Day: November 24, 2017

Stockhausen’s Stimmung at the Barbican ****

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Singcircle

Barbican Hall, 20th November 2017

  • Jacqueline Barron – soprano
  • Zoe Freedman – soprano
  • Heather Cairncross – mezzo-soprano
  • Guy Elliott – tenor
  • Angus Smith – tenor
  • Gregory Rose – bass/director
  • Robert Henke – laser artist
  • Kathinka Pasveer – sound projection
  • Stephen Montague – assistant sound projection
  • Reinhard Klose – sound engineer

Karlheinz Stockhausen

  • Stimmung
  • Cosmic Pulses

Right you had to be there OK. Stockhausen is the great big looming presence that hangs over the whole of modern classical music. A whole new way of thinking about music. A whole new sound world. Music as mathematics. Rigorously intellectual. A control freak whose vision extended well beyond this earth into our wider universe. A mystic. A teacher. An inspiration. Certainly bonkers.

That’s the myth anyway. I have never been brave enough to take the plunge on a recording or concert previously, figuring it was going to be well beyond me, and probably painful. Yet there comes a time in every man’s life, (well probably not yours I suspect), when he has to step up to the plate and take on the musical challenge. I would be willing to bet though that I was not the only one in the packed Barbican Hall who was new to this and approaching it with some trepidation. Seriously they can’t all have been Stockhausen devotees.

I was totally unprepared then for what followed. For this is actually a pleasant piece of music which, for me, turned out to be comparable with listening to the best of Renaissance vocal music. It takes a bit of getting used to the “pure harmonics” sound and the way that the six voices are used, and the text, with all its sexist, priapic boasting, and barking out of various gods’ names, is nonsense. But the sounds and patterns of the voices are fascinating and, at times, just beautiful. Like a motet, honestly.

Mr Stockhausen takes the high pitches that shadow every natural note, or fundamental as he termed it, and asks his singers, by shifting the position of tongue and lips, to draw out these high pitches and expose the “harmonics”. Starting with a low B flat he then takes five ascending notes and creates a new vocabulary of harmonics. From this he conjured up Stimmung. There are 51 different parts or “models”, with each male voice leading 9 of the parts and each female 8. The “lead” for each part waits for the rest of the ensemble to merge their previous material into their “lead”, to achieve “identity” in terms of tempo, rhythm and dynamic, and then, with a flick of the hand, passes on the “lead” to whoever comes next. This means the performance can vary depending on how long the “identities” take to emerge and in what order the “models” are taken. In 29 sections the “magic” god words ring out and there are some other recognisable words popping up elsewhere (“barber shop” being the funniest). All clear. Well the surprising thing is that the structure is clear, crystal clear.

I know it sounds daft. But it isn’t. It is captivating. Not much to look at mind you. Six people sat round an IKEA bubble lamp with microphones, (mind you it does look a bit retro 70s cool), gurning and sometimes waving. But it sounds divine. Literally.

Singcircle were founded in 1976 by Gregory Rose, who is still there. They have performed Stimmung over 50 times. It is clearly a tricky thing to pull off. This was the last ever performance so certainly poignant. Kathinka Pasveer, the sound projectionist, was one of Stockhausen’s leading acolytes and interpreters so no-one better to mix the whole. I think I heard a couple of electronic grunts along the way but who cares. You closed your eyes and just let the transcendent sounds swirl over, around and through you. Jeez I am travelling back in time to my long-hair days in the mid 70s.

Stimmung though was enough for me. I passed on the second piece, Cosmic Pulses, which came after the interval. No point pushing my luck I reckoned. I had checked it out ahead of the gig and could see that this was likely to be a step too far. One of Stockhausen’s last purely electronic works, from 2007, it is a knotty mathematical puzzle built on 24 structured loops, in a pitch range of seven octaves, played through 8 speakers. It looks intimidating on paper, there is an extract of the “score” in the programme to prove the point. In reality it is terrifying. Even with a fancy laser show I could tell this wasn’t going to do it for me.

So just Stimmung then. One revelation was more than enough on the night. This gets performed by other vocal groups, who presumably know what they are doing. When it does do not hesitate if you have any interest at all in music, of whatever form. I am off to search out a decent recording.

 

 

 

Basquiat exhibition at the Barbican review **

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Basquiat: Boom For Real

Barbican Art Gallery

I just don’t get it. Why are punters and critics raving about this broad retrospective of the artistic myth that was/is Jean-Michel Basquiat? I completely understand how significant an artistic/cultural phenomenon he was before his early death in 1988 (aged 27, same age as Masaccio, and various rock’n’roll heroes), and he definitely comes across as an interesting bloke, living in interesting times, mixing with interesting people in an interesting city. But “one of the most significant painters of the 20th century” as the intro to the exhibition claims. Come on. Picasso, Juan Gris, Malevich, Chagall, David Bomberg, Stanley Spencer, Emil Nolde, Egon Schiele, George Grosz, Oscar Kokoschka, Max Beckmann, Otto Dix, Gwen John, Lucien Freud Agnes Martin, Graham Sutherland, Francis Bacon, Bridget Riley, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Rothko, Clyfford Still, Josef Albers, Barnett Newman, Frank Stella, Anselm Kiefer, Richard Hamilton, Alex Katz, Peter Doig, Richard Serra, Gerhard Richter. That’s just some of the painters I think are better, Even Hockney, for all his faults, is a way better artist in my book than Basquiat. 

Maybe his reputation simply reflects the price of his art. If a Japanese collector wants to pay $110m for one of Basquiat’s works who am I to argue. The same fella paid $57m for another one last year. I guess he must like them. Mind you some numpty just paid $450m for a Leonardo that probably isn’t. I hope whoever it is hands out the readies to charities on a regular basis and pays his or her, or maybe its, taxes.

For me this does point up a whole bunch of necessary, (and probably unpleasant), fictions on which our world is hooked. The fiction of money. The buyer presses a key to conjure up some electronic corn, the seller parks it somewhere in a different server, They both believe it is real. The notion of value. The value of a piece of art is a function of who paid for it in the first place, and for what purpose, whether it survived, so how scarce it is, and how it is now viewed by experts (whose opinions change, a lot). We, the viewing public, also now get a look in, if we like what we see. Let us call this the aesthetic value. This may not be synonymous with its use value. Its exchange value, given its unique character, is likely to be its price, and this can be anything that a buyer wants it to be. A unique object, a tiny coterie of buyers, a rigged market. Clearly price is no indication of value. We also have the fiction of legal ownership sitting behind this Leonardo transaction. The seller’s fortune was built on potash. Once a state asset, now his. Right time, right place, right attitude. And finally we have the prosiac fiction that Salvator Mundi may not actually have been painted by the hand of the great Renaissance polymath. Does it matter? No idea.

Anyway Boom for Real kicks off with some early works from the New York/New Wave exhibition in 1981. There are some naive townscapes which stand out and some of the trademark self portrait skulls. We then see J-MB’s gnomic graffiti work as SAMO© and tour through late 1970’s and 1980s New York, meeting some of his chums and collaborators along the way. Music (he was in a band), video, performance, clubs, postcards, photos, flyers, poetry, helmets, other stuff. Not much visible in the way of drugs, best keep that under wraps (no pun intended), though his habit exudes out of the later works. There is no doubt that J-MB got about a bit and that the New York scene of this period was pretty exciting. No wave, new wave, Mudd Club, Club 57. Most of the music that came out of this era is shite, trust me, but it did give us the mighty Talking Heads, and, latterly, Swans, and the first stirrings of hip hop. Of course this was all middle class, white art students feeding off the prior generations of New York cool, but, given the quality of the legacy, this was heady stuff. (We Brits had to make do with proper working class, DIY, Punk and its antecedents – I for one was happy with that deal).

J-MB stood out because of his beauty, his personality, his relentless self-promotion, his nihilism, his “self taught”, status and obviously his colour. No wonder he was embraced and feted by the artistic establishment, (there is a canvas by Keith Haring, J-MB’s most obvious “influence”), including a room devoted to the relationship with the granddaddy of them all, Andy Warhol. As well as some double portraits, the curators are proud to show off a lease for the flat AW rented to J-MB. There is a lot of stuff like this upstairs, whisper it, maybe a bit too much.

Downstairs we finally get to see more substantial work and this, I am afraid, is where I have a beef. Lists of stuff J-MB read, references to canonic Renaissance artists and Jazz greats, anatomical life sketches, self portraits, poetry of a sort, black heroes, cars, planes, repeated signs and symbols. I can appreciate the fidgety energy and the restless enquiry which blares out from these works and their semiotic value. I can see that J-MB had a lot to say about the situation of a black man in a white world. I can definitely see why people were attracted to him. What I can’t see is any interesting drawing or painting marks. There is a lot to read here, and the man undoubtedly had a lot to say, but nothing much to really see. The hyperbolic nonsense from the curators which follows you round the exhibition didn’t help.

I know I am in a minority here and, given that this is the first major exhibition of his work to appear in the UK, (and there is next to nothing in collections), I can see why the punters are rolling in. I just don’t think he was a particularly interesting painter. Person yes, painter no. There was more for me in the few pieces of work from David Hammons in the recent Tate Modern Soul of a Nation exhibition than there is across all of this exhibition. (Soul of a Nation exhibition at Tate Modern ****). And he, Hammons, is a fella who can properly take the conceptual piss. Witness USD 200K some-one paid for his work On Loan.