Gabriela Montero @ City Halls, Glasgow

The theme for Gabriela Montero's improvisational encore was not promising: an audience member suggested It Ain't Necessarily So from Porgy and Bess, only managing to sing a single line. Yet, after picking out the line on the piano, Montero launched into an improvisation that ignored the song's jazz influences (for the most part), and toured around the pianist's knowledge of classical, romantic and rag-time motifs.

Improvisation is more readily associated with jazz - Adorno, one of those Cultural Marxists who have ruined everything moaned that it gave the illusion of change without ever departing from the theme. It's a political reading (jazz is like a false consciousness, pretending to be radical but relying heavily on existing structures). Montero's deliberate inclusion of improvisation in the concert hall answers his rather disappointing complaint.

This improvisation was a handy spot of musical history - at least for a character like me, who has a relatively shonky grasp of the history of western orchestral music. Kicking off with something that sounded like Bach - ordered, trilling, serious and maybe a little too pleased with itself, Montero soon drifted into more expansive, lyrical and romantic territory. Yet, as Adorno says, she never lost the theme... and that is the point. Putting Gershwin through his paces, pointing out how recognisable moods and atmospheres define the style, Montero both reveals her skills and points out how music is determined by its references to other music.

That last phrase might not be clear - that it, I call a piece 'classical'

or 'romantic' because I recognise it in relation to other romantic pieces. 

Then she went rag-time on it. Syncopated beats, I believe. 

Most of the audience had fun recognising It's Ain't... re-emerging from her runs. I went into the fantasy land of semiotics and thought about how clever I am. That wasn't Montero's fault, but I am learning about this music stuff. 

South Atlantic Crossings with Gabriela Montero (piano)

When she's not winning a Grammy for Best Latin Album, Gabriela Montero likes to knock back by improvising. Of course, this causes great problems for me, since I define 'classical music' by its adherence to the scored performance, and only recognise improvisation when it turns up in dance or jazz. So, thanks once again to The Scottish Ensemble who, when they aren't doing life drawing classes or linking up a selection of contemporary compositions into a coherent suite, have bought her over to the UK for a series of gigs - The South Atlantic Crossings.

It's not like she can't do the mainstays of classical piano: she won a bronze at the Chopin Competition in 1995, and has recorded an album full of Bach (and beyond...). The Scottish Ensemble have got her on board for a programme that includes the Big B, and a selection from Piazzolla, the Argentinian composer who wasn't scared of dropping in a funky tango. 

She's a good match for the Ensemble: far from playing to the stereotype of chamber music, they like to find work that is upbeat and modern (or downbeat and modern), alongside Bach and other favourites from the canon. In classical terms, they combine a commercial sensibility - hence Mozart's Piano Concerto, which can draw a crowd - with an enthusiasm for less familiar numbers (Golijov, perhaps?).

CLOSE UP Dramaturgy: editta braun company

The virtuoso concert pianist AyseDeniz performs hers and Thierry Zaboitzeffs compositions at the grand piano in in her peculiar, idiosyncratic way, inspired by Chopin and Rachmaninoff. 

Four dancers - bodies in concert - enter the stage, creating a physical dialogue with AyseDeniz's performance, thus embodying and externalising the interior sounds and texture of the music. 

Lemur-like creatures, distorted, constricted and oppressed, invade the concert pianist’s perfectly harmonic world. As if even the artificially encapsulated high culture, where the pursuit of perfection often doesn’t leave any room for doubts, could not escape from human thoughts and every day’s worries. 

Nightmarish realities and fears, but also a foreshadow of the desire for free moving appear as incarnated thoughts and feelings. 

Fantastical lemur-like creatures - distorted, constricted and oppressed - invade the concert pianist’s perfect harmonic world, so that even the artificially encapsulated world of high culture, where the pursuit of perfection doesn’t leave any room for doubts, cannot escape from the tension of everyday cares and worries. Nightmarish realities and fears, but also a shadow of the desire for freedom, appear as incarnated thoughts and feelings. 

The five dancers’ moving bodies - sometimes individually, sometimes in pairs, sometimes a seemingly inextricable agglomeration of extremities - constitute and articulate the physicality and motivations of strange, otherworldly creatures. Are they the pianist’s alter egos or dark suppressed aspects of her soul? While she is playing, these beings become her fellow antagonists and collaborators. They are suffused by the dense, mighty live music and then are driven or tortured, hunted or released, by the sounds around them. They resist – and they react. 

