The festivities to which I refer are not those giant,
camping in a damp field, paying £9 for a beer, constantly fighting the need to
urinate, crouched under a campervan at 2am and talking of ‘the sins’ type of
affairs.
No, I speak of the local kind. Lots of music, unconventional
venues, and the ability to go home at the end of the night instead of fighting
your way into someone’s tent while saying “it’s alright, I’ll just curl up at
your feet, you won’t even know I’m here!”This bank holiday weekend’s roll call includes Rochester Sweeps Festival, Canterbury’s City Sounds, Smuggler’s Pop Up Festival in Deal, and the Sounds New Contemporary Music Festival.
All are worthy of your time and dancing but it is Sounds New that has earned my, and your, attention today.

Sounds New was born way back in 1997, and was revamped in 2011. The strap line is “an essential platform for the music of our time”, comprising eight days of contemporary music and poetry at various locations in Canterbury’s two universities, as well as in city centre cafes, galleries and churches.
Its reputation for presenting new music from across the world without elitist restrictions is well established, and it has received rave reviews from The Guardian and The Telegraph in the past.
Okay. Okay.
We’re all thinking it – ‘contemporary music’ sounds dangerously broad and potentially twee. I’ll admit. I was dubious when I heard about it. Because…..what exactly is it?
We’re all thinking it – ‘contemporary music’ sounds dangerously broad and potentially twee. I’ll admit. I was dubious when I heard about it. Because…..what exactly is it?
I asked a few friends what those two words made them think
of. Answers included pan pipes, avant garde classical, wind chimes and a child
hitting a bin with a stick. Helpful. Helpful.
I needed assistance. I would need to speak to someone in the
know. And so to my former stomping ground, the University of Kent, where I met
deputy director of music and member of the Sounds New artistic board, Dan
Harding.
Dan is a jazz man trapped in a British suit. He looks like a
pressed professor, but inside he’s a hive of excitement, bursting to talk about
every kind of music under the sun and then compare notes about it on Twitter.
Dan in his element- the Colyer-Fergusson concert hall |
Having started on the piano aged three (that’s just showing
off), Dan has been teaching music ever since leaving university (despite
swearing he’d never teach). When he moved to Kent in 2008, word soon got out
that he was, in his own words, ‘a contemporary music fiend and a bit obsessed”
and he was quickly enlisted to serve on the Sounds New artistic board.
Tinkling the ivories |
“I love contemporary music because it is fearlessly inventive,” he explains, fizzing with excitement over his frothy latte. “My passion is jazz – jazz is a monster that plunders and recognizes no musical boundaries. You have people mixing hip hop with jazz, you had prog-jazz, classical. It doesn’t recognize pigeon holes.
“You’ve got to keep inventing,” he almost implores. “You
have to keep it new.”
I cut right to the chase: just what IS contemporary music?
Dan pauses. I feel stupid. That was a stupid question, wasn’t
it? Oh God, it’s such a stupid question. I may as well have asked “how do
instruments know what sound they are supposed to make?”
“Contemporary music is the music of our time,” he says. I’m about to pound the table and insist that it must be more complicated than that, when he continues…….I really must stop reacting in the middle of people’s sentences.
“It spans everything from that very inaccessible classical music – you know, squeaky strings, and odd musical languages and effects - to current pop, rock and jazz.
“Classical music no longer sits in an ivory tower above all other genres. It rubs shoulders with them, and they plunder from each other. It’s about inventiveness, not the same thing preserved for years.”
It strikes me that I’ve been a bit fixated on finding a precise
way of explaining what contemporary music is. This is, I realize, because I
assume that my readers won’t be comfortable without an exact definition of what
they’d be listening to.
But that’s stupid. This is not the age we live in anymore,
where we have to buy before we try and end up wasting a tenner on that Babylon
Zoo CD because that Levi’s advert LIED TO US. We now live in a digital age
where discovering new music has never been easier through the likes of Spotify
and YouTube. But still, people are often afraid to wander from their comfort
zone.
