Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival
Article published: Sunday, February 8th 2009
"Music lives in everything" by Abi Sanders
It may sound surprising, but there is no better way to open your mind and ears to myriad sonic novelties than to spend nine days in the biting November cold in Huddersfield. This northern town hosts a contemporary music festival which presents not only new music but sounds, images and ideas in original and innovating forms that will encourage you to rethink the world around you. From intricately organised new chamber works by leading complexity composers, to relentless cacophonous noise and with the spectacle of a naked man being pulled excrutiatingly slowly on a bicycle along the way, the exposures are intensely varied and some infinitely memorable.
The Arditti Quartet take a refreshingly different approach to the traditional playing style of classical string quartets. They succeed in tackling some of the most complicated music around, including Dum transisset I-IV by Brian Ferneyhoughm, a piece notorious for its impenetrable difficulty; the mere writings of this new complexity composer are like a new incomprehensible language in itself. Their powerful textures interspersed with moments of elusive beauty was stunning, one of the outstanding performances of the festival.
Dror Feiler’s Müll proved a notable event in the schedule: 50 minutes of relentless noise from a full orchestra playing at their loudest volume, next to a detritus-chomping refuse truck, sirens blazing, from which a powerful amplified bald baritone singer emitted a repeated operatic roar.
The point behind this cacophony is that we take for granted that the popular classical music of composers such as Beethoven was considered very hard to listen to in its time. At the same time – and on a more earthly level – it rearticulates John Cage’s point at the opposite end of the spectrum: that our lives are full of sounds, unjustly unappreciated, simply because they are not considered music per se.
What sets this festival apart from any other of its kind is the conspicuous absence of elitism. Perhaps this is why the unlikely Yorkshire town of Huddersfield is the perfect setting for an event that relies entirely on an open-minded audience. It seems that one could never perform such daring and sincere works in larger location, crawling with trendy cosmopolitan pseudo-intellectual types, without receiving a bombardment of pretentious critisicms or false elations.
If you attend even one concert containing a piece never before heard there are bound to be things that you dislike or do not understand; but anyone – regardless of their education in musicology - is entitled to a valid opinion. Huddersfield contemporary music festival allows such an atmosphere to flourish and it is exactly this openness which makes the concerts so interesting. There is no right or wrong opinion when a new piece of art is aired and some of the music will inevitably be awful. But a stage on which new experiments can be tested is essential for our cultural development as a whole; in that sense it can be enjoyable even to hear the worst pieces, as in the trial-and-error test ground of cultural experimentation disastrous failures are just important as the resounding successes.
In the end the most important and exciting thing thing you can do is simply turn up, open your ears and listen.
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