Richard Barrett CONSTRUCTION

[hackneyvi]

i still have not listened, mostly because i have a problem with how long this piece appears to require to hear it .... i mean the Art of Fugue i somewhere arounf 1hr 50m

Re sheer length, I have a similar feeling about Mahler. But with Bach, wouldn't we be accustomed to hearing excerpts from this; that whilst it is (an incomplete) whole, pleasure and satisfaction can be got from hearing parts.

Which makes me think - I've got a hour before I need to go out and I might as well give Barrett my ear.

Perhaps reason here is what mucks up the listening. We don't say we need to hear the whole thing to say what we might feel about a portion; but might be expected to hear the whole thing to make other kinds of judgement about it. But what are we judging if we're not judging our feelings about music?

I suppose I mean that giving a thing of this length a fair chance doesn't have to mean listening to it in its entirety and, though its length has deterred me all week, on reflection I can't think why.

[heliocentric]

Funny isn't it, how these avant garde über-serious composers write lots of stand-alone shortish pieces over several years, and then group them together as a vast cycle of works, presumably to make a more epic statement?

The composer said in his introduction that it was planned as a single work from the very start, and it's clear from the Huddersfield Festival wesbite that it was also (unlike the Ferneyhough and Dillon examples you mention) commissioned as such. Did you listen to it? If so, what was there about it that gave it the "whiff" you mention? If not, what's with the pontificating?

[french frank]

I think someone put up a link to the programme note somewhere - no? Can anyone help with finding it?

[hackneyvi]

4 sections (?) form a micro-opera based on The Trojan Women;
5 fragments which could form, if compiled, a violin concerto;
10 sections (the remainder): half have electronics in the foreground, half have the instruments;
All the parts run continuously or simultaneously or something.

Utopian ideas and spontaneous and pre-planned thinking / action are er have um something to um do (wa diddy diddy dum diddy doo) with it er.

An inspiration was Bacon - angular juxtapositions with disturbing events occuring within the setting.

God um he er he's a ahh boring er oh-wa er speaker (but I appreciate er that he um that he er was er nervous um).

The 9 members of his audience must have been quite overwhelming to confront.

[heliocentric]

The 9 members of his audience must have been quite overwhelming to confront.

I'm sorry but what evidence do you have for the size of the audience? since you obviously weren't there.

[hackneyvi]

I'm about 15 minutes in and I think that the mini-opera might have started.

So far, it's sounding pretty much like a new music parody.

I'm reading Tolstoy at the moment and I think he would have despised this. It's not really making any mark on me at all, though, so far.

Oh, wait though ... There's an unintelligible woman swooping in Greek that I fancy would be incomprehensible even if Greek was a language I spoke. She's starting to get on my tits.

[hackneyvi]

I'm sorry but what evidence do you have for the size of the audience? since you obviously weren't there.

You're quite right, I wasn't there and the audience may have numbered in the thousands. But I fancied I could hear individual pairs of hands clapping in an echoic acoustic, which I took to be a sign of thin attendance.

But size isn't everything.

I've done 30 minutes and I feel ... it's of no interest to me.

[heliocentric]

I fancied I could hear individual pairs of hands clapping in an echoic acoustic

That would be because the main microphones used to pick up the general sound were right in the middle of the audience and therefore quite close to some pairs of hands, and I know that because I was there, and found the turnout not bad at all for a concert (the fourth in the festival that day IIRC) that everyone knew wouldn't end until quarter to one in the morning. What's more nobody left the auditorium during the performance. Not that any of that should mean that it ought to be of any interest to you of course. I just wonder why you make these cynical assumptions.

[ahinton]

The 9 members of his audience must have been quite overwhelming to confront.

I wasn't present either but I have to say that anyone incapable of deducing from the applause that the number of audience members must have been in three figures would have an aural capacity so limited as to enable him/her to derive very little from the music...

[John Skelton]

I think someone put up a link to the programme note somewhere - no? Can anyone help with finding it?

I linked to the hcmf website, ff

http://www.hcmf.co.uk/Richard-Barret...l-CONSTRUCTION