A theme for the festival in Donaueschingen was popular music, or so I heard in a radio broadcast on the six-hour drive from Berlin to that little Southern German new music metropole. But in Donaueschingen, there really wasn't that much pop music; the theme was actually a kind of after-construction, something that had, according to the festival director Björn Gottstein, crystallised as a kind of a common denominator in several of the works that had been commissioned. For me this felt like grabbing something out of the void; in the three days of the usual intense programme, it hardly shone through as something specific.
Instead it was the first work at the official opening concert that seemed to me to hit the core of what Donaueschingen is, was, and maybe can be expected to be. Jan W. Morthenson, one of the most radical Swedish composers, especially in the 1960s and 1970s, and a pioneer in computer-generated electronic music, opened with a new work for the South-West German Symphony Orchestra, Omega. The next day, one could read in the official festival blog that this had not impressed the critic Christoph Haffter. ‘He [Morthenson] seems to ignore the challenges for a contemporary composer and instead lean towards a late romantic idiom … expressive pathos … doesn't belong in Donaueschingen’.
‘Late-romantic’, ‘expressive pathos’: these are not inadequate terms with which to characterise the piece. Morthenson says that the work ‘is a look into the past … I have often viewed composing as a large historical wheel, which generations are trying to hold on to … the personal efforts are gradually transfigured as in a mirror’. Is the work a re-sounding of Morthenson's concept of ‘meta-music’ – music about music – which he started to investigate in the late 1960s? How much of a composer's creative biography do we need to know in order to appreciate a work, see its (plausible) radicalism, or judge whether it ‘belongs in Donaueschingen’? Are we listening to a sort of outdated modernism, or a comment on that very modernism?
The other three works in the concert were perhaps closer to how new music is supposed to be. Although the boundaries of the contemporary idiom in Donaueschingen are quite wide, there is still an ‘in’ or ‘out’. ‘Out’ is sentiment, classical beauty, expressionism, or a conventional classical handling of instrumentation. ‘In’ includes James Dillon's The Gates, a half-hour long complex collage, in which the presence of the Arditti string quartet adds a layer of complexity, turning the structure into a sort of concerto grosso. ‘In’ also includes Martin Jaggi's rather disjointed Caral – archaic flute sounds and a bit of pentatonicism connected the work to its composer's ongoing series of exploration of ‘first civilisation’ musical cultures (in this case the Andes) – and Klaus Schedl's Blutrausch, a hard and noisy sound mass for orchestra and tape against which the death metal singer for the evening, Moritz Eggert, growls. With my eyes closed I could imagine this coming out of the sound system in a small punk bar, but in an orchestral setting it felt as if alternative popular culture had been put on display, creating an awkward distance. These three very different works shared a sort of ‘medium-convincingness’; they fitted into the Donaueschingen context, something made clearer by the one piece that didn't.
Dillon's piece was dedicated to the late former director of Donaueschinger Musiktage Armin Köhler, who died shortly after the 2014 festival, and Peter Ablinger also dedicated his work to Köhler. Ablinger's idea was a bit of fun: six popular songs, hits, from the 60s and 70s, providing the raw material for the six sections. The composer encouraged us to guess the pieces and send in our answers to him with the possibility of winning a signed CD. So far I haven't met anyone who had a slightest clue about any of the songs; maybe the songs, as Ablinger (b. 1959) suggested, belong to ‘a certain generation’. Whether works had been commissioned by Köhler or by the new festival director Björn Gottstein, the festival seemed to be anchored in a well-established idea of ‘contemporaneity’. As in the past, some composers seem to get commissions on a regular basis; a festival of Donaueschingen's importance and reputation surely has a responsibility towards new music communities in general and should not rely so heavily on a few names.
Highlights were relatively few but one work that stood out was Rebecca Saunders's Skin, performed by Klangforum Wien, Skin was a kind of monodrama for soprano and ensemble in which Juliet Fraser excelled, integrating her voice sonically with the delicate and sparsely instrumentation. The text, mainly by the composer herself, played an important part in the work, but unfortunately it was almost impossible to apprehend any of it. Patricia Alessandrini's Leçons de ténèbres was a quiet and subtle work, exploring the colour palette of flageolet glissandi, scratches and noises, and stood out in ensemble recherche's concert, which, apart from Ablinger, also offered Wieland Hoban's subtly instrumented and constructed Ur∂arbrunnr and, in Martin Smolka's a yell with misprints, an episode in which the whole ensemble played Peking Opera gongs.
I enjoyed the cellist Okkyuong Lee's group of musicians such as Lasse Marhaug on electronics, Jae Hyo Chang on Korean percussion and the classical Korean singer Song Hee Kwon. Different temperaments were exposed, with each musician allowed to develop their own line within the ensemble sound, but there was nothing here that one could not experience every week in a city like Berlin, albeit in more intimate places. The festival also included a few sound installations in more or less public spaces. Thomas Köhner's installation was set in a hermetically dark room, with red light, smoke and low frequency vibrations. It was well executed, but I've been in similar environments before. Hannes Seidl's radio project Good Morning Deutschland was located outside the main festival locations and near the newly created refugee housing as a radio show run by and for refugees. According to Seidl this provided ‘the potential to allow the newly-developing community to network, exchange, make music together and design a future for our society’. I would argue that the main way to become part of a society is to have access to its cultural institutions – like the Donaueschinger Musiktage – but maybe the refugees were invited to the concerts as well.
Bernhard Gander's Cold Cadaver with Thirteen Scary Scars was characterised by hard driving pulses in a typical rock-fusion manner, with abrupt changes and the attractive groove-addition of the musicians of Steamboat Switzerland on Hammond organ, electric bass, drum-set and piano, but it lacked the sense of direction you would find in a rock context. Franck Bedrossian's Twist managed better in combining the disruptive and direct volume and original noises from metal plates and electronics. The sound surface had some obvious ‘metal’ or ‘noise’ qualities, but, unlike Gander's piece, did not rely directly on these genres.
As the attentive reader will have noticed, there certainly were some pop references in the works mentioned so far and, if one extends ‘popular’ to embrace everyday material, there was also Joanna Bailie's captivating soundscape-based Music from Public Spaces for choir, string quartet and recorded material. But the popular connections were mostly at a distance, analytically conceived and executed through dissection. This is nothing unusual; indeed it is what art music is about. Instead, in this aesthetically unchallenging programme, it was interesting to see what happens when a work takes another, different approach to the general discourse. If the festival really did have a theme it was to question appropriateness and inappropriateness at a new music festival, something further demonstrated by the rather negative reaction to G.F. Haas's new concerto for trombone and orchestra: a thoroughly conventional work, but without the potential critical sting of Morthenson. In the end, what matters may not be context, but what's actually there; that way we are exposed to our listening, to hear what we hear.
