The programme for the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, summarised by Artistic Director Graham McKenzie:
This year’s Festival is undoubtedly characterised by the bringing together of often quite disparate forces, to create new sounds, new experiences, and new approaches to music making. Perhaps this is best evidenced in the pairing of roaring saxophonist, and the founding father of European free improvisation, Peter Brötzmann, with German new music supergroup Ensemble Musikfabrik. Elsewhere, avant-garde composer and lmmaker Jennifer Walshe leads the dance with the renowned Arditti Quartet, while Claudia Molitor continues to offer new insights into the creative process, and non-conventional approaches to composition – creating large-scale works, rich in layers and depth – often constructed from fragments of sound. Equally inventive yet surprising is American saxophonist Colin Stetson’s re-imagining of Gorecki’s classic Symphony No 3 – drawing on noise, drone and even dark metal to transform, and provide fresh insights to a heralded masterpiece.
The true purpose behind these musical experiments of course is to continue to push boundaries, to break down barriers, and (mis)conceptions about music. American critic Ben Ratliff in his recent book Every Song Ever writes ‘What does it mean to listen in the digital era? Today, new technologies make it possible to roam instantly and experimentally across musical languages and generations, from Detroit techno to jam bands to baroque opera. As familiar subdivisions like “rock” and “jazz” matter less and less and music’s accessible past becomes longer and broader, listeners can put aside the intentions of composers and musicians and engage music afresh, on their own terms’.
I am also pleased to welcome Georg Friedrich Haas to Huddersfield as this year’s Composer in Residence. Anyone who was present at the UK premiere of in vain (hcmf// 2013) could not fail to be profoundly and deeply affected by the sheer power and force of this music. Now based in New York to take up a position at Columbia, Haas is artistically at the height of his powers. Yet, unlike many of his contemporaries, his academic position has not turned his artistic practice to look inwards – but rather the opposite – to reach out and engage with the very real issues facing the world today. This is certainly true of the works he brings to Hudders eld. Hyena deals with the trauma of addiction, with a powerful text and performance by Mollena Lee Williams-Haas, while I can’t breathe is the composer’s response to a Black Lives Matter march going past his at, in memory of Eric Garner, and in solidarity with the protesters.