What was the inspiration for this performance?
Very simple: I heard the pianist in the frame of a music-festival in Portugal and had images of a dance-piece happing around a grand piano, representing somehow the inner world of the pianist. Creatures enter her bubble, her closed world of classical music and cause some disorder ...

How did you go about gathering the team for it?
I work with the composer Thierry Zaboitzeff and the dancers since many years - so I had just to convince AyseDeniz. And she was curious enough to dare the adventure.

How did you become interested in making performance?
I guess, something pushes me since I can stand on my legs, means, since my childhood.

Was your process typical of the way that you make a performance?
Yes. I always work with improvisation as starting point. But for CLOSE UP we had a special magic experience: After three days only we did an improvisation of 45 minutes, guided by me from outside, and not only the dancers improvised, but also AyseDeniz on themes of Thierry Zaboitzeff. This is very rare for a classical pianist.

What do you hope that the audience will experience?
To get connected with own feelings, own memories, own phantasies, own ideas - triggered by our performance.

Are there any other questions that might help me to understand the meaning of dramaturgy for you in your work?
Just let yourself go 

Stephen Fry: Don't Buy his Books Ever

Young writers are often encouraged to 'find their own voice.' However, if you are Stephen Fry, time would be better spent finding someone else's voice. In his Incomplete and Utter History of Classical Music, Fry manages to perfect his persona. He captures the experience of being caught at a dinner party with a bore.

Fry's refusal to give any information without adding an anecdote that is designed to prove his superior wit. In the early chapters, he flirts with racism (Chinese names, eh? Hilarious), before proving that old myth about Wagner enthusiasts being boring (Wagner gets pages and pages, reflecting the maestro's long, tedious passages). JS Bach gets less of a mention than Julie Andrews, and while it is unfair to expect a light entertainment read to be comprehensive, Fry - or possible his co-author Tim Lihoreau - could have made an effort to include some information.

When authors moan about the death of print, they usually blame the internet. I blame Stephen Fry: publishing something this bad, lazy and conceited is an argument against cutting down trees for paper. In short, Fry's prose style is a perfect match for the expression on his fucking smug face. Ask him the time, and he'll meander around a pun on clock until you miss your train.

What's all this about Goldberg, anyway?

The Adventures of Prince Achmed

@garethkvile @rgarciafons @GCHalls thanks: it affirmed my belief that #film and #music are always at their best shared and live
— Svend Brown (@svendbr) March 1, 2015

 Svend Brown is a Vile Arts' favourite. Not only does he programme contemporary classical music that demonstrates a

sensitivity both to its populist potential and intellectual intensity, he engages with the idea of the concert as a performance. His comment on The Adventures of Prince Achmed not only correctly assesses the success of Renaud Garcia-Fons' live soundtrack to this early animation, it reveals his underlying aesthetic, which challenges simplistic ideas about what consist of 'performance'.

The Adventures of Prince Achmed is the oldest surviving animated feature film (it is just over an hour) and is a 1926 retelling of a tale from the Arabian Nights - with the story of Aladdin thrown in for good measure. While some of the representations of oriental people could be criticised for racism, the animation style, based on shadow puppetry, holds up against contemporary techniques. The story relies on the panels to explore character rather than explanatory text - except in one sequence when director Lotte Reiniger reveals a sophisticated understanding of controlling dramatic tension - and is charming and melodramatic in equal measure.

Achmed's use of the frame will be revisited in this blog - the way that it adapts shadow puppetry and self-consciously shifts perspectives throughout is fascinating and surprisingly advanced for a 1920s' production - but Garcia Fons deserves kudos for his score. 

Most musical adaptations of silent cinema are either perfunctory (Glass' effort for Dracula is a lazy disappointment) or founded in the egotism of the musicians (55Daysof Static ruined Silent Running by bursting out into expansive post-rock every time the camera observed outer-space). Garcia Fons' ensemble, with a mixture of western and eastern instrumentation (the tabla rocked the show),

was delicate and subtle, never merely illustrating the scenes but, equally, refusing to overshadow the animation. A fluid, measure composition, it added romance and humour to a film already full of beauty and inspired images.

