Concert review : Hanna Hartman, Hurricane Season (world premiere, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, 17 November 2019)

Abstract

After occasional previous engagements in the north of England, including a particularly memorable performance at Distractfold’s Cut & Splice Festival in 2017, Hanna Hartman was engaged as composer in residence for hcmf’s 41st iteration. Hurricane Season, a world première, was also an hcmf// commission. It was for objects, electronics, amplification, magnified projection, and a rather large-sized magnet (or perhaps more than one), which I imagine most of the commission was spent on getting through international customs. The aural component of the piece was fairly unremittingly scratchy and granular, the sort of soundscape one might expect to hear if holding a stethoscope to a dead tree filled with insects. And it was certainly a soundscape – the sounds seemed to result not so much from the motions and frictions of the different materials (though, I assume, most of them actually did come from this) but hover around the space cavernously as a sort of underscoring to the action. Hartman’s preoccupation with exploding the finest grains of material was here achieved at once aurally and visually, with the mega-enlarged projection complimenting the various gradations of scrapes and squeaks of the moving objects. I’m coming to this from a New Music perspective, so my frame of reference here is more Mikrophonie than Child of Tree, but one could just as easily go down the route of reading Hurricane Season through the more experimental tradition of allotting objects an aural agency which might be overlooked otherwise. [excerpt]