A casual babble of voices and laughter at a social gathering, music playing in the background. Then a shocking cut-off and we are in a strange world of crystalline sounds, ethereal and beautiful, vibrating, forming and re-forming. A crack in the universe has opened and we have slipped out…
This is the opening of Ake Parmerud’s Crystal Counterpoint. It is like a metaphor for the experience of much electronic music. We step out of the familiar into…what? We have no words for it, it is too new, too compellingly ‘other’. It is, I think, the future.
But we live in the present, and Sonic Explorations offers many bridges to that ‘other’. Most of the works to be played use familiar classical concert instruments, which are treated by live manipulation or which are in close dialogue with a ‘tape’. The familiar instruments are extended into new territory, they are not just landing on new ground with no bridge to approach it on. The link with classical tradition ‘speaks’ with all the more power of feeling for being set against that background.
The speed and capacity of computer technology has increased so much in the last five years, that, at last, almost anything is possible instantaneously. The only limitations, as always, are composers’ and listeners’ imaginations. Art proceeds at the pace we are capable of comprehending it, not faster.
In this mini-festival we will get a chance to get the measure of our pace, and also to sense the evolution of this art from 1958 (Varese and Ligeti) onwards. We will also be able to hear much music from outside Britain, and we’ll hear about the role that IRCAM, the enormous institute in Paris dedicated to scientific/musical research, has played in this history from one of its founders.
I hope that we will be explorers, open to the future, and open to the sheer beauty of what is emerging all over the world from the imaginations of some of the most gifted new musicians alive.
© Jonathan Harvey