The 'liveness' of film is a tough idea, but Brown is saying something about the film as a performance - the way that it brings together an audience, making a community. The live music adds to the theatricality, and the sense of event... and the music itself is deepened by the visuals (a trick used effectively by Godspeed You Black Emperor). Cheers, Sven. 

The Blue Planet

The Piano in Glasgow

Being a theatre writer, I proudly march into other areas of performance and shout that I understand exactly what is happening here. However, that review I did of Beethoven's First when I spent 500 words complaining that some guy got in the way of the orchestra and kept waving a stick at them might have destroyed my musicological credibility. Consequently, I now try and sit next to David Kettle and copy his notes at the interval. 

Anyway, if you want to see me make a fool of myself, the City Halls are putting on their annual Piano festival (it's year four and counting). I'll be somewhere at the back, hoping that there isn't too much of the difficult stuff... then I look at the programme and realise I might be okay...

Saturday 8 November


6PM ALASDAIR BEATSON & HEBRIDES ENSEMBLE
Judith Weir Arise! Arise!

Adès Piano Quintet
Schubert Notturno in E flat major, Op.148 (D.897)
Adès Darkness Visible

“Artistry incarnate – that was Beatson” Sunday Times
An outstanding pianist himself, Tom Adès writes wonderfully for the piano and his Piano Quintet is fantastical and brilliant. Not short on references to the grand Romantic tradition of piano quintets – Schubert, Brahms, Dvorák – it bristles with new ideas and possibilities. The wonderful young Scottish pianist Alasdair Beatson joins Hebrides Ensemble for this special performance.

Well, I am sure to spot the references.

Recital Room, City Halls (unreserved seating)
7.30PM DENIS KOZHUKHIN
Haydn Sonata in D, Hob.XVI:24
Schubert Sonata in D major, D.850
Mussorgsky Pictures at an Exhibition

“flawless technique, combined with a healthy musical approach, intense lyricism and a beautiful touch.” Trouw (The Netherlands)

Denis Kozhukhin is no stranger to Glasgow having thrilled audiences with his stunning performances of Prokofiev and Rachmaninov concertos in recent seasons. We’re delighted to present his debut recital of Classical and Romantic favourites, with Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition delivering a mighty climax:

“… in Kozhukhin’s hand it rose to the final peroration with magnificent, unforced grandeur.” Daily Telegraph

I thought I would be okay with Haydn and Mussorgsky (they use Pictures to introduce classical music to the kids, sometimes). But I have no idea what a peroration is. David?

Grand Hall, City Halls (reserved seating)


SUNDAY 9 NOVEMBER

3PM KATYA APEKISHEVA

Scarlatti Sonatas in F minor Kk.466, E Kk.380 and B minor Kk.377

Janácek In the Mists

Schumann Faschingsschwank aus Wien, Op.26

“a profoundly gifted artist” Gramophone

A prizewinner at the Scottish International Piano Competition, Apekisheva has forged a multi-faceted career as soloist and chamber musician. This solo recital juxtaposes the brilliance and poise of Scarlatti with Janácek’s passionate miniatures and Schumann’s Viennese Carnival scenes.

Recital Room, City Halls (unreserved seating)





5PM ELISABETH LEONSKAJA & EMERSON STRING QUARTET

Shostakovich Piano Sonata No.2 in B minor, Op.61

Beethoven Quartet No.11 in F minor, Op.95, ‘Serioso’

Shostakovich Piano Quintet in G minor, Op.57

“The popularity of mercurial Elisabeth Leonskaja… has never been higher, perhaps because she is one of “the last of the great Russian school”” Sean Rafferty, Bach Track

Hang on, is there really a magazine called Bach Track? 

One of the world’s greatest pianists teams up with one of the greatest quartets for an unmissable pairing of Shostakovich and Beethoven. Georgian pianist, Elisabeth Leonskaja was rewarded with a standing ovation in 2012. Here she plays music very close to her heart due to her strong association with Shostakovich and his music, not least his hugely popular Piano Quintet.

