All posts by partialdurationscontributor

Syzygy Ensemble, Into the Light

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Syzygy Ensemble
Into the Light
The Melbourne Recital Centre Salon
18 November 2013
By Hannah Lane

Syzygy ensemble saw in the festive season with the celebratory finale of their 2013 Melbourne Recital Series. Their boundlessly energetic performance traversed a piñata’s worth of new music styles from brilliantly constructed French postmodernism to relentless pop-influenced American minimalism.

With the Salon set up cabaret style, allowing the audience to mingle and relax, the ensemble must be commended for leaving stuffy concert hall conventions at the door and instead infusing the audience with a sense of the sheer fun of some of this music. However, this didn’t mean that when it came to virtuosic moments Syzygy didn’t know how to up the ante!

Andrew Norman’s Light Screens (2002) takes its name and musical inspiration from architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s iconic stained glass windows. The relentlessly episodic form and jazzy harmonies of this piece resonate with the so-called “ecstatic music” movement that is currently dominating the younger and cooler American composition scene headed up by poster boy Nico Muhly and his record label The Bedroom Community. Light Screens oscillated between frenetic activity and moments of repose with rhythmic ostinati and recurring melodic motifs juxtaposed with sustained notes and colouristic timbral effects from the flute, during which the listener could easily imagine the composer marvelling at the ecstatic beauty of Lloyd Wright’s designs as the light moves through them. The violin, viola and flute created striking, sudden bursts of colour and then disappeared into the ether, while Blair Harris maintained an architectural thread—a counterpoint to the fragmented melodic and rhythmic activity—with sustained tones on the cello.

The “party piece” of the evening was undoubtedly French composer Bruno Mantovani’s postmodern mash up, D’un rêve parti (2000). Mantovani may be known to some for his recent controversial comments about female conductors. Fortunately his gender politics weren’t on display in this seamless journey through the major French compositional styles of the twentieth century. The title is a snappy bilingual pun, D’un rêve parti, translating roughly to English as “a departed dream”, as well sounding like “rave party”. We revel in swirling cluster chords and descending arpeggiated gestures from the piano, which bring to mind the keyboard writing of Debussy, Messiaen, and at times Boulez, while the piccolo and clarinet provide melodic gestures reminiscent of Debussy and Jolivet. The build up to the middle section of the work was particularly thrilling, beginning with a lyrical melody from Robin Henry’s clarinet, which signals a move into a new sonic world of seedy cabaret jazz, but not before we hear a piano solo, a cloudy Messiaen-like chord progression and some extended techniques, with Leigh Harrold reaching inside the piano to produce a dark, ominous thumping tone that is joined by weighty groans and growls from the cello, while the flute and clarinet repeat an ever intensifying ascending melodic question mark until we begin to feel like the music is literally bursting at the seams. Suddenly we’re in the world of raucous jazz with Thelonious Monk-style riffs on the piano and shifting syncopated rhythms that sound like a racing heart. The improvised feeling in these passages is breathtaking but Mantovani is not finished with his technicolour dreamlike journey through musical history. We experience the relentless rhythm of an underground techno rave party interspersed with bursts of explosive jazz. Upon introducing the piece, Syzygy flautist Laila Engle mentioned that the ensemble had discovered this work six years ago but did not have the requisite number of musicians to perform it up until this year. The level of commitment and passion for this music was most evident in the ensemble’s performance that night.

Philip Cashian’s Dark Inventions (1992) provided a point of moody repose after the hyperactivity of D’un rêve parti. Low tones on the flute and alto flute were echoed by a series of expansive gong strokes. Shimmering interjections from the glockenspiel floated above a backdrop of shifting blocks of colour as cello, piano, clarinet and flute each added a new timbre.

Also providing a stylistic foil to Mantovani’s dense, hallucinatory musical trip was local composer Ralph Whiteoak’s jazz influenced vignette Along Came A Spider (2012) and the American composer (and co-founder of the iconic new music festival and ensemble Bang on A Can) Michal Gordon’s minimalist pop hit In the Light of the Dark (2008). With their varied use of popular musical material and appropriation of popular musical styles, these pieces worked effectively in providing a sense of musical unity to a diverse program.

