Until very recently, the brilliant and tragic life of Julius Eastman and his seminally iconoclastic music, had been almost entirely forgotten after his death in New York at the age of 49. But a surge in performances of his music is now taking place, along with a re-evaluation of the considerable importance of his work.

Eastman was an exceptional pianist who studied with the legendary Mieczysław Horszowski, but his interest in experimental music led to him becoming a central figure in the more radical styles of music during the 1960s and 70s. Eastman was also blessed with a fine baritone voice, and in America he became the go-to performer of Peter Maxwell Davies’ Eight Songs for a Mad King, even performing the work when it was conducted by Pierre Boulez at the Lincoln Centre.

By the 1980s, Eastman had cut ties with many academic institutions and was unable to secure regular employment. His music was considered far too extreme for performances in any mainstream venues, and he gradually became isolated and despondent to a point where drug addiction took control of his life. For a period he was homeless, and after a heart attack, he died alone in a New York hospital – it took eight months after his death for any type of modest obituary to appear in print.

Eastman’s deliberately provocative works tackled political and social issues, centred around the prejudice he experienced being black and gay. Often obsessively repetitive, he combined a minimalist style with a certain flavour of pop and jazz, but the score for Buddha, composed in 1984, is simply a single page of manuscript paper in which notes and motifs are hinted at within an oval boundary. And so the piece is open to a considerable amount of free choice, improvisation and duration.

©Tom McKinney 2022

The first half of the programme brings together a collection of short pieces curated by composer and pianist Jill Jarman (who worked with Evelyn Glennie to create the second half of the concert and who is performing as part of the ensemble here today). This diverse collection of music aims to immerse us in the diverse sounds and atmospheres of the city. Bach’s well-known ‘Prélude’ from Cello Suite No. 1 in G Major, resonates with spaces of meditation and worship away from the urgency of urban life.

In contrast, Jarman’s composition for saxophones and piano reflect a vibrant multiculturalism, drawing on diverse musical genres, as do two pieces by Ian East. East’s Dance of the Awakening & Secret Spaces, are inspired by Balkan folk dance, and Jarman’s Chick Pea, nods to jazz fusion, both foreground and celebrate a rich musical diversity. Vincent Ho’s solo Tam Tam piece, Sandman’s Castle, captures the duality of city life, moving between calm and chaos, hard and soft. This dynamic journey culminates with Reich’s Clapping Music and in Orologeria Aureola (composed by Glennie and Sheppard), which embody the energy and drive which inspired this concert.

This very early piece, composed in about 1878, was probably written to be played at the Worcester Glee Club. The manuscript in the British Library is, curiously, headed ‘Xmas music’ on the oboe part. The Andante is graceful, and the second movement is reminiscent of a Mendelssohn Scherzo.

Nigel Simeone 2013

Moderato – Allegro
Adagio
Andante – Allegro

Elgar’s Piano Quintet is one of his last large-scale works, dating from the same period as the Violin Sonata and the Cello Concerto. In October 1918, Elgar wrote to the critic Ernest Newman, telling him that the first movement of his Piano Quintet was ready: ‘I want you to hear it. It is strange music I think, and I like it – but it’s ghostly stuff.’ The work was to be dedicated to Newman. The first private performance of the complete work took place on 7 March 1919 at Severn House, Elgar’s London home. George Bernard Shaw was there, and his reaction was enthusiastic: ‘The Quintet knocked me over … This was the finest thing of its kind since [Beethoven’s] Coriolan.’ Shaw is presumably referring here to the dark, uneasy opening which certainly recalls the mood of Beethoven’s overture.

As the introduction gives way to the main Allegro another influence is apparent: the Piano Quintet by Brahms. It is presumably the sweeping, passionate drive of the musical argument in this movement – punctuated by some dramatic references back to the introductory music – that led the English musicologist and Elgar biographer Percy Young to describe it in the most glowing terms, declaring that it was ‘in some ways Elgar’s finest movement’. The work’s central Adagio begins with a tranquil viola solo, supported by the other strings. This expansive movement is crowned by a passionate climax of almost orchestral grandeur, before subsiding back to the gentler, calmer mood of the opening. After a brief introduction that becomes increasingly agitated, the main theme of the finale is a noble arching theme marked ‘with dignity, song-like’. Much of the movement is restrained and reflective, but at the close Elgar drives home his musical ideas to a powerful and thrilling conclusion.

