This issue of Unknown Public comes with a fold-out poster headed by the questions, "Must contemporary music always be 'spiky' or 'alienating'? Can new music evoke more pleasurable sensations without descending to banality? Can abstraction be sexy?"
This is followed by a series of vox-pop answers. Many of them are variations on "Yes". Yes to which question? The first, second or third? There are some more specific responses as well, like "The spiky [sic] Boulez intellectual school have convinced the public that they are contemporary music — why? Pärt and Tavener are also contemporary". And "Come, come, what's more sexy than Feldman? When did you last listen to Paragraph 7 of Cardew's Great Learning?" And "How can the cutting edge feel comfortable?"
In the manifesto for this compilation, then, editor John L Walters writes of "our desire for sensual richness, which can be met by gorgeous timbres, visceral rhythms, or the way players simply breathe life into music through the physical act of performance."
So it's sad that the fourteen pieces on the album fail to touch or move me in any significant way. Sensuality can be funny like that.
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