Coming Together - Louth Contemporary Music Society (Dundalk, 2026)

Louth Contemporary Music Society - Coming Together

LCMS, Dundalk 2026

Canti della tenebra - Beat Furrer
Litanei - Beat Furrer
Coming Together - Frederic Rzewski
 
String Trio - Jürg Frey

in mia vita da vuolp - Beat Furrer
Lotófagos - Beat Furrer
Prophezeiungen - Beat Furrer

Ten Lyrics of Li Po - Harry Partch
U.S. Highball - Harry Partch

Davóne Tines: Recital No. 1 - Mass

Dundalk - 19th and 20th June 2026

The persistent rain stopped and the skies cleared a few hours before the opening evening concert of the first day of the 2026 Louth Contemporary Music Society festival. Now in its 20th year, this year's programme was entitled Coming Together and the LCMS's midsummer celebration of new music brought together many regular attendees under the June sun in Dundalk, Co. Louth, including the seagulls who added their customary background lament. The unique conditions of this setting - something that makes this festival of new music unlike any other - were reflected in the programming for the opening concert at St. Nicholas' Church of three pieces that alone almost constitute a mini-festival. It certainly pointed to the variety and the adventurous direction that the festival would take in the following full day of concerts; a format that is characteristic of the festival, the programme constantly surprising and delighting, yet retaining a clear coherent unity, never feeling like it is just a collection of pieces thrown randomly together.

The principal guest composer this year was Swiss-born Austrian composer Beat Furrer who has such a variety of work that you could build a festival around his compositions work alone. Furrer, in my opinion (as principally an opera reviewer) excels in vocal pieces and while we didn't get one of his full scale operas at the LCMS festival, the works chosen for the programme proved to be extraordinarily rich in musical, lyrical and even dramatic content. Furrer's astonishing choral work Enigmas featured in last year's festival Echoes, and the qualities of that work were reflected in the two pieces for solo voices on the opening night. Based on a work by the Italian poet Dino Campania (1885-1932), Canti della tenebra for contralto and piano (Cornelia Sonnleithner the contralto, Mary Dullea on piano) immediately grabbed your attention, the mood of the piece melancholic and reflective of someone unmoored on a journey. The musical setting reflected and deepened the meaning - something that would be a feature of the rest of the festival selections - drawing you in and inviting you to feel and connect with the underlying sentiments.

Furrer also gifted us with a remarkable new piece commissioned by LCMS, Litanei for soprano, clarinet & string quartet. It was perhaps not so easy to relate to the emotional content, but the effect of the manner in which the fragments of the poems were assembled and presented was extraordinary. Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-77) and Gaspara Stampa (1523-54) are separated by centuries and language but weaved together their words don't so much intensify their respective agony as much as support each other through the pain. Furrer conducted the ensemble with a very tight rein through the precise, short sharp jagged expressions of intense hurt fired out in the voice and in the instruments ("crushed… skewered…between the pages of the book…reality murdered") were wreathed in short gaps of silence to let them resonate, before building in intensity. Elina Viluma-Helling unveiled some stark emotional trauma that you might not want to feel so viscerally, but for the listener - for this one anyway - it was utterly gripping. You could feel yourself tensing, but somehow the musical development managed to find a release for all the pent-up emotions across its short but intense journey. Utterly breathtaking.

In a way that is typical of the programming - and reflected at greater length across Day 2 - Frederic Rzewski’s Coming Together couldn't have been more different in its musical treatment and yet in a way it was complementary to the Furrer pieces and even an ideal way of further coming down from them. The work is based on a letter written in 1971 by Sam Melville, a prisoner in Attica Correctional Facility in upstate New York, in the same year that Melville was later involved in the prison riots demanding basic human rights that saw forty-three inmates and guards killed, including Melville himself. Rzewski's setting of the words is a celebrated piece, very much in the minimalist tradition of Terry Riley’s In C, but it has features that also have echoes to other works seen at the LCMS in previous years such as Gavin Briers' Jesus Blood Never Failed Me Yet and Robert Ashley in the Lovely Music programme, using conversational or found text with an enigmatic expression that is explored through rhythmic propulsion and repetition.