Nigel Simeone © 2011

RADIGUE – Occam XXV (45′) 

OCCAM XXI – Angharad Davies (16mins) 

OCCAM RIVER XVIII – Rhodri Davies & Dominic Lash (15mins) 

OCCAM XVII – Dominic Lash  (13mins) 

OCCAM RIVER XVII – Angharad Davies & Rhodri Davies (16mins) 

OCCAM I – Rhodri Davies (28mins) 

OCCAM RIVER XV – Angharad Davies & Dominic Lash (15mins) 

OCCAM DELTA XIV – Angharad Davies, Rhodri Davies & Dominic Lash (17mins) 

The tenth piece in Claude Debussy’s first book of Préludes for piano is titled La cathédrale engloutie, the Sunken Cathedral. It’s a dreamy, pictorial piece, depicting a mythical Breton city swallowed by the ocean, a kind of Gallic Atlantis. What makes this short piece stick in the memory is not necessarily its vocabulary—of church bells, and watery organs—or its musical vernacular—borrowing pentatonic scales from Javanese gamelan—but its aura of sunkenness: it’s the dunking in a deep, quietly fizzing pool, in which everything moves in a new, collectively dislocated time. 

Water, sound, and sunkenness are ideas that the celebrated French experimental composer Eliane Radigue has returned to time and again, especially in the post-millenium creative spurt of this now 93-year-old composer. Waves form the obvious meeting point between these ideas: “We live in a universe filled with waves”, Radigue said in an interview given during the construction of Occam XXV, her piece with Frédéric Blondy: from the tiniest microwaves, to the point where our ears perceive sound, and extending to wavelengths found in the ocean. “We also come into contact with [the ocean] physically, mentally and spiritually”, she added. 

As well as working on a perceptual and sensual level, the link between sound and water also informs a key philosophical concept. Just as water flows seeking the path of least resistance, so the guiding mantra of Radigue’s constructions for instrumentalists—that of Occam’s Razor, the so-called parsimonious principle—is that the simplest route available is invariably the best. And so, the selection of pieces heard in this Radigue Weekend chart courses that, on paper, seem fairly simple: from deep to shallow, deep to high, broad to thin, dense to sparse, absent to present to absent again.  

Where the challenge comes is in what Radigue calls the “virtuosity of speed”. It’s like Paganini, but in reverse: performers require “a virtuosity of absolute control of the instrument, an extreme, subtle and delicate kind of virtuosity” when performing music that’s achingly restrained. Kate Molleson, in her book Sound Within Sound—a title which itself references Radigue’s sonic burrowing—tells of performers, so engrossed in the progression of one of Radigue’s pieces, that they’ve ‘woken up’ mid-performance, unaware as to how much time has elapsed, where they are, or who has been watching. 

Radigue’s music requires a certain virtuosity from the listener too: How to listen to music without event, in a musical space—and a digitised society—in which events are more abundant than ever? One key way into this unusual appreciative realm is by opening not just our ears to sound, but our bodies too. In 1974, Radigue visited her son in New York, and realised that she could no longer put a sound to the movement of her daughter-in-law’s lips. It turned out that she had lived almost fifty years with an unknown hearing impairment, something which she later realised had had a huge impact on how she sought out and shaped these slow-moving sounds. Sound, for Radigue, is something fundamentally bodily, as well as aural. And, when guiding newcomers in how to listen to Radigue, the writer Louise Gray channels Pauline Oliveros, pioneer of Deep Listening. In one of her exercises, Oliveros asks participants to “walk so silently that the bottoms of your feet become ears”. Feel the sound, as much as you hear it. 

Opening the weekend is Occam XXV, for organ, premiered by Blondy at Islington’s Union Chapel in 2018. These Occam works are organic forms from their conception. Radigue, who received no formal compositional training, prefers to work with performers individually and in person. Whatever seeds they come up with germinate, and are tended to by Radigue, the constant gardener. Though these works have no score, save for some pictorial guides, this is no free improvisation either. “The difference is that you are following the vision of another person”, trumpeter (and fellow “chevalier d’Occam”—knight of Occam) Nate Woolley writes. “The vision is very clear—the water, the razor, the idea that you never return, that you are always moving forward. These are things that Éliane shapes”. 

Over the course of forty-five minutes, Occam XXV rumbles from the deepest reaches of the organ—from the bass sounds you feel more than hear—through to the shrillest edges of perceivable sound. To describe these pieces in reference to structural milestones is futile, though it’s amazing how much these small, quivering forms morph and contort amid a perception that nothing is moving. To listen to Occam XXV is to climb a steep, never-ending mountain facing forward, occasionally allowing yourself an about turn to marvel at just how far you’re come. 

