ALTAIR FIVE
THE ALTERNATIVE GUIDE TO INTERESTING MUSIC BY MARK PRENDERGAST.
This is an archive edition.
The most recent issue is here.
ALTAIR FIVE
THE ALTERNATIVE GUIDE TO INTERESTING MUSIC BY MARK PRENDERGAST.
This is an archive edition.
The most recent issue is here.
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CONTENTS
RECEPTION
I'm now into my third year of writing on my ambitious task of penning an alternative history of 20th Century music. I sit in the midst of trees and green grass everyday in a tranquil area of London - immersed in my own notes, articles and interviews built-up over fifteen years. I've just finished an essay on Steve Reich, a man I've interviewed three times in three different countries - America, England and Holland - though this wasn't planned. Synchronicity used to be something to do with Koestler but was hi-jacked by Sting for The Police. It's something to do with two independent things happening at the same time. While penning the discography to the Reich section of my book a boxed set was despatched to me from WEA containing all of Reich's music - all! I take this as a sign of good tidings for a project that has taken nearly ten years to realise!!
As U2 circumnavigate the globe (20 cities down, 60 cities to go) this summer has proven to be another classic for British music. After the great rain-out of Glastonbury we see a summer which coincided with a run of classic releases from bands like Primal Scream and Spiritualised. And as Glastonbury showed the quality of British music is incredibly high. Radiohead, Prodigy, Cast and Kula Shaker are so musically literate they'd make your hairs stand on end. And there seems to be no shortage of good bands. My only current disappointment is John Squire's 'Seahorses' project where a phenomenal guitarist (who wears his Jimmy Page image, complete with low slung guitar, too up front for my liking) has saddled himself with a curiously mediocre band. It seems that Mani Mounfield made the right decision in opting for Primal Scream after the Stone Roses split. The only thing I can say about the new '90s music is that almost all of the groups seem to be in some sense faceless. They don't have a crafted stage image in the tradition of Hendrix, Bowie or Led Zeppelin. They let the music speak for itself which it does. And talking of Glastonbury I thought Sheryl Crow was the best thing there, a truly gutsy, ballsy American rock 'n' roll chick , if there ever was one.
Anyway because of looming last final deadlines and things from my publisher this edition of ALTAIR 5 has to be short. Don't worry I'll make it up to you later. Thanks to those people who wrote to me. Send anything you desire for review, everything that gets sent is listened to.
Mark Prendergast,London.
| Come Out | (1966) |
| Piano Phase | (1967) |
| It's Gonna Rain | (1965) |
| Four Organs | (1970) |
| Drumming | (1971) |
| Music For Mallet Instruments | (1973) |
| Clapping Music | (1972) |
| Six Marimbas | (1973-1986) |
| Music For 18 Musicians | (1976) |
| Eight Lines (Octet) | (1979) |
| Tehillim | (1981) |
| The Desert Music | (1984) |
| New York Counterpoint | (1985) |
| Sextet | (1985) |
| The Four Sections | (1987) |
| Different Trains | (1988) |
| Electric Counterpoint | (1987) |
| Three Movements | (1986) |
| The Cave | (1993) |
| Proverb | (1995) |
| Nagoya Marimbas | (1994) |
| City Life | (1994) |
CLASSICAL
Erik Satie : Piano Dreams (Decca)/Unusual Inspirations (EMI)
Having for years been a champion of Reinbert de Leeuw and the Satie editions he did for Philips in the 1980s ,I'm quite impressed with this new Decca selection with Pascal Roge in charge. The are no 'Sarabandes' but some of the other stuff is exquisite - a 'Nocturne', 'Caresse', 'Ballet Waltz', all the 'Gnossiennes' and 'Gymnopedies'. It's also at budget price. The EMI album presents his orchestral music including one of the great Ambient vocal/orchestral masterpieces in 'Socrate' from 1920. There's his weird 'Mass For The Poor' all heavy organs written in 1895, the Debussy orchestrated 'Gymnopedie' (never my favourite versions but here from the '60s in a French version acceptable) and a lyrical comedy about the 'Lure of Medusa' in one act with 7 dancers and 8 instruments. The double disc set ends with 'Things seen to the right and left without glasses - a hypocritical chorale, a wary fugue, a muscular fantasy ' for violin and piano. Satie wrote more than 70 pieces a lot of them for more than the piano. Here's a chance to sample them.
Debussy - Chamber Music (EMI)
Toru Takemitsu - Piano Works (Finlandia)
Unknown Public 8 - Sensuality
Roger Eno - The Music of Neglected English Composers (Resurgence)
MODERN RECORD OF THE PERIOD
PRIMAL SCREAM - VANISHING POINT
ARCHIVE RECORD OF THE PERIOD
STEVE REICH - WORKS 1965 TO 1995
TEASER TRACK OF THE MONTH
ROY HARPER - ONE OF THESE DAYS IN ENGLAND.
COPYRIGHT ON ALL OF THE ABOVE RESIDES WITH MARK J. PRENDERGAST. ANY EDITORS OR PUBLISHERS WISHING TO QUOTE FROM THE ABOVE WRITINGS CAN DO SO AS LONG AS THEY ENQUIRE AT PHONE (LONDON 0181 299 2998) OR FAX (0181 693 0349). THE WRITER IS FREELY AVAILABLE TO CONTRIBUTE SIMILAR IDEAS ON HIS FAVOURITE MUSICS TO PUBLICATIONS WITH A GENUINE INTEREST.
