Picture of José Dias: https://www0.sun.ac.za/music/jose-dias/; background: https://woordfees.co.za/
José Dias talks to Naomi Meyer about Paranoid Android at Toyota Stellenbosch Woordfees 2024, an event described on the Woordfees programme as follows: “An eclectic sextet surprises with a concert of 20th century music. On the programme are compositions by, among others, Arnold Schoenberg, Guillaume Connesson, Frank Martin, Terry Riley and Radiohead, arranged by Matthijs van Dijk.”
José, I attended the Paranoid Android event the other night at Woordfees. Please tell those of our readers who could not attend the event, about the programme: why did you choose to share these specific pieces with the audience? Would you kindly tell me something about the different pieces of music you played – and the different composers?
The original idea for this programme came from our flautist, Gabriele von Dürckheim, who (like all of us, in fact) has always dreamed of performing Arnold Schoenberg’s “Pierrot lunaire”. It is such an iconic, but also notoriously complex, work that opportunities to programme and perform it are rare. It requires an outstanding vocalist who is also instrumentally minded, as they must navigate the really intricate rhythms and patterns of the score. And then a group of five instrumentalists who can take up the really challenging individual parts in a chamber music setting of the most complex kind. I am happy to say that we managed to put together an absolute dream team – the rehearsal and performance process was nothing but a joy.
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And then a group of five instrumentalists who can take up the really challenging individual parts in a chamber music setting of the most complex kind. I am happy to say that we managed to put together an absolute dream team – the rehearsal and performance process was nothing but a joy.
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From that idea of “Pierrot” as the centrepiece of the programme, we tried to select other 20th century works that would somehow complement and follow up on its strangeness, its hallucinatory feel and also its challenge of classical music conventions. So, we added Frank Martin’s “Trio on Irish folk tunes”, which is incredibly accessible in its use of Celtic music, despite being a truly modernist work; Guillaume Connesson’s “Techno parade”, which challenges all three players to create a real techno vibe and feel on classical instruments (shoe brush included!); Terry Riley’s seminal ’60s work “In C”, which broke all rules of its time and set the foundation for minimalist music; and finally a new and wonderfully effective arrangement by Matthijs van Dijk of Radiohead’s brilliant song “Paranoid android”, which came to be the title of our programme of fun, unusual musical madness!
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So, we added Frank Martin’s “Trio on Irish folk tunes”, which is incredibly accessible in its use of Celtic music, despite being a truly modernist work; Guillaume Connesson’s “Techno parade”, which challenges all three players to create a real techno vibe and feel on classical instruments (shoe brush included!); Terry Riley’s seminal ’60s work “In C”, which broke all rules of its time and set the foundation for minimalist music; and finally a new and wonderfully effective arrangement by Matthijs van Dijk of Radiohead’s brilliant song “Paranoid android”, which came to be the title of our programme of fun, unusual musical madness!
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The programme and the items were not familiar and well-known, but certain elements of the way the music was played were universal: there is structure in the music (except one of the items after the interval – please elaborate on this piece and the musical notation?), and somebody is counting, indicating when the rest should play. Talk to me about the technical challenges of the music, and the aspects which classical instrumentalists would recognise or would experience as different.
Yes, all the music in the programme is written out in the traditional way, but, being from the 20th century, it often leaves space for improvisation by the performers. The most strictly notated is the “Trio on Irish tunes”, which is actually very ingeniously mathematical in its conception: it constantly superimposes different Celtic dance rhythms on very melodious tunes, which one would expect should clash but which actually ends up fitting beautifully. The Connesson is also pretty set in the score, but is written so cleverly as to sound like a techno track, and it comes across as if the performers are just “jamming”. The Schoenberg is very strictly and meticulously notated, but the voice part is incredibly free – apart from obeying the rhythms and entry cues, the singer can move in their declamation up and down in pitch, without really ever singing, but just following the score’s suggestion of a melodic outline.
