Modern magic

When I first came to London one of my principal activities was attending concerts of modern music, perhaps once or twice a week.  My golden memories of that time are compounded partly of a general sense of wonder at all that the great city offered, and more particularly by the very special magic of those concerts which seemed to me like a continual fanfare to the opening up of this brave new world. Even now, on the rare occasions when I can visit the concert hall for this purpose, I am transported to an enchanted kingdom which seems as fresh as the first day I entered it.

The pleasures to be derived from this music, are, to be sure, of a singular nature.  Contemporary compositions are a rare and exotic drug craved by the few.  And this of course becomes part of its attraction.  Since such concerts are almost invariably attended by the same hard core of enthusiasts - who probably number less than a few hundred in the whole of the capital - you soon get to recognise your fellow adepts.  Just as Mozart wrote ceremonial music for the masons, so all modern music can be seen as the latter-day equivalent for an even more select and mysterious associations.  The widespread and ineradicable nature of these low-profile and hopelessly low-profit events throughout the capital each night only adds to the abiding sense of conspiracy.

The very paucity of audience also has the effect of rendering the occasion rather more august and serious; there is none of this cheery populism which so often invades ordinary concerts.  Even in the smallest venues such as the Purcell Room - and particularly in atmospheric buildings like St John's Smith Square - the sense of space makes everything paradoxically more intimate and personal.  It is as if the musicians are playing just for you.

Indeed, the performance you hear may well be the work's only outing, given the way contemporary music is funded in this country.  It is like the ritualised smashing of crockery to prevent defilement after a king and queen have eaten off them; the concert turns out to be a unique, once in a lifetime experience, and one which is unlikely ever to be devalued by anything so crude as a repeat performance, at least not in London.

Not all of the joys are of such a tangential kind.  Nowhere else can you hear music which draws so eclectically on every musical tradition imaginable, and adds many of its own.  There is the brain-damaging rigour of the residual post-Webernians and the languorous lushness of the neo-romantics; you can listen to the intricate trance-like beauties of systems music or the sparse and fervent glories of religious composers like Pärt and Taverner; alongside the crazed algorithms of Xenakis there are the insidiously hummable and subversive pastiches by Gavin Bryars; and against Ferneyhough's intentionally unplayable essays in compositional bravura there is the counterbalancing simplicity and humility of the last Experimentalists like Howard Skempton.  All of this is music which lets us sense most directly the great exploration which lies at the heart of new art; this is music to stretch the ears, electrify the mind, warm the heart and for me to stir cherished memories of a younger age.

(3.12.87)

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