This is the first of the Unknown Public series I've covered so far that didn't come in a brown box, but as a hardback booklet instead.
The theme this time is music for dance. Not necessarily music that's going to get you out of your chair and shaking your thing. In fact, not really that at all. But music that has been commissioned for, or used by, contemporary dance groups. I know it's my failing, but I've never been a big dance fan, though D was and is, and I went to several performances with her (I particularly liked Drop Dead Gorgeous by Vincent Dance Theatre).
Anyway, you just get the music here, no dancing — though if you turn the book upside down and flick through the pages, the photographs form an animated sequence.
I like several of the pieces, but the sad thing is that the ones I like are almost all the ones by artists, composers and performers I already liked — Gavin Bryars, Jocelyn Pook, Michael Nyman, Martin Simpson and the Penguin Cafe Orchestra — which means not many new discoveries. The Bryars track is particularly beautiful. I don't know what it is about the Penguin Cafe Orchestra's Numbers 1-4: it wasn't one of my favourites of theirs 20 years ago, but nowadays I can't get through the first 90 seconds without being overwhelmed and usually breaking into tears.
Of the performers that are new to me, David O'Higgin's electric jazz is probably my favourite, though he admits it's a bit of cheat since he didn't actually write it for a dance company and "so far no dancing has been attempted to it"
Comments