KVT went to New Music Meeting

New Music is Wonderful Noise

Went to the Youth Theatre on Thursday night to catch the New Music Meeting and was not disappointed.

On Thursday, 19 year old Huyen Hong Giang led us into an hour and a half of experimental music with his Harsh Noise composition, played on analog pedals with a contact microphone. It was the perfect overture.

I’ve long been a devotee of soundscapes and Pippa Murphy’s Caspian Retreat solo from her trilogy Telluric Currents, played via a laptop, was a stunning follow up.

The varied program was riveting and the predominately young audience in the upper level seats around me was attentive and really appreciative. The presentation was beautifully professional and each short piece skillfully progressed into the next. To have a favorite was difficult. The invited international composer/musicians gave us tantalizing western insights into this fringe music genre and the locals, most of whom have international reputations, were excellent.

To listen to new music on radio you usually have to catch the sessions in the wee hours and when my favorite classical station attempted to inject a piece each morning into their breakfast programming a month ago the audience reaction was overwhelmingly negative. One wonders when new music will have a mainstream acceptance or will we be stuck in the pre-mid-20th century forever! But then, seeing that visual arts managed to move past 19th century impressionism and into the exciting (and profitable) realms of modernism and post-modernism and collectable acceptance in one century, then perhaps our ears might attune to the sensibilities of our eyes and allow our brains to link up with the new musical sounds this century.

New Music, I guess, fits into the classical repertoire and all of the artists in Hanoi New Music Meeting have had classical training and have moved on to experimental music, noise and sound performance and composition with many using conventional instruments. In the case of the Vietnamese, their own very traditional instruments.

Funny, but I had a mindset that composers were predominately male (how many female composers feature in conventional classical concerts?) but here we had an equal gender mix. Will it be female composers heading concert programs in 50 years time?

I’d love to find out how new music is scored and notated as conventional methods would be difficult…. And will musicians have to retrain to be able to read and play the stuff? Scoring for found objects and toys will test the skills of a lot of percussionists and I can’t imagine how  Vu Nhat Tan will notate for his kaoss pad, kaossilator, convulsion CN2, and self made sound generators.  I wish I’d been able to attend some of the sessions at Goethe to find out.

Video art is of course an art form that goes so perfectly with this type of music and Brian Ring’s really good accompaniment to San X’s passionate composition had a perfect William Kentridge feel to it.

The voice has always been a part of classical music making and Kim Ngoc highlighted new music vocals in her beautiful aural and visual conclusion to the evening’s music with a stage realization that was post-modern in its traditionalism.

Couldn’t wait for Friday night’s new music chamber music recitals by the same musicians.