Hannah Lane

Partial Durations is a Matthew Lorenzon/RealTime joint project.

Kynan Tan, Perspectives [macro]

Reviews

Perpspectives [macro]. Photo by Sohan Ariel Hayes
Perpspectives [macro]. Photo by Sohan Ariel Hayes
Kynan Tan
Perspectives [macro]
Free Range Gallery
9 December, 2013
By Steve Paraskos

Kynan Tan’s first solo exhibition, perspectives [macro] explores the concept of a massive network of points as viewed from a singular perspective. Tan’s idea is that each individual point within a network or system is constantly and unendingly exerting and receiving a gravitational force in space-time on and from each other point within the system. Tan uses self-constructed computer programs to create vivid, non-linear, synaesthetic audio-visual works derived from data sets found within the collective unconscious sphere of the internet. He also projects repurposed archived footage in company with his computer-generated imagery and synthesised sounds.

Inspired by the generally-held notion that “the internet is a repository and library for outsourced thoughts and memories” and Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities where “imaginary, impossible and dystopian structures are simultaneously fictitious and vivid representations of subconscious constructions”, Tan has created 3D printed sculptures rendering the data of sleeping brain activity, which sit atop an irregular plinth standing near the centre of the Free Range Gallery in Perth’s CBD. Each appears as its own city; the physical manifestation of the collective unconscious of dreaming ideas. These intricate dream-like structures are surreal models of the most audacious modern architecture and are as wondrous as they are varied.

The accompanying sound work begins as a projection of nodes massing and connecting with each other in interactive networks that betoken clicking grains. The growing network resets and builds to the call of an increasing number of beeps. Sweeping cities, colonies of ants, swarms of bees and war planes cover the projection and four screens on the side walls, reinforcing the status of the macro perspective over the negligible individual points. The harmonious phasing swamp of traffic on the busy street of Perth’s CBD just outside the door of the gallery ensures there is never a moment of silence as the wooden floor rumbles to the timed passing of trucks, buses and trains like a surround sound sub.

Microscopic particular static crackles like the communiqués of distant sirens. Moaning modems and granular glass orchestras whir into life as quickly as they cease. This is a truly immersive experience where the sounds and visuals are inseparable. The eyes and ears can only discern the art and ground themselves by referencing the other sense.

Drawing upon Einstein’s conception of gravity that “each individual object exerts forces in both space and time, and that perception of time is relative to the surrounding forces”, Tan explains that the weight of the structure affects the movement of the form through time. This computer generated form is constituted by infinitesimal saw teeth that snake as a whole in all dimensions like the lines of a multidimensional, macrocosmic polygraph. Soon after, flocking particles slowly coalesce as a heavenly choir via Einsteinian algorithmic processes.

This is the astounding and original work. One hopes that Tan’s phenomenal and prescient installation is seen the world over.

Steve Paraskos

Partial Durations is a Matthew Lorenzon/RealTime joint project.

Forest Collective, Calypso

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Rosemary Ball as Artemis. Image by Meghan Scerri
Rosemary Ball as Artemis. Image by Meghan Scerri

Calypso
Composed by Evan Lawson
Libretto by Samuel Yeo
Forest Collective
December 5
Rosina Auditorium, Abbotsford Convent
By Alexander O’Sullivan

Joseph Kerman, who has been writing on opera since the 1950s, predicted a few years ago that the medium’s future would not lie in traditional houses, with their costly choruses, stage machinery, orchestras and roster of international stars. Rather, it would lie in smaller groups, like the Forest Collective, performing ‘chamber operas’ in the model of Britten’s Albert Herring or The Turn of the Screw.