As delivered by Daisy Press and the ensemble, Rzewski’s Coming Together was just as fascinating and thoughtful the compelling exploration of words in the Furrer pieces, but approached from a totally different angle. Like In C the instruments are not predetermined, but the rising and falling interactive dynamic is an essential scored element and Daisy Press was expressive in exploring the words and communicative in how she put them across, not least in the enigmatic repetition of the line "I think the combination of age and the greater coming together is responsible for the speed of the passing time." Giving this year's festival its title, there are plenty of other opportunities in the remaining Day 2 programme to reflect on that idea of a "greater coming together", but the programme on the opening night concert alone provided a rich musical assemblage of its own.

In as much as any musical piece is - and it was the only purely musical piece in this year's programme - Jürg Frey’s String Trio is a work that locates you in space and time: slowness of time, each note measured out, the performance venue playing a vital role in the uniqueness of the piece. This would sound and feel quite different in Frey's home place of inspiration in the Swiss Alps, it might have sounded different indeed even in Dundalk in another venue like the chapel of St Vincent's but in the former jail of the Oriel Centre, it had perhaps a more melancholy and reflective tone. You could even see a kind of 'coming together' forming already in the festival's programming, the previous evening ending with a piece that was informed by the writing of a prisoner in a jail adding an unexpected resonance to work. Rather than a lament however it felt more like welcoming music, drawing you and the audience back in together, and running to around 47- minutes long, providing something of an endurance test to prep you for the day ahead. Ultimately however the String Trio was rewarding in its slow development and progression, the subtle brush of a bow, the holding on a sustained note, the off-centre changes and interactions of Darragh Morgan (violin), Danusha Waskiewicz (viola) and Jakob Kullberg (cello), and the intimacy and acoustics of the Dundalk Gaol enough to hold you rapt and attentive.

In his introduction to his three pieces performed at St Vincent's Chapel, in mia vita da vuolp (in my life as a wolf, 2019), Lotófagos (The Lotus Eaters, 2006) and Prophezeiungen (Prophesies, 2023), Beat Furrer talked about voice, language, the inspiration of the poems that they are written around, and how there is a need to feel them deeply in order to write music for them. The pieces all accordingly have different combinations of singer and instrumentation; in mia vita da vuolp for soprano and baritone saxophone, Lotófagos for soprano and double bass, Prophezeiungen for alto, contrabass clarinet and accordion. Two of the pieces have opera connections, Lotófagos incorporated into the Furrer opera Wüstenbuch (2010), Prophezeiungen written in preparation for the opera Das grosse Feuer (2025), and performed by musicians and singers of the astonishingly virtuosic Cantando Admont vocal ensemble they were accordingly fully dramatic in expression, from the lowest of whispers to the most piercing of shrieks, from rapid recital of text to slowest drawing out of words.

Testing voice and instruments to their limits, soprano Elina Viluma-Helling and baritone saxophonist Gerald Preinfalk swooped and howled though in mia vita da vuolp; double bass player Nikolaus Feinig was bent over at a 90° angle for most of the 10 minutes of high bass notes of Lotófagos in a battle to draw full expression out of the setting of the Spanish text scored in a dauntingly challenging range that was met by soprano Giulia Zaniboni. The combination of voice and instruments of these two pieces produced some incredible sound worlds, but the most striking and unusual was evident in Prophezeiungen, the contrabass clarinet of Marco Sala and accordion of Krassimir Sterev creating unearthly sounds that wove through the astonishing vocal delivery of alto Helena Sorokina. It was a charged pin-you-back-into-your-pew performance of all three pieces, finding incredible musicality even at the most extreme limits of sound, voice and music, but always in service to the vivid imagery of the texts.

Ostensibly having little in common with the other concerts, Harry Partch fits into this programme much more easily than you would think, which is of course one of the wonders of the programming of the LCMS, which always looks for something a little more outside the box for its event at the Spirit Store venue. Creating his own self-made custom instruments, composing in just intonation, new music doesn't get much more experimental than the truly unique and inimitable compositions of the American iconoclast Harry Partch, very much an outsider in life and work compared to the European modernists of the early 20th century. What the music also has in common with the other pieces in the LCMS programme however is the distinctive nature of the writing for the voice, Partch adopting just intonation precisely for a more natural expression of the spoken voice. 

We got a broad view of Partch's work from his earliest work in his new experimental style in Ten Lyrics of Li Po, Luke Fitzpatrick playing Partch's customised viola with a cello neck studded with little metal frets described as 'brads' in the programme notes. U.S. Highball however felt more authentic Partch, recounting his own lived experience as a hobo hopping trains across America, authentic also in its record of those whose company and adventures he shared, having tremendous value for that alone. Using an adapted fretless guitar, its notes and sounds played out on raised strings with picks on right hand and bottleneck slides on the left fingers, the whole piece as Charles Corey notes (and plays) "captures the relentless energy of freight trains barrelling down mountainsides".

