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Christopher Fox: Catalogue irraisoné EXAUDI, cond. James Weeks Métier MSVCD 92103
Christopher Fox’s Catalogue irraisoné, for solo voice or vocal ensemble, teeters on the edge of music. It consists of the simplest forms almost entirely drained of content and context. Of the 12 short pieces, some are unadorned speech, some simple, nursery rhyme-like melodies, some have sparse percussion accompaniments. There are no harmonies, no expansive tunes, no rhythmic complexities, very little development.
The description ‘catalogue’ is appropriate: each piece seems little more than a precisely annotated index card for something of more weight, housed somewhere else. Their collection hints at an inscrutable culture, with its own rituals and strange art. This is reflected in the restricted, but crucial, concessions to variation, stark switches of parameters like factory robots executing their pre-programmed movements. The listener, as archaeologist, is invited to reconstruct something of this alien world. And only now something sinisterly familiar is traced, first through the texts, sourced from a multilingual array of guidebooks and introductions, then through the titles: ‘Patrol’, ‘Scanner’, ‘Outsider’, Security Code’. This world hides itself behind a peculiar beaurocracy, but its threat still permeates even the most objective utterances.
EXAUDI’s straight-up performances are the only way this music could work. A different performance would try to invest them with weight and significance of their own, something ridiculous, rather than leaving them as pointers to unknown objects. EXAUDI bring the disinterested commitment of the archivist or bibliographer, leaving the mystery and meaning of this music to us to uncover.
Tim Rutherford-Johnson Richard Ayres NONcertos No 37b for Orchestra; NMC D162
Responses to experimental contemporary music are mostly subjective. I have not got on with some of Christopher Fox's austere music (q.v. "teeters on the edge" - above) so it is a pleasure to welcome this anarchic disc of Richard Ayres, a composer new to me, a "controversial Gaudeamus prizewinner" in Amsterdam. The liner notes by Fox whet the appetite for a unique disc.
Ayres' all inclusive aesthetic should appeal to open-minded listeners as being in the line of Mahler (who told Sibelius that symphonies should "take in the whole world"), Ives and more recent composers who bridge genres unapologetically.
Ayres "opened up" his music to encompass all possibilites, "episodic, obsessive, ecstatic, comic", all juxtaposed shamelessly. I
Try first the NONcertos for horn and trumpet, in which the solo instruments gives you something to hang onto (the marvellous Marco Blaauw has also a great solo CD "Hot" of Barry, Berio, Kagel etc BVHA CD 2406) .
Peter Grahame Woolf
Richard Ayres No. 31, No. 8, No. 35, No. 9, No. 5, No. 24 musikFabrik
During a clear-out I came across this CD which hadn't been reviewed. Richard Ayres is one of my favourite contemporary composers, though opportunities to hear his music in UK are rare and it is hard to explain his appeal. This Portrait disc ends with another of his NONconcertos, this one for Alto Trombone. Do try it; it'll surely make you smile - and think. Peter Grahame Woolf
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have enjoyed these pieces immoderately at home, and too for repeat listening on my iPod in urban street environments, where this music sounds at home... 