Evan Lawson (composer) and Samuel Yeo’s (librettist) Calypso is composed on an even smaller scale than these models. This forty-minute opera explores a brief episode from the Odyssey, describing how Odysseus becomes shipwrecked on an island and is detained by Calypso (sung by Lotte Betts-Dean on December 5). His memory of Penelope compels him to leave, leaving Calypso heartbroken. Despite the short length of the work, I was struck by how little happens. Oedipus Rex and Elektra (to cite widely differing operatic approaches to Greek myths) have relatively little action, but are unified by a progressive buildup of tension that leads to a violent denouement. Calypso on the other hand merely reaches out her hand to the departing Odysseus—hardly a climatic moment for the audience (and unrealised in the staging of the performance I attended).

Lawson and Yeo have constructed a psychodrama where Calypso is torn between conflicting emotions, symbolised by her servant Uriel and the goddesses Athena and Artemis. Artemis, forcefully sung by Rosemary Ball, represents the will of the Gods, or as Yeo points out in his programme note, the desire for mythological characters to play out their lives according to fate. Athena, whose more sympathetic music was radiantly realised by Janet Todd, urges Calypso to ignore the will of the gods and enjoy Odysseus’s company. Uriel, sung by Michael Lampard, represents the real world, to which Calypso must return from her fantasies.

Lawson’s music is, bar to bar, beautiful. Making the most of his small ensemble, he was able to achieve a variety of surprising effects, displaying a keen knowledge of the limitations of his ensemble. The young soloists and instrumentalists seemed fairly comfortable with his lines, and navigated several tricky moments well. I found the Rosina Auditorium, with its ballroom acoustic, far too loud for the forces assembled, and yearned for a proscenium and an orchestra pit – luxuries clearly beyond the capabilities of the company.

It is clear that Yeo and Lawson’s creative conception exceeded their means. It may be the stench of Wagner that has descended over Melbourne that explains my puzzlement over the piece’s brevity. I thought the ideas, both musical and poetic, cried out for a longer and more detailed treatment than they received here. The music also called out for a larger ensemble, or at least some doublings on the strings, given their sustained lines. Smaller works are more difficult to realise than larger ones. Consider the forty minutes of Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex, a score that displays a complete unity of conception, where every part, from note to phrase to scene, logically develops a coherent argument. In Calypso I was presented with parts, sometimes intriguing, often skilful and always beautiful, that failed however to present a clear vision of the plight of the heroine.

Perhaps I was expecting more sex. Despite Lawson mentioning Britten’s Peter Grimes and Death in Venice as inspirations, I thought A Midsummer Night’s Dream a more obvious inspiration, for example in the combination of harp and harpsichord. Calypso‘s music sometimes resembled that of the latter work, but without the erotic excitement in Britten’s world of the fairies. I simply didn’t believe that Calypso wanted to bonk Odysseus. Instead, the static staging and somewhat awkward gestures of the singers imparted a severely chaste atmosphere to the proceedings.

Yeo’s libretto sometimes errs on the side of pretension (“as fragile as the candle made of glass” – a Game of Thrones reference?), but in general offers short images well-suited to musical setting. Lawson has the right idea about text-setting, but I was sometimes reminded of a quote from the Dream: “his speech was like a tangled chain; nothing
impaired, but all disordered.” This criticism could apply to much opera in English: having deciphered the singers’ diction, the audience is then faced with an abstract poetic text, a further obfuscating layer to be untangled, before they can even consider its relations with the music.

Performing opera on any scale is an extraordinarily expensive undertaking and new works often create issues that retard the rehearsal process immensely. Also, given the current economic and institutional climate in opera, producing new works must always result in a compromise (witness the recent trials of the Met’s commissioning programme). The Forest Collective has put together an accurate and enjoyable realisation of a new score, and is to be congratulated. Perhaps next time there will need to be more realistic expectations about what can be done with such small resources.

Alexander O’Sullivan

Partial Durations is a Matthew Lorenzon/RealTime joint project.

