Harpsichords, Matthew Bourne, Glen Leach, Nika Ticciati, Nightports (download and double CD)
Discus Music
As soon as I started listening to Matthew Bourne’s Harpsichords I found myself taken back to 9pm on Sunday 13th August, 1972. That evening saw the first UK performance of John Cage and Lejaren Hiller’s piece, HPSCHD, at the Roundhouse, broadcast on BBC Radio 3.
The compromises parents make with children. 9pm was past my bedtime back then, but I was told I could listen to it on my transistor radio, so long as I was in bed. I can still hear it in my head. A swirl of harpsichord sound, electronica, the mutterings, comings and goings of the audience. Cage and Hiller described HPSCHD in their programme note for its first performance (in 1969) as follows:
Twenty-minute solos for one to seven amplified harpsichords and tapes for one to fifty-two amplified monaural machines to be used in whole or in part in any combination with or without interruptions, etc., to make an indeterminate concert of any agreed-upon length having two to fifty-nine channels with loud-speakers around the audience.
Digital sound recording and processing was still the stuff of science fiction back then, but it’s hard to imagine any modern digital system having the aura of Cage’s ‘one to fifty-two amplified monaural machines’. The harpsichord solos consisted of classical harpsichord pieces processed by a computer programme that mimicked procedures taken from the I Ching. It might seem quaint these days, but the name, HPSCHD, came about as a result of the need to create a six-character file name. The first performance had taken place the same year as the first moon landing and even the Apollo Guidance Computer had only just over 30 kilobytes of RAM.
HPSCHD was a happening. As John Cage said of the happenings he created, ‘I don’t think we’re really interested in the validity of compositions any more. We’re interested in the experiences of things.’ In addition to the harpsichords and tape machines, an array of projectors displayed slides and movies on overhead screens. For the UK performance, the seating was removed from the Roundhouse so that audience-members could wander in, out and around as they pleased. The first performance had lasted five hours. I’m not sure how long the Roundhouse performance went on for: it going on well after my bedtime, I think I fell asleep before the end. It’s one reason, I think, why my memories of that night were so magical: I was listening to John Cage in the dark, surfing along the edge of sleep.
Unlike Matthew Bourne, Cage was not keen on improvisation as a way of making music – he considered it to be too bound up with the performer’s emotions and tastes. Nevertheless, Harpsichords has definite echoes of Cage and is a good example of how that composer’s influence persists. (The same could be said of Bourne’s 2022 album, Irrealis, a collection improvised prepared piano tracks). One of Cage’s lasting legacies has been the idea of music as process. Bourne has often pointed out that he’s ‘possessed of a burning desire to make music on anything old, broken or infirm’ and this album came about when he acquired three harpsichords in various states of disrepair. In a way, one could think of them as randomly ‘prepared’. In the case of HPSCHD, the music is processed by computer before it’s played. In the case of Harpsichords, it’s processed by the idiosyncrasies of the wrecked, neglected instruments.
On the sleeve, six letters of the title, Harpsichords, have been struck through, leaving one wondering if this is a nod towards the Cage-Hiller happening. The first CD consists entirely of tracks created by all three harpsichords together. Harpsichords in good nick are wonderfully noisy at the best of times: in the hands of Bourne, Leach and Ticciati, these three instruments are even more so. There’s a real energy to the music: microtonal patterns build into exhilarating cacophonies, rhythmic clatterings and relentless, dense crowds of notes receding into an indistinct background. In the album notes, Bourne says they ‘felt as if [they] had only scratched at the surface (sometimes literally)’ of the sound-worlds they could create. The literal scratching probably refers to Track 4 (‘The Helmet of Disaster’), much of which is made from noise rather than pitched sounds.
On the second CD, the harpsichords are played separately. These improvisations are all by Bourne, Mark Slater (one half of the duo, Nightports) adding electronic processing. Adam Martin (the other half) added more processing and effects at the editing stage. It’s not Bourne’s first collaboration with Nightports: they issued their first joint album back in 2018 (see links, below). On that occasion, Bourne was playing not harpsichords but ‘decrepit dusty’ upright pianos. In the notes to the harpsichord album, he says how ‘recordings were later subjected to brutal cuts and edits made with the same attitude of spontaneous playfulness as the performances.’ Listening to them, I got the feeling that although Bourne was frequently referencing other pieces and styles (it’s hard to be specific) the end result has a refreshing originality about it. The first track (‘Burn All Three’) references a remark Bourne makes in the album notes to setting the harpsichords alight ‘in some sort of sacrificial bonfire after their usefulness had expired’. If he did, I hope he recorded it. I’d love to hear it.
Dominic Rivron
LINKS
Harpsichords: https://discusmusic.bandcamp.com/album/harpsichords-175cd-2024
Irrealis: https://matthewbourne.bandcamp.com/album/irrealis
An interview with Nightports: https://thevinylfactory.com/films/nightports-matthew-bourne-live/
Nightports w/ Matthew Bourne: https://nightports.bandcamp.com/album/nightports-w-matthew-bourne
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