On both occasions I found myself thinking about the relation between the music and the space. At the Haydn I remembered a thought I'd had before, and which Lil had talked about, when we visited the cathedral in Florence: that religious or not, one couldn't help but be amazed and moved by the monuments that belief had built. The university chapel is not particularly remarkable, but in combination with the music - selections from across 40 years of Haydn's life - an atmosphere was created that reminded me of that thought.
Whilst overall it was a bit too religious for my taste, the piece I enjoyed the most was "Motet, Insanae et vanae curae" (which translates as "mad and groundless cares"). The "lyrics" are about sticking with God, and not being tempted by "earthly things". What I liked about it was its very dramatic opening which gave way to a much calmer middle section, before getting dramatic again at the end.
Having said that, what has stuck with me more than any of the music was this little story about the second piece, the Organ Concerto in C major:
"When he left choir school, Haydn remained in Vienna. He lodged with a wig-maker who had two daughters, Maria Anna Aloysia Apollonia, who would later become Haydn's wife, and Therese, who was his true love. Sadly, Therese and her parents were determined that she, as the younger daughter, should become a nun. On 12 May 1756 she took her vows and entered the Order of the Poor Clares. The music for the ceremony was directed by Haydn."
I tried to detect moments of longing and sadness in the music, and thought of poor Haydn directing musicians playing a sort of farewell song to his beloved. I thought what a great film a depiction of that day would make.
Last night, I saw Toshimaru Nakamura and Jean-Luc Guionnet perform. Nakamura "is one of the great Japanese minimal improvisers" and Guionnet is "a French saxophonist/ composer/organist/field recording artist."
The Instal website describes them thus: "Toshi turns his mixing desk into an instrument of fizzing electric potential by looping the output back into the input, creating a feedback system. Jean-Luc's blasts of electronic sounding sax/organ always sit best next to the static fuzz of abused hardware."
The words I noted down on my mobile phone, knowing I'd write about the performance, were these: seance, summoning, scary, site specific. Now, apart from a strange conclusion that Nakamura and Guionnet's work conjures thoughts of the letter S, what I suppose these words mean is that the hard/soft dynamics - similar to Haydn - of the piece were attempting to call something up, to manifest something. It felt particularly apt in a chapel. Erik said their sound was like the walls crashing in. There was this curious miz of destruction and creation in their music. (You can hear it here).
The second performance last night was by Hermann Nitsch, "one of the great visual/live art/performance artists of the 20th Century". The programme notes detailed Nitsch's history as a founding member of the Aktionists (from Vienna, like Haydn), "who developed an artistic, critical response to the strict, conservative society of post-WWII Austria ... in a blend of shock, ritual, the ethics of religion and sacrifice, [and] our culture's fixation with violence", inticingly describing his performance art pieces as "juxtapositions of quasi-religious and ritualistic icons, including staged crucifixions, robed processions, nudity, animal sacrifice, the drinking of blood, drunken excess" etc etc.
We were given a specially commissioned piece for organ, the inspiration for which was "the almost presumptious task to conjure, to sing of, and measure the extent of cosmic space". (In fact, a Google image search for Nitsch comes up with lots of fairly hideous looking animal dissections). In practice it was a very old man playing great organ chords by putting planks of wood on the keys, helped by two middle-aged men. He kept stopping, and no-one was sure whether to clap or not. After clapping in these pauses twice, he leaned over from the organ balcony, and said, rather grumpily "my concert lasts for 1 hour, exactly 1 hour. You can clap then", rather wrecking an mood of cosmic contemplation he was attempting to create.
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