Ahead of the 2020 Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, Timmy Fisher takes a look at some of the festival’s most memorable moments
‘For me, Huddersfield is about all sorts of music, but it’s not about the mainstream.’ Graham McKenzie, Artistic Director of the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, is scrupulous in his pursuit of the obscure. Since its conception in 1978, the festival has hosted the full spectrum of musical experimentation, from acoustic reinterpretations of Kraftwerk tracks to a concert given entirely on half-cooked vegetables (the instruments were later served to the audience as soup).
The festival was the brainchild of Richard Steinitz, a composer and lecturer at Huddersfield Polytechnic (now the University of Huddersfield). As Artistic Director from 1978 to 2000, it was his vision in inviting the biggest names in European and American modernism to this corner of West Yorkshire that gave the festival the cult status it now enjoys.
The sheer unlikeliness of catching Cage, Messiaen and Boulez in a Huddersfield Pizza Hut – as some of those who visited in 1989 did – is part of the festival’s allure. (McKenzie: ‘We went to that Pizza Hut years later and tried to get them to put up a plaque. They asked head office, who said “no”. Nobody had a clue who they were.’)
The main draw, however, is the startling mix of concerts, talks, workshops and installations that puts Huddersfield on an equal footing with any festival of its kind: the Darmstadt Summer Course, the ISCM World Music Days, Utrecht’s Gaudeamus Muziekweek or Oslo’s Ultima. Ahead of the festival’s 42nd iteration, we remember four of its more remarkable moments.