White Fungus Magazine

Reviews

 

White Fungus, issue 13
White Fungus, issue 13

White Fungus
Issue 13
by Alistair Noble

The world is full of odd magazines, weird journals, and sinister periodicals. White Fungus, a magazine published by New Zealanders living in Taiwan, is one of the oddest I’ve met for some time but it is odd in all the right ways. It is subversive and polished, intelligent and arty, attractive and unsettling—all of which was complicated for me by the fact that I bought my copy of this avowedly anti-establishment publication in the suffocatingly distinguished confines of the bookshop at the National Gallery of Australia. You probably won’t find this one at your local newsagent.

We are immediately struck by the pointed absence of advertising. It feels strange to pay $20 for an anti-consumerist magazine, but there it is. It does make us wonder how they pay their way. Presumably, that imported fashion mag you bought last week (90% advertisements for things you and I can’t afford) is making an eye-wateringly unnecessary profit but still, we wonder who is paying for what exactly in White Fungus? Certainly, I paid for it, and in return acquired nearly 200 pages of dense text in both Chinese and English, with a great many diverse and curious pictures.

Slowly, over the next few days, it dawned on me that I had rather more than I had bargained for. This is a magazine with as many words as a novel, with footnotes, with wonderful photographs and illustrations (and a comic story)… but all of that is just the surface detail. Underneath, this is a journal of ideas. In the same sense as slow food and similarly pleasurable, this is a slow mag: it takes time read, to ponder, to digest, and no doubt, it took considerable time to create.

The leading edge of Issue 13 is a series of large-scale feature articles. First, polymath Ron Drummond imagines the first woman on Mars, and much more besides. In what I think may be a very important piece of writing he dreams up a future for humanity that is soundly based in a realistically pessimistic view of our limited human capability but also proposes startling solutions to current problems. He draws inspiration from the Apollo space program—essentially a great work of Cold War period theatre—and notes that it cost each US tax payer only $120. How small our collective imaginations have become in the 21st century, bound by the petty fears our economic and political masters cultivate in us. Our parents used to worry that either reds or capitalist/imperialists would take over the world… we are reduced to scrounging a smaller tax bill for next year.

This is followed by a beautiful essay from Tessa Laird, ‘in praise of bats’. Lyrical, philosophical, and scientifically informed, this is a heartfelt and delightful work. We are drawn into Laird’s thoughts through the elegance of her writing and the palpable romance and peculiarity of her subject: ‘My love affair with bats began in the early 1990s when I visited Sydney’s botanical garden for the first time. Sydney is like Auckland through the looking glass, or on acid’. Well, indeed. Did you know that 2013 is the Year of the Bat? Now you do.

This magazine began as a very local New Zealand publication, now eccentrically translated to Taiwan. I feel that the editors retain a strong affinity for the local over the global, yet the publication has patently developed larger aspirations of its own: concerns range beyond both New Zealand and Taiwan to many other parts of the planet (contemporary music in the US, art in Indonesia, etc.) and taking sights on other parts of the solar system.

At the heart of Issue 13, a series of shorter articles pick up themes that circle around art, music, politics and society. White Fungus editor Ron Hanson writes about the contemporary art scene in Taiwan with curiosity and insight, Kurt Gottschalk provides an interesting introduction to the career of the strangely self-absorbed US composer Robert Ashley, while one ‘Mattin’ reviews some disturbing recent work of conceptual artist Hong-Kai (disturbing in so far as her art is based upon the exploitation of the work of other artists, whose wishes about the outcome of the collaboration are purposefully ignored).

As a virtue of the small editorial and production team, the magazine has a well-curated feel, with a focussed style and an energising undertow of consistent themes. If I find fault with this issue of White Fungus at all, it would be in this: for a magazine ostensibly concerned with society, arts, and politics, it could sometimes push a little further (and a little harder) beyond description and into the realm of analysis and critique. Hanson and Nick Yeck-Stauffer writing about the remarkable (and genuinely puzzling) musician Thomas Buckner exemplify this shortcoming by relying too much on stories of the “and then he met X who introduced him to XX and they went to XXX” type, without telling us what this means in relation to the artist’s work. In general, I appreciate a light touch in political writing—tending toward the implicit—but a few more signposts and moments of analysis would be helpful.

