For ANAM’s opening concert of the year Stanley Dodds, newly-appointed principal conductor of the Berlin Symphony Orchestra, led the cohort in a programme of meteorological proportions. George Butterworth’s A Shropshire Lad is a bombastic early-twentieth-century romp. Written after the Second Boer War, the work’s folk-inflected romanticism has become familiar to concert-goers throughout these two years of commemorations of the First World War. The piece is a reminder that the language of grief changes and that composers are constantly inventing new ways of expressing the extremely complex emotions associated with trauma, loss and mourning.
A case in point being Wilfred Lehmann’s Symphonic Requiem for the Child Victims of War from 1994. The score has been revived by ANAM’s librarian Philip Lambert, who heroically typeset the piece over fourteen months. Where Butterworth’s war is one of misplaced heroism, Lehmann uses the post-World War Two trope of senseless mechanisation. Menacing strings descend upon scratched cymbals and motoric snare drums. An alienating cluster of woodwinds combine with an eerie bowed vibraphone. Lehmann paints this terrifying environment so that we empathise all the more with the Symphonic Requiem‘s instrumental “protagonists”: a violin, a mandolin and a glockenspiel. The solo violin appears first, its lament accompanied by a sombre, marching orchestra. The mandolin and glockenspiel enter, playing a sort of hide and seek punctuated by cheeky portamenti. As the background becomes more chaotic, the voices are separated. The mandolin and violin “run” away among blasts from the timpani. This is a piece for current wars as much as past ones. It is about refugee children and those who don’t get to be refugees because they die before they can escape. Shane Chen performs the solo violin part masterfully, executing an extremely virtuosic cadenza before rejoining the plodding orchestral march. Everybody plays the violin’s lament from the beginning, but the violin has the last word with a bit of a jig.
After the vibrant characterisations of Lehmann’s Symphonic Requiem, it was difficult to settle in to Carl Nielsen’s “The Inextinguishable.” A bloated opening orchestral statement thankfully gives way to a mysterious and compelling cello solo (all the more compelling because of the lightning from the storm brewing outside the hall). Another bouncing, bolshy orchestral episode gives way to a thin, tense moment in the strings. Once more, the weather helped, with the storm buffeting the building from all sides. This was the perfect environment in which to hear the Symphony’s central wind octet—with extra-musical wind.
The Inextinguishable
Students of Australian National Academy of Music
Shane Chen, violin
Conducted by Stanley Dodds
George Butterworth, A Shropshire Lad; Wilfred Lehmann, Symphonic Requiem for the Child Victims of War; Carl Nielsen, Symphony No. 4, “The Inextinguishable.”
Partial Durations is a Matthew Lorenzon/RealTime joint project.
Following Pink Violin and Violin Music in the Age of Shopping, not violin music presents the latest scholarship from the rarefied field of Rosenbergology. For those who have not had the pleasure of delving into the intellectual humus of the Rosenberg family tree, the Rosenbergs are a clan of physicists, mathematicians and, of course, violinists who all share the same first initial “J.” The family’s pseudonymous scholars are keen culture critics and dialecticists, ready to lament the decline of Western Civilization while decrying its inherent contradictions. The book revels in collapse and tragedy, beginning with a post-apocalyptic portrait of one Dr Rosenberg reinventing the Doric column and ending with a suicide.
The material form of the book develops this sense of cultural amnesia. It is an unwieldy book, lacking even that most basic of bibliographic conveniences: page numbers. There is no table of contents, nor even a list of contributors. Book sections can only be distinguished by their idiosyncratic typesetting. Each chapter has a different font (though Comic Sans does not make an appearance, I was disappointed to find. Even scientists at CERN use it!). The glossy, low-resolution cover betrays its origins in a print-on-demand self-publishing house. It is, in short, a dysfunctional book.
Which is precisely the point. Contributors were briefed to explore dysfunctionalism as a theme. In one chapter “Dr Robert Ostertag” gives the principle of dysfunctionalism as that “[…