1985 was a good year all round, and the summer was especially good for music. I'm not talking about Live Aid. I'm thinking of WOMAD at Mersea Island, and of two series of concerts in London. One was at Bloomsbury Theatre and included my first Roedelius and Michael Nyman. The other was the series on the Southbank Centre curated by Harrison Birtwistle, that first introduced me to Varèse and others…
… including Electric Phoenix, whom I saw either in the Queen Elizabeth Hall or in the Purcell Room, and enjoyed enough to buy this record in the foyer. The Cage piece, which is a chance-derived set of variations/deconstructions of two 18th century hymns by Billings, is, like most of Cage not the kind of thing that draws you and hooks you. He did, after all, set out to write music that was 'unhummable'. Over the decades I've dipped into different bits of Cage, more or less randomly, and recently I've been enjoying some of his 'whale songs' from emusic, which are a little like these stretched-beyond-breaking-point choral works. Now I have more patience for them, but when I was 20, I didn't get it.
The Berio piece, A-Ronne, however, was what they performed that night, and it's a tour de force, contemporary classical music at its very best. By turns playful and profound, always dramatic, and stretching the vocabulary of music while retaining many distinctly musical pleasures. It's very difficult to describe quite what it sounds like. I guess I should have said that there are no instruments at all on this record, just voices. But voices of every shape, size, volume and intonation. Sometimes it's a bit like Rowan Atkinson interrupting the drunken revelry of the Knights who say Ni (can anyone fail to love Wikipedia for the endless array of things it has entries about?). At other times it's like a Genet play as the voices act out roles from the bedroom, the confessional, the army square, and the fascist rally. The word are taken from a poem by Edoardo Sanguineti, which is itself a mash-up text, with a postmodern, Peter-Greenaway-esque obsession with classification and its discontents. I quote from the sleeve notes:
A and Ronne were the first and last characters of the ancient Italian alphabet — the three signs ette, conne, ronne coming after the final letter zeta. The title A-Ronne is there the ancient Italian equivalent of A-Z.
The poem is constructed from quotations in several European languages, including the opening words of the Communist Manifesto, the beginning of the Gospel According to St John (in Latin, Greek and German), a verse by T.S. Eliot, words from an essay by Barthes on Bataille [natch], and lines from Dante's Divine Comedy. But the text is of no semantic importance to Berio's setting, since the meaning of the words is never purposely associated with the perceived ('theatrical') situation. Sanguineti's poem is repeated about twenty times — almost always from beginning to end. It explores three themes — beginning, middle and end — and this is reflected in the form of Berio's composition. The piece concludes with a Coda (which has its own palindromic form) — full of recall, yet at the same time strangely frozen in its own identity.
It was a lot of fun on stage, and it's still great on record. Excerpts from it, along with those from John Arlott and William Burroughs, appeared on the mix-tape I did for Jeremy the following summer.
The members of Electric Phoenix include Linda Hirst, who will crop up again on a quite different record from the 1980s.
| Buy via Discogs | Discogs entry for this album |
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