festival of electronics in performance TCM Contemporary Music Group/Gregory Rose Elysian Quartet and TCM String Ensemble/Nick Pendelbury To launch their enterprising electroacoustic festival, Trinity College of Music held its first ever concert of this type. It attracted a large, predominantly young audience and sounded magnificent in the Old Royal Naval College Chapel, with the winter sun streaming in to enhance the visual interest. Thea Musgrave's (Adam Cadman, clarinet) had tape delay echo effects to represent Narcissus's reflection. Miguel Azguime has an appropriately sophisticated website. Derrière Son Double was a rich, complex and compelling work for instrumental ensemble and electronics, with acoustic instruments serving as models for the electronic parts and vice versa, both situations alternating. Cameron Sinclair's The Fly depicts 'transformation of man into fly' with sandpaper, key clicks and digital delay, and virtuoso performance by Yuva Ceder (oboe) and Nadir Sidali (percussion); this the most immediately winning of the works, followed by an endearing acoustic transcription of an Aphex Twin piece 'pushing the ensemble in directions that would not have been taken otherwise'. All nicely varied, and it left a very mixed audience intrigued and satisfied. By the evening, there was talk of WiredUp becoming an annual event. The sold out strings showcase had us moving between the lovely Peacock Room at Trinity and an interactive set-up in the Theatre Studio close by. The Elysian Quartet had marked their high credentials for me in Janacek, since when they have nailed their colours to the mast of technology in a big way, believing in 'the capacity of technology to expand the world of acoustic sound to be as limitless as the human brain'.
The Wired Up festival culminated with this major event, like unto which Trinity College of Music and Blackheath Great Hall had never known anything comparable*. Again the concert hall, and indeed the whole building, was packed to bursting, with a palpable buzz of enthusiasm amongst a predominantly younger audience. Ingram Marshall's tape piece with brass sextet overlay was, I was assured, truly evocative of being 'lost in the fog' at San Francisco, with lighting and a blue foggy atmosphere contributing effectively [pictured]. Edward Gregson's short showpiece in three sections was accessible and brilliant, with computer delay treatment of solo flute and clarinet. Heinz Holliger's Pneuma pushed a large wind orchestra into the strangest of extended effects and vocalisations from "the hiss of breath to a full scream". The whole combined 'rhythmic accuracy and improvisational confidence' from the young players negotiating alternate traditional and graphic scoring, with a huge balloon anticipating the inevitable final bang. This was the scene for what might have been the largest scale performance ever of Trans, a work controversial now as in 1971. The TCM Symphony Orchestra fielded more than double the 20 strings prescribed. Seated too near one loudspeaker, the crash of a recorded weaving loom which punctuated the music became oppressive and failed to "shoot through the sounding space from one side to the other" as intended. The composer's peculiar detailed instructions were minutely followed, with the conductor Nick Pendelbury behind a screen and a solo piccolo trumpeter 'emerging like a spirit above the string players, on an invisible platform to which an invisible ladder leads'. No expense or trouble was spared in the recreation of this disturbing work which Stockhausen had originally conceived in a dream. Definitely an "event"; no booing as preserved on the CD of the premiere (Stockhausen Edition 19), but a thought-provoking work to conclude a concert which no-one present will ever forget. Following the success of Lachenmann at RCM, and hard on the heels of the Gubaidulina disaster at the Barbican, TCM in Greenwich had unquestionably been the place to be this mid-week! Peter Grahame Woolf Alexa Woolf adds: "Trans" could be regarded as an important musical contribution to the burgeoning philosphical debates of the 1970s. Analysis of the intimate connections between culture and socio-economic life produced increasing awareness of the validatory function of art, including music. TCMSO/Simon Wright photos: Colin Still/Optic Nerve * But see also Stockhausen's Gruppen at Blackheath
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