‘Gently rumbling without direction’, a programme note appended to the first part of Cassandra Miller's solo for piano Philip the Wanderer, might equally have stood in as descriptor for tonight's programme tout court. This is not meant as a criticism. Time's arrow, the vector of narratives real or implied, may well be the most burdensome yet most easily sloughed off (and perhaps least missed) item of nineteenth-century baggage to be jettisoned by composers over the last century or so. What tonight's collaboration between An Assembly and Ensemble x.y (led and programmed by the increasingly omnipresent wunderkind of British new music, Jack Sheen) offered up was a quite different approach, a different way through the passage of time. Less music as organised sound; more sound in itself a means for organising time.
Take Anthony Leung's piece from the very start of the programme. The first of Three Concert Pieces, each, we are told, ‘a reflection on the most common durations found within the activities young composers participate in’. What we get, then, is five minutes of a single chord strung out on length-of-breath notes by a quintet of winds. Always changing, always staying the same, its inner harmonic tension is fraught with a certain taut expectation. The piece is animated by a sense of suspension – we are listening, waiting, as time passes. The music occupies the time, fills it up, teases it as its limits. On one level, it's a joke about handing in a kind of bare minimum for a rote assignment. But at the same time it's an attempt to map out the contours of a formalised timespan, to mark a territory and think through its frontiers.
Following Leung's piece, the remaining 16 members of both ensembles joined the five winds in a long, single-file line at the front of the stage for Paul Newland's piece, Locus. The horns, flutes and clarinets were now augmented by strings plus an assortment of less traditionally musical objects and actions like the crumpling of newspaper or silver foil, a coin rubbed around an upturned silver dish, and field recordings played (rather quietly) from three different mobile phones dispersed along the line. The saxophone (played by Harry Fausing Smith) was also wrapped and stuffed with bubblewrap, choking out its notes in a manner that sounded oddly subaquatic. As the title suggests – only emphasised by the rustle of the field recordings – the work's steady-state soundworld gives the listener an immediate sense of inhabiting a particular place. But this is not so much a journey across the land as – again – a kind of waiting, an attendance to the minutiae of some impossible vista, simultaneously underground, overground and underwater, urban and rural, sparse and full. The image that came to mind was a of a person humming to themselves at a bus stop, and finding the street thereby transformed and made musical.
After Cassandra Miller's lithe and exploratory solo piano piece and a see-sawing chamber work by Bryn Harrison inspired by the paintings of Bridget Riley, the evening closed with a performance of Michael Finnissy's Piano Concerto no.2 from 1975–76. Played dazzlingly by pianist Joseph Havlat in front of a horseshoe of nine strings and two alto flutes, the piece is a wild flurry of activity, full of jagged spikes and dense clouds of interlocking notes. Hardly ‘static’ by any standard metric, yet nor are we really going anywhere. It fidgets and rumbles and dances on the spot, but it pointedly remains where it is, even gesturing wildly at the extremities of its own confinement. If Newland gave us a man waiting patiently for a bus, Finnissy's protagonist might be pacing in an anteroom, anxiously anticipating the results of a test. But he's still waiting. In his programme notes, Finnissy wrote that at the time of composition, his attention was focused on ‘the various possibilities (and stereotypes) of “concerto”’, its tripartite structure, conventions of leading and following, working ‘concertedly’ or apart. Like Leung's Concert Pieces, it's a question of filling out a standardised form, of worrying at its limits and gesturing beyond them, marking out a territory and making time audible.
In the mid-1980s, Gilles Deleuze published his second book on film, Cinema 2: The Time Image. He identified a new kind of cinema emerging outside Hollywood in the post-war period, particularly in the films of Yasujiro Ozu and directors associated with Italian neo-realism. Such films sought to capture a direct image of time. The camera lingers over a scene, as if slowly taking it all in. Characters stare out beyond the frame, apparently lost in thought, watching time pass. Music, like cinema, is often described as an ‘art of time’. The phrase is familiar enough to pass as cliché. Works have stretched out time and compressed it, nullified it or exploded it. But in works like those on tonight's elegantly curated programme, time is not pushed or pulled, distorted or distended, made to do little tricks or jump through hoops. Rather, time is simply attended to, made present, sounded. We hear time passing and spend time in the company of sounds.
