Gaudeamus Muziekweek 2018 took place 5-9 September 2018 in Utrecht, The Netherlands. Information about this festival is available at: https://gaudeamus.nl/en/terugblik/gaudeamus-muziekweek-2018/

Reviewed by Seth Rozanoff
Amsterdam, The Netherlands

The Gaudeamus Foundation has long promoted contemporary music in The Netherlands and internationally. Each year the organization’s most ambitious project occurs during the fall, in the form of the Gaudeamus Muziekweek, a festival and competition wrapped into one weeklong series of events. The 2018 festival took place in Utrecht between September 5th and the 9th, with concerts and events throughout the city’s cultural locations. The TivoliVredenburg venue, housed in a building specifically designed to present contemporary music (boasting five concert halls), was a primary site of the festival.

An iconic element of the Muziekweek is the Gaudeamus Composition Prize. With the competition jury present throughout the festival, the finalists for the prize contribute works from which the winning pieces are selected. Composers of any nationality, younger than 30 years of age, are encouraged to submit their compositions, typically small or large instrumental pieces, to be considered for the prize. Lately, the competition seeks to attract work that utilizes live electronics or video. As such, the programming for many of the concerts reflects a range of media.

Works selected to compete for this year’s prize were performed by groups and individuals including Slagwerk Den Haag, Nikel Ensemble, Tomoko Mukaiyama, and Asko | Schönberg. Other notable groups performing at the 2018 Muziekweek included the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, Bozzini Quartet, Ensemble Klang, and the Rosa Ensemble. These esteemed musicians, over the five-day event, support the work of the six competition finalists. Additionally, the Gaudeamus Foundation includes a few artists-in-residence, along with works from the winners or finalists from previous competitions as well.

The Gaudeamus Foundation also provided some educational programming, offering workshops led by various composers and teachers. For example, the Trash Panda Collective organized a score reading session. During this event, compositional outlines submitted by composers beforehand, were explored for potential improvisation. Other examples included lectures and discussions by Nicole Lizée and Richard Ayres (competition jury members), Moritz Eggert, Thea Derks, and an IRCAM spatialization workshop. This eclectic programming attempts to provide participants and viewers entryways into contemporary musical practice.
One of the more distinctive reading sessions, developed and led by Ashley Puente, was entitled From Graphic Score to Modular Patch. This subject has been little studied and is a novel way to produce music. As if to illustrate her points Puente gave a performance the night before on custom-built modular synthesizers.
Another standout event was entitled Senses Working Overtime, a Sound Art Expo that took place in Het Huis Utrecht over a two-day period. This show was comprised of seven different provocative sound installations. Similar events such as Modulation Meets Gaudeamus, which I will discuss later, were produced in spaces suited for performance or sound art. Overall, there were almost 50 events that took place in Utrecht, including the Gaudeamus Saturday Night, a miniature festival involving 20 concerts and installations throughout the TivoliVredenburg complex.

My discussion of the Gaudeamus Muziekweek stems from my encounter with a selection of concerts, workshops, and composers - a kind of snapshot of practice. It should be noted from the outset that I recognized an open-minded competition jury. The selected works demonstrated highly distinctive or idiosyncratic approaches, and the finalists were matched with performing groups, such as Insomnio, New European Ensemble, pianist Saskia Lankhoorn, Slagwerk Den Haag, and the Nikel Ensemble.

The first works I heard in the festival were from three of the finalists at the Rattling Rhythms #1 concert, performed by the percussion quartet Slagwerk Den Haag. This group’s collective approach, as it relates to performance in particular, provided an ideal creative environment in which composers could test the limits of their craft. And a core feature of Slagwerk Den Haag is its intention to explore a seemingly infinite range of materials. How would some of the finalists approach managing such a wide range of sonic possibilities, including the use of electronics, in this context? The concert featured works, all world premieres, by Raphael Languillat (French, born in 1989), Sebastian Hilli (Finnish, born in 1990), and William Daugherty (U.S.A., born in 1988).

Languillat’s (((LIMBO))) _ plexus (part i) required the performers to manage percussion and electronic sound sources in a manner that produced sparse timbral fragments. They could be heard as material events, where the physical aspect of sound formed, was largely determined by the use of amplified percussion instruments, pre-recorded sound, light-boxes, and projections. The work also involved an offstage speaker, along with performers in the audience who used walkie-talkies. Another aspect of Languillat’s sound work overall, is the influence of his own work as a photographer. This approach to composition, the willingness to explore boundaries with fine art, added a distinctive conceptual layer to his work. It should be noted that some of the images used for his projections were from slide films of x-rayed body parts and MRI scans. The materialityI sensed in Languillat’s work stemmed from themes such as World War I trauma, memory, and the notion of the life-death cycle, which the composer drew from in the preparation of his work.