I'll be fine here: I like Shostakovich. I can hunt for clues about the pressure of Soviet censorship during the quiet parts... and he is one of those relatively modern composers who can do all the fancy technical stuff, but still likes a good tune. A Russian tune, so pretty tough, but I can dig it.
Grand Hall, City Halls (reserved seating)

This is just the first weekend. I am going to continue you this as soon as I find my Idiot's Guide to Classical Music.

Beethoven Weekend In Glasgow

There are few things that I enjoy more than trying to explain art as if I know what I am talking about. Sadly, I do have an idea of what I am talking about when it comes to theatre (an idea - not necessarily a good one, but I have something). A weekend of Beethoven, however, is a little out of my range. My music collection is okay until about 1500, then takes a few centuries holiday until 1913 and The Rite of Spring got my attention. 

Then again, I have learnt to trust Sven Brown, who is behind this mini-festival. After three years of Minimal at the City Halls, I know he can programme forty eight hours of fun. He has even made it easy for me by kicking off with Beethoven: An Introduction Lecture by John Deathridge (Thu 26 September, 8pm).

Press Release Begins...City Halls, Recital Room
John Deathridge is one of the world’s leading Beethoven experts. To open this first Beethoven festival in Glasgow, he offers an insight and overview of the works we will hear, linking the music with events in Beethoven’s life, and considering its impact on Beethoven’s contemporaries.

Vile adds...

Plus, this one is free... and is followed by another chat and play session the next day. Brown's structure provides me not just with tunes to hum but ideas to pilfer for my blog.

Press Release Resumes...
Getting to the Heart of the ‘Harp’ QuartetFri 27 September, 6:15pm
Free to ticket holders of the 7:30pm concert
City Halls, Grand Hall
Spend 45 minutes with the Elias Quartet taking a close-up look at Beethoven’s 10th Quartet (Op.74), and discovering it from the inside – from the point of view of the performers.

The Tempest and The HarpFri 27 September, 7:30pm
£15
City Halls, Grand Hall
Each of the concerts this weekend focuses on a different period of Beethoven’s life: early, middle and late. The music here all comes from the 1800s when Beethoven was in his 30s and the period when he moved centre stage in Vienna.

Getting to the Heart of the ‘Waldstein’Sat 28 September, 6:15pm
Free to ticket holders of the 7:30pm concert
City Halls, Grand Hall
Svend Brown joins Llyr Williams at the piano to look in depth at this fiery, radical piece of music and consider its place in the total cycle of Beethoven’s piano sonatas.

Waldstein and RasumovskySat 28 September, 7:30pm
£15
City Halls, Grand Hall
Here Beethoven challenges everything that meant ‘music’ in his own time. Performers, instruments and listeners are pushed to extremes in exhilarating, demanding music that leaves you breathless and transported. Arguably more powerful and extraordinary than his symphonies.

Getting to the Heart of Op.132Sun 29 September, 2pm
Free to ticket holders of the 3.15pm and 4.30pm concerts
City Halls, Grand Hall
T.S. Eliot called Op.132 ‘inexhaustible to study’ and envied Beethoven’s achievement in this piece. The Elias Quartet consider the piece’s emotional and technical complexities ahead of the afternoon’s final concert. 

Vile pipes up...

TS Eliot has got a cheek calling anything 'inexhaustible to study.' He had to give The Wasteland footnotes himself, thereby ruining the fun of certain A Level Students in the 1990s who wanted to pretend they got all his references. For anyone confused by the nomenclature of classical music, it's a string quartet. I looked it up on wikipedia. 

Hang on, I can go to YouTube.

Press Release Resumes...

Beethoven’s Distant BelovedSun 29 September, 3:15pm
£15
City Halls, Recital Room
Beethoven’s lyrical song-cycle An die ferne Geliebte is a miniature delight – the first proper song-cycle of the 19th century, paving the way for Schubert and Schumann, among others. Stephan Loges places it amidst songs by Beethoven’s contemporaries and admirers, including Schubert.

Beethoven: Closing ConcertSun 29 September, 4:30pm
£15
City Halls, Grand Hall
Bringing works from three decades together, this programme opens with Beethoven turning 30 and ends with one of the very greatest ‘Late’ Quartets, dating from 1825. A tumultuous and enrapturing finale.

Vile concludes...

