KVT – New Music @ Goethe

There’s a lot of exciting, modern classical music out there. The problem is that it’s not reaching its potential audience. – Gabriel Prokofiev (grandson of composer Sergei, also a composer who uses electronica as a medium)

So It’s exciting to realize that ‘new music’ is alive in Hanoi as recently played at Goethe by THE NEW MUSIC ENSEMBLE and that local audiences are responding enthusiastically

The ensemble has a distinguished line up of performers including members of the successful Song Hong chamber music ensemble who were joined by a flutist and a dan bau musician.

BUT WHAT IS NEW MUSIC?

In this opinion piece I use the term in relation to contemporary classical music

One young thinker puts it like this: New music challenges the audience to consider sounds (or silence) that are not generally considered music as music

In the history of music new music has periodically popped its head above popular styles and caused a kerfuffle until audiences gradually embraced it or it subtly became a dominant presence. In the 14th century it was ars nova; in the17th it was nuova musiche . After 1850 it was the music of Liszt, Wagner and their followers. Last century gave rise to atonal music and its ilk. Recent historical phase is electronic which, popularized as dance music: techno, drum and bass, house, ambient, jungle, industrial, etc, has also become music for concentrated listening.

Electronica as classical music grew in popularity with a large group of Hanoians from the early part of this century with dedicated young composers and musicians exampled by Vu Nhat Tan and Tri Minh leading the charge.

Since their inception in 2008 packed out Sound Stuff performances fused electronica with traditional and orchestral musical instruments and paralleled listening concerts with dance music parties.

The success of NEW MUSIC as classical medium in Hanoi could be laid at the feet of Kim Ngoc, the internationally celebrated female composer, musician and performance artist who founded Vietnam’s first experimental sound music festival in 2009 and which by 2013 had become a feast of local and international musicians playing new music at a variety of venues. Kim Ngoc is seen below as a music maker at a Cracking Bamboo (international music) performance

[youtube width=”700″ height=”393″]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-AYUlvPMrbo[/youtube]

Kim Ngoc established DOM DOM (fire fly) as a dedicated hub for experimental art and music.

AND ALL OF THE ABOVE LEADS US TO the recent packed performances by the New Music Ensemble which had its beginnings in 2013, revved up when American conductor Jeff von der Schmidt collaborated with them, and which, this year hit the road with a roar at L’Espace in April.

One of the main aims of the ensemble and its mentors Kim Ngoc and Vu Nhat Tan is to present ‘new music’ by Vietnamese composers.

In this concert we got

• a very accomplished string quartet composed by 60 year old composer and peoples’ artist Do Hong Quan
• a stimulating dan bau composition by French/ Vietnamese composer Nguyen Thien Dao who died in 2015 and who had merged contemporary western classical music with emerging Vietnamese music since the 1990ies . His symphony RENDEVOUS was played by the Vietnam symphony orchestra in 2014 and this atonal tone poem had me on the edge of my seat with its string vibratos.
• an intense and beautiful 1985 cello sonata, Moon, by Vu Nhat Tan…….who is no stranger to the classical genre. The VNSO premiered Tan’s exhilarating, 15 minute composition Hanoi, Hanoi…. and Hanoi a couple of years ago, not long after the Song Hong Quintet got their fingers flying and the hair on the back of my neck rising with his experimental tone poem Rains

One of the world’s best regarded new music composers is Japanese Toru Takimitsu (1930-1996) had his 1960ies flute composition played, breathed and voiced spectacularly.

Paul Hindemith’s music was declared degenerate by Hitler and the Nazis so you can imagine how invigorating is his 1935 String Quartet which he said should be played so that ‘the listener should never be given a chance to rest. Even the few quiet passages must have a threatening sense of thunder in the air. Above all, the piece must never sound orthodox. It should always give the impression of a colorful improvisation.’ And thus it was played for us.

In their prime, Song Hong’s quintet signature piece was Shostakovich’s 1940 Piano Quintet and to conclude the concert they played two movements with the flair and intensity that is demanded by a composition that was just about squashed under the heel of one of Stalin’s merciless boots.

Composers such as Vu Nhat Tan and Kim Ngoc are helping to redefine classical music in Vietnam and with an ensemble as willing and talented as the New Music Ensemble we should be able to expect more exciting and intelligent adventures into newer new music as the ensemble explores and expand its abilities

Their next outing is later in the year at L’Espace with a grand slam event at the new Concert Hall to follow

I wonder if the New Music Ensemble will stick to conventional instruments as they advance into the new music genre, or will they include hybrid species of electronica?

I sort of hope that they get stuck into occasional electronic shared adventures as there are many talented Vietnamese composers and musicians out there who could stir the complacent music world into a space that is beyond just entertainment

A whiff of what could be occurred a couple of years ago at Chula when Vu Nhat Tan paired with a violinist and gave us a fabulous dose of his violin sonatas.

Many contemporary New Music composers are women so perhaps in the future programs will include their work.

The ensemble prepares its visuals with care (I particularly liked the pairing of Hindemith’s music with the art work of another artist that the Nazis declared degenerate, Paul Klee) but I’d like to have less amateurish verbal introductions to compositions because the bulk of in audiences are sophisticatedly literate.

GRATTITUDE and THANKS

We are lucky in Hanoi to have generous sponsors that allow audiences free or inexpensive access to classical New Music events, encouraging the genre to thrive.

This time it was the Goethe Institute