You don't usually get an opera singer doing a recital at the LCMS, but even when it looks like that is what has been programmed for the final evening concert of the festival, you can be sure it won't be any regular recital. Davóne Tines is however definitely a big name American bass-baritone in the opera world. I saw him in Amsterdam ten years ago when he made his first significant international appearance for the premiere of Kaija Saariaho's Only The Sound Remains at the DNO, and he has taken notable roles in premieres of John Adams' Girls of the Golden West and Terence Blanchard's powerful Fire Shut Up in My Bones, all indicating that Tines works outside the standard repertoire and very much in the sphere of new music. His Recital No. 1 - Mass then is indeed not just the regular programme of songs removed from their original context, but rather pieces selected and arranged to form a new context; a modern mass, so to speak, given appropriately in the St. Nicholas' Church of Ireland in Dundalk. And in that respect, it's also very much in this year's programme of finding creative and imaginative ways of interpreting words and finding a way to bring out other deeper personal meanings and ideas.

On paper Recital No. 1 - Mass is an eclectic mix; Handel and Bach side-by-side with Caroline Shaw and Julius Epstein, with spirituals arranged by Tyshawn Sorey, better known to me as a virtuoso jazz drummer but also pianist and composer. Conceptually however Tines had the whole recital perfectly arranged and measured and the voice to carry it off, accompanied only by the piano of John Bitoy. Bach's Mache dich, mein Herze, rein and the spirituals in particular were quite movingly sung and played, the church (or heavens) even playing its part in the evening by beaming a ray of the setting sun through the front windows of the church down to the altar to light up a ferocious delivery of Moses Hogan’s Give me Jesus. It's this kind of unpredictable and unprogrammable moment that you get more often than you would imagine at the LCMS and it's the kind of thing that makes the LCMS truly special. Whether the US bass-baritone succeeded in his aim of creating a queered mass or touching on something spiritually transcendental, Tines certainly made a case for the negro slave spirituals being as equally close to the love of God as Bach's celestial music, bringing humanity to the divinity. Somehow that seemed to be the perfect summation to the coming together of all the adventurous, surprising and uplifting music presented in this year's LCMS programme.

External links: Louth Contemporary Music Society

Echoes - Louth Contemporary Music Society (Dundalk, 2025)

Echoes - Louth Contemporary Music Society

LCMS, Dundalk 2025

8-4-8 "Silver Light", Cold Trip (Part 1), Monadologie XXXVI - Bernhard Lang

Bashō, Eight Pieces for Four Guitars, Svatý Kryštof - Martin Smolka

The Marble House - Nico

Songs of the Smile's Fig - Sarah Davachi
Enigma I, II, III, IV, VI - Beat Furrer

Glosa a lo Divino - Kevin Volans

The Aleph Guitar Quartet, Daisy Press, Daan Vandewalle, Apartment House, Francesca Fargion, Chamber Choir Ireland, Nils Schweckendiek

Dundalk - 13th and 14th June 2025

As always, the Louth Contemporary Music Society managed to find a suitable title and theme for their annual festival of new music that, despite the remarkable variety of works performed, manages to gather everything neatly under a wide umbrella. More than that, Echoes also presents an interesting way to approach and consider the collection of the individual works in relation to each other and their place within that broad family of 'new music'. Despite the remarkable variety of the each of the works and the festival as a whole, this year's theme gave each of them a context and fresh perspective. Not to mention the relevance of the theme in as far as how the regular venues for the festival all provide their own unique and important sound resonance.

Echoes, in relation to the music of the 2025 festival's primary guest Bernhard Lang performed here, is perfectly fitting in terms of how those works often have echoes of music from the past and thrive on repetition. New music doesn't exist in a vacuum, but reflects and echoes our own responses, our own experiences of music in an individual way. New music in as far as Lang is concerned is not to ignore, disparage or destroy traditional music forms of the past but rather - in such series as his Monadologie works - he is continually looking for ways to keep the history of music alive and responsive to new ideas. In these works, the composer takes elements of great works, runs them through a computer, cuts, pastes and loops and presents them in a new context. That makes it sound like a technical exercise, creating what Lang describes as a 'meta-composition' - in popular music it might be called 'a remix' - but in practice and in performance it expands the range of music, instruments and technology in a fascinating way that is relevant and contemporary.