With the range of compositions being played, it is interest to notice how Beethoven's music was influenced by his life circumstances. It's funny how he stops using high notes in his mid-career but seems to bring them back towards the end, an intriguing fact I noticed the last time I perused a selection of his scores.

Eno gets Brewed

Shock Upset at City Halls as Local Boys Take Down Magisterial Soundscape artist


Music at the Brew House 4: Icebreaker 3

Brian Eno, long established as the defining artists for both ambient and electronic music, has lost out to Edinburgh's contemporary classical underdogs Stephen Deazley and Martin Parker. This long-awaited clash, pairing Edinburgh's Music at the Brewhouse against Icebreaker's recreation of Eno's Apollo, ended in upset as Deazley's collaboration with media designer  Andy McGregor emphasised an idiosyncratic story of one man's bravery over The Science Museum's 2009 commission featuring Eno's music and NASA's footage of the moon landing.

On paper, it was no contest. Eno's 1983 album Apollo, Atmospheres and Soundtracks had been scored for Icebreaker, known for their driving soundtrack to Ashley Page's seminal ballet, Cheating, Lying, Stealing. The addition of BJ Cole upfront on pedal steel, and the unseen images from Apollo's mission to the moon, seemed to ensure that Brewhouse, more frequently seen at Tramway creating multi-media musical happenings and relying only on a film of the barely known test pilot Joseph Kittinger, would provide little more than a distraction.

Brewhouse chose to bat first, offering a taut introduction. Guided by Kittinger's journey into the outer reaches of the stratosphere, and his descent, Man High made optimum use of the chamber line up: Peter Furness' clarinets summoning up the woozy splendour of the ascent, while the three violins held steady, lending a romantic swoon to the adventure. Driven by Joby Burgess' diverse percussion and David Knotts' pulsating keyboards, Brewhouse illustrated McGregor's mixing of the 1960 footage of the pilot's 32  kilometer leap.

In the second half, Icebreaker began with a solid summary of the space race's intentions. Footage of Kennedy giving it patriotic pride and the tension at Cape Canaveral soon resolved into iconic imagery of the Apollo spacecraft reaching to the moon. Because of the emphasis on new footage - no countdown to blast-off or amusing zero gravity snacking - the familiarity of the journey does not detract from the spectacular surrealism of the moon landing. By the time the astronauts finally reach the moon, Icebreaker have established both the bravery of the mission and the splendour of our species' trans-planetary ambition.

For all Brewhouse's dynamic drama, the relaxed majesty of Eno and Icebreaker looked set to triumph. Then, sometime between the landing and the larking about on the moon, Icebreaker lost the game. Cole's pedal steel adds an awkward sentimentality to the sequences after the US flag has been planted. The new footage is given the intensity of holiday film, a schmaltzy, thoughtless celebration of a couple of guys arsing about in outer space. Eno is not just an avant-garde electronic experimentalist: he is the producer of U2, and this is audible in the later half of For All Mankind. Ironically, the astronauts are brought back to earth by his sterile theft of Hawaiian and country motifs.

Of course, the real winner tonight was contemporary classical music: Deazley and Parker established themselves as accessible, forceful composers, and even Icebreaker's disappointing result linked ambient electronica to lush orchestration. A show of two halves, perhaps... but both halves demonstrated how music can reanimate obscure heroes of history and events that familiarity has rendered empty.

On Balance, I am Glad I went Out

I hate being out of my depth. It is pretty clear that I am this evening, even if I am in The Arches. It's the Hebrides Ensemble, one of Scotland's top contemporary classical companies. I am about to start wishing that I had stuck to Lady Gaga.

Play it safe, Vile. The musicianship is obviously superb. Alexander Janiczek, the violinist, is in international demand. And the soprano who is duelling it out with him, Elizabeth Watts won the Rosenblatt Recital Song Prize in 2009. They are tussling with Kafka Fragmente, composed by Kurtag. You see, sometimes facts are useful.

I can't start claiming objectivity when it suits me. I don't really know what the Rosenblatt is. I wandered in here, full of confidence. I've managed some Reich, some Glass. I even wrote about the Kronos Quartet. This little Performance Critic has gone one art form too far.

