In 2022, BBC3 presenter Kate Molleson published the book Sound Within Sound, which profiles ten modern composers she considers unjustly neglected in the classical canon: Julián Carrillo, Ruth Crawford Seeger, Walter Smetak, José Maceda, Galina Ustvolskaya, Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou, Else Marie Pade, Muhal Richard Abrams, Éliane Radigue, and Annea Lockwood. It’s an eclectic group, the only commonality being the artists’ exclusion from the traditional canon.
This July, London’s Southbank Centre ran a four-day festival inspired by Molleson’s book, making it a kind of laboratory that tested how these composers’ music works in a concert hall.
Opening day began in the cavernous Queen Elizabeth Hall with Lockwood’s Jitterbug. In an interview with Molleson after the concert, the composer explained that the score for Jitterbug consists of stone tablets she found in Montana. The lines and shapes on the tablets are interpreted by musicians (in this case, cellist Anton Lukoszevieze and violinist Angharad Davies of Apartment House). Recordings of river and insect sounds accompany the live musicians’ whispers and scratches. Music For Five Pianos, by Filipino composer and musicologist Maceda, begins with repeated and phased octaves, threatening to settle into predictable postminimalism, but quickly muddies the waters with cluster chords and polyrhythms that defy comprehension. It is as though each piano were autonomous, with the five only occasionally converging by chance into clarion gamelan-like passages. Seeger’s chants, performed by The Marian Consort before and after the concert out in the atrium, are eerie modernist refractions of medieval church music. The three pieces have little in common, and perhaps that’s the point—to highlight the variety of esthetics in and around the classical tradition.
On the second day, the London Sinfonietta presented Carrillo alongside one of his contemporaries in the Mexican avant-garde of the 1930s, the rambunctious leftist Silvestre Revueltas. It was a study in contrasts. Revueltas’ Homenaje a Federico García Lorca was full of life and humour—there are, hilariously, unison runs played by piccolo and tuba. Think Nino Rota. Carrillo is at the other end of the spectrum: sparse and austere. After two intriguing quarter-tone string quartets came the first true standout of the festival, Carrillo’s Preludio a Colon. (Yes, that’s an homage to Columbus; born to an Indigenous family in 1875, Carrillo came, paradoxically, to identify completely with European esthetics and institutions.) The piece is in sixteenth-tones. Soprano Juliet Fraser sang a melismatic descending motif accompanied by flurries of flutes, strings, and a purpose-built microtonal harp (introduced and played by Ernestine Stoop). The performance of the haunting piece was virtuosic.
Next, Israeli pianist Maya Dunietz performed Emahoy in the smaller Purcell Room. She is uniquely qualified for the task. As recounted in an interview with Molleson halfway through the concert, Dunietz knew Emahoy intimately and has helped to arrange her scores for publication. Emahoy’s music, a sort of Ethiopian twist on Chopin or Debussy, is justly beloved—this was the sell-out concert of the festival. Dunietz is a spirited interpreter, and delighted in The Homeless Wanderer’s frolicking rubato and the drama of The Last Tears of a Deceased (dedicated to Emahoy’s brother, who died fighting invading Italian fascists in the 1930s). She also sang Emahoy’s vocal work If Someone Deserts You, which in its idiosyncratic earnestness calls to mind singer-songwriters like Molly Drake and Sibylle Baier.
The third day offered two concerts dedicated to the music of Galina Ustvolskaya, who has an intense and rigorous musical lexicon that earned her the moniker “the lady with the hammer.” The first concert comprised her last three piano sonatas, which were played by Siwan Rhys. Heavy, densely chromatic, and full of thuds (played occasionally by fists and forearms), they are minimalist descendants of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata 32. Having Ustvolskaya follow Emahoy was an inspired bit of programming. Deeply if unconventionally spiritual women who developed unique musical languages in enforced isolation under oppressive regimes, they are two sides of the same coin. Where Emahoy lilts, Ustvolskaya rages.
Next up was the London Sinfonietta performing Ustvolskaya’s second and third symphonies scored for characteristically bizarre orchestras: In lieu of the normal sections, there are five basses, six flutes, three drums, etc. Each symphony also features a solo voice reciting in Russian invocations by the eleventh-century monk Hermanus Contractus. I can’t decide if the result was closer to death metal or amateur theatre. I preferred the sonatas.
Quatuor Bozzini’s warm performance featured pieces by five composers, only one of whom is featured in Molleson’s book—Seeger again, this time the skittish String Quartet (1931). (They had wanted to play a Muhal Richard Abrams string quartet, but, to Molleson’s point about the marginalization of these composers, they couldn’t find the score.) Also included were works by James Tenney, Rudolf Komorous, Vanessa Beyer, and Graciela Paraskevaidis. To close out the day, we heard the electronic music of Danish composer Else Marie Pade—imagine Delia Derbyshire doing Carnival of Souls—in an almost pitch-black Queen Elizabeth Hall.
The fourth day consisted of music from Éliane Radigue’s sprawling Occam series performed by harpists Rhodri Davies and Hélène Breschand and Quatuor Bozzini. In the first half, the harpists conjured fragile drones by bowing and plucking their instruments before the festival drew to a close with a lush, yearning rendition of Occam XV from QB. Running parallel in the Purcell Room was an installation of Lockwood’s sound map of the Housatonic—a physical map with numbers indicating the locations of the recordings we’re hearing. It is as though Lockwood has handed over authorship to the river—she the instrumentalist, the river the composer.
“I see this program as the beginning of Sound within Sound Volume 2,” Clemens Merkel of Quatuor Bozzini remarked in his program notes for the Seeger concert. I hope he’s right. There is a huge variety of music at the fringes of classical that deserves its day in the sun.
Daniel Glassman writes about film and music. He lives in London, U.K.