Well - views of others before I give some thoughts?

Also eager to hear a report. I went to hear students + staff of the RAM playing York Bowen. The students won by a mile (pace the trumpet professor).

I went to the first two bits and then (since it had been going 2 hours) had unfortunately had enough, so I missed Rolf Hind, Rzewski and the discussion. That was a pity but there was too much in the programme and I just needed a break. Since I missed the discussion I will perhaps recycle some of its points, so apologies in advance if I do...

I think it would be too obvious to point out that a Riot it was not, and that even the few pieces that did address political themes simply commemorated a more or less distant event in a safely apolitical way (no actual rabble-rousing or indeed concerted political discourse in the texts) - or at least in the case of the Ortega one could see how playing the piece in Chile to certain people might be daring, but I was uncomfortable with it out of that context as it came across to me (i.e. in London in 2007) as faux-shocking and a very long way away (not, perhaps, the fault of the composer).

As far as agitprop goes, one could hear Cardew turning in his grave.

BUT, I didn't really expect to be politically MOTIVATED TO ACTION by the concert (though that would have been good), and had I enjoyed more pieces for what they did musically, I might have been more satisfied with each composer's 'take' on the interweaving of music and politics. After all, not everyone has a gift for radical political statement, nor is a musical contemplation of political issues less committed an act (vide Finnissy's History of Photography, inter alia). I don't find music lends itself comfortably to being used as a political tool either, unless it is very crude.

Personally, I find the most interestingly and engagingly political music is that which weaves its politics into its very ontology, i.e. those experimental works of Wolff in which musical-social co-operation is teased out of the musicians.

The (perhaps egregious) distinction between music about politics (however politically aware) and political music (that is, music which creates its own polis) occurred to me during the piece I most enjoyed, Claudia Molitor's Leek, which as well as being beautiful and witty was also a subtle though very clear study in human relations.

That was the only music that changed, refreshed or engaged my politics (as opposed to my general humanitarian instincts); and partly because it was for me the best.

Well my view is that this was a moderately successful concert but, of course, not as technically flawless or intellectually sound as had it been my concert. But then no one can hope to have my high standards!

It's OK, if that person has nothing better to do. As long as you all know that this is the real me.

For what it's worth, I did find the concert disappointing. The programme booklet said the following:

'Music should change you. Music can thump tubs, start riots, influence subtly, be personal and political or simply show reality in the raw. It can have a deep and lasting impact. All these categories are represented in this concert, and I hope at least one of them touches you.'

which seems something of a hostage to fortune - I would be surprised if many would really make such a claim on the basis of hearing the music that was played. For the most part, the politics in quesion could be gleaned from simply reading the Wikipedia entries included in the programme booklet - if one's to make music and politics the subject matter of a concert, then surely the actual sonic, rather than merely textual aspects, count? And I found most of the new works were in this respect little distinguishable from other 'non-political' SPNM works. Mostly generating a certain type of sonic colour and then spinning that out for a certain length of time, sometimes just by piling more novelties on, rather than having a deeper structural or emotional content. The Ligeti work (Sippal, dobbal, nadihegeduvel) is a fine piece and with a markedly greater expressive depth; whilst the highly rhetorical performance wasn't really to my taste, all of the performances were thoroughly competent. The issue which a lot of people raised had to do with the specific amplification of the voice in Rzewski's Coming Together, which employed some echo techniques but made the words impossible to hear, a shame when the text is so potent. I don't know who's decision it was to amp it in this way, but couldn't see what was achieved. There are pieces with spoken text in which a certain blurring of the text (even when it has a quite precise semantic content) is desired (Michael Finnissy's Not Afraid and Recent Britain are two examples), so as to produce a sort of 'smudged semanticity', but Rzewski's is not like this.

But questions of 'music and politics' are often focused primarily upon texts, theatre, extra-musical allusions. Whilst a classical concert is a social, and thus a political, occasion, which brings with it a range of expectations and conventions. How works of music engage with these is a fundamentally political question. James's comment about the Ortega is very interesting, makes me think about the relationship of certain works to context. To criticise the Ortega on 'purely musical' grounds (it mostly consists of spun-out shrieking, with little progress other than to pile it on) is probably to miss the point in terms of its original context; but when placed in this sort of concert, it's inevitable that it raises other questions. Other examples of this include Dieter Schnebel's Glossolalie '61 or concert sans orchestre, music/text/theatre works that certainly had a very critical relationship to the context in which they were played at the time (in the early 1960s), but nowadays, when the sorts of effects they use have become absorbed into a contemporary musical vocabulary, they rather have the quality of ephemeral farce. But both are specific realisations of abstract text works, 'toolkits' from which to build pieces; it makes more sense to reassemble such pieces anew in light of a changing context (as was done with glossolalie in the 1990s). Glossolalie '61 comes unfortunately close to sounding like a somewhat more wacky Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra nowadays.