The Fragmente read like a teenage emo diary, but Kurtag's duet for violin and voice brings them to disturbing life. I am getting that cold existential vibe, familiar from Live Art, that peels away the façade of safety and reveals that life is, actually, Hell. Is it really a duet? Sometimes the violin and the soprano are fighting. Then the instrument provides gentle support, almost like a loop.

It's a labyrinth here. I try to retrace my steps.

The first half was charming: artistic director William Conway strolled on and chatted genially about the pieces. He did warn us that the Kurtag was hardcore, but he illustrated the upcoming Sonata with a quick blast on the cello, and seduced us with a version of Schumann's Auf einer Burg. As he said, you could practically see the Knight asleep in his tower. It was elegant.Even Janacek's Kreutzer Sonata was enticing, leaving out the savage murder in the final bars. I was safe. This was entertaining, a bit classier than the previous night - when I watched the Adult Channel Freeviews and tried to ignore my citalapram cravings.

Now I feel like Kurtag has sound-tracked my anguish. There are forty-odd fragments, each one veering in mood, but returning to a desolate howling. Watts ranges from shrieking to elegant phrasing: sometimes the darkness hurts, sometimes it soothes.

When I came back after the interval, they had set up a large wall. Behind this, the singer and violinist paced. One would emerge, then the other. Dramatic lighting, shadows cast, the music - the violin seemed to become two, three instruments, setting up drones, cracking open melodies, rattling, singing, poking, slicing. The voice sparred, jabbed, feinted. Kafka's words, more opaque than usual, were all the more doomy for being in German.

I'd heard a few snatches on the Radio Hour: I was not prepared for this. Dark and deadly, vicious and seeking, the subtle performance touches prevented a descent into melodrama. I am embraced and provoked, swept away and looking out to see if I can find a recognisable reference before...

Finally... Kronos Quartet

Last week, Cambridge Union promoted a square go  between Kissy Sell Out and Stephen Fry, over whether classical music is irrelevant to today’s youth. In Glasgow, where art happens instead of being debated, The Kronos Quartet played in The City Halls and provided an answer. For students pondering where to spend that nine grand on an impractical degree, Glasgow proved that it has music worth going to see while you piss your future credit rating up a wall. Cambridge offers examples of how badly England deals with the idea of the public intellectual, pitting the one man twitter machine against an artist who thinks that playing Altogether Now by the Farm and having a slot on Radio 1 makes him a figurehead of da yout.

Unlike Fry and Out, Kronos aren’t spending their time on facile arguments. They cover Sigur Ros string quartet style, get works from Reich and Riley commissioned for them about Big Political Issues, invite Inuit throat singers and electronic experimentalists onto their stage, and rock the sound system as hard as four guys on violins, viola and cello can. They even get up and start whanging on a specially amplified set of barbed wire fences. Radio 1’s obsession with New Music translates as four guys with guitars rehashing pop rock tropes, or a couple of teenagers in their skidders, talking about empowerment. Kronos find new instruments and fly around the round, seeking collaborations. While I am sure that Kissy Sell Out managed to define the meaning of “relevance” during his speech, Kronos have settled on the more traditional notions of “interesting”, “challenging” and “exciting”.

Across the weekend, The Kronos Quartet gave the Scottish premiere of Reich’s WTC, added Tanya Tagaq as a fifth member – her panting, growling voice an earthy counter-point to the quartet’s discipline – teamed up with Alim Qasimov Ensemble for a chamber murgham mash up that sought a compromise between the Azerbaijan group’s improvisation and the west’s carefully notated scores, and scrabbled through jazz cut-up maverick John Zorn’s Dead Man suite. They had time to premiere David Kirkland Gamer’s Lament for the Imagined, a melancholic meditation on the Scottish Diaspora, and make a new friend in Scottish harpist Catriona Mackay, before revisiting their collaboration with long term associate Wu Man on a new piece from 1960s minimalist legend Terry Riley. Apart from the strings, they played percussion, squeaky toys and plugged into a sampler for a John Oswald encore. Oswald invented the mash up back in the 1980s, through a series of disorientating and boldly political remixes.

Yes, but is it relevant? Can young people dig it? Never mind those family events, or the teenagers at opening concert – what does it say to the youth? What sort of message are they giving?

