Aldeburgh Festival 2007
Forgoing the concert-halls and churches that have housed the Aldeburgh festival since Britten, Pears and Crozier founded it in 1948, I take a detour along winding Suffolk roads to Bentwaters Airbase, where ‘Faster than Sound’ boldy asserts itself as a now annual addition to the festival programme.
Last year’s trial was not widely advertised, as the organisers didn’t want to attract the wrong sort of audience, but this year they decided that ‘ravers’ should be just as welcome as those more adventurous members of the regular Aldeburgh audience. Today violas sit with computers, carefully-clad arts tsars amongst trendy art-school students and eerie Cold War watchtowers amid woods in Aldeburgh’s one-day sonic arts festival, designed to ‘join the dots between musical genres and digital art forms’.
Strung out along the taxiway which serves as entrance to the main area is Mark Limbrick’s ‘Wire’ – a blown up version of the childhood experiment with two tins connected with a piece of string, enticing this mobile audience to pluck, scrape and make sounds for themselves.
In the ‘Star Wars’ building, Mike Challis’ brilliant ‘Anticipation’ can be found in one of a network of rooms each enclosing a separate sonic art installation. Editing together all the sounds normally edited out of recordings of concerts at Aldeburgh (i.e. pauses and applauses), ‘Anticipation’ highlights the role that the ritualistic aspects of performance play in our experience of concerts, as we find ourselves unable to switch off the anticipation that is incited by a welcoming applause. In an adjoining room, David Hopkinson’s ‘Cutting up my friends’ uses visual clips of instrumentalists to represent musical patterns and manipulates them in line with the musical development which might seem novel until you realise it’s not really any more sophisticated than Disney’s Fantasia.
While well-established electronic music names like Phillip Jeck and Plaid take on the unique space of the Dome, a host of newer names such as Modified Toy Orchestra and Dat Politics entertain in the bunker-like rooms of Star Wars. Both bands bring a self-conscious childlike quality to their performance; the modified toy orchestra really is a group of electronically doctored childrens’ toys, while Dat Politics sing ‘can you please turn my brain off’.
This is a ‘cool’ day out, there’s no doubt about that, but what business is ‘cool’ of the Aldeburgh festival? Many critics have been quick to applaud a predominantly classical music festival for jumping on the sonic arts bandwagon and doing so with style but FTS’ goals of experimentation and exploration are not met when the audience doing the exploring is already well-versed in the scene. Putting visual art with music or crossing classical with electro is no longer new enough, and the result feels more like a VIP party than a ground-breaking sound experiment.