The Terry Riley work “In C” is a really visionary experiment with chance and aleatory elements, giving only parameters for execution and allowing change into every performance. All performers share the same score, which has 53 tiny melodic and rhythmic fragments. There are instructions on how to start and end the piece, and also suggestions on how to execute them, but a lot of choice and initiative is left to the performers – when to move from one fragment to the next, how many times to repeat them, etc. Every performance is absolutely different and unique. You can also perform this work with five players, as we did, or do it with 50 or more, and it can last from a few minutes to some hours! The idea here is that a kind of kaleidoscopic musical texture arises from the combination of those fragments, evolving as the players go through them each in their own way. It is an aural experience; it is music in a truly postmodern sense.
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Every performance is absolutely different and unique. You can also perform this work with five players, as we did, or do it with 50 or more, and it can last from a few minutes to some hours! The idea here is that a kind of kaleidoscopic musical texture arises from the combination of those fragments, evolving as the players go through them each in their own way. It is an aural experience; it is music in a truly postmodern sense.
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“All music notes are created equal,” you said at the beginning of the event. Would you define this as a postmodern way of musical thinking? Is there always a deeper meaning behind the music people hear? Are our brains wired so that music should sound a certain way?
That very “democratic” expression was my silly way of explaining in a nutshell the concept of atonality present in “Pierrot lunaire”. In Western music, millennia of tradition lead to what we still today understand as musical keys and modes, meaning that musical notes are organised according to the sense that within a specific key (say, C major), there is a central note or chord that acts as its basis, and all the others create a musical pull either away from it (tension) or back to it (relaxation). This becomes quite complex to explain here, but it forms the foundation of what Western “ears” understand as harmony – the idea that certain notes and chords have particular functions and feeling within a key. The 19th century, for Western music, was an exploration of how far these functions could be stretched and diluted, in order to create very colourful, dynamic and absolutely gripping music, much like what we still hear in movie soundtracks by someone like John Williams.
Schoenberg, riding on the turn-of-the-century musical advances of the Impressionists, like Debussy, became a real master of this way of writing music in his youth, but soon felt that it was an artistically exhausted approach. He then set out to develop new ways of thinking about how notes could be combined. The first step was to abolish the assumption of a hierarchy between notes within a certain key. He proposed atonality, meaning having no key, or no tonality – a harmonic language in which notes would be combined only according to their individual acoustic character (ie, an A sounds different to a G), and where dissonance would be emancipated and made less functional and rather more colouristic. It was, on the one hand, an acceptance of the unpleasant, the harsh, the ugly in human existence, in line with Expressionism and the humanist nihilism following the horrors of the First World War; on the other, it does show an almost Marxist attempt to equalise the “rights and opportunities” of musical notes, much in line with the socialist politics of the time.
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So, it predates postmodernism, but shows already the seed for the idea that one should not assume that certain rules cannot be broken, that certain systems are unique or beyond question. And it set in motion the musical 20th century and the collapse of Western tradition as a straight line, much the same way Marcel Duchamp had done in the visual arts. Suddenly, anything was possible; sound had also been emancipated, and its simplest manipulation could become music.
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So, it predates postmodernism, but shows already the seed for the idea that one should not assume that certain rules cannot be broken, that certain systems are unique or beyond question. And it set in motion the musical 20th century and the collapse of Western tradition as a straight line, much the same way Marcel Duchamp had done in the visual arts. Suddenly, anything was possible; sound had also been emancipated, and its simplest manipulation could become music. The best example of this on our programme is the Terry Riley piece. The others are modern in their content, but actually very classical in concept.
We are certainly not specifically wired to listen to music in a Western way (although it is based on very scientific biological-acoustical principles), and the variety of music making around the world is enough of an easy proof of this. But it is no surprise to me that the radical-relativist and postmodernist approach hasn’t really managed to take hold in the broader general culture, because while it tries to demolish power structures in a supposedly leftist, activist way, it is actually quite elitist. Postmodern conceptual art always requires explanations. It almost exists so that it may be reviewed; it demands that the audience try to extract meaning or sensible experience out of something often perceived as alienating or meaningless through their senses. This is why visual artists still keep going back to representational art, why writers are still writing novels with a plot, why composers still tend to choose certain familiar systems of organising their musical material. These built systems do have built-in hierarchies, but they welcome easier sensorial reactions and interpretations by the audience member.
