“Symphonic electronics” – to use the title of this BBC Immersion Day of Barbican concerts – have come a long way since the pioneering efforts of Edgard Varèse and his pupil Iannis Xenakis. The problem with ‘tape parts’, as they were known in the 50s, is that they reduce live musicians to the status of a backing track. Hence Varèse and Xenakis tended to contain them in separate vessels rather than combining them in unstable suspensions. Modern software allows for a more creative and artistically satisfying fusion of sound sources.
That said, the nature of the sounds themselves has not evolved as far or as fast as composers and audiences might have anticipated. What used to be quaintly known as space-age music still tends to default to variations on the aliens have landed/are taking off. In a work titled Cosmic Pulses, which rounded off the day, this is perhaps to be expected. And by the time Karlheinz Stockhausen was composing it, in 2007, he had earned the right to present a virtuosic summation of his mastery as a composer for supra-human forces.
This was at least the fourth ‘performance’ of Cosmic Pulses in London, and familiarity has served to illuminate how Stockhausen draws in his listeners almost second by second, outlining the basic material quite simply at first, before gradually adding layer after layer and sending that material down dizzying flights of invention, in which space becomes as consequential an element as pitch, dynamic and rhythm. You could compare it to a 24-voice fugue or ten simultaneous games of chess; or a waterpark of far more overlapping tubes than any human engineer could realise, filled with swimmers at play.
In composing Gondwana in 1980, Tristan Murail used electronic techniques rather than sounds, and the result was a piece that sounds as new and as bewitching as ever. Ilan Volkov drew an impressionistically sensitive palette of timbres from the BBCSO as he moulded the shimmering waves of the piece to evoke its title of Earth’s first continent. The other works on the programme mixed live electronic and live orchestral sources, with mixed success.
Steven Daverson has taken his title from the closing shot of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia. Figures outside a Dacha, with Snowfall, and an Abbey in the Background paints the scene through a thick mist in which elements of music such as melody and pulse have been obscured by time. On a first hearing, the form of the piece proved as elusive as individual details, with the contributions of a concertante group gathered around Volkov being scattered across the hall by a sound design (the work of Carl Faia and Daverson himself).
A rich Japanese strain of modern electro-acoustic music was represented by Misato Mochizuki’s Intrusions. Supervised by Lewis Wolstanholme, the electronic element of the score echoed and decorated the orchestral parts, where Daverson has comprehensively integrated them. Hearing all the notes was less of an issue, even during the midst of what might have been imagined as an electrical brainstorm.
The main event of the evening concert was the first performance of Bab-Khaneh: Gatehouse of Memory, commissioned not by the BBC but the Barbican. The BBCSO filled an expanded stage as the support act to composer and turntablist Shiva Feshareki, while conductor Jack Sheen turned pages. Drawing on her Iranian heritage with a title which evokes the Barbican itself, Feshareki has produced a 50-minute son et lumière which blends the vocabulary of space-age electronica with mashups of songs from Purcell’s Pursue thy conquest now to Foreigner’s Waiting for a Girl like you. Her programme note refers to the orchestral musicians as “soloists on their own trajectories” and a “mathematically infinite and natural harmonic series” of pitches beyond the 12 notes of the diatonic scale. Such intricacies were lost on my ears, and what I heard was a semi-improvised set stretched to extravagantly indulgent lengths. Electroacoustic music used to be the future once, but this Immersion Day suggested that composers still struggle to let go of the past.
