The latter largely amounts to an emphasis on improvisation, both jazz-based and “classical”, and experimentalism; on performance that dispenses with musical notation. McKenzie seeks to broaden the scope of the traditionally quite scholastic festival, and the bassist-composer Barry Guy was a featured improviser this year. Another novelty was the use of concert formats — the Hub Shorts morning and afternoon slots at the Lawrence Batley Theatre, the six-hour session on a dancefloor by the ensemble (rout) — that put a focus on short and unusual pieces. At the same time there were many events of a perfectly recognisable Huddersfield kidney: 60th-birthday tributes to Michael Finnissy, whose song cycle, Whitman, was unveiled; performances of Richard Barrett’s music by the Australian avant-garde group Elision; the premiere, by the soprano Patricia Rozario and the Northern Sinfonia under Thomas Zehetmair, of an orchestral song cycle, Farness, by John Casken; and, most notably, a retrospective of music by the American innovator Morton Feldman.
Well, actually, Feldman was just about the only modern master not to be represented by Steinitz (hence the title of this strand, Missing Morty), and I often wondered why. One deterrent is, of course, the inordinate length of many of his later pieces. I caught the performance by members of the Smith Quartet and the pianist John Tilbury, at St Paul’s Hall, of Feldman’s last completed opus, with the typical, elemental title of Piano, Violin, Viola, Cello (1987), a continuous unfolding scheduled to last 75 minutes and taking 10 minutes more.
What can one say of a work that seemed to distil music’s essence? Silence is indeed an apt response to a listening experience so like that of meditation, though this spiritual exercise remains wholly musical. As with most Feldman pieces, the tempo is slow, the discourse unbrokenly smooth, “attacks” are gentle, if firm, and a uniform quietness prevails. The string players mute their instruments and avoid vibrato. (The violinist, Darragh Morgan, even used a baroque bow, which facilitated some magically feathered harmonics.) The pianist plays diaphonously dissonant chords that sound as if Feldman has tested each one meticulously — “handcrafted” them — and these are interspersed by rising, four-note arpeggios.
Harmonically, the work is super-subtle. To find chords whose mere iteration will sustain a structure of such size is a severe test of the atonal language that Feldman uses. Another composer, a less scrupulous “minimalist”, would hammer away at any old chords, but the work really is propelled harmonically from within, and for that reason never boring. Not that it modulates in the tonal sense, but there is an audible logic to the way one vertical configuration melts into the next.
Sometimes a piano chord will suggest a remote harmonic region, but the strings draw us straight back to where we were. The work is static and repetitive, but only as a tree is, or a pile of autumn leaves. Tiny variations of patterning — such as the first use (after an hour or so) of pizzicato — are momentous. The end — a simple stepwise keyboard figure — came when one was hardly expecting it, but immediately seemed inevitable. The performance was magnificent.