The London Contemporary Music Festival Trolls for Aesthetics

Recently, the London Contemporary Music Festival released a limited run of merchandise. There was a graphic T-shirt featuring the names of musicians whose creations have appeared at past festivals, plotted on a graph with two axes: the Y labeled “twee” to “brutal,” and the X “top” to “bottom.” Brian Ferneyhough was a brutal top, Cornelius Cardew a twee bottom, and Laurie Anderson was somewhere in between.

The festival — equal parts adventurous and provocative — leans further into artistic trolling for this year’s 10th anniversary edition. Titled “LET’S CREATE,” it focuses on the trickster figure in art, which it describes as “shape-shifter, border-crosser, mischief-maker, lord of misrule.” This is a return to what the festival’s directors, Igor Toronyi-Lalic and Jack Sheen, see as its essence.

“The trickster is our patron saint, for all experimental music,” Toronyi-Lalic said in an interview. “That is the impetus.”

“LET’S CREATE” is a nod to the much-discussed set of principles and desired outcomes used by Arts Council England to inform their funding decisions. Similar trickery streaks through the program. Take Wednesday’s concert, “Sorry.” After the British premiere of Philip Corner’s 1969 performance “During This Concert the Hall Will Be Bombed — or Blown Up,” there’s a sci-fi opera (featuring Spam and the cost of living crisis) by the noise artist Russell Haswell and a pantomime by Adam de la Cour inspired by the Garbage Pail Kids, (which themselves are a 1980s parody of the Cabbage Patch Kids). Then, closing the evening, the electronic producer Aya plays music by the other 45 Ayas listed ahead of her on music database Discogs.

Holding together a packed festival program — the music spans from the final notes that Plato heard to the present, with nearly 50 world premieres — are similar feats of niche trolling. To introduce “LET’S CREATE,” Toronyi-Lalic and Sheen asked ChatGPT what the 19th-century music critic Eduard Hanslick might have made of it. “It is not music they are creating but a chaotic charade masquerading as artistic rebellion,” the digital Hanslick replied.

The initial impulse for the festival came as a reaction to the “Rest Is Noise” festival at the Southbank Center in 2013; Toronyi-Lalic thought that it was too focused on music written before 1940. Over a decade later, the London Contemporary Music Festival still feels driven by its directors’ dissatisfaction with programming, commissioning and even taste in England.