There was no technology employed, for example, in the opening Friday evening concert performance at the An Táin Arts Centre in Dundalk of 8-4-8 - Silver Light and Cold Trip. The first piece, performed by the Aleph Guitar Quartet is not actually part of the Monadologie meta-compositions but rather employs another method in his GAME series that allows an element of openness, randomness, variability and unpredictability into the composition. The four musicians playing amplified acoustic guitars pre-select their individual parts from a set of cards to produce a piece that takes on a random and original form. When played together, using a remarkable variety of techniques and textures including microtonal tuning and extended techniques; picking, strumming, rubbing, tapping and bottleneck sliding; the individual parts come together in unexpected ways, and sometimes planned ones. There seem to be infinite possibilities to this kind of approach.

While that unpredictability and variety is constantly providing surprises, what isn't often considered is the visual side of performance, which is a benefit that comes with seeing such material played at the LCMS and other festivals of this kind. There is a tremendous advantage is not just hearing the music live and spacially separated in a suitable environment, but it aids engagement to be able to see what each guitarist is playing, how it works with the other parts and how it contributes to the whole. 

In my limited experience of Bernhard Lang's work, mainly from his opera work like Re:igen, I had an impression of him as being a playful and irreverent composer. Playful maybe, but on the basis of 8-4-8 and his other works performed in this festival, clearly not irreverent. You could be mistaken for thinking that of Cold Trip, which you could describe as a remixed distillation of Schubert's Winterreisse. There's a purity in that work that surely needs no distillation, but at the same time this 200 year old song cycle doesn't need to remain preserved in amber or indeed forever frozen in time. Its qualities have been influential throughout musical history, in classical, folk and pop music, and Lang's piece for four guitars and singer basically acknowledges that. It's all the more apparent when seen performed here by The Aleph Guitar Quartet with soprano Daisy Press in the beautifully lit and immaculate sound environment of the stage at the An Táin Arts Centre.

Lang's Cold Trip (Part 1) emphasises and highlights the nature or character of Schubert's setting of the Wilhelm Müller poem, with a looped repetition of key words, "frozen", "tear drops", "snow", "deep sorrows", "my heart is frozen". What is different is that in Lang's version this seems less melancholy (and, let's face it, self-pitying), is how when sung by Daisy Press it takes on a wider range of human expression; finding playfulness, humour and even a cold sensual quality in the rhythms and the imagery, at times recalling the intense cabaret melodrama of Pierrot Lunaire. Although the Aleph Guitar Quartet play with the same complexity of techniques found in the 8-4-8, they also support this exploration, bringing out pop-like melodies that indeed reflect Winterreise’s influence on modern (self-pitying) soul balladeers. Cold Trip doesn't treat Schubert at all irreverently; it doesn't desecrate Winterreisse, but rather explores it with a view to the resonances of the work that still echo throughout the years.

On Saturday the second full day of the festival, Lang could be seen to take a similar approach to Chopin's Études in Monadologie XXXVI, demonstrating a foundation of piano playing learning Chopin can continue to be another source of wonder. The twelves pieces vary in how close they keep to the original Chopin etudes, Lang again taking elements and repeating them, sometimes letting them take off in different directions. In the resonant acoustics of the St Nicholas Church of Ireland, pianist Daan Vandewalle dived deeply into the pieces, exploring the full range of tempos and range of sounds on offer from pianissimo to fortissimo. Requiring no extended reaching into piano extended techniques and no electronics, Lang's reinterpretations felt natural and organic, Vandewalle making them sound fresh and vibrant, showing that they still have riches to offer.

The Aleph Guitar Quartet and Daisy Press were back at the Chapel at St. Vincent's Secondary School; a venue typically used by the LCMS for very slow, quiet music that often has a spiritual nature. That might not have been the intention of Bashō and Eight Pieces for Four Guitars composed by Martin Smolka for the Quartet, but there was certainly room for quiet contemplation in the venue and the music, and a third piece Svatý Kryštof - a new commission for the festival alluding to the St Christopher on the Charles Bridge in Prague - was appropriate for the location. Introducing the concert Smolka preferred to let the works speak for themselves and proposed their main objective being to seek to bring beauty back into music. It was an afternoon of quiet music that need to be listened to intently and in the location of St Vincent's that wasn't difficult. The acoustic guitar arrangements rarely developed into a flow, relying rather on a single note or two played round-robin fashion by each guitarist. This had the effect of opening up the songs, spacial positioning and visuals again enriching the experience, inviting the listener to focus on the delicacy of the playing and revel in the beauty of each and every note and microtone. This also provided ample room for the voice of Daisy Press to bring the poetry of Bashō to the setting with an unaccompanied delivery of beautiful precision for Svatý Kryštof, the resonance of the voice and the words carrying through.