Talk to me about whether music is timeless or not. Is this something to explore, or what should be discussed instead? Do you think audiences should be exposed to all kinds of music – and why? If events like this one on the Woordfees programme are not created, where do you get a platform to perform a programme like the other night’s event?
I would say that art is always of its time, but also that great art has the potential to be timeless. By that, I already get into trouble with the postmodernists, but that’s fine by me. I would describe great art as art that has a few or even all of the typical creative elements present in great proportions and in whichever combination: conceptual depth, craftsmanship, artistic vision, historical significance, emotional and/or intellectual effect, etc. Nowadays, their importance is still often underplayed, and a kind of conceptual framework is meant to replace them and give a stamp of artistic value, no matter how unskilled or derivative the work might be. Avant-garde, protest art or activist art is really a fairly recent development that somehow had already lost its essence once it became culturally acceptable and even profitable, but it seems to have stuck as the way in which much current artistic creation achieves artistic stature. From my perspective, without the strong presence of the elements I mentioned, any attempt at conceptual expression or activism through art is misguided; its impulse belongs in the realm of criticism or commentary, rather than in that of artistic creation. It then becomes thoroughly “of its time”, rather than “timeless”.
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Audiences should naturally be exposed to all kinds of music, including less complex and, dare I say, even bad music. Music plays a huge number of different roles in people’s lives, and I wish we could live in a world where musical experiences in childhood were integral, in a non-enforced way, so that children could grow up with access to music making, especially through their own bodies and not through digital media.
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Audiences should naturally be exposed to all kinds of music, including less complex and, dare I say, even bad music. Music plays a huge number of different roles in people’s lives, and I wish we could live in a world where musical experiences in childhood were integral, in a non-enforced way, so that children could grow up with access to music making, especially through their own bodies and not through digital media.
Opportunities to challenge our audiences’ expectations and “comfort zones” in a traditional concert setting are quite rare, especially when it involves a greater number of performers. We have to think of the financial implications which make programming something like our Paranoid Android very difficult, if all wish to make a living out of our work. We are forever indebted, as performers, to the support and enthusiasm of arts festivals like Woordfees and concert promoters like the Endler Concert Series, for these opportunities, as well as to the sponsors and patrons that make these platforms financially viable.
The music performed the other night seemed spectacularly difficult. Please tell me about all the musicians who performed with so much flair and skill?
Ha ha, that’s certainly one way to put it with which I don’t think any of us would disagree. I think that each work had difficulties of a certain kind for its performers. Speaking for myself, the Connesson piece was probably the most technically challenging, because it is very “acrobatic”; the Martin was quite challenging in terms of ensemble, due to its rhythmical intricacies; the Riley is the most challenging in achieving an effective performance that feels truly “lived” and “in the moment”; and the Radiohead arrangement was pure head-banging fun. The Schoenberg was tremendously difficult on all levels for all of us – musically, technically, as an ensemble and also conceptually. It took me a lot of researching and studying of the score to make enough sense for myself of a work that is, in fact, mostly trying to bypass that cerebral “understanding”. But it was an experience that has enriched us all and is one we hope to continue exploring in future performances.
The other four instrumentalists are also members, as I am, of the Cape Town Philharmonic Orchestra: Gabriele von Dürckheim is the solo flautist, Féroll-John Davids is the solo clarinettist, Petrus Coetzee is the leader of the viola section and Peter Martens the leader of the cello section. Beyond that, they all have illustrious and busy careers as soloists and chamber musicians, and most of them are also lecturers at the SU Music Department, like I am. Our soprano, Magdalene Minnaar, is currently the artistic director of Cape Town Opera and is also one of the most celebrated singers in the country, with a career that is so multifaceted as to include opera, musical theatre and concert work, producing some of the most innovative musical events of the last couple of decades. It is really an absolute dream team, made up of the best of the best in the South African music community, and I feel incredibly lucky to have joined them in this programme.
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