Endurance performances keep audiences up all night

It is 3am in London’s Barbican concert hall and a string quartet is midway through a recital of Morton Feldman’s six-hour composition String Quartet II. We’re in the midst of LCO 24: an all-night-and-day live music programme presented by the ardently experimental London Contemporary Orchestra. Ticket-holders can come and go as they please during the event, from 6pm on Saturday until 6pm on Sunday. At this unearthly hour, the audience is scattered loosely but attentively around the 1,900-capacity auditorium. I am sitting towards the back of the stalls, and my head is beginning to swim.

The LCO has earned acclaim for its far-ranging works and collaborations, but LCO 24 is its most ambitious project to date. “These big, complex productions take a long time to formulate, then the right opportunity needs to come along,” says Robert Ames, the LCO’s co-artistic director and co-principal conductor. “The pandemic wasn’t the catalyst for making LCO 24 happen. But this moment in time — the depths of winter, post-Christmas, dark days and so on — feels right for a deep, contemplative music experience.

“I like the idea of ritual in performance . . . The 24-hour format really helps tap into that and creates new and interesting challenges that you just don’t get in a typical short evening show.”

LCO 24’s programme features new long-form compositions from collaborators including electronic artist/producer Actress, as well as works by pioneering composers such as Feldman, John Cage and James Tenney. The latter’s minimalist Having Never Written a Note for Percussion is a single elongated note/sound-bath, played here on a gong, and reverberating around the concert hall for around an hour. It’s the first piece I catch on Saturday night, and it takes time to sink in; LCO 24’s unrushed experience feels like an alien contrast to everyday life.

At the same time, LCO 24 is the latest in a long line of durational art and music performances. In 1963, Cage organised the debut of Erik Satie’s Vexations, a late 19th-century piece where the theme and two variations are repeated 840 times. Pianists at the 18-hour show included a young John Cale. Multimedia artists have used extended timeframes as creative playgrounds and endurance tests; Andy Warhol’s five-hour movie Sleep (1964) and the even lengthier Empire (an eight-hour, slow-motion shot of the Empire State Building, 1965) were presented as “anti-films”. Douglas Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho (1993) painstakingly projected Hitchcock’s thriller, frame-by-frame. Christian Marclay’s 24-hour synchronised montage The Clock (2010) spliced together film scenes featuring timepieces and proved an art-world blockbuster.

Durational performance has converged with pop culture. Although the idea of being stuck in an elevator with Shia LaBeouf seems deeply unappealing, a succession of visitors joined the US actor during #ELEVATE, his 24-hour performance piece in Oxford (2016). Alt-rockers The National performed their track “Sorrow” repeatedly for six hours in a MoMA collaboration with Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson (2013), while hip-hop heavyweight Jay Z rapped his track “Picasso Baby” in a six-hour set at New York’s Pace Gallery (2013). (At Jay Z’s performance was artist and durational performance superstar Marina Abramovic, who has argued that the extended art experience brings us closer to our consciousness.) Turner Prize-nominated art collective Black Obsidian Sound System’s projects have included a 24-hour fundraising rave.

Clubbing all-nighters are my comfort zone; Morton Feldman is not. By 5am, I have been beguiled by the fragmented beauty of String Quartet II, jolted by its persistent, underlying tension, and I think I might be hallucinating the sound of woodwind and vocals. It is a piece that opens with taut, discordant notes and seems to soften into tiny, subtle textures and variations, but it never entirely allows you to settle. Perhaps I’d naively expected an experience like Max Richter’s eight-hour Sleep, which I’d been lucky to catch live (and snooze through) in 2017, yet while Richter cradles the listener, Feldman needles you.

This is challenging for the musicians, who (unlike me) cannot leave their positions for six hours and barely stop playing. Violinist Eloisa-Fleur Thom says: “Physically, some of us have adapted our sleep patterns, from days where we’ll sleep longer into the day and stay up more at night, to power naps followed by long practice sessions. As the piece was a little overwhelming at the start, meditation has been a lifesaver — and also brushing up on our counting skills for the 124-page piece.”

It’s tricky to see the quartet’s faces clearly in the half-light, beneath Laszlo Zsolt Bardos’s trippy projected visuals, but they’re the most serenely hardcore performers I have ever witnessed. The piece eventually ends without crescendo, and they slip offstage like apparitions. It isn’t immediately easy to gauge what my fellow gig-goers think; I can’t ask my friends because they left at 2am, but I chat to a few strangers — everyone expresses excitement (“I couldn’t really say no to a 24-hour ambient event,” grins one man), but the atmosphere feels dissonant.

Despite the continuous music, there are minimal comforts for an overnight stay, though one woman has thrown her colourful blanket over a foyer bench. I buy a lukewarm coffee from the single bar open, and head into the murky pre-dawn: back to everyday life for a few hours, with Feldman’s strings stirring my woozy head.

When I return in the late afternoon, the concert hall is busier again, and I’m excited by the prospect of more music. LCO 24’s final performance is Mica Levi’s Thoughts Are Born (2020), originally composed for seven or more players (one of whom operates the light switch). The ensemble is fuller and lush-sounding here; each time the brass and string sections swell in accompaniment to the keening solo cello and violin, the stage is illuminated, then plunged into darkness. The past 24 hours have been surreal, disorienting and strangely elating — somehow, I was still left wanting more.

barbican.org.uk