As if genre and historical music frontiers were not already breached, the third show of the day added some opposing push from the direction of popular music into 'new music'. Not that the music of Nico, John Cale and the Velvet Underground stable are easily categorised themselves. The early evening LCMS show at The Spirit Store has come to play that role in the festival; not so much that of a refresher or a breathing space from the often intense music and high concentration performances elsewhere - although it serves that purpose too - but rather one that offers a sideways perspective that has an indefinable influence on the works surrounding it. That's something that Apartment House are well used to and the idea of presenting a complete reworking of Nico’s debut album The Marble Index is an interesting one. The arrangement by Kerry Young for string quartet, Young taking the piano and electronics and singer Francesca Fargion singing the songs with a folk-inflection, offered a new fresh perspective on the other pieces in the festival as well as on Nico's album itself. On more than one occasion references to "frozen warnings" and "roses growing in the snow" reminded me of Winterreise or even Lang's Cold Trip. Although such connections are unintentional (I presume), they are nonetheless evidence of adventurous programming throwing up unexpected references and resonances. Or indeed Echoes.

The final evening concert of an LCMS festival back at the church of St Nicholas is often a selection of choral works that prove to be the ideal way to finish off the festival. The selection here for Echoes sung by Chamber Choir Ireland was wonderfully varied, showing the huge range of possibilities and approaches to choral music. Sarah Davachi's new commission Songs of the Smile's Fig established a distinct meditative mood in a steady flow of ethereal voices over its three parts that held a drone-like undercurrent for the words of surrealist André Breton to weave strange imagery. The words themselves could hardly be distinguished in this flow, but were perhaps less important than the mood they evoked. It was almost the opposite with Kevin Volans' Glosa a lo Divino, where the Spanish language text of the 16th century poet San Juan de la Cruz could be clearly followed in the see-saw up-and-down staccato rhythm dwelling on each syllable of every word with only the occasional overlay of running lines in the latter verse. It does allow the beauty of the writing to be heard and contemplated.

In between those two rather more sedate pieces, five of the seven Enigmas (I, II, III, IV, VI) composed by Beat Furrer on 'prophesies' written by Leonardo da Vinci were completely and thrillingly in an otherworld of their own. The shifting arrangements and repositioning of the singers give the pieces an extraordinary power and dynamic range of sometimes eardrum battering force that felt truly apocalyptic without every falling into predictable choral voicings or Carl Orff Carmina Burana territory. I can see why however, particularly in these times, the festival would not want their audience - one that seems to grow year upon year - to leave with admonitions of dread and doom ("It will come out of dark and gloomy caves/and whoever does not support it will meet with sudden and terrible death") ringing in their ears. Kevin Volans' Glosa a lo Divino, with its beautiful sentiments, provided the right note to end with the echoes of another successful LCMS festival still resounding as you made your way home.

External links: Louth Contemporary Music Society

Ashley - The Bar, from Perfect Lives (Dundalk, 2024)

Robert Ashley - The Bar, from Perfect Lives

Louth Contemporary Music Society, 2024

Gelsey Bell, Brian McCorkle, Paul Pinto, Dave Ruder, Aliza Simons, Amirtha Kidambi, Caoimhe Hopkinson, Sean Carpio, Steve Welsh 

The Spirit Store, Dundalk - 15th June 2024

A performance of Robert Ashley's The Bar could in the context of the Louth Contemporary Music Society festival be considered a moment of light relief, a bonus extra in addition to the full performance of the composer's final opera Crash the previous evening, but it was also - as the performances at the Spirit Store in Dundalk are turning out to be - an essential and somewhat wayward element that contributes to the remarkable variety that is typical of Eamonn Quinn's programming for the LMCS's annual summer festival.

The second day of the 2024 two day festival opened with Linda Catlin Smith's Dirt Road at the church in St. Vincent's Secondary School. A seemingly austere, delicate, slow moving hour-long piece, the performance explored the interaction of violin and percussion with subtle variation and progression. The afternoon concert featuring Hamza El Din’s Escalay presented an extraordinary combination of Eastern meeting Irish traditional sounds, following on from an Irish traditional version of In C last year. A complete one-off, you only get this kind of thing in Dundalk, only at the LMCS. Before the immersive surround sound performance of Stockhausen's extraordinary Stimmung echoed around St. Nicholas church to close the festival however, we were invited to The Bar at the Spirit Store.

