People often say that nothing is less funny than explaining a joke. Perhaps this is especially true in classical music: if you don't find a composition funny when you hear it, Schenkerian analysis is hardly going to help. It's quite bold of the Spektral Quartet's violist Doyle Armbrust, then, to declare in his liner note that their album Serious Business is ‘not funny’, as such, but rather ‘an album about what makes something funny’. That would normally seem highly pretentious, but, as comedians know, context is key, and fortunately his comment is placed within an article which is itself quite funny, and presumably a little tongue-in-cheek.
There are four pieces on the album. Three of them are new; one, Haydn's ‘Joke’ quartet, is not. This one bizarre incongruity means that the album's structure is itself a kind of joke – or, perhaps, the album is about whether its structure is a joke. Either way, it is a beguiling listen. Hack (2015) by Chris Fisher-Lochhead, which was the inspiration for the project as a whole, does indeed ask a question about how humour works. Each of its 22 short movements (grouped together into four ‘sets’) consists of a transcription and arrangement of a snippet from a stand-up comedian, with pitch variation, rhythm and cadence preserved (in most but not all cases) as accurately as possible. As an idea it's wonderful, but the question it seems so perfectly designed to tackle – is there anything inherently funny in a comedian's delivery, without the words – is smothered by the arrangements, which are often so involved that the contours of the transcription seem secondary, and are sometimes hard even to pick out. What we are left with is entertaining in itself as a series of witty, zany miniatures but the piece overall seems caught in limbo: it isn't transparent enough to work as an experimental look at speech-patterns, but equally, the comedians’ skits haven't been left far enough behind for the piece to take on a full life of its own.
Sky Macklay's Many Many Cadences (2014) broaches a different kind of humour by stacking tonal cadences on top of and next to each other. Ironically, this results in a piece that becomes tonally and rhythmically confused. What makes it seem particularly good-humoured (though I'm not quite sure about ‘funny’) is its genial, pop-influenced sense of pulse, which makes the whole thing zip by entertainingly. David Reminick's The Ancestral Mousetrap (2014), on the other hand, could hardly be less genial. Over its five movements, the players (to their great credit) sing a series of distractingly horrible, absurd poems by Russell Edson, to their own accompaniment. Edson (1935–2014), whose macabre prose-poem miniatures earned him cult status, epitomises how difficult it is to define humour in literature, never mind music. ‘Oh my God’, thinks a man after most of his body parts have fallen off, ‘I'll never get home’. That's pithy and droll, yes, but I would argue that it's too sinister even to count as black humour. At any rate, Reminick's setting of these poems is a marvellous display of imagination, and the two purely instrumental sections that bookend the piece are entrancing (particularly the daringly simple closing passage), but the rest of the time it's frustratingly hard to hear past the text. For all the musical imagination Reminick has thrown at his piece, the lasting feeling it generates is sheer disgust, thanks to Edson's words: how can anyone find that funny, it makes one ask. The Spektrals' album manages to deliver on its promise to be about humour rather than actually humorous, then, but this does seem a rather Pyrrhic victory.
Trees, Walls, Cities, a collaborative work created for the 2013 City of London Festival and recently released digitally, is a similarly strange achievement in that it manages to unite the festival's three disparate themes: trees, walls, and conflict and resolution. It consists of eight songs by eight composers of different nationalities, setting a mixture of commissioned and pre-existing poetry. Each is named after a city, so that they collectively form a sort of journey around Europe and the Middle East. A prelude, a postlude and a series of interludes are written by Nigel Osborne, which grants cohesion to the cycle. Despite the perplexing web of themes, most of it is essentially about war and its lingering effects. The Brodsky Quartet plays, and the impressive mezzo-soprano, who has five languages to tackle, is Loré Lixenberg.
Among the cycle's high points, Theo Verbey's ‘The Garden of Paraclesus’ is a beautifully sombre meditation on loss that sets Peter Huchel's lament for a lost son (‘who once planted conversations like trees’) in a mournful whisper. Isidora Žebeljan's ‘When God Was Creating Dubrovnik’ is an unexpectedly frenetic setting of a beautiful, rather gentle poem by Milan Milišić, a Yugoslav writer who was one of the first civilian victims of the Siege of Dubrovnik. There is a conflict between the text and the music here that seems to mirror the battling forces of past and present, as well as war and peace. I suspect that it is no coincidence that these two successful numbers ignore various aspects of the stiflingly specific brief – Verbey's piece is not really about his assigned city, Utrecht, and Žebeljan wisely engages little with walls or trees. With similar success, Yannis Kyriakides's ‘Walls Have Ears’ (Nicosia) treats the wall theme abstractly, addressing linguistic rather than physical barriers: Turkish-Cypriot poet Mehmet Yaşin's text concerns his displacement in wartime, and the loaded, sensitive question of which language then to speak. While Lixenberg sings plaintively in Turkish, the quartet recites an English translation, to hypnotic effect.
Elsewhere the quality is uneven. Christopher Norby's opener, ‘Once There Was an Island’ (Derry-Londonderry), feels too earnest, and isn't helped by a text that seems to box-tick its way through the themes. Berlin is represented by Søren Nils Eichberg's ‘Just Outside’, which smartly engages with Schubert's song ‘Der Lindenbaum’ to evoke Unter den Linden – a location that covers trees, walls and conflict in one fell swoop. Compositionally the Schubert elements are well integrated, but Eichberg's (deliberately) pop-style lyrics jar. From Vienna, Gerald Resch's ‘Flak Tower, Esterhazy Park’ has a harrowing subject but a disappointingly straight-laced expressionistic style. Habib Shehadeh Hanna's concluding ‘Song of Songs’ (Jerusalem) sets a passage of Solomon in a lively manner that feels a little safe. London has not been a site of conflict in modern times, though fortunately for Jocelyn Pook and commissioned poet Richard Thomas it does have a wall and trees. Their ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’ is a sort of faux-ballad addressing, rather naively, inequality and poverty. A nursery rhyme and a weirdly obvious quotation from The Lark Ascending do not contribute positively.
Nigel Osborne had the difficult task of threading everything together, and his interludes, impressively, are stylistically unobtrusive and softly pensive in just the right way. This project, though clearly designed by committee, has much to commend it. And why not take a leaf from the Spektral Quartet's book (or, perhaps, tree): if we don't treat this as a collaborative project, as such, but rather as an album about collaborative projects, then surely it fully succeeds.
