Letter to the Editor: This scene kicks and screams

To the Editor,

 

It’s around 8:30pm, and I’m backstage at the JdP music building at St Hilda’s. I’m sweaty, and I can barely walk in the tight dress I chose completely of my own volition. The second half of the concert is about to start, and as is typical of me, I’m not sure when I’m supposed to be on stage, so I tentatively tap on the bathroom door. I hear the whirr of a razor – Giuliana Tritto is in there, putting the finishing touches on her newly shaved head, which she shaved on stage, in silence, at the end of the first half. I feel bad disturbing her with my silly logistical questions, especially after what must have been an intensely physically and emotionally taxing show – on a blistering June day, the performers and composers have been convulsing on the floor, screaming, hysterically laughing, play-fighting, running into walls repeatedly. In the second half, they will continue to scream. Despite this, she’s as friendly and helpful as ever.

 

 

Giuli is one of the creators of a new music collective at Oxford called Screaming Mouth, and their inaugural concert I pledge allegiance to angry women was centred around female rage, an ‘evening of sound and fury’. When I was invited to participate, I felt that this was an offer too enticing to refuse. Many of the works were hybrids between musical pieces and performance art, a mix of prerecorded and live performances. Many were difficult, even harrowing to watch, (Giuli’s bury your dead deep in the earth, Ynyr Pritchard’s FIGHT, BABY, STAY, BABY, SEXY, BABY, and Leandro Landolina’s abject larynx come to mind – look them up on YouTube!) and the concert went on for at least an hour longer than advertised, leaving everyone, from performers to stagehands to audience in varying stages of tiredness. I lost my voice for at least an evening after going a bit too hard on the whole screaming aspect, but I guess that’s the price to be paid for a good old cathartic collective musical experience.

 

Where might Screaming Mouth sit on Mr Bilsland’s food chain of a musical scene? Probably amongst the ‘punks of the DIY movement’ if anything, a catch-all using the word ‘punk’ to encompass anything outside of the mainstream. Or perhaps meaning ‘punk’ in a literal 1970s sense. Either way, this hierarchy doesn’t make any mention of experimental music, or even classical music, or really anything outside of pop, rock, jazz. I won’t try to make a case for classical music’s inclusion, although I do think that a thorough, exhaustive ecology of a city’s musical scene would at least make some, possibly derisive reference to the concert black wearers and Wagner apologists among us (let it be known that I am not the latter).

 

 

But I would like to put a word in for the experimental and contemporary classical music at Oxford, of which there is a fair amount if you know where to look – Ensemble Isis, an experimental ensemble made up of students, EXMO (Experimental Music Oxford, run by Zach DiLello), EMPRes (Electronic Music Practice Research group), and Red Lipstick. Oxford has been home to strikingly original avant-garde composers like Jennifer Walshe, a professor of composition who amongst other things has been a pioneer of working with AI in her music, and has written a book called 13 Ways of Looking at AI, Art & Music (some of these ways include – as fan fiction, conceptual art, the ineffable, boobs, relational aesthetics).

 

 

The music made by these experimental composers and collectives is not easy listening, and it’s a far cry from the mainstream, from the ‘endless hordes of cover bands and jazz groups’ in Oxford. But avant garde and popular music have not always been as separate as they might seem to be now – from the Beatles taking inspiration from Pierre Schaeffer’s Musique concrète to Brian Eno and Aphex Twin’s John Cage-inspired ambient music, the two genres have long existed in a mutually co-constitutive, ever-evolving relationship that has been consummated again and again by digital sampling, interpolation, indirect and direct inspiration. Nowadays you might look to artists like Björk, FKA twigs and Arca for evidence of how experimentalism has made its way into the mainstream.

 

 

As for Oxford’s music scene, I don’t believe that it’s as inherent to any fundamental essence of the city as it might have used to be. I’m sure that if you squeezed Christ Church’s halls hard enough the sounds of organ-accompanied choral music would be what leaked through, but this hardly seems relevant in a musical landscape that reflects our current globalised condition. Place will inevitably bleed through the performances we hear here, often in unexpected ways, but to me Oxford’s music scene has to be understood as a shifting, crawling mass that is made up of the musicians and listeners who move in and out of the city. It’s a scene more kinetic, more characterised by movement than most because of the students and academics constituting it who are often only around for short periods. Whilst it is tied to Oxford, I see these ties as quite loose, a kite tied to the city’s trees, floating above it, buffeted by winds that waft musicians and ideas and genres around.

 

 

When I’m talking about the movement of musicians I’m thinking for example of a concert I saw last term by Samuel Boateng, a research fellow in music at St John’s as well as a jazz pianist, composer, and playwright, with the Adepa ensemble, and other artists including saxophonist Eve Boulos and multidisciplinary artist Rawz. Samuel’s music explores place and displacement, identity, Pan-Africanism, and transnationalism. While it was a jazz concert, it was also conceptual in some ways, touching on environmental themes, and bridged cultures, with a virtuosic performance by vocalist and mbira player John Falsetto. A particularly touching song was titled Put me in your pocket and described his feelings of homesickness upon seeing an old musical mentor from Ghana, his home country, at a gig in the UK.

 

 

Listening to some of the experimental music I’ve described here does, to Mr Bilsland’s credit, require a ‘degree of self-effacement’, even sometimes putting yourself through ‘humiliation rituals’. Ynyr Pritchard’s piece at I pledge allegiance was acutely attentive of the performativity of performance, an exercise in humiliation. Watching them ask the audience (in a tone both provocative and despairingly resigned), ‘Do you want to see me to do it again?’ before repeatedly running into a wall would be an unusual, embarrassing, probably uncomfortable experience for those of us used to the easy cheer of pop music. But this piece, and the other pieces performed at this concert, and those by some of the other artists I’ve mentioned, are original and poignant. This is music that is about something. The crowd at I pledge allegiance was small and mostly composed of friends and family members, but this does not negate that the composers here are an integral, unique part of Oxford’s music scene. A scene which does contain originality and innovation, even if some might consider it ‘unlistenable’. Even if you have to look at the ‘dark and murky areas’ of the map to find it.

 

 

Most of what I’ve mentioned here is drawn from my own experience, from the musicians around me who I admire. Some of it is quite easily listenable, and some of it isn’t. I don’t have an encyclopaedic knowledge of Oxford’s music scene, but I do have immense faith in it. So, maybe consider challenging yourself in your listening – go to Screaming Mouth’s next concert, perhaps. Or don’t. But I’ll definitely be there.

 

 

Yours sincerely,

 

 

Lilia Goldstein

 

Read Cameron Bilsland’s original piece here.

 

Words by Lilia Goldstein. Image by Franco Lopez, with permission. Thank you to the Jacqueline du Pre music building for hosting this event.