Even if they are a bunch of old white men playing in an established tradition, Kronos’ eclecticism would impress the most exaggerated stereotype of a diversity officer. Equally, their willingness to unearth any manner of music – Tagaq sounds as if she spends her weekends eating raw flesh and the crossover with the Scottish Youth choir makes human voice and cello sound like a techno hymn – mirrors the sort of selection that would appear on the i-pod of a teenager with unlimited access to the world’s music, like there used to be before the record companies started sending mentally ill old women to prison for downloading. Sure, classical music is irrelevant. Just read what Kissy Sell Out has to say in the Independent’s tabloid version. After all, Radio 1 has always been hip, and never more so than when its DJs exercise their formidable intellects in a newspaper that is so pleased with its new format it has forgotten that it needs to have engaging articles.

As part of The Kronos Quartet’s weekend in Glasgow, a late night Saturday bill hands the stage to Tagaq and another set of collaborators, Baltimore’s electronic mischief makers Matmos.Having already teamed up with The Kronos Quartet for Tundra Songs, and showcased her incredible vocal range and style – imagine Bjork with a larger range of octaves and a penchant for rhythmic growling, Tagaq comes on stage accompanied by a violinist and a drummer. A short talk about her inspiration – her throat singing is an Inuit technique, and needs a little explanation  before she lets rip – and the trio dive into what appears to be an improvisation. Tagaq obviously leads the musicians, as her snarls, yelps and grunts determine the mood and pace: the piece shifts from erotic intensity to calming interludes, through aggressive tribalism and ecstatic crooning. It’s too easy to reduce her to an exotic curiosity, when both her stage presence – her movements border on contemporary dance – and commitment to deep emotion make her the embodiment of what rock’n’roll pretends to be: sensual, feral, alien and disturbing, while utterly gripping.

 If Matmos' recent albums have seen them move into glitch-based keyboards, and away from their outrageous sampling tapestries, their live show is a mixture of the wildly experimental – a sinister improvisation based on tests for telepathy – to the more danceable and joyous. Joined by a guitarist, the duo balance minimalist repetition with an earthy bass that manages to be both abstract and groovy. While the absence of the classical forum makes this an unlikely pairing rather than an integrated show, the combination of Matmos and Tagaq ensured that, outside of the Cry Parrot celebration across the town, there was no more experimental and engaging music on show in Glasgow.

Sell Out? Kiss off!

I am young enough to be excited by new music, but old enough to be irritated by stupidity. This week, I am in a massive temper about an article by Kissy Sell Out in that tabloid version of the Independent – you know, that one that has articles about itself as “the best loved tabloid broadsheet”, sells for 20p and has bad haikus instead of news.

I am pretty naive about popular music – last week, My Producer Harry shouted at me for playing The Swedish House Mafia on our radio show, since they have been hyped by Radio 1 – but Kissy Sell Out might become my nemesis. I had better listen to his show sometime. Although he has debated at the Cambridge Union – against Stephen Fry, whose tweets about having a shit having been mistaken for some kind of contemporary philosophy – I doubt Kissy is best represented by his article in the paper. He is trying to make some point about classical music having had its day. Apparently, because he noticed that The Farm – a dodgy Liverpudlian boys band that somehow got tangled in the arse hair of the Madchester scene – used a melody from Pachelbel, classical music is exposed as elitist. He goes on to say that the act of “writing music down” isn’t as vibrant as recording it. Because classical music is notated, it isn’t as good as Kissy’s radio show.

I’ll be talking about Kissy’s Cambridge debate in another article – coming soon, and it might actually mention The Kronos Quartet, who are the putative subject of this week’s gay ramble. In the meantime, I’ll just rant about a few of Kissy’s Big Ideas. One is that classical music is elitist, while youth culture is all about inclusion.  Another is his belief that recorded sound is more authentic than the music made from a score. He doesn’t consider live performance at all. Being the sort of person who thinks the name Kissy Sell Out is cool, his grasp of language is pretty weak, too. For the record, I was born Vile, and when my sentences get out of control, I haven’t taken my medication.