This is Altair 5 signing off for now. Music needs you too..
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Satie was one of the great French bohemians of the 19th century. A chaser of hash dreams and mellifluous music, a mystic interested in ritual, a founder of his own church, a dedication to the poor and a maker of music still to be discovered. He is best known by the music he created in the 1880s/1890s - the Gnossiennes, Sarabandes and Gymnopedies which are so delicately limpid that they can make you float. Used as the soundtrack to so much they are inimitably French. Satie hated German music and refused scholarship until he was in his forties after Debussy and Ravel had overtaken him in the popularity stakes. He's famous for the humour of his titles - " Three pieces in the form of a pear." - his bowler hats and avant-garde image.
Nearly 80 years after his death Claude Debussy still exerts a phenomenal influence over modern music. Look at how often he's namechecked in David Toop's 1995 book 'Ocean Of Sound'. His direct influence on Miles Davis and Steve Reich is discernible in their music. And what of whole-tone scales, Spanish music, sunken cathedrals, Erik Satie and the stuff of Baudelaire dreams. Did Debussy soundtrack the decadents? Or was he a futurist before his time? Most people know the orchestral pieces 'Prelude To The Afternoon Of A Faun' or 'The Sea' but this disc reveals other music. It's a double, ending in the earliest pieces from 1889 - 'The Little Suite' for two pianos where the young composer pays homage to Faure, Bizet, Delibes and others. The characteristic splashy piano sound associated with Debussy can be heard on the 1891 'Scottish March. There's a string quartet from 1893, Debussy's first Spanish-flavoured piece from 1901, some lovely dances for chromatic harp (crossing strings/invented 1894) from 1904, 'Syrinx' for solo flute from 1913, 'Six Antique Epigraphs' for piano from 1914. The set concludes with works composed when he was ill with agonising cancer - 'In black and white' (1914) is more jolly than the three 'Sonatas' (1915-1917) one for cello and piano, the elegiac one for flute ,viola and harp and the final one for violin and piano.
If Debussy influeced Takemitsu, he went on to influence generations of musicians including David Sylvian and Ryuichi Sakamoto. Takemitsu is famous for pushing electronic and experimental music in Japan at a time Stockhausen was doing so in Germany. More famous is his work for Japanese film-makers, notably Akira Kurosawa and the titles of works evoking nature - 'Riverrun', 'Rainspell'. His music evokes weather or the slight changes in the landscape of a Kyoto garden. Kimmo Korhonen's sleevenotes here point to a " translucently bright, elegant and extremely sensitivity towards the sound spectrum of the piano. " There are elements of John Cale (aleatory), Webern (pointillism), Messiaen (glow), Javanese gamelan, symbolism (Odilon Redon), water 'Rain Tree Sketch' and much else in this collection of often beautiful pieces performed by Izumi Tateno.
The sleevenote says " our sensual richness can be met by gorgeous timbres, visceral rhythms or the way players simply breathe life into music through the physical act of performance. " There are fourteen examples here. The first is a brief elegy for John Cage by Howard Skempton on piano, the second is a beautiful performance by soprano Claron Mc Fadden of Louis Andriessen's 'Dances', the third is a wonderful electronic collage by Sylvia Hallett. What's great about UP is their willingness to give relatively unknown composers/musicians a try and group the efforts under some kind of accessible banner. So here you hear (no pun intended) the cross-pollinated jazz of Bob Moses, the quiet-intensity of Mark-Anthony Turnage, the beauteous Portugese of Monica Vasconcelos, the dark eroticism of Fabienne Audeoud, the cloistered ambience of Mark Ramsden, the potent Pre-Raphaelite poetry of Christina Rossetti, Eddie McGuire's robustly romantic guitar work and the classic that is Eric Dolphy's bass clarinet improvisation from the 1960s of Billie Holiday's 'God Bless The Child'.
Whether it be his work with Kate St. John or his own recent album 'Swimming', Roger Eno has always had an affinity with English music particularly the music of Vaughan Williams and Delius. One day while in Norfolk Church he heard the music of Willington Crook, one of the earliest people (1895) to use chance procedures in music. There's an erotic picture of Ellishaw Blakehope in this collection from about 1920. Her father was a reverand and taught her liturgical music. Yet she ran away to Chelsea and became an exotic dancer. Her floor show featured music inspired by Rudolph Valentino movies. Pilham Aisby was a master of bass viol who lived almost all of the 17th century. He wore very long wigs. Clare Brand spent eleven years (night and day) writing music having left the Royal Academy. Then one day in 1995 she destroyed everything and moved to the West of Ireland. The brooding but lyrical 'Bright September' was her last composition. Jack Hill was a Lincolnshire watchmaker's son. He was conscripted at 18 to die in the trenches as he composed 'Hours of Darkness' an intensely emotional expression of war. Morley Butterknowle was a railway signalman who wrote on the harmonium between trains. Gayle Hawes was 81 when she died having spent the years from 13 onwards trying to catch an elusive tune. 'The Love Affair' went through innumerable variations over 950 notebooks. When she finished it she committed suicide. Two versions are included. Burwell Ruckland lived in Paris and devoted himself to the memory of Satie. Yet his two piano pieces here are as individual as anything I've heard and by far the best pieces of music on this remarkable disc.
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