Where should I start? (For those who don't know, I should point out that I was invited by the organisers to take part in the post-concert discussion.)

The discussion on Friday night had only just got started when it had to be curtailed on orders from the St Luke's staff, who if you ask me need to act a bit more like they work in a performing venue and not a SWAT team. Those who were present on Friday evening might be interested to know that, when the concert was repeated at the RNCM on Saturday, neither Rolf Hind nor Richard Thomas were present: to be fair, Rolf had informed the organisers of this in advance, but "something came up" for RT, presumably an acute case of not being arsed.

As for the concert being entitled "Riot", those of us who have witnessed riots would be able to tell the difference right away, I think. The only piece performed which had any real integrity as a work of political art, Frederic Rzewski's "Coming Together", was performed in such a way as to neutralise its message: the instrumentation (unspecified in the score) for tuned percussion and a few little additions (tabla, for god's sake) made it sound like a prettified "World Music" version of a Steve Reich piece, while the vocals, speaking a text written as a letter by a participant in the Attica prison riots of 1971, were frequently obscured by the addition of electronic delays and reverb (not mentioned in the score). One audience member on Saturday said that the echoes helped to give him the feeling of oppression and claustrophobia in the piece, but I don't think this piece is about "getting a feeling", it's about demonstrating (in both senses) a situation and a strictly systematic musical structure, and anything that gets in the way of this is offensively inappropriate. Apart from "Coming Together", the main interest in the concert was supplied by Ligeti's "Síppal, dobbal, nádihegedüvel" which, having no relevance to a concert of "political music" at all as far as I could tell, uses a voice and several truckloads of percussion equipment to produce a few miniature often folk-tinged songs, some of which are exquisite, although my feeling was that if you have all that gear on stage you ought to do something more with it (some instruments were played only once). Unfortunately, though, the main problem was that their tessitura was far too low for Loré Lixenberg.

Overall it wasn't a concert to convince anyone that the idea of a politically-engaged music is being taken seriously by the organisers or performers. On Saturday night I took a taxi back to my hotel, and the taxi driver was playing a tape of a wonderful solo male voice chanting the Koran, and sounding as if he meant what he was singing, which we can be sure he did, and this was by far the most beautiful music I'd heard all weekend. Make of that what you will.

Thanks for that report, Richard. I don't feel so annoyed at not being able to make it now. Fortunatley, with a little more time to plan a way of getting there by public transport, I was able to get to the last night's Bozzini String Quartet's "Hear and Now" concert at the Maida Vale studios. A fine, and with the exception of the 'cellist*, upstanding group fo musicians. No hint of a riot there either though. Quite (quiet?) the opposite in fact.

That would certainly be the case, hence my reservations about the Ortega at the Riot concert, which certainly conveys its anger and a general thrill of horror to any audience I should think, but as far as it being a wider Music for Political Change or even Awareness (other than in Chile) I am sceptical.

There was another piece that commemorated the Stonewall Riots, but that shifted between evocation of the event and generalised humanitarian emoting ('Let me breathe. Let me sing') accompanied by vibraphone (IIRC) which felt all very worthy but hardly a rousing anthem of liberation.

I must say (again) that I'm not sure how well music and politics ever mix, beyond using fairly crude song as a form of sloganising or banner, which is effective as far as it goes but leaves me uneasy; surely politics should be swayed by argument not an appeal to the Power of Melody (which either side can use)?

Is political music about directly inspiring action or political consciousness in the listeners? Cardew would have said so, exclusively; hence no music not easily understood by the 'pop-conscious audience' can be political. He even roundly rejects Rzewski's Coming Together for being too subjective (i.e. composerly) in its treatment of the material, and developing the 'hypnotic or hysterical' aspects of pop music rather than the 'positive' aspects. (Cardew Reader, p.188, from Stockhausen Serves Imperialism). We may not agree with Cardew, but his narrow definition of properly political music, when abstracted from the specifics of his communism, begs some difficult questions about what a political musical work is/can be, and what music is actually doing there?

I'd really like to hear both Richard and Ian elucidate some paradigms for politically-engaged music. The more I think about it the more I wonder what 'political' means. Is Beethoven 9 political? Where do politics stop and philosophy begins?