Having said all that, White Fungus (which, by the way, is traditionally a rare delicacy in Chinese cuisine) is a significant and ambitious publication that not only deserves your attention, but is also good for you. Get a copy, carry it around with you to read and re-read as antidote to the shiny ad-filled trash that cycles its way through commercial newsagencies on the way to landfill. This is a magazine to keep around and annotate in the margins (matte paper, so you can use a pencil), to savour and discuss.

Alistair Noble

Partial Durations is a Matthew Lorenzon/RealTime project.

Directly or Indirectly from a performer’s perspective

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Callum G'Froerer at Directly or Indirectly no. 1. Photo by Ella Blackburn
Callum G’Froerer at Directly or Indirectly no. 1. Photo by Ella Blackburn

Do participants have a unique perspective on their fields? How might a frank assessment by a peer contrast with an “objective” work of music criticism? For this review as part of our “experiments in music journalism” series we invited experienced improviser and composer Simon Charles to give his considered opinion on the new concert series curated by James McLean and Callum G’Froerer, Directly or Indirectly.

Directly or Indirectly no. 1
Callum G’Froerer, Dave Brown, Joe Talia and James McLean
Conduit Arts
20 July
By Simon Charles

When approached to write this review I expressed an immediate reluctance, due to feeling uncomfortable about assuming the role of ‘reviewer’ and this being somehow different that of fellow artist. There is undoubtedly a benefit in articulating ideas about the motivation behind a work, and evaluating its effectiveness, as this discourse provides a groundwork through which broader stylistic narratives can start to emerge. Hopefully, the greater scrutiny these motivations are placed under can lead to more meaningful and lucid work. However, I can’t help feeling a certain disdain that the role of a reviewer can have such influence shaping broader musical values. I’ve shied away from it, because I would prefer to contribute to the conversation about musical value and emergent stylistic trends through my own musical practice.

However, I’ve obviously agreed to write this review, and in doing so I feel that it’s necessary for me to write this short disclaimer; that I know all the performers involved in this performance personally, and that I am giving my critical perspective through the lens of fellow musician, rather than ‘reviewer’ as such. It may seem a little harsh and direct, and it might seem to be lacking in the evocative, although ultimately inconsequential, detail typical of many reviews.

Directly or Indirectly is an initiative by James McLean and Callum G’Froerer that will hopefully become a regular forum for the presentation of experimental and improvised music. Their first event was held at Conduit Arts and featured solo improvisations by G’Froerer, McLean, Joe Talia and David Brown.

G’Froerer’s set on solo trumpet was characterised by a range of ‘extended’ techniques, revealing the performer’s vast experience in performing contemporary notated compositions. To his credit, G’Froerer managed to move beyond these common techniques, demonstrating an inventiveness and sense of exploration. The piece was successful as a series of episodes, intent on exploring the various sonic possibilities of the trumpet. However, there was room in this investigation to undergo even greater rigor, so that the work could convey a more unified statement. There is an obvious rigor in G’Froerer’s technical mastery of the instrument—he is capable of producing and incredibly beautiful sonorities. However, I craved a musical objective toward which this exploration could be orientated.

James McLean at Directly or Indirectly no. 1. Photo by Ella Blackburn
James McLean at Directly or Indirectly no. 1. Photo by Ella Blackburn

James McLean’s set for solo drum kit demonstrated absolute technical mastery. He plays with remarkable control over the timbre and resonance of his kit. He is also skilled as an improvisor in letting ideas emerge, controlling the rate at which they morph, and is decisive as to when they should end. Perhaps this is a personal quip, revealing my own frustrations in playing a musical instrument, however I felt that both G’Froerer’s and McLean’s improvisations revealed a preoccupation with the instrument, that comes at the expense of an artistic agenda to which both performer and audience can equally relate.

McLean’s solo set did demonstrate a keen awareness of structure and development, however there was a stage in the performance at which he seemed to return to material that was similar to ideas that had already been explored. As he returned to this material, it was possible to engage with the work on the level of its technical proficiency, however I craved a more adventurous sentiment to unite the work as a musical whole.

