Floris Solleveld wrote a blogpost about the seventh day of the festival. It’s in Dutch but you can try the online translation to read it, or read it after the break. (via muziekweek.nl, via Ottokar’s Eenpersoonskoninkrijk)

From the above translation:

The music week started with a new adaptation of Michael Mensingh’s Style Wars IV (Postmodernism strikes back), and is now at its end with the premiere of Style Wars V – Minimal Madness. In this episode clashes minimal music with twelve-tone music, resulting in the continuing breakdown of tune but it never really is a Kammersymphonie. Despite the disturbing rhythms and dissonant cycling through it remains a coherent piece with a recognizable pulse. Musically this is a result of which you would like Philip Glass would be an example, but morally it is still less satisfactory: in the confrontation between “Glass and Schoenberg ‘victory leaves Mensingh very easy to Glass. (Also: Glass did not itself a “Style War” included in Part XII of Music in Twelve Parts?)

Photos: Herre Vermeer

Despite all the differences there are in fact no such Gaudeamus Style Wars. You can differentiate between serious and playful composers, between theatrical and pure musical persuasions, but there are no small Adornootjes longer around, who consonance a bow for the culture industry, and minimalism is a trope has become where you you can control or no. As Henk Heuvelmans at the awards ceremony last year said: “There were no factions Between the composers, no scores were burned”.

In that harmony can be question marks. An undisclosed composer (some colleagues will be a suspect) admonished me with any raised voice: “If you are interested in interdisciplinarity and new artistic forms of presentation, what do you do when Gaudeamus? They all think is in the Central European tradition of Boulez and Stockhausen. And they make music for ensembles. that interested nobody. The groups with a new sound that is better for your generation fit no longer think as ensembles but as a band. A new generation of composers working with theater, with artists, with designers and technicians. And you will not see on Gaudeamus, but ArtScience and Today’s Art. You have to look again at the Hague. ”

Let’s say that the warning was worded a little too exaggerated. There are in the program three such groups as the band thought (Hexnut, Klang and the Rosa Ensemble), there are plants that you partly as art can classify, and a high-tech wave field synthesis system, and Wrench, the Night of the Unexpected and the spectacular concert on Wednesday evening Barbara Lüneburg constitute a convincing argument against cross-discipline.
The allegation has a bite: Gaudeamus is indeed very much a festival for composers. The question “are you a composer Also?” is a fairly common way to get acquainted. And who as non-program notes by the composer takes detects something you like fetish notes may indicate: an excessive fixation on sounds even more sophisticated and technical details.
This perspective is not so much the divide between schools and between composing composers who are primarily about the music, composers and music with as many interesting things to do. But there seems no question of fault, rather a continuum. As far as I know, no angry young dogs self-proclaimed “post composers”.

[And "my generation" I think of Roger Daltrey of The Who, who 36 years later at the Ground Zero tour was singing My Generation.]

Peter Bruun: Preludes to Disaster

Helene Gjerris, voice 
Paul Taub/fl, Laura DeLuca/cl, Anna Klett/cl, Frans Hansen/perc, Mikhail Shmidt/vn, David Sabee/vc, Jesper Egelund/db

It is simply a pleasure to be in company with such good musicians for an entire evening. Louisiana hosted a chamber music experience where you could hear four different works of our time played by the Danish avant-garde ensemble FIGURA and American ensemble Seattle Chamber Players. Helene Gjerris enriched the entire three-quarters of the program with expression and human voice.

Seattle Chamber Players consists of five musicians, who normally plays in the symphony in Seattle and also has a very established career with new chamber music. The ensemble has been in Denmark, like FIGURA have visited them in Seattle, and the cooperation was audibly.

Surplus Whining
The evening opened with a work by FIGURA’s composer in residence, Steingrimur Rohloff, and was the first fruit of their two-year period of cooperation. A work in five movements that circled around some texts by Peter Laugesen. The atmosphere was artistic weaving with some aggressive questioning of the creation. Rohloff caressed the sound of nothing. Language is a noisy, conception is intense and quiet. It is a kind of surplus whining about creating a problem. Is it not more beautiful just to ignore them, because perhaps it is never enough. A beautiful and endearing surplus whining in return, which still betrayed the will and ambition. Casper Schreiber conducted safely and beautifully and with an omnipresent pulse.

Anders Brødsgaard’s Galgenlieder had the mood to have a screw loose in the right place. We got five of a total of 10 songs with texts by German Christian Morgenstern. Absurd comedy and poetry in rousing association nonsense verse that relates so skewed from reality that the optic gives new meaning. Helene Gjerris read Brødsgaard own translations before each song, because they did not lay in any program. But she should do it again, program or not, for the excellent translations in itself was a pleasure read with this prominence.

Farewell to rock
Seattle Chamber Players had a piece by Russian composer Vladimir Nikolayev with them. The play vnik-ton experience is composed for them and inspired by the composer’s visit to the rock museum in Seattle. It started very well with anything, minimalist sequences, ostinatos-brew people in tune, but gradually appeared all voices a kind of impotence. Air violin, flute breathless, stuttering cello. As a victory over this impotence was the violin still fought them to a Hendrix solo cadenza. “Smoke on the water” theme took over the stage, gradually became an adorable string duo, spelled backwards and forwards and melted into the other voices, untill there was only an idyllic little lake left, which was almost the drum’s surface. The expressive percussionist Frans Hansen had put his drum down on two chairs with two blankets under and schratced its skin, while something disappeared. The Rock music arguably.

The raisins in the sausage’s end
Peter Bruun Preludes to disaster, uses texts from Cervantes Don Quixote. It is mankind on a safe collision course with disaster, a little fun, but also a little sin, and nobody says anything. Like us, even today, says Peter Bruun. The path is safe, and we’re not even going to comment on it. The music was influenced by medieval impermanent beauty in the shadow of doom and ended with a handsome rate of universal melancholy.

Fortunately, the concert was held without a break. The audience had a concentrated and exclusive half hour in the FIGURA’s eldorado of exciting music and talented guests.

Seattle Chamber Players and FIGURA. Music by Steingrimur Rohloff, Anders Brødsgaard, Vladimir Nikolayev, Peter Bruun. Louisiana Concert Hall on Wednesday
Source: www.information.dk/278514

(Translated by FIGURA)