Who's tired of institutional European contemporary music – its publicly subsidised but walled-off subculture(s), its desperation to avoid cliché that leads directly into a forest of other clichés, its ossified power dynamics and subsequent public efforts to undermine them but not by so much as to upset things?
Sara Glojnarić is, and she wants you to know it. In recent years, as she has become (still in her early 30s) one of the most awarded and celebrated young composers in Europe, Glojnarić has developed a practice of scepticism towards the received practices and metacultures of contemporary concert music, not so much by avoiding its native clichés as by overtly embracing others. The seven works on this disc, all between nine and 13 minutes but otherwise fairly diverse in surface, express in different ways a sense of dissatisfaction and cynicism about the value of contemporary music (defined however you like: it doesn't matter) tout court.
Two of the major strands of that expression ask a similar question: something like ‘Yes, this is all very well, but what about music that people actually like?’ The series of works entitled sugarcoating, for instance, base their material and its processes on the so-called Million Song Dataset, an online project that has collated data about, yes, one million popular songs, along axes such as not only tempo, key, length and so on but also degree of compression and ‘danceability’. The sugarcoating pieces are meant to exemplify the emergent unified properties of this massive slab of information – not quoting a song, not invoking a genre or a musical or cultural practice, but summarising a whole fundamentally messy but hauntingly homogeneous archive.
So what does it sound like? sugarcoating #4 (2022), for orchestra, saturates and flattens its way to a surface of blaring tritone- and fourth-heavy brass and incessant percussion redolent of the climactic Varèse of Amériques, without the sirens or the crystalline-reptilian little melodic fragments. It is, in other words – and this is, it seems, precisely the point, or one of them – loud orchestra music of a familiar sort, plucked from its natural habitat and pinned under glass through a technique of sheer insistence and stark juxtapositions. The most unexpected, and in the end most effective, ingredient here is a recurrent interruption from an oversweet Pink Panther of a vibraphone, motor going at full tilt, which keeps the wit alive while moderating the energy.
The other sugarcoating, the 2017 original, is for a smaller ensemble and therefore has to work harder to achieve the overcompressed saturation it seeks. The compositional problems are harder, and the work gains a great deal of character from that fact. Like its orchestral sibling, sugarcoating builds itself out of juxtaposed blocks, most of them spastically repetitive and frenetic to the point of hysteria, their effect coming in the unrelentingness of their mass and volume and turnover more than the details of their content. It is exhausting to hear and it must be exhausting to play – a theme to which we will return – but there is a degree of resourcefulness to the harmony here (where we are allowed to hear it) and a sense of the dynamic potential of the juxtaposition of mutually incompatible pulses that helps to avoid the creeping anonymity of everything but those vibraphone passages in sugarcoating #4.
But then again, anonymity is what Glojnarić is after, isn't it? Or is it?
Indeed, the other strand in Glojnarić's work that takes on the question of the music people actually like does so from a more personal direction. Instead of taking cues from the phenomenon of recorded popular music itself in all its emergent sameness, three works here – Pure Bliss (2022), for large ensemble, Artefacts (2018), for voices, tape and video, and Artefacts #2 (2019), for soprano, drum set and tape – borrow much of their material from specific songs of particular personal importance to the performers.
Artefacts, comprised again of a blocky sequence of jittering, glitchy collaged fragments, often of phrases of text spoken or shouted in unison or near-unison by the perennially virtuosic Neue Vocalsolisten, takes its place comfortably in a flourishing subgenre of new music, though we experience it here only indirectly: the concert piece with witty video. At several points we hear the live audience laughing at something silent, but the idea is made clear enough by the repeated fragments of pop hits from the 80s and 90s passed between tape and vocalists. Pure Bliss and Artefacts #2 come across more memorably, at least on disc, simply because they have much stronger purely sonic identities. The former is suffused with a carpet of stretched chords, excerpted again from pop recordings, lending the surface an unaccustomed late-nineteenth-century lushness; the latter is a harsher, more alienating experience (thanks largely to a tour de force of unrelentingly chameleonic virtuosity from soprano Sarah Maria Sun that is the highlight of the entire disc) that seems less eager to please either through the saccharine prettiness of received pop harmonies or the equally received vocabulary of new-concert-music comedy.
The remaining two pieces, Latitudes and Latitudes #2, form another linked pair, and it is something of a relief here, as in the 2017 sugarcoating, to feel less of the pressure of irony. Latitudes (2020) is for a piano transformed by adhesive pads into a semi-pitched percussion instrument, accompanied intermittently on tape by echoes of its own relentless figurations and occasionally by aggressively synthesised chords; the 2021 sequel is a chaos of pulsed figures for drum set gradually supplemented and then supplanted by a parallel riot of click tracks on tape. These works are, like everything here, also about something: the insatiable demands and inevitable failures of extreme concert virtuosity in the sort of mechanistic, athletic material that leaves nothing to chance and nowhere to hide. They are also, again like everything here, couched in a language of sharp corners, surprising juxtapositions and recorded interventions, and, like everything here for a third time, they are flawlessly crafted. But the drama they stage is human, not rhetorical; the energy is organic, not imposed from without; the stakes seem higher, the shared experience with the towering exertions of pianist Magdalena Cerezo Falces and percussionist Leonie Klein more intimate, and the sonic language more concentrated. As a result it is these pieces that show the most of what the best of those old radio hits, whatever their degree of compression or danceability, had in spades: soul.