Joe Talia’s set was marked by an incredible attention to subtle glitches and clicks that were framed in such a way so as to draw the ear toward these essential parts of the work. There were moments when the work momentarily lost focus, however Talia was always able to steer the work back into interesting territory, displaying a remarkable talent for a kind of deep ‘retrospective’ listening—being able to successfully contextualise preceding ideas. His vocabulary or pallet of sounds was varied enough to provide contingencies that enabled work to move in different directions, whilst complimenting an overall ‘sound-world’ that unified the work.

Dave Brown’s set for solo guitar conveyed the performer’s unique and idiosyncratic ‘voice’ that reflects not only a personal understanding of musical style, but a perspective on some of the typifying stylistic traits of Australia’s underground, experimental scene. This voice never lost focus, which seemed to be the overall point toward which the performance was directed. Many of the ideas presented in Brown’s performance were interesting because they drew attention toward imperfections in sound (such as feedback, buzzing from the amplifiers, etc.) thus revealing the performer’s sensitivity to their immediacy and tactility. Rather than ideas being filtered through a preoccupation with a traditional conception of technique, Brown’s performance seemed more concerned with structure—that the work may ‘resonate‘ musically through a narrative of distinct and multi-layered passages.

The overall event demonstrated the unique and immense challenge of performing a lengthy solo improvised work. On reflection, it is entirely different to a context involving other players, as it lacks a sense of dialogue or conversation and there is no opportunity for the individual to ‘step out’ and re-enter the piece. It is a challenging format for both performers and audience. However it was clear that this was in no way underestimated, and that Directly or Indirectly, as an organisation, are committed to meaningful and challenging musical ventures.

Gentleness-Suddenness, Bruce Crossman

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Gentleness-Suddenness
Campbelltown Arts Centre
29 June 2013
Review by James Nightingale

Campbelltown Arts Centre brought together four of Australia’s finest exponents of new classical music to perform a program of works by Sydney based composer Bruce Crossman. Crossman’s music brings facets of Asian musical idioms into what is fundamentally a contemporary classical musical language, creating a thoroughgoing cultural dialogue that takes the performers to their virtuosic limits.

Double Resonances, composed in 2008, is a duet for piano, played by Michael Kieran Harvey, and a world of percussion brought to life by Claire Edwardes. The contrasting resonances of the instruments themselves, and of the musics of east and west, form the defining feature of this evocative work. On the one hand, the density and harmonic homogeneity of the piano speaks from the Western concert hall, while on the other, Asian gongs, crotales, tam-tam, bowed vibraphone and cymbals carry the listener into the unique idiomatic sounds of metal—a batterie formed from the sounds of the Chinese, Korean, Japanese and Indonesian instruments that are now common in Western contexts.

Crossman favours a structural arc on which to pin his musical ideas. In Double Resonances, this arc travelled from a bleak stasis broken only by muted plucked piano through a dialogue between ‘jazz piano’ and ‘gamelan’ and back again. This journey was regularly punctuated by shared ensemble pulses/gestures that carried the weight and momentum of the work. Seeing the performers work with single-mindedness to carry through the complex instructions of the score was fascinating and rewarding for an audience that had made the journey on a rainy night to the CAC.

Violinist James Cuddeford joined Edwardes and Harvey for Not Broken Bruised Reed (composed in 2010), a work that also moved through an arc shaped structure. Here, the structure felt like Crossman had established a sound world based upon the natural fundamentals of the tones that was disrupted by the drama and journey of the work. The return of the original timbres of the work underlined the ritual space that the work inhabits, a sensation highlighted by the players speaking and whistling as they played.