The Bar is just one section of a seven-part opera Perfect Lives that Ashley originally developed as an opera for television in 1983, back in the days when TV music programming was a little more adventurous (or existed even). As one of the more widely seen Ashley operas, Perfect Lives consequently has become almost a definitive example of his style, although this is more extensively explored and expanded as it forms part of his Now Eleanor‘s Idea tetralogy. As far as Perfect Lives goes, it at least has that familiar rhythm and meandering philosophical exploration of ordinary people's lives in the Midwestern States of the USA.

"These are songs about the Corn Belt, the people in it, or on it." as Ashley narrates with variations of delivery and intonation for each section of the opera. The characters in Ashley's operas are all regular people, all have plans, but perhaps lulled by Ashley's own voice as the narrator in the recordings of his work, they seem to be subject to a kind of dream logic, getting distracted from their purpose through meetings with others, getting bogged down in details. Ashley's voice gives the impression of it just being a part of the way things go. In another work, Celestial Excursions, he explores how some old people talk endlessly, randomly, with a kind of verbal incontinence. These matters are of interest to the composer and recur in different forms in his work.

Words, as seen in Crash, have a musical quality of their own in Ashley's operas, in the abstraction of the texts, throwing out ideas that may or not be picked up later, that develop into a refrain and are echoed by a chorus. You can no more make sense of way the individual words and phrases fit together than you can 'explain' why one note follows another or how it adds up to create a narrative, and yet patterns emerge, elements connect. It just feels right. Language and communication are very much a part of what defines the character of his works.

The opera Perfect Lives revolves around two characters 'R', an Ashley-like figure and Buddy "The World's Greatest Piano Player", based on "Blue" Gene Tyranny, Ashley's musical collaborator. They arrive in a small Midwest town to entertain the locals at the Perfect Lives Lounge, but end up getting involved in an unusual kind of bank robbery where the money is just "borrowed" for a day. In Part 1. The Park, a man from country in hotel room in small Midwestern town pours a drink, picks up a phone and considers such philosophical matters as how can we pass from one state to another. In Part 2. The Supermarket we meet Helen and John who book adjacent rooms ("This is not very interesting, I know", the narrator admits). In Part 3. The Bank, Gwyn works at the bank. ("That's her job. Mostly she helps people count their money. She likes it.") Gwen is eloping to get married and takes day off work.

We come to Part 4. The Bar, where the star and a slightly seedy older man (Buddy and R) turn up on their day off at the Perfect Lives lounge and get into a philosophical conversation with the owner, Rodney. ("We don't serve fine wine in half pints, Buddy"). What happens in The Bar is no more enlightening or even entirely comprehensible than the previous sections (synopsis interpretations differ wildly), but there are familiar ideas that Ashley revisits in one form or another, such as the body having four ages (The Seed, the Root, the Trunk, the Branches), but also thinking about how we pass from one state to another. All of this is set to a music bar room Boogie-Woogie on piano, using preset rhythm templates derived from the Gulbransen 'Palace' organ.

As ever, there are much more complex ideas involved in Perfect Lives than the simple flowing and often abstract narration suggests. Improvement (Don leaves Linda), the first Ashley opera I discovered via a radio broadcast of a live performance in Vienna, another part of the Now Eleanor's Idea tetralogy, is described as "an extension 500 years later of the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492 as an allegory for self-realisation". The stated purpose of Perfect Lives is 'Rebirth', or as I've seen it described "A banal road movie and at the same time a cultural-historical reappraisal of European-American mythology" and "a comic opera about reincarnation". As with Linda's surreal and comic encounters with an airline ticket sales person in Improvement having been abandoned by her husband Don at a service station, it's hard to match the verbal descriptions of everyday problems of ordinary people with such high-minded intentions. 

The question of rebirth does float into view on occasion in those reflections on passing from one state to another and these questions come up time and again in Ashley's works, perhaps most specifically in Crash, which considers the average life as being divided into distinct 14-year periods. The music for the operas also appear to be far from the high concept technical exercises in musical virtuosity that you would expect from avant-garde opera. The dominant music in Perfect Lives sounds like jaunty keyboard rhythms that resemble pre-programmed organ tracks or synthesiser backing tracks, which when combined with the dry drawl of the abstract and digressive narration can prove to be hard to remain focussed on and yet fascinating in their flow. It might sound like basic Boogie-Woogie rhythms but the lightness is deceptive, the music clearly intended to evoke an almost trance like state, while being more complex than it appears to be on the surface.

If there are numerous levels and ideas to be teased out of Ashley's Perfect Lives, the Varispeed Collective have their own unique interpretation when bringing The Bar to a live audience, preferably putting it on at a bar. Rebirth not so much, this version is all about the Boogie-Woogie. And at the Spirit Store pub in Dundalk, which is also a notable music venue in the town, that means involving the locals, having a pint of Guinness and having fun. This is not the time for any deep probing of the philosophical content of Perfect Lives, or even the content of this section of it. And you can't really fault them for that, choosing instead to contribute to the wonderful, almost unimaginable range of what Eamonn Quinn has in mind for the LCMS annual celebration of contemporary music.

Ashley's characteristic cadences and dry midwestern drawl are almost impossible to imitate, at least with the particular emphasis he brings to his own words. The composer recognised however that it's necessary for performers to bring something of themselves to a performance, and they certainly did that at the Spirit Store in Dundalk. Neither can you or would you want to replicate the musical rhythms of "Blue" Gene Tyranny. The piano bar room boogie is taken up by Brian McCorkle and Paul Pinto from the Varispeed Collective, the main vocal duties shared between Aliza Simons, Dave Ruder, Gelsey Bell and Amirtha Kidambi special guesting as Rodney, alternating also to provide the chorus backing vocal reactions and interjections, all getting down in the spirit of the boogie. 

It's part of the spirit of the Varispeed Collective's arrangement of site specific performances of The Bar not just to perform it in a suitable location - and the venue at the Spirit Store could not be more perfect - but also involve local musicians. That's a philosophy that also fits perfectly with the philosophy of the LCMS, and what makes their festivals unique, celebratory and inclusive. Caoimhe Hopkinson on bass, Sean Carpio on drums and Steve Welsh on saxophone all joined in with the unique character of the work and the performance. This was a very different interpretation then from the familiar Robert Ashley version, and it would be hard to define it as opera in any classical sense, but you could say that about any Ashley opera. As an element of the LCMS however, who hold to no rules or narrow definition of what contemporary music should be, it was just perfect. Lovely music indeed.

External links: Louth Contemporary Music Society, Lovely Music, RobertAshley.org

Ashley - Crash (Dundalk, 2024)

Robert Ashley - Crash

Louth Contemporary Music Society, 2024

Gelsey Bell, Brian McCorkle, Paul Pinto, Dave Ruder, Aliza Simons, Amirtha Kidambi

An Táin Arts Centre, Dundalk - 14th June 2024

The LCMS, the Louth Contemporary Music Society, have been hugely imaginative in their programming over their 18 year history, finding accessible yet challenging and innovative ways to bring new music to a wider audience. Some of the names invited to put on performances of their work in Dundalk include Terry Riley, Philip Glass, John Zorn, Salvatore Sciarrino and Kaija Saariaho, but founder Eamonn Quinn makes great efforts to involve local musicians and present challenging but still accessible material to the local audience. In 2018, Gavin Bryars led world class musicians and local children's choir and music students through a moving rendition of 'Jesus Blood Never Failed Me Yet' and last summer's Folks' Music festival saw a thrilling rendition of Terry Riley's 'In C' played in a completely unique fashion by some of the finest Irish traditional and folk musicians. For their 2024 festival, going under the title of Lovely Music, the progamming of Robert Ashley alongside Linda Catlin Smith, Hamza El Din and Stockhausen is equally inspired.

I can't say for certain whether there has ever been a Robert Ashley opera performed in Ireland before, but it's hard to imagine anyone being as bold and adventurous as the LCMS. Holding a two-day festival dedicated to new music every June, bringing in some of the major figures as guests and featuring some of the best new music ensembles in the world to this small town, they don't usually feature opera as a rule or indeed have the resources to stage full operas, but then rules about what we think of as opera don't really apply to Robert Ashley’s works. There are several companies that specialise in performances of his operas and - I say this as someone who has long awaited for the opportunity to see one performed live - we were fortunate enough to have the Varispeed Collective come over and perform two works, Crash and The Bar (a section from the TV opera Perfect Lives).

Crash, Robert Ashley's last opera, was first performed just after his death in 2014. Like all his works, it's based around voices and a concept, but appropriately for a work that feels closest to autobiographical, there is a refinement of both those features. Crash consists of just voices: there is no music, not even the plinkity-plonk (apologies for using advanced musicological terms) electronic keyboard backing that often features. As far as concept goes, Crash appears to be a little more straightforward than some of his works in its structure into sections that advance the underlying concept. Of course many of his works start out that way and are far more sophisticated in their structure than they appear, but quickly meander down inexplicable and unpredictable twists and turns. As indeed does Crash.

There is at least an effort to hold that concept together a little more tightly than usual. As is announced at the start of the opera, it's based on the idea of life being divided into stages, not unlike Shakespeare's seven ages of man, but in the theory Ashley works with that was inspired by a book about Hindu belief, it sees it being divided into distinct 14 year cycles that govern our lives, each with their apogee and nadir that bring times of fortune and misfortune. That's 14 years for the masculine part. The feminine part is a 10 year cycle and one might be more dominant than other or become more dominant at different stages. The idea is one that the narrator(s) say is one that many religions hold to, seeing it as being related to the physical manifestation of the body as impure and evil, while the spiritual aspect has now been lost.

Structurally then Crash is divided into six Acts of 14 year cycles; Act 1 years 1-14, Act II is 15-28 through to Act VI covering 71-84, each section around 15 minutes long. The narration likewise has three interweaving narrative voices and three backing voices, which makes it somewhat easier to follow than Ashley himself doing all the main voices and appearing to go off in tangents, as in other works where the structure is less immediately evident. One voice sings as if they are talking in a conversational manner on the phone, another has a floating meditative singsong voice, the third exhibiting a mild stammer or halting glitch. All of these are styles that Ashley would have adopted himself in other works as the main narrator/actor.

The first voice talks about the basic concept (initially anyway) of the 14 year cycles, the second has a detached poetic quality that seems to relate to the main character's out-of-body experiences (electrocution, fainting, allergic reaction) and the third voice relates life experiences through those ages, covering the highs and lows of his career as a composer and musician. The other three backing voices recite vocalisations and chanted refrains of words from the main narration behind the narrative voices. Along the way, the text hits upon all variety of subjects including small people, neighbours and the discovery and meaning of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The choices of what is expanded on as significant moments in the main figure's life are almost inexplicable, but of course they all relate to an examination of a life subject to forces outside oneself, or within oneself.

Just to complicate - well, not just to complicate but to adhere to the idea of cycles where dominant forces appear - the three singers doing the conversational, poetic and glitch voices switch with the 'backing' voices, and each of the two groups of three take their turn as one of the three voices in each of the sections. These are complex musical ideas, arrangements and leitmotifs, all presented in an unconventional manner, hugely distinctive and quite unlike anything else, but which nonetheless are surprisingly easy to grasp. Grasp perhaps, but not necessarily fully comprehend. You are kept on your mental toes trying to relate the interweaving stories and ideas and it requires intense concentration. There is no time in the flow to stop and consider an idea, so it's almost impossible to take everything in. There inevitably comes a point in Crash, like all Ashley's work, where you think either you or the work has wandered off and lost the meaning at some point.

Unless you see it performed. In that respect at least, Crash is much like traditional opera. With six people sitting at desks with no musical instruments and essentially reciting the text into microphones, you might think there is nothing that can be gained here that you can't get from listening to the exact same thing on CD, but the performance is a vital element. It's not that it varies to any degree from the recorded version, and I'm not going to claim that you can glean any greater meaning from the text, but there is definitely a truer connection established when you see people involved who can't help but bring themselves into the interpretation, allowing you to see as well as hear the quirks of Ashley's score presented to you. And yes, the visual engagement does certainly helps focus and the mind is less likely to wander, or at least not wander any more than is intended.

There are a few other reasons why this performance for the LCMS's Lovely Music festival was special, it being the 10th anniversary of the opera's first performance and the 10th anniversary of Robert Ashley's death. To make it even more of an occasion, it was performed by the original cast who worked with the composer on this final opera, the Varispeed Collective (including Amirtha Kidambi, whose solo musical career with the Elder Ones I am a big fan of). To be honest, just seeing a Robert Ashley opera performed is something I never even expected to see and that it didn't disappoint. It's a promising sign that Ashley's work still has followers, admirers and supporters (including Lovely Music that publishes his recordings) all contributing to keep his legacy going. This was an utterly fascinating performance of the work of a truly unique and inimitable composer.

External links: Louth Contemporary Music Society, Lovely Music, RobertAshley.org