My Producer Harry and I are trying to resolve our playlist struggles on the Vile Arts Radio Hour. I want to cover gigs that are happening around Glasgow, but this has left our selections uneven. And it doesn’t help that I play stuff without always listening to it first. Into this combustible mixture comes Perfecting Sound Forever, a history of recording that Harry has been reading, and I stole from him while he was trying to fix the sound on an interview I messed up. Although this is a very practical conversation – we are trying to develop a radio show that our listeners might enjoy – it quickly gets into me showing off about having read Plato once, and blood being spilt over the exact relationship between musical fashion and technological advance.

Two interesting points did emerge, right into Kissy’s theses. One is that recorded sound is frequently fraudulent, imitating the sound of a band but made by musicians playing at separate times, and multi-tracked beyond any chance of live replication, and that various sound tests, right back to Edison’s day, were about as scientifically valid as homeopathy.  The other is that any musical choice we make – say, including tonnes of stuff that is connected to Winning Sperm Party or Cry Parrot, or my insistence on working a regular dubstep track into the Hour – has to involve consideration of what audience we are including or excluding. The irony is that one of the show’s foundations is inclusion, that opera and classical bump alongside electronica and new Glasgow bands like the wonderful Holy Mountain. The show is all about widening the remit, crossing over into new scenes, and making connections. It’s why I play doom cabaret songs about book burning by the Creative Martyrs over Steve Reich’s Different Trains or the dialect poetry of Martin O’Connor over MC Lars. That, and I am unsteady on the cross-fader.

But as someone who supports eclecticism and diversity, I can’t buy Kissy’s idea that youth cultures have always been about inclusion – or, as he suggests “music scenes that transcend social boundaries should surely be of the utmost importance in youth culture”.  Optimistically citing jazz halls as the foundations of ant-racism in the 1920s and the importance of Live Aid, music has, for Kissy, “quite literally changed the world”.

If you are a social worker, then yes, transcending social boundaries is important. If, on the other hand, you actually belong to a youth culture, those who are excluded are as important as those included. Once upon a time, before the music business became a career choice, rock’n’roll was about pissing off parents, rebelling. Mods and Rockers didn’t ruck down Brighton beach to transcend social boundaries. And NWA didn’t bang on about being gangsters to develop a community. Ideas like cool and exclusivity have high value in music. And the rave culture Kissy praises was not all about high-minded social mobility. It was about taking shitloads of drugs until you thought everyone was cool, except for the police who kicked the shit out of us when we protested for our “right to party”.

Kissy praises the web-culture that has made music accessible – and has encouraged the sort of eclecticism we can agree to love. But he has that annoying ahistoricity of the Sunshine Generation  - of the sort that doesn’t understand why Pearl Jam weren’t as good as Nirvana for anyone actually around during The Grunge Years  -  with a Wikipedia entry in place of research, and optimistic platitude in place of considered opinion.  He ignores what he cannot accommodate – that youth culture is fierce and exclusive – and aims to transcend boundaries by making fatuous divisions between elitist classical and popular chart tunes. Yet Kissy celebrates those acts who have used classical music as a motif. Sadly, he includes Malcolm Maclaren’s Fans, which misappropriated both opera and hip-hop. It’s a shame he doesn’t include the follow up, which tried to match funk and waltz, despite their different time signatures, and lyrics about women’s tits. His argument against classical music seems to be based on identifying its influences on pop.

As for his emphasis on the “visceral power of a sound recording”... I just give up. I honestly don’t understand what he is talking about. He appears to be saying that listening to a recording is better than reading the notes on a page. Kissy’s argument is a bit like saying that looking at dirty Polaroid of an ex isn’t as intimate as having sex with your girlfriend, so feminism is a bad thing. It takes something obvious and spuriously links it to another idea.

Harry and I have at least read a book about this, and I’ll pretend I know what compression means. We are a bit suspicious about the hegemony of recorded sound, and I am trying to connect this to my various conspiracy theories about late consumerism and the removal of choice. In short, the recording is an artefact, ready for sale and consumption. I don’t like art being reduced to a commodity, especially when the commodification is hidden. Before I get as tangled in language as he does, I’ll conclude that Kissy’s advocacy of recorded sound is a typical example of how late capitalism uses the rhetoric of romanticism to sell us crap. That’ll be why he is on Radio 1 and in the national papers, and I write a blog. He’s a shill for corporate interests. And in an act of anti-consumerist fervour, I am going to listen to Radio 3.