After the interval Harvey, Cuddeford and Edwardes were joined by mezzo-soprano Lotte Latukefu for the premiere performance of Gentleness-Suddenness. This song cycle expands the artistic palette of the instruments with text, pictures and live electronics. As the title implies, the piece is about contrasts, although gentleness and suddenness are by no means antonyms of each other. Consisting of two parts—‘Water and Fire’ and ‘Spirit’—which again utilized the arc structure which framed the musical drama. The musical content in this piece, however, was directed more particularly at the task of giving colour and nuance to the texts. The text, which was assembled by Crossman from fragments of the Bible and Chinese Opera (specifically from the Peony Pavilion), was in effect a love poem, brought to life by Latukefu’s voice which travelled effortlessly through a joyful range of colours and textures.

The visual element of the performance, featuring photographs by David Cubby and film by Iqbal Barkat, attempted to provide a context to the musical discourse, however, I for one found it difficult to take my attention away from the performers. Perhaps the musical details and language of the work were more obvious to my ears than to others? The experiment should be persisted with, as I’m sure that this kind of creative collaboration will lead to further artistic insights for all involved.

Hearing several of Crossman’s pieces in succession provided a clear window into his aesthetic—space, clarity, action and reaction—and language, one that incorporates aspects of Asian music expressed through the idiomatic sounds of Western instruments. Harvey, Edwardes, Cuddeford and Latukefu took painstaking care to bring out the ensemble and individual details that cram Crossman’s scores. The works were recorded during the week prior to the concert and there will be many among the audience, like myself, who will be keen to have a second listen to the performances of these mysterious and subtle pieces. This was an engrossing and satisfying concert of music that displayed the highest artistic ambition and craft on the part of composer and performers.

Kupka’s Piano, Giants Behind Us: German Music and its Discontents

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Kupka’s Piano
Giants Behind Us: German Music and its Discontents
10 May
Review by Jocelyn Wolfe

On Friday night Kupka’s Piano’s series of expeditions seeking innovative works from different countries led them back to the ‘spirit realm’, the place of geniuses, the land in which the great colonisation of western classical music originated—Germany. The title “Giants Behind Us” of course echoes Brahms’ trembling in the shoes of Beethoven. All the composers in Kupka’s “Giants” program are touched in one way or another by this history in presenting new works (including Australian and world premieres) in a new century, which, in Lilienstern’s words, has them all living in an internationalised, individualised world, learning from each other, trusting in their own musical ideas and perception. There was no trembling in the air in this concert. These were strong, confident statements of musical futures for all concerned, composers and performers alike. But there was nonetheless a sense of the long arm of tradition no matter what disaffection may reside in the creators. Flenady, in the program notes, describes this as a diverse expression unified in integrity and intent. For Rosenberger, it’s the “connective tissue” of events, actions, and people; and for von Lilienstern, it’s the connective tissue of Constructivism.

Before the concert, I was reminded in a conversation of the play currently showing in Brisbane—Red. It’s all about Rothko. Yes, Kupka is the painterly inspiration for the ensemble, but it’s to Rothko that I look for what the connective tissue was all about in this concert. His rectangular fields of colour—predominantly one colour—and the play of light open up to inquiring eyes. Just look—so much detail in fragments, layers, and textures within; and yet, after all, you can say that the painting is red. Across the pieces heard in this concert, there is this kind of canvas. Even gestures in the playing bespoke brush strokes of a painter, Rothko not Pollock—decisive, disciplined, and vigorous.

The opening piece by Wolfram Shurig (2005), a trio for piano (Alex Raineri), sax (Samantha Mason) and percussion (Angus Wilson), is a vibrant layering of relations between instruments, embedded in a rhythmic flux held firm in the hands of Wilson’s skillful mallets. It moves to a slow moving, pared down piano solo conveyed by Raineri with gossamer precision, until the return of the sax in a new guise—a melodic fragment ever so poetic. And the music simply breathes a few last breaths and is gone.

