The Philharmonie de Luxembourg's plumply funded Rainy Days festival has gradually been establishing itself as a festival of international renown, and was this year marked by the new artistic direction of multidisciplinary composer Catherine Kontz. What is clear at first glance, with Feldman, Lucier and Lockwood peppered through the programming, is that Kontz has made a conscious aesthetic choice in her curation. This music of deep listening focuses on the act of listening itself, with no distinction or hierarchical bias made between improvisation, written acoustic music, post-fluxus conceptualism and electronic music of yore, and tends to involve musical experiences engrossed in delicate, slow-booming processes. While that may not be to everyone's taste, it is delightfully refreshing to see a clear and pointed vision instead of a hodgepodge of who's hot in new music. Using the very elemental theme of memory as a vehicle for the aesthetic direction as well as a means to link past and present contemporary music (however oxymoronic that may sound), Kontz manages to brilliantly curate a tight four-day program full of surprising, ear-opening experiences.
Each day comprises an extended line up of short performances, with an average of one to two works (or 40 min) per event, allowing for many ambulatory breaks between the halls, in which the audience can decant their thoughts while admiring the many facets of the architectural wonder that is the Philharmonie. The effect of such programming is much like that of a ten-course meal, where one can savour and digest many more sonic experiences than if one were to sit in one 100+ min, pitch-heavy concert. With each break, the option of exploring the various installations scattered around the sumptuous venue is always an option, including Welcome Here Kind Stranger. In an authentically furnished pop-up Irish pub, Owen Spafford and his band revel in authentic quaintness, as they perform traditional music with fiddles and flute while drinking draught Guinness available to all. More than just a break room, the work explores the ethos of a music inextricably linked to its context as a space of cheer and respite.
Perhaps one lesson learned is that for such a programme to function effectively, concert durations must be impeccably timed and observed in order to avoid any knock-on effect from tardy arrivals. In more than a few critical instances, delicate works were brutally interrupted, causing anxiety for ‘late’-comers and frustration for those already entranced by a crystalline Feldman or a gossamer Bailie.
One of the highlights included the Montreal-based Architek Percussion quartet's portrait of two Canadian composers. Sabrina Schroeder's Stircrazer I (2022), with samplers and multiple kick and bass drums surrounding the audience, explored the sonic capabilities of rumbling and could be described as an étude in tension building. The navigation of timbre, gesture and tension is masterful, although the lack of any huge climax or surprise felt like a wasted opportunity for a lengthy piece in which the audience had been brought into such a trance-like state. Emily Doolittle's Re(Cycling) I: Metals, is as conceptually clear in its limitation of materials: an orchestra of recycled metal containers – including pie plates, pudding foils, salad bowls, tins and coffee pods – are rubbed, brushed and dangled, creating various domestic sonic and visual associations and tapping into the rather universal memory of early childhood kitchen play. The seemingly light-hearted work is also political at its core, reminding us that our first memories of sonic exploration were achieved by creating wonder through waste.
The crown jewel of the festival, however, was the co-premiere of Joanna Bailie's 1979, which captures the first year the composer has clear memories of from her childhood. This Proustian endeavour to seize the essence of one's early years through sound and image is not an easy one, but Bailie champions this with her typical slowly unfolding and evocative soundworld, perfectly captured by Ictus’ sensitivities. The warm, sonic embrace from omnidirectionally swelling strings and slowly descending antiphonal chains of thirds by the flute and clarinet lull us into a different feeling of time, readying us for the video element introduced to us at the midway point. Projected onto a large, hitherto concealed screen are subsequent black-and-white images of the composer's memories, glowing, blurring and fuzzing each in their own way. Almost dreamlike, they feel just on the cusp of reality, encapsulating the complex set of emotions one feels when recalling early childhood. Just like a child's word, the work is unabashedly honest in its simple and direct means, and of course its unapologetic yet always tasteful use of diatonicism. Through it, one has the sense of having peered into the composer's soul. Not often can that be said of contemporary composers!
The Langham Research Centre performed thrice on Saturday, displaying versatility and charm in iconic works like Lucier's I am Sitting in a Room, but even more so in their first set, Into the Analogue, in which they revisited and remixed great works of musique concrete (including ‘Dinotique’ by Luc Ferrari) using their instrumentarium of vintage analogue devices. At times saucily intersplicing crisp sonic images of mooing cows with wailing babies, typewriters and apple crunching at unpredictable pacing and tempi, they also demonstrated surprising lyricism in their wacky and broad palette, with astral chants made up of oscillator glissandi in three-voice counterpoint.
Classic Fluxus works were also shown, such as Annea Lockwood's Spirit Catchers from 1974, in which four amplified reciters (including Sarah Washington and Knut Aufermann) quietly and simultaneously regaled us with the story of an object that is dear to them. In this very polyglotal version (German, French, English and Luxembourgish), the counterpoint of moods was particularly poignant, as a silly story of a doll intermingled with the sorrowful break-up with a friend and a sober yet deeply moving story about learning to read.
Also refreshing was Sunday's programming, apt for all but dedicated to families and sharing with children the taste for everything that music can be. Various short and interactive events were offered throughout the afternoon with an underlined laxness in concert etiquette. The screening of old 8 mm, often educational, film shorts from the mid twentieth century was inventively accompanied by solo performers Ulric Berg (sax), Angharad Davies (violin), Tim Parkinson (synth) and Frin Wolter (accordion). The original audio track of these films being absent, each performer got to create their own scores, creating new associations between sound and image.
The final concert was by none other than superstar Laurie Anderson, whose latest show, Let X = X, is more than anything a nostalgic retrospective tailored for Gen Xers, where she revisits her life and hits with her tired band Sexmob. Weirdly enough, she brings up global collapse an alarming number of times, but with a blasé attitude that feels deeply complacent to anyone from a younger generation. Although it was a thrill to see a legend live, one could unfortunately tell that this was just another show on her tour.
It is rare to find a theme that composers truly engage with, which is why as a theme for this year's Rainy Days, memory was such a strong binding agent. Memory fascinates us intrinsically, both as humans and as artists of ephemeral matter, as it allows us to make connections with the music of the past and present and ultimately makes us aware of the cognitive faculties that allow us to emote through sound. The feeling of contentment after such a festival arose thus not only from captivating works and performances, but from a tight-knit curation that made us ponder and remember.
