London Contemporary Music Festival Marks 10 Years with a Celebration of Experimental Music’s Legacy

With performances ranging from improvisation to film, electronic music and DJs, and orchestral music, London Contemporary Music Festival ambitiously aims to “provide a home to the promiscuous music lover.” To mark their 10th anniversary this year, four nights of diverse musical disciplines within contemporary and experimental art circled around the theme “LET’S CREATE,” celebrating the idea of tricksters and mischief while poking fun at Arts Council England’s branding for an initiative of the same name.

The main advertised event of the final programme on Jan. 17 at Wigmore Hall was a new collaborative work by French composer Éliane Radigue and Franco-American composer and clarinetist Carol Robinson. But what I did not realize before sitting down in my seat is that the entire first half would focus on the revival of intonarumori, a collection of musical instruments originally built by futurist composer Luigi Russolo in the early 20th century. Traversing new and older works, the intonarumori were played by The Orchestra of Futurist Noise Intoners, consisting of members of the Guildhall School of Music and Drama’s New Music Society and led by Italian composer Luciano Chessa.

The Orchestra of Futurist Noise Intoners, conducted by Luciano Chessa — Photo courtesy of Wigmore Hall

As we first entered the hall, the audience was confronted with 16 of these mammoth machines, which looked like large wooden boxes with a duckbill-like megaphone attached to the front. Each intonarumori had a different method of sound generation – the ‘ronatore’ resembled light buzzing, the ‘gorgoliatore’ produced gurgling sounds, and the ‘stropicciatori’ scratched and scraped the surface – all of which we were gradually introduced to in the programme’s opener, Waking The Music Intoners by Pauline Oliveros.

The world premiere of Chris Newman’s People guided the orchestra through singing a ‘drunken chant’ as they cranked their levers and made their noises, resulting in an explosion of rapturous sound. Their chants, sung at the top of their lungs, produced a mass of sound with twinkling fragments of the intonarumori grunting through the texture.

Pablo Buzzi’s Pioggia nel pineto antidannunziana, classified as a “word image for gurglers, cracklers, and howlers,” riffs on a poem by Gabriele D’Annuzio. Chessa brought the plonky, vibrant work to life with a megaphone at hand, though it was relatively quiet and seemed more like a prop than an amplifier. The same was true in Margareth Kammerer’s Blues or Woman in the Mind at Night, where the composer sang about her unsettling visions of a six-legged dog and upside down planes hidden behind walls. Though the megaphone looked visually appealing, it didn’t make Kammerer noticeably louder, but her delicate voice rested beautifully in the disgruntlement of the intoners.

Anton van Houten, Joey Marijs, and Erik-Jan de With of Ensemble Klang — Photo courtesy of Wigmore Hall

Vocalist and composer Jennifer Walshe fiercely cut through the noise with a set of sound poems by The Guinness Dadaists, namely Brian Sheridan, Toshiro Sawa, and Dermot O’Reilly. All of the sound poems danced around the vowels and configurations of the Irish language. Walshe is superhuman in her performances, fitting an absurd amount of sounds within one breath and leaving us wanting more. Here, she moved through leaps and sound effects at rapid speed, again defying the possibilities of the human voice.

Walshe was later joined by composer-performer Neil Luck for Fancy Palaces, her work with the late Tony Conrad. Away from its original form, the piece expanded to include the mass of intoners as they theatrically sang about technology and the state of the world. Luck and Walshe were magical as they moved from more melodic singing to vocal fry, creating small vibrations throughout the space while twisting and cranking the intoners.

To end the programme, the intonarumori were taken off the stage and replaced with sheets of metal, drums, and trays displayed between two piano benches. Saxophonist Erik-Jan de With, trombonist Anton van Houten, and percussionist Joey Marijs from Ensemble Klang then took centerstage to premiere OCCAM DELTA XXIII by Éliane Radigue and Carol Robinson. Known as a pioneer of electronic music, Radigue’s career has recontextualized durational music and the unique relationships performers have with their instruments. Works in the “Occam” series are communicated orally, emphasizing a collaborative process to find the right sound and approach to the material. OCCAM DELTA XXIII began from nothing as we heard de With’s long note emerge, blending into pitches from trombone and singing bowl. Marijs effortlessly navigated the long drone texture as he moved from bowing cymbals to lightly rolling on thundersheets, all while maintaining a continuous sound. Harmonics grew over time from the raucous cacophony of the full ensemble texture, and then from the individual instruments; a highlight was the imperceptibly high trombone harmonics created by van Houten before coming down to a more settled harmonic state and ending this year’s LCMF in a state of solitude.

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