by Thomas CorcoranHolywell Music Room, 6/11/07“In stuff, there is less stuff than nothing.” Thus speaks Mark R. Taylor, lecturer in Music at Brasenose, in his exposition of the theories behind his composition of a Piano Trio, which was performed alongside the trios of Ravel and Fauré by the Shelley Trio through the OU Music Society in the Hollywell Music Room last Tuesday. We all know the atomic analogies he is alluding to – the nucleus “like a pin-head in a football field in Basingstoke”, the electrons like members of the crowd round the pitch. Taylor has tried to apply these basic theories of matter to music: by attempting to produce a piece of music in which “there is more nothing than stuff”, he hopes that what is there – “the stuff” – should coalesce into a musical form. That is, for about every note of music in the piece, there are five or six bars of silence.
The result? Something unbearable. Taylor asked us before the performance “not to ponder what mindset he was in” when he composed it in 1999; to be frank, I wouldn’t want to, though I would suppose that it was something that somehow managed to encapsulate both “thoroughly demented” and “mind-bogglingly tedious”. Sitting sanctimonoiusly in a conducting position before the trio of pianist Geoffrey Lim, cellist Alice Hyland and violinist Christopher Tarrant, he emphatically signalled to them when to play each note. Without attacking all forms of conceptualist music out of hand, it could be said that this sort of music is to be written, and not performed – at least when I, and anybody else with an ear for aesthetics, is in the room. A continual repetition of notes at long intervals for twenty minutes cannot produce aesthetically pleasing music. I have never fallen asleep in a music concert, but this was surely the closest I have ever, and ever will, come to doing so. But ultimately, I didn’t fall asleep, because this strange sight – of three individuals playing a note, then pausing for about ten seconds, before playing another and pausing for another ten seconds, with utter concentration at this futile task, while a man sitting before them ceremoniously accompanies each note with a sweep of his hands – did not make me fall asleep, but could only make me burst out laughing at the bizarre absurdity of the whole concept.
Live: Shelley Trio