Brisbane-based Peter Clark, forging a future in composition and conducting with scholarships in conducting at Lucerne Academy under his belt, offers a piece for flute (Hannah Reardon-Smith), clarinet (Macarthur Clough), violin (Alethea Coombe), cello (Danielle Bentley) and vibraphone (Wilson), in what the composer calls version I of In Lines, in Time (2013). We are invited by Clark, who also conducts the piece, to consider whether the 5 instrumental lines, each rendered in a different meter, intersect or are heard each in their own right in a layering of sound. I find a weaving line, usually led by one of the five with its different timbres, melodic fragments, and rhythmic positioning, making a whole—sometimes broken, sometimes sparse, and at times rich and dense, but utterly coherent. The different underlying meters seem not to intrude in the sense of wholeness and there are definitive moments of absolute metric unity in the score, nicely articulated.

Before we hear version II, Isabel Mundry’s piece (1999) simply called Composition for Flute and Percussion, comes as a kind of intimate interlude. This is clever—nice programming. Its timbres of flute, (its percussive qualities are astutely teased out by Reardon-Smith) and various percussion, under the bandaged mallets of the inventive Wilson (yes, he found bandages to provide the best timbral qualities for the percussion palette of this piece) takes us into the surface textures of our canvas. This is a beautifully articulated interplay between the two, a lacy infrastructure with suspended moments and motivic patterns, attended by the ‘ching’ of a triangle.

And now the return of In Lines, in Time, this time version II, again conducted by Clark. This is more expansive, bringing back the piano, and has the quixotic vertical definition of harmony without harmonic definition. There’s a great balance in the ensemble, so many finely tuned ears and eyes focused on Clark’s brush strokes.

Soprano, (Tabatha McFayden, in splendid red), clarinet (Clough) and triangle (Clark) take to the stage in vehement conversation with Gerald Resch’s Splitter (2002). The composer’s note, hoping that the listener will not perceive the strict skeleton underlying the structure of the piece, which is based on a text by Austrian avant-garde poet Waltraud Seidlhofer, but will simply feel that “the musical things that happen have a certain logical alliance” is barely needed. The ear is completely tuned to the conversation—the clarinet resounds emphatically in short bursts and the soprano’s vocalisation shimmers, shouts, and whispers in retaliation. Clark’s scintillating triangle almost steals the show.

Katharina Rosenberger describes her solo for saxophone Phragmocone (2006/10) as having contours of melodic lines and overarching rhythmic incidents closely following the “logarithmic spirals” of a nautilus shell”. The effect is introspective of those spaces and lines, feeling the raw surface of unprocessed acoustic sound, thanks to Mason’s sensitive interpretation. But this is not the only time that I need to close my eyes for the full effect, as new music notations tend to require a great presence of paper and stands on stage.

On to the end–von Lilienstern’s The Severed Garden (2009) brings the core group of Kupka’s Piano together along with the fine bow of Danielle Bentley. This piece prompts me to wonder what Schoenberg, rather than Beethoven, would make of all of this now. I recall Alex Ross’s comments in The Rest is Noise: “Schoenberg’s atonal music is not all sound and fury. Periodically, it discloses worlds that are like hidden valleys between mountains, a hush descends, the sun glimmers in fog, shapes hover …” . While this piece is not a legacy of Schoenberg, it at the same times evokes things hidden and heard, there and not there, things that expand and shrink. It’s all there in the red canvas. So Lilienstern’s initial fury gets mellowed, the bass clarinet is genuinely grounding and the music takes on, as the composer describes, a more singing, symbolic quality. There is an unmistakable funereal finish, prescient with the sound of the bass drum.

Canvas complete. Context painted. Six composers writing at the beginning of the twenty-first century sharing to some extent a pedigreed genealogy that is fundamentally German—a genealogy not lost even on Australian Peter Clark. How does their canvas differ yet resonate with something implicitly German? Rosenberger has her finger on it saying:

I realised that for many years I was trying to run away from a Germanic contemporary approach to composition, which I perceived as overly rigid and kopflastig (‘top-heavy, overly intellectual’). I wanted to involve the body more, the senses, the physicality of sound … but I also recognise that I never shook off an obsession over details and how these relate to the entirety of a piece, and passing out the inner logic of a composition. (From Interview with Katharina Rosenberger)

Kupka’s Piano, still in their youthful twenties, bring a discerning maturity to their program and performance.