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Lots of fun Instal
Look at this beautiful thing - or, more importantly, listen to it. It’s a musical alphabet, first screened on children’s TV show Sesame Street back in 1977.
How often do avant-garde artists get asked to make sounds for children’s TV? Not often enough, I reckon - although I sympathise with the YouTube viewer who said this clip gave them nightmares as a child. The artist in this case was Joan La Barbara, an American singer and composer who, partly inspired by free jazz, learned how to turn her voice into an amazingly versatile musical instrument. She has variously made music with John Cage, Morton Feldman and Philip Glass, as well as her husband Morton Subotnick, the composer who made early electronic album Silver Apples Of The Moon. She has also worked with choreographer Merce Cunningham, and in theatre. Here’s a striking stage performance from 2003 called Messa di Voce, a mix of animation and human voices. Joan comes in towards the end.
Next weekend Joan is performing at Instal in Glasgow. She makes a perfect poster girl for Instal, a festival of ‘brave new music’ which believes - rather like whoever commissioned that Sesame Street clip back in 1977 - that brave new music is for everybody. The people behind Instal are Edinburgh couple Barry Esson and Bryony McIntyre; both work very hard to try and attract a wide audience to what they do, which is often very leftfield indeed. As well as Instal, their Arika organisation runs Kill Your Timid Notion in Dundee, and has organised musical performances across Scotland in an oil tank, a cave, a reservoir, a disused train station, and down a manhole. Their next project, they hope, will involve borrowing a train from ScotRail, taking their audience on a day trip from Glasgow to Mallaig and back, and staging experimental sound performances along the way.
If Barry and Bryony often succeed in drawing a diverse crowd to what they do, it’s partly because they’re very good at presentation, and coming up with ideas that capture people’s imaginations. Who wouldn’t be curious about what a gig in a oil tank would be like, even if you’ve never heard of the person doing it? In that spirit, the marketing material for Instal focuses less on the names on the bill - who will be familiar to connoisseurs of the avant-garde, but not necessarily anyone else - than on the kinds of experiences the festival offers. This year, there’s ‘circular singing, a 100-piece untrained choir, long stretches of almost nothing, organ drones attempting to set the stars to music, Walkman solos’ etc. (The ‘circular singing’ is by Joan, pictured below in her younger days. It is a technique that involves breathing during notes, instead of between them, allowing you to make sounds that would otherwise be impossible.)
People occasionally get a bit sniffy about this ‘populist’ approach, as demonstrated by this preview in the List, which grumbles about the Instal crowd being too big and not discerning enough. That’s a valid concern, if you’re a dedicated avant-garder and don’t want your brave new music festivals to feel watered down, but the line of questioning still has a faint whiff of elitism about it. Barry and Bryony have also been accused of conservatism. For all their talk of ‘brave new music’, Brian Morton once argued in the Scotsman, they are still ‘most comfortable with the old nexus of performers and audience’ - ie: the audience turns up and watches something but doesn’t participate. Which, in an age when interactivity is the buzzword, when theatre companies like Blast Theory are blending theatre with computer games, and audience-generated projects like the Fragmented Orchestra are being hailed as the future of music, is arguably slightly old-fashioned.
This feels like nit-picking to me, though. The bigger picture is that Barry and Bryony’s festivals and events offer experiences that you won’t find anywhere else in Scotland - and, in some cases, anywhere else in the UK or even at all, as proved by the distances some people travel to come to them. Arika is a national treasure, one not shouted about often enough. Besides, this year’s Instal arguably includes an effective riposte to Brian Morton’s argument, in the shape of Phil Minton‘s Feral Choir, which consists of members of the Instal audience, untrained singers recruited via workshops which will take place at the Arches and the CCA in Glasgow later this week - here’s a clip of the Feral Choir in action last year that offers a taste of what it might end up sounding like…
I know Barry and Bryony a bit, and enjoy their company a lot. Both of them are sincere and passionate about what they do. Once Barry gets talking, it’s almost impossible to shut him up, as he waxes lyrical about Altermodernism, the role of culture in society, free jazz, the commodification of music etc, throwing out a string of quotes from Hollis Frampton and John Dewey along the way, and generally emitting nervous energy. Brian Morton described him as ‘thin as a banjo wire and almost always past you before you know it’ with ‘the most purposeful walk you’ll ever see’, which is about right. At their festivals, Barry is your genial if occasionally bumbling host, introducing the acts, answering questions, making you feel generally welcome, and ensuring you never feel inferior for not understanding something. He thinks Instal should be ‘about the joy of discovery, about asking questions and having ideas’. In short, he’s like the best schoolteacher you ever had. And this, for an avant-garde layman like me, is just the ticket. Go Barry. Go Bryony.
Andrew
