery, the surreal sounds of Khyam Allami’s Requiem for the 21st Century floated out from behind a black-curtained entrance. Following the fragments of oud, strings, and voice, the gallery opened up to Khyam’s immersive installation of decaying ouds that projected microtonal sounds composed through custom-built software, programmed to produce endless variation. Some of the public took the time to sit and meditate, responding in their own way to a piece of lament; while others passed through momentarily, bewildered by the aesthetics of the instruments and sound.
The PRS New Music Biennial opens the doors to Hull. Sprawled across the historical port town – situated on the east-coast of Northern England – the new music festival takes over Hull’s streets, government buildings, libraries, art spaces, theatres, and concert halls. While Hull was named the City of Culture in 2017 – bringing with it a surge of funding for architectural rejuvenation and new art spaces and organisations – the New Music Biennial in Hull is somewhat dwarfed by its partnered host city, London, which showcases the same program a week earlier out of the arts powerhouse Southbank Centre.
Yet, after the initial media hype has subsided, and the London reviews come to light, Hull begins to reverberate with its own collective excitement. Throughout the cobble-stoned hub of Humber Street and the eclectic Edwardian and post-war industrial cityscape, composers and audiences intermingle among the hipster-vibes of new venues and coffee shops.
For the cities outside of the artistic centre of London, new initiates like Hull’s Absolutely Cultured – responsible for the outstanding festival planning – are at the forefront of shifting perceptions and opportunities for local arts communities. Over a whole weekend, the entirely free festival makes traditionally inaccessible music accessible to all. In the de-contextualised spaces of Hull, interdisciplinary and experimental music was met with renewed perception and reception. Video-game BAFTA-winning composer Jessica Curry’s She Who, a setting of the poem by feminist writer Judy Grahn, was sung by an intimate chamber choir of the National Youth Choir in the city council’s Guildhall. The dynamic, lyrical, and energic lines are tear inducing; a choral work of immense emotive energy. “The composer Jessica Curry wanted the work performed in a space without association to historical patriarchy,” conductor Eimear Noone told the audience. In an expression of individual identity as a composer – before that of a woman, or mother, or sister – Curry’s work embodies the struggle of woman against patriarchy and male-dominated spheres, in its interaction between female and male voices.
“I didn’t think there’d be so many people coming from outside,” a local acknowledged to another sitting on my opposite side. A gentleman in front was in raptures, interjecting the Q&A format to pour out his gratitude. The interjection of audience members wasn’t an uncommon occurrence; many made use of the festival’s Q&A format to help make sense of the music. After Conor Mitchell’s Lunaria, a socially and politically charged audio-visual work of chattering cacophonous press material and driving metric dissonance, one woman cut across a BBC radio presenter, desperate to ask a clarifying question of her own.
The afternoon of Sunday took me to Fruit, a new performance venue and bar with the aesthetic resembling the white-washed walls and straight lines of a contemporary art space. Filling the stage in an egalitarian formation of a semicircle, Manchester Collective performed Edmund Finnis’ The Centre is Everywhere, an interwoven texture of 12 independent voices that created a shifting foreground of dynamic arching lines, washing over and converging in cascades of harmony, petering out into the texture of white noise.
On the premieres of these PRS commissions, I reminded myself of the dedication and commitment of performers to prepare and rehearse a single 15-minute work, to be performed only twice in both London and Hull. The transporting of a Javanese gamelan between the two cities should be recognised equally to the actualisation of a strikingly unconventional and highly detailed score written by composer Rolf Hind. Written for gamelan, two pianos, and percussion, Tiger’s Nest was remarkable in its relationship between the tunning, structure, and phrasing of the gamelan and that of the pianos (one detuned and prepared). Inspired by Bhutanese myth, Rolf’s work created an atmosphere of ethereal mysticism that recontextualised the role of the gamelan, celebrated its it unique harmonic and textural qualities, and offered a new approach for its inclusion in larger ensembles.
With the desire to see every event, the 10-hour programming throughout the city got the best of me. Of the works I heard, I was left feeling inspired, ambivalent, heart-wrenched, peaceful, stimulated, and joyful. Not all the works met my personal taste for subversion of traditional practice; but those that did – only some of which I’ve mentioned – deserve a life of repeated performances. Yet, in the context of new music commissions, it’s nonetheless valuable to give space and means for new projects to come about and be heard in shared and accessible spaces. The New Music Biennial, if anything, is about new opportunities for artists to dip their toes over the edge of their respective genres, and then pull their audience into the deep.
You can now listen to the highlights of the New Music Biennial 2019 on Radio 3’s New Music Show (while available), recorded live at London’s Southbank Centre.
All images supplied and unless otherwise stated credit PRS Foundation’s New Music Biennial, produced by Absolutely Cultured © Tom Arran. Featured image shows the Manchester Collective.
