Another Timbre

Apartment House play a series of works by Ryoko Akama, based on research she conducted at the Kryzstof Kieslowski archive in Poland.

How to Learn Songs by Ear

Three relatively late works by John Cage, performed by Apartment House. 'Two' (1987) was the first of his number pieces, while 'Hymnkus' (1986) is an one-off from the year before. 'Thoreau Drawings' (1974) is a very rarely performed work in two halves. In the first section the ensemble interpret shapes taken from drawings by Henry David Thoreau, and the second half is a (mono) field recording made at dawn in August1974 by the composer David Behrman in the small town of Stony Point, NY.

As with Luc Ferrari, it is an assemblage of recorded sequences in which we recognize a succession of various events and we reconstruct in our imaginary a possible narrative that may have been at the origin of these sounds.

We can still ponder this quartet written for the Bonn Festival in 1980. It has a wonderful quality of longevity, striking a passion for the timbre of the human voice. Arditti fully understood what Nono wanted: not a pretty but rather a threadbare timbre, unfinished and ugly, carrying the weight of the 20th century horrors and its challenges; Am Steg, like fingernails slowly descending down a chalkboard, the string body pulverized into fine particles of timbre not dissimilar to Penderecki's masterpiece on the subject of nuclear terror. While modernity may have died, Nono still lives on, for his departure always seem to give rise to another beginning of his impassioned love for unshackled timbre.

If you're a modern middle-aged urban black man living in the U.S., what is your ethnic heritage in music? Is it the hot or sweet music that poured forth from those oldtime tube sets? Is it the lullabies your mother sang? Or the music of the marching bands? Or the sounds from the big bands and r&b groups at the local dance hall? Surely it's a bit of all this and probably much more. Underlying all the concrete musical manifestations of black America you will find two main sources: the African and the Eurasian. From Africa comes the group feeling, the collective music-making, the emphasis on sound and rhythm – echoes of bush schools and community rites. From Eurasian sources come the long solo lines, the emphasis on melody and text – echoes of the bards singing their lengthy epics. These musical heritages impinged when the Jihad of Islam swept Africa in the 8th century and again when the European colonial powers moved into Africa and the Americas in the 15th century, and again when the global music industry moved into every corner of the planet in the 20th century.