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Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, 18–22 November 2021.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 April 2022

Roger Heaton
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Extract

Contemporary music festivals are a neatly packaged way of encountering a variety of new and recent pieces, where someone else has done the hard work and chosen them for you. In our online/streaming life, rather than surfing Bandcamp or similar and following our own predilections, these festivals, in a healthy way, force you to confront your musical barriers and to harmonise your prejudices. In the UK and Ireland, Ilan Volkov's Glasgow Tectonics, Eamon Quinn's Louth and Graham McKenzie's Huddersfield seem to me the most interesting at the moment. There are, of course, other useful and enterprising festivals: some are a mixed bag of old and new, some are composer-led or have other agendas, so they have built-in filtering – in other words, prejudices. Festival directors have their likes and dislikes too, I guess, but the evidence from the three mentioned above demonstrates an openness and a researched risk-taking: Huddersfield, with McKenzie in charge, is more open than most, presenting quite a range of different genres and media.

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FIRST PERFORMANCES
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Tempo , Volume 76 , Issue 300 , April 2022 , pp. 85 - 90
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press

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References

1 Just casting an eye back over programmes, by way of example, from 2008, McKenzie's third year as director, there was a commission for saxophonist John Butcher, three big ensemble pieces from Enno Poppe, who also conducted, and a new piece from Claudia Molitor, all of whom are here 13 years later (although Molitor's installation was postponed). James Dillon seems to have had performances at almost every festival since the first, in 1978.

2 www.mdiensemble.com/en/videos/ (accessed 25 November 2021).

3 Incidentally, I sometimes found the festival programme booklet less than helpful in its omission of musical technical information (we weren't told that Dillon's violin and tape piece is in two movements with specific descriptive titles, for example) in favour of the kind of Sunday-supplement gushing, flowery but opaque arts-advertising-copy speak that creates a haze of descriptive images but leaves you none the wiser.

4 www.aileensweeney.com (accessed 25 November 2021).

5 New Music Show, BBC Radio 3, 27 November 2021, available on the Sounds app (accessed 28 November 2021).

6 Quoted in Whittall, Arnold, ‘The Elements of James Dillon’, Musical Times, 189/1899 (2007), pp. 3–17CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Pace discusses the piece again, with similar comments, in his forthcoming ‘New Music: Performance Institutions and Practices’, in The Oxford Handbook of Music Performance, eds G. McPherson and J. Davidson (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021, pp. 396–455).

7 New Music Show.

8 https://forkingpaths.leeds.ac.uk/ (accessed 25 November 2021).

9 www.temporalityoftheimpossible.com (accessed 30 November 2021). Her CD of the same name will be released on the HCR/NMC label in February 2022.

10 Thomas, Philip, ‘The Music of Laurence Crane and a Post-Experimental Performance Practice’, TEMPO, 70 no. 275, December 2015, pp. 5–21CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Michael Finnissy, Laurence Crane: 20th Century Music; solo piano pieces 1985–1999. 2008, Metier, msv28506.

12 Thomas, ‘The Music of Laurence Crane’, p. 13.

13 Juliet Foster (soprano), Mark Knoop (piano), Michael Finnissy, Choralvorspiele, Andersen-Liederkreis. 2018, hat[now]art, HATNOWART212.

14 ‘Interview: Graham McKenzie on 40 years of Huddersfield’, http://katemolleson.com/interview-graham-mckenzie-on-40-years-of-huddersfield/, (accessed November 30 2021). This first appeared on Sounds Like Now: www.soundslikenow.net, (accessed 25 November 2021).