Dan concurs. “As people, we tend to play it safe with our music
choices. We put our money down on the same thing because it is a safe bet. We
forget what we did when we got into music in the first place; we tried different
things, and sampled our friends’ tastes.
“As a result, music can become a victim of its own success –
once you have been successful, you are commissioned to do more of the same so
that consumers know what they are getting, and that hampers creativity.
“But music that is always progressing is the most
interesting. I like the idea of hearing new things in music, and not just
another performance of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 21. At Sounds New, we could put on crowd pleasers at the
festival and give people another chance to hear Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition.
But we want give people the chance to experience something they haven’t heard
before.”
With so much on offer so regularly across the country, there
is an obvious appeal in a festival that promises something new every year. At
the same time, doesn’t the board worry about competing with other festivals and
events?
“From our point of view, there really isn’t another festival
like ours in this area,” he explains, and he’s not boasting. “That was very
important for our identity from the start.
“You don’t want to be treading on the toes of other
festivals, or putting on something where people say ‘I don’t need to go to
Sounds New because I can exactly the same thing ten minutes down the road’.
“We are lucky that Kent is a culturally rich county to live
in – there is rarely a weekend without something happening in Kent, so you can’t
have all the time to yourself. You may not get 100 per cent of the audience, but
it is also a strength as you are part of bigger music scene. We put on several
things that appeal to a variety of audiences, and we hope they will sample a
few different acts over the course of our festival.
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Copyright Neil Sloman/Sam Bailey |
If you love music, or if you are bored of it, go and enjoy something from Sounds New. It might rekindle a long lost desire, or inspire you towards something completely different
That is how we all started with music, isn't it? By trying something new.
Here are some Sounds New highlights
(Full programme here)
(Full programme here)
- The Ice Breaker ensemble with BJ Cole perform a piece by the master of ambient, Brian Eno, against background footage of the moon landing. (Far out)
- The London Sinfonietta culminate a four-day residence at Christ Church College University with a performance of Protest Songs, in which both the music and the ensemble respond to social and political themes. (Fight the power!)
- A 70th birthday performance from world-leading saxophonist and free-jazz legend Evan Parker. (I can play the saxophone. Not well. Or at all. But I can)
- The Brodsky Quartet who have collaborated with the likes of Bjork, Elvis Costello and Paul McCartney. (Their version of Hyperballad? TAS-ty)
- The 12-strong vocal group Exaudi combine renaissance music with the new. (Haunting)
- Sarod maestro and composer Wajahat Khan, who descends from a 400-year old family of celebrated musicians in India, and has performed to great acclaim in over 40 countries worldwide. (I had to look up what a sarod was but now that I have, I want one)
- Piano in the Woods - in 2012 a piano was placed in private woodland and improvised performances have taken place on it every month since, responding to the instrument’s changing state. Saturday marks its final performance from regular pianist Sam Bailey while lithophone virtuoso Toma Gouband playing stones and other found objects alongside it. An photo exhibition of the various performances and collaborations will also be on display at the Sidney Cooper Gallery during the festival (I won’t be able to see this one, as I am away, so you all have to and then describe it to me an exquisite detail)
- A new favourite of mine, folk instrumentalists Arlet make
camp in Mrs Jones Kitchen alongside The Leon String Quartet, with dual
compositions promising to scale folk, jazz and classical influences. (They almost
sound French, but really REALLY good French. You’ll want to drink wine and then
skip)
- There are also many, many excellent poets at different events throughout the festival. Please support them and enjoy their work as well as the music.
*Django IS a jazz kitty. He has an odd gait, so he walks in three paw time. AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHA he calms my dark places.
** The Gulbenkian Theatre café in broad daylight
*** Coffee and a diet coke
**** A group of student drinking water who would NOT stop playing with their
phones' ringtones.
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