Hilli’s Psycho Wood focused on performative agency even more so than Languillat’s piece. During the pre-concert talk it was suggested that Hilli’s work would rely upon genre hybridization as a core feature. Ultimately, Hilli’s intention not to reference contemporary classical music aesthetics, and touch on 1960’s rock styles of Jimi Hendrix and the Beatles, came through in the work. These conceptual interests stem from Hilli’s interest in Timothy Leary’s book The Psychedelic Experience (1964). The ensemble for this work is required to perform on instruments that Hilli made from the planks, logs, leaves, bark and branches he had found in Finnish forests and junkyards. These instruments were then organized into a special pitch-based system. Hilli also added paper sheets and a cajón to the instrumentation. Regarding staging, the performers sat on the ground with their instruments placed in a circle. Hilli’s concept resulted in the juxtaposition and complementing of sounds within the wood source material, some of which was processed from environmental recordings and used for playback.

Daugherty’s work, as we come marching, marching, provided yet another distinctive conceptual approach to the percussion quartet medium. The title of the work is taken from the first line of the American poet James Oppenheim’s poem Bread and Roses (1911).This work was influenced by a speech upon which the poem was based, given by Rose Schneiderman, a leader of the American Women’s Trade Union League. Daugherty’s orchestration points toward a sonic materiality, which at times pits elasticshapes heard against one another, often extended to overlapping layers. An interesting feature of Daugherty’s orchestration was his use of an air raid siren. Like Edgar Varese’s siren use in Ionization, the timbre was an essential musical ingredient, whose role was to expand the sonic palette of the ensemble.

The next event I attended was the Modulation meets Gaudeamus concert, for which there was no conventional concert staging. The performers utilized sizeable setups consisting of custom built or modified, analog electronic instruments for each set, which they freely arranged in the space. Listeners could choose to sit relatively close to the performers, or stand if they wished.
To sum up, this event lasted for over four hours, in which I heard a few primary styles that could be characterized as either drone-ambient or experimental electronica. Others drew from musical and compositional elements found in Electronic Dance Music.

The first work featured the Dutch artist Wouter van Veldhoven. The core of his setup included a collection of reel-to-reel tape machines, various tape recorders (some modified), televisions, and Pure Data patches. The machines produced what I would describe as ‘faulty’ sounds such as clicking sounds of the machines in motion. These were then fed back into his system to produce continuous loops.
Next, was the French artist known as Zonk’t (Laurent Perrier). Perrier develops improvisation through the use of a personalized setup comprising analog synthesizer modules and Ableton Live. During his performance, I sensed a musical form emerge from his use of various sequences. At times one could hear a fixed beat pattern serving as the musical foundation for further sonic exploration. Other times, Perrier produced extreme dance music rhythms, pitted against grooves in the lower registers.

The final work on this program was by the American musician Ashley Puente. She brought a modular synthesizer setup designed by 73-75, which draws from the Serge Modular System, designed by Serge Tcherepnin. Puente’s musical material was distinctive largely due to her tonal approach to forming her materials. She formed traditional musical phrases, while utilizing some of the standard synthesis techniques her setup afforded.

Revisting one of the TivoliVredenburg venues, I attended the Dream Work Ensemble Nikel concert. The program for this concert paired Ensemble Nikel with Austrian experimental filmmaker Peter Tscherkassky. Founded in 2006, Ensemble Nikel is a quartet comprised of saxophonist Patrick Stadler, electric guitarist Yaron Deutsch, percussionist Brian Archinal, and pianist Antoine François. For this event with Nikel, Tscherkassky provided a trilogy of films: L’Arrivée (1997-1998), Outer Space (1999), and Dream Work (2001).

A total of eight composers were commissioned to write music for these films. The Utrecht concert featured music for either Outer Space or Dream Work by composers Simon Løffler, Clara Iannotta, Boris Bezemer, and Miko?aj Laskowski. All the featured composers had works presented at previous Gaudeamus festivals, and Ionnotta had been nominated for the prize in 2013. Tscherkassky describes Dream Work as follows: “A woman goes to bed, falls asleep, and begins to dream. This dream takes her to a landscape of light and shadow, evoked in a form only possible through classic cinematography. The formal element binding the trilogy is the specific technique of contact printing, by which found film footage is copied by hand and frame by frame onto unexposed film stock...The new interpretation of the text of the original source material takes place through its ‘displacement’ from its original context and its concurrent ‘condensation’ by means of multiple exposure” (http://www.tscherkassky.at/content/ films/theFilms/DreamWorkEN.html). Dream Work was created as a homage to Man Ray and his original production techniques used in 1923.

A focal point in Løffler’s composition for Dream Work is something he built akin to a spinning machine. Serving as an additional player or musician, it’s controlled by the other players who sit on stage without using their instruments. Instead, Løffler requires the Ensemble Nikel players to wear a type of prosthetic in order to extend their hands. The hand actions of characters in the film influenced Løffler. He coordinated these hand movements, along with the machine player’s actions, against the film.

Ionnotta’s approach aims to create a distinctive audio-visual quality, not by merely composing a film score, but by capturing the essence of the film’s rhythm. For me, Ionnotta’s work was musically cohesive, as she mapped her sense of the film’s rhythmto Ensemble Nikel’s performance.

Bezemer’s work drew from his view of the seemingly contrasting modes of behavior present in Dream Work:fluidity and jerkiness. For example, Bezemer scores the percussion in a manner that cuts acrossthe rest of the ensemble’s sonic textures. Another example engages a musical scenario wherein the electric guitar’s lines are pitted directly against the percussion. Overall, Bezemer demonstrates a wide orchestralrange between his instrumental groupings.

Laskowski chose to compose a soundscape for Outer Space, where the musicians are required to mimic sounds of a given set of sound samples. Laskowski organized his material so that individual players could demonstrate idiosyncratic performance techniques. For example, the pianist bows the piano strings with a VHS tape, or plays strings manually with a cassette box. The guitarist excites his strings with a screwdriver or pumice stone, etc.

The compositions for Tscherkassky’s three films, took many artistic risks, resulting, among other things, in the expansion of Ensemble Nikel’s sonic range. This could be due to the practical issues which arise when forming compositional strategies with the moving image, or pitting a live ensemble against a pre-produced film.

The last event I attended was called the Gaudeamus Saturday Night, which took place in TivoliVredenberg. It was comprised of various concerts and installations, some of which overlapped with one another. Amongst the 19 Saturday Night sets the collective known as Monoták produced the most distinctive musical contribution. Theirs was a four-hour presentation of works from the collective’s five-year history, composed and performed by its members. Monoták consists of artists Anat Spiegel, Bart de Vrees, Dirk Bruinsma, Wilbert Bulsink, Ivo Bol, Paul Glazier, Henry Vega, Florian de Backere, Eric de Clercq and Thomas Myrmel. Monoták, based in Amsterdam, also organizes events and concerts throughout The Netherlands and Europe.

Stemming from my first encounter with Monoták, this group explores a range of poetics between instrumental, performative, text, and image elements. Their artistic output could also be characterized as exploring the composer-performer and improvisation-score relationships relating to the group’s use of technology, overall. At first glance, one sees a seemingly complex setup of various controllers, laptops and tablets, microphones, mixers, and projections, suggesting a multimedia approach to collaboration. Monoták’s performances are formed from a socially-mediated context, built around members’ encounters between one another. This offers audiences a distinctive musical narrative, compared to other concerts of this type, which tend to gravitate toward a rigid historical performance model of contemporary music.

There were other groups and individuals performing during the Saturday Night event that utilized electronics. These groups included Plastiklova, a vibraphone and electronics duo (Laurent Warnier and Yu Oda), I/O (led by Thanasis Deligiannis), Sarah Davachi, Kara-Lis Coverdale, and Coby Sey, among others. Ultimately, the Saturday Night event offered audiences the widest range of artistic expression in the Muziekweek, due to much of the work involving electronic media.

After attending the aforementioned Gaudeamus events, two issues remained in my thinking as they relate to what seems to be the Muziekweek’s aims at reaching the public: highlighting creative practices that involve the use of electronic technology, and bridging the gap between serious new music composers and sound artists. As such, I wondered if it is necessary to offer such a wide range of new music practice to the public? Or, how might a sense of inclusiveness be encouraged between creative technology (new and old) and contemporary classical music disciplines? Gaudeamus seems successful in their attempts to be inclusive, with marathon-like events focusing on individual or collaborative music making involving electronics. Here, the audience may better engage with performers, learning about the technology used, through this direct physical encounter. Perhaps what is most important is the ability that these events, which can seem obscure compared to the instrumental composition-based concerts, have to encourage practical and conceptual creative action.