The presentation of this CD rings every danger signal in the
book. The gate sleeve gives three extracts from the scores presented
here and there is a further example included in the booklet.
None of these scores contain a single indication of the pitch
the performer is required to deliver. One of the excerpts comes
from a piece entitled “Being itself a catastrophe, the
diagram must not create a catastrophe.” The booklet, which
only gives two-and-a-half pages of explanation, states that
“The axiom of Cassidy’s work is a simple but radical
one; heard sounds are uncontrollable traces, marking the points
of collision of forces that come from elsewhere en route to
somewhere. There is no solid ground.” And no solid basis,
either; one cannot imagine that any performing tradition could
ever exist in this music without the composer’s presence
to supervise every single performance - or if other performances
took place, that any one performance could be more valid than
any other. The opening piece, The Crutch of Memory, is
scored for “solo indeterminate string instrument”.
When this much control is surrendered, what is there for the
composer to contribute?
The answer is, not much. What we have here are a series of guided
improvisations by some very gifted players on what amount to
little more than abstract doodles. The Figures at the Base
of a Crucifixion, which the booklet notes inform us “completely
disclaim any fealty to pitch”, take their titles from
paintings by Francis Bacon. Bacon was essentially a figurative
painter who reflected reality through his own personal vision,
and the composer here disclaims any contact with reality whatsoever.
Any resemblances to a compositional style are a reflection of
the avant garde experiments of the Stockhausen era, and
they now sound simply very old-fashioned. Most of these sounds
we have heard before, and any potential for expression that
they may once have possessed has long been exhausted. The last
three tracks on the disc proclaim their ‘modernist’
credentials with titles that resolutely avoid the use of capital
letters - a literary affectation that is even more passé
than the style of the music itself.
Cassidy, born in America, is currently “Coordinator of
the MA in New Music” at Huddersfield University’s
Centre for Research in New Music having previously taught in
colleges in America. One cannot resist the observation that
Nicholas Slonimsky’s hilarious Lexicon of Musical Invective,
a collection of early vituperative reviews of music subsequently
firmly established in the canon, has a great deal to answer
for. On his website Cassidy seems to positively revel in his
reputation as a musical iconoclast, and quotes with glee from
various negative reviews his music has received over the years
as if this constitutes a testimonial. But not all new music
which receives a negative review is inherently a masterpiece.
Of the players here Peter Veale and Richard Haynes deserve special
mention for the violently grotesque sounds they manage to extract
from their instruments. They swap between oboe, musette, English
horn, and three different members of the clarinet family in
the only piece on the disc which involves more than one solo
performer. Carl Rosman provides the vocal line in I, purples,
spat blood, laugh of beautiful lips, and we are given an
extract from the score in the booklet. We are told that the
text comes from Rimbaud (in an “unattributed English translation”
- why bother with a translation when not a word is clearly audible?)
and Christian Bok. No texts or translations (unattributed or
otherwise) are provided so one cannot judge whether Rosman conveys
any meaning or not. The booklet tells us that “the actions
of the mouth and tongue produce a tangled web of phonemes”
and that the pitches are “transitory excerpts of a randomly
generated, inaudible ‘text’.” So all the effort
of the performers effectively goes for nothing. The extract
from the score given in the booklet reveals that Rosman takes
a very cavalier attitude not only to pitch - guidance is provided
for the singer, although not to the listener, by a computer
track - but also to the extremes of dynamic that the composer
has indicated. In the opening phrase the sudden moves from fff
to mp and back to ff are smoothed out to an extent
which in any other music one would call excessive.
Unless you are a listener whose devotion to the Darmstadt school
and their followers is unbounded - in which case you will probably
have heard all of these sounds, or something very similar, before
- this is not a recording that should detain you for long. The
works presented span a period of ten years but there is no discernible
difference in style between the earliest and the latest - nor
would the style of the music, a positive abnegation of the composer’s
role, permit this.
Paul Corfield Godfrey
Elision Ensemble (Richard Haynes (clarinets and saxophone); Graeme
Jennings (violin); Benjamin Marks (trombone): Carl Rosman (voice
and bass clarinet); Peter Veale (oboes): Tristam Williams (trumpet)