Out of the shadows, into the light
Julius Eastman. Photo: Andrew Roth
Ahead of Manchester Collective’s debut at the BBC Proms, writer Johnny James explores the outsider voices and stories that feature in this subversive musical programme.
Classical music is made by the few for the few – until we decide it isn’t.
The world of professional classical music has, historically, been an exclusive one – made by and for a slim demographic, while outsiders remain just that: outside. But as the world discovers that inclusivity breeds innovation, why should classical music drag its feet? After all, the genre has been in a state of flux since its inception; challenging conventions is part of its DNA.
The same is true of both Manchester Collective and harpsichordist Mahan Esfahani, whose every step questions pre-conceived notions of what classical music can be. In The Holy Presence, they present a programme of outsiders, taking music that in some way exists in the shadows, and holding it up to the light.
Julius Eastman was a key voice in the story of American minimalism, but his identity as a black and openly gay composer did not easily fit into the musical landscape of the 1960s and ’70s. “What I am trying to achieve is to be what I am to the fullest,” he said in a 1976 interview. “Black to the fullest, a musician to the fullest, a homosexual to the fullest.”
Eastman’s dedication to living boldly saw him pushed to the margins of the classical establishment and virtually erased from the pages of 20th century music history. Until now. Eastman’s lost scores, which reveal a composer way ahead of his time, have been painstakingly reassembled from recordings, and reinstated into the minimalist canon. Among these works is the raucous masterpiece The Holy Presence of Joan D’Arc (1981). Taking rhythms from a punk-rock song by fellow New Yorker Patti Smith, The Holy Presence sees Eastman graft minimalist repetition onto harmonies that lean towards Wagner and Schoenberg – a collision of worlds that had hitherto never met.
“Minimalism was still in its austere, two-dimensional phase, conceptual and concerned with abstract pattern,” writes critic and musicologist Kyle Gann in his book of essays Gay Guerrilla, “but in one step Eastman started mixing genres and forecasting techniques that would be tried in Post-Minimalism 15 years hence.”
Throughout his compositional life, Eastman had a proclivity for leaving things open to interpretation. While The Holy Presence is scored for 10 cellos, Manchester Collective will present it in the context of a string orchestra, staying true to both the composer’s freewheeling ethos and the ensemble’s own spirit of exploration.
If Eastman sought freedom in the liminal spaces between musical worlds, then so does Joseph Horovitz, whose 1965 Jazz Concerto for harpsichord, strings, and jazz kit also appears in this programme. As a Jew born in Vienna, living and working in the UK, Horovitz has been similarly overlooked by the classical establishment. And yet here is a composer who brings new audiences into the fold of the genre. By combining traditional jazz language with principles of formal thematic development, the Jazz Concerto extends a hand beyond the classical music world, and invites ‘outsiders’ in.
Mahan Esfahani with Manchester Collective. Photo: César Vásquez Altamirano
There are surely few performers more suited to the Jazz Concerto than Mahan Esfahani, who is something of an outsider himself. The Iranian-American harpsichordist, who now lives in Prague, has built a career around the unlikely and the virtuosic, fusing Baroque sounds with everything from jazz to electronica. By doing this, he too draws fresh audiences into the concert hall. “Classical audiences are worryingly grey” said the Guardian’s Rachel Cooke in a review of Esfahani’s 2019 performance at London’s Barbican Centre. “And yet here were hundreds of rapt young people – and Jarvis Cocker – listening to a harpsichordist explain how Bach works.”
Not unlike Esfahani and his lifelong ambition to reinstate the harpsichord into the mainstream of concert instruments, British-Bulgarian composer Dobrinka Tabakova uses the idioms of previous eras to share her experience of the present. Joining the dots between East and West European, ancient and contemporary, her Suite in Old Style (2004) pays homage to her roots within a 21st century framework, refracting Baroque music through a series of abstract forms. “I feel it’s almost as though you can decipher the future through the language of the past”, says Tabakova, whose place in this programme of outsiders speaks to the scarcity of Eastern European composers in present-day repertoire.
This idea of reaching across time is embedded into Manchester Collective’s own practice. Their 2021 album The Centre is Everywhere, for example, unites works that are temporally, physically and aesthetically distanced from one another, making one compelling whole out of supposedly incongruent parts.
The album’s title is borrowed from an ethereally beautiful Edmund Finnis work for 12 string players, which was commissioned by the ensemble back in 2019. We’ll hear it performed again here, alongside Henryk Górecki’s Concerto for Harpsichord and Strings (1980) – a dazzling, vigorously rhythmic piece that would test the limits of any harpsichordist. Falling between two starkly different pieces in the Górecki canon (his Third Symphony and Blessed Raspberry Songs), it is, in its own way, an outsider.
Johnny James is a Manchester-based writer and musician.