The following concert features a selection of works, mostly of around the same length, for violin, harp, and double bass, in various combinations, which continue this steadfast mode of work. All these works begin with thoughts of bodies of water, though the exact sources (and any representations) are kept hidden. In Occam XXI, written with violinist Angharad Davies, a line from Woyzeck springs to mind: “You’re running around like an open razor blade. You might cut someone”. Where other Occam works have a mellower quality, the various sheer overtones of the violin—coupled with the absence of a bass register—give XXI a feeling like stacked sheets of roughly cut glass: related, separate, dangerously sharp when in contact. 

OCCAM XVII, with bassist Dominic Lash, features slower, less abrasive material, though these harmonic clouds blacken from their previous light grey shade. The Davies siblings join for River XVII, then split for the longest piece in this concert: the first Occam piece of the series, for solo harp, featuring the unusual technique of bowing the harp with both hands. Two bodies of water flow past each other occasionally meeting in the duo piece River XV, and Delta XIV concludes with the trio altogether. This final piece premiered in 2019; the Delta tributary series is now up to XXIII. For all their steady restraint, Radigue’s riverworks flow ever onwards, and might even be accelerating. 

Hugh Morris, 2025 

Très modéré –

Très fougueux –

Lentement –

Animé – Mouvement de valse bien rythmé

Born in Romania, Enescu was a child prodigy, writing his first compositions at the age of five, and a brilliant violinist. By the time he went to Paris in 1895, he was already an immensely accomplished musician having studied violin and composition at the Vienna Conservatoire. In Paris, he studied composition with Fauré and harmony with André Gedalge (who were also Ravel’s two most important teachers). The Octet was completed in 1900, when Enesco was just nineteen years old, and a year before he wrote the popular Romanian Rhapsody No.1 for orchestra. The composer’s Preface to the score of the Octet explains something of its unusual form:

This Octet, cyclic in form, presents the following characteristics: it is divided into four distinct movements in the classic manner, each movement linked to the other to form a single symphonic movement where the sections, on an enlarged scale, follow one another according to the rules of construction for the first movement of a symphony.

Scored for two string quartets, this splendid and grandly-conceived work had to wait nearly a decade for its premiere, given in Paris on 18 December 1909. Since Enesco was already a sought-after soloist in 1900, he composed the Octet in between performances of concertos by Beethoven, Saint-Saëns and Bach. From the start of the first section (presenting a theme that somewhat resembles the main theme of Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge), Enesco’s skill at writing for his unusual forces is apparent, generating a great sense of power and momentum. The second section – “very impetuous” – is angular and jagged, and this is followed by a rather unsettled slow movement. The finale is dominated by a spiky waltz, full of wide leaps, but ending with a bold close – D flat then C in powerful octaves.

Nigel Simeone © 2012

Assez mouvementé 
Tranquillement 
Vif 
 

Born in Romania, George Enescu was a child prodigy and he entered the Vienna Conservatory at the age of seven. His teachers there included Joseph Hellmesberger and Robert Fuchs, and in 1891 Enescu was introduced to Brahms. After graduating in Vienna at the age of twelve, Enescu moved to Paris where he studied with Fauré and André Gedalge – both of whom also taught Ravel. Enescu’s Violin Sonata No. 2 was written in April 1899 when he was 17 years old – and still a student. Its premiere was given in Paris on 22 February 1900 by Jacques Thibaud with the composer at the piano, and the sonata was dedicated to Thibaud and his pianist brother, Joseph. Enescu himself recalled that the opening theme first came into his head during a walk when he was 14: ‘I carried it inside me for three years; then, at the age of seventeen, I wrote my Second Violin Sonata in the space of a fortnight.’ As Enescu’s biographer Noel Malcolm has noted, the work has ‘an extraordinary unity, mainly because of the way it is pervaded by the long, mysterious … theme which opens the first movement.’ This theme is developed and transformed throughout the Sonata, giving the whole work a powerful coherence. The musical language has occasional echoes of Fauré, but even in this early work, Enescu was a highly original creative voice, even incorporating elements of the modes and harmonies of his native Romanian folk music in the slow movement.  

© Nigel Simeone

Many of today’s greatest jazz musicians consider Bill Evans to be one of their most important influences, and his legacy as a composer and pianist is truly immense. Evans played in the sextet that recorded Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue, and later performed with many influential ensembles. His musical style was guided not only by his jazz predecessors, but also from his childhood piano lessons, where he loved music by Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert and especially Debussy.

I Loves You Porgy is a number from George Gershwin’s opera Porgy and Bess, and Evans made a handful of recordings of gentle, introverted improvisations based on the song, which Steven Osborne has transcribed for his own performances.

© Music in the Round