THE SET ENSEMBLE - stopcock

Finding yourself in front of a blank sheet of paper, with or without staff lines, unaware of all the other sheets that existed before it: this is undoubtedly a good mental exercise for approaching composition today, in an age where we're (mistakenly) feeling ever closer to the idea that everything has already been said and/or written. Needless to say, that blank page is Cage's impossible silence, and onto it pile up cautious suggestions, like test sounds meant to restore the instruments' natural voice, almost oblivious to classical notation.

From here, halfway between execution and performance, spring the work of Oxford's young Set Ensemble and Sarah Hughes's piece "Fires And Conifers", which over the course of sixteen minutes collects contrasting acoustic interventions: minimal, sustained sounds are interspersed with sudden disruptive elements, like Morse code in (non)music; the violin bow is a weak, colourless breath, the double bass's sudden outbursts are violent jabs coming from nowhere, while the seraphic slowness of piano and guitar recall the duets of Michael Pisaro and Taku Sugimoto; indeed, the influence of composers such as Jürg Frey and Antoine Beuger is the practical foundation on which the Set Ensemble's young composer-musicians base their deep listening and the actions that follow from it.

Bruno Guastalla, the ensemble's cellist, is fascinated by the application of geometric principles to musical writing. Drawing on the imperfect elegance of Paul Cézanne's "natural solids", his piece is a droning polyphony with a three-part structure – as in a classical sonata – built on the continuous motion of sounds that are at once dense and diaphanous, "flawed" and suspended along the long thread of time, just as Morton Feldman would have wanted.

With the third piece, devised by Patrick Farmer, we instead return decisively to the realm of performance art. "This Has Already Had A History (2b)" requires each participant to carry out the disintegration process of a given object, in this specific case chewing and ingesting fruit and vegetables (two bananas, an apple, a mango, a carrot and some crisps). A "chamber decay" devoid of theatricality, which thanks to the microphones highlights the rhythms and natural alternations of different ways of eating, amid crunching, swallowing and stomach gurgles.

With similarly simplicity, the conceptualism of "360 Sounds" can be explained in a few words: Dominic Lash's very short piece employs six musicians who each play one note per second for the duration of a minute, thus achieving a total of 360; but the starting point and the chronological pacing are neither fixed nor guided, and are therefore subject to six different perceptions that drift closer together and further apart within the short timespan, creating curious dimorphisms forcibly confined within a very limited frame.

The same composer offers "For Six" as the album's closing track, returning to the realm of execution: the ensemble is organised into three pairs, two of which are "tonal" (pitched at the lowest level the instruments allow) and a final one of an electronic nature; following a score that leaves room for indeterminacy, each musician can choose whether to remain silent, play a continuous sound or an irregular one, and the other member of the pair responds individually to that stimulus. This creates two levels of sonic interaction, perceptible separately as adjoining duets and collectively as a sextet.

A collection of sounds equally concrete and quiet, finally, makes up Paul Whitty's piece "You Have Not Been Paying Attention (Again)": crackling electronic stimuli, acoustic rustles and scrapes rise just above the threshold of silence, clearly distinct yet equal within the whole. A minimal orchestration, in its own way both funny and hypnotic, capable of ennobling even the micro-sound of an opened CD player (thus rendered almost voiceless).

Here, then, are six examples of how, starting from theoretical premises that can also be complex – and which I have rendered here in very simple terms – one can move toward an eminently contemporary musical practice, fascinated by the immediate and the unusual, devoted to sound as such rather than to compos(it)e form.

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05/01/2016