Richard Barrett CONSTRUCTION

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

did any one listen to this ......

a live show from Huddersfield Town Hall as part of the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival 2011. The programme features the world premiere of a major new work by Richard Barrett - Construction - a two-hour piece which explores ideas about urban living, both through promised utopias and harsh realities. The performers are ELISION with vocalists Deborah Kayser, Ute Wassermann and Carl Rosman, conducted by Eugene Ughetti.

?

it displaced Jazz Library from the schedule but a two hour forty minute broadcast of live contemporary muisc is to be admired .... except that i could not manage more than five minutes of the sounds presented ... mea culpa

[Oddball]

Yes, I listened - and have been scanning the H&N board for some remarks on the work.

Well I listened to the end (twice). There was nothing in the work that turned me away from it, but I hesitate to take a viewpoint on a work that long.

[Bryn]

did any one listen to this ......



?

Sure did, and as at least one other has observed, a lot that relates closely to 'free jazz' in it, (certainly more so than John Tilbury's Samuel Beckett performances which featured on the Jazz on 3 a few years ago). I've listened to it twice now (at the time of the broadcast via FM, and last night to the 320kbps AAC-LC offering via the iPlayer. Those who attended will have a better idea of how good a job the broadcast audio engineers did but it sounded very good to me.

Oh, and as SMP pointed out in her introduction to the performance, it's "CONSTRUCTION", not "Construction". As is so often the case the online schedule compilers got that wrong too. There again, as Mr. Barrett only finished writing it a few days ago, perhaps they were in no position to be aware of such subtleties.

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

so amended ...

[Ian Thumwood]

I tuned in hoping to hear Jazz Library and CONSTRUCTION must have been what I heard instead. Must admit, I hated it and turned over after a couple of minutes and played a James Carter CD instead as I drove hoime from Andover.

[Serial_Apologist]

I tuned in hoping to hear Jazz Library and CONSTRUCTION must have been what I heard instead. Must admit, I hated it and turned over after a couple of minutes and played a James Carter CD instead as I drove hoime from Andover.

Richard Barrett's music certainly presents challenges in getting into. I thought the first couple of minutes were the most accessible part of the work! - there was even a beatbox passage. None of the detail has stayed with me; on the other hand I was kept captivated by the piece for its entire duration: not a boring moment - unlike in some of the works linked in the "50 Years of Minimalism" programme on earlier on Saturday evening. Anyone else listen to that? No? Not surprised - it doesn't seem to have warranted a thread, even. What a load of... all the spokesmen (sic) for the genre spoke at top speed so one could not absorb points they were apparently making, as if coked up... and talk about DEFENSIVE positions being taken, sheeeesh - like, this music is abstraction, like the Abstract Expressionists returning to basics (??); like, now the message about minimalism has now been fully taken on board by serious critics and composers, we're no longer forced to undergo the miseries (or some such) of modernism. The programme was as full of self-congratulatory self-justifying selfrighteousness as Stockhausen!

[Bryn]

I expect most of the other Tunbridge Wells comments re. the minimalist programme were aired the first time it was broadcast.

[hackneyvi]

I expect most of the other Tunbridge Wells comments re. the minimalist programme were aired the first time it was broadcast.

I wasn't 'disgusted' but listening to the later part of the programme, I did think both the speakers and the music were trite; exemplified by Nico Mulhy and the soup which was ladelled onto the soundtrack under Michael Nyman's closing speech. It doesn't seem to me to be music of any greater depth than that of The New Seekers but The New Seekers at least have brevity to mitigate other shortcomings.

[Alison]

I was so disappointed I missed the first of twenty minutes of CONSTRUCTION.

It sounded a feast for the ear and consistently engaging in the manner described by SA.

[Bryn]

It's on the iPlayer in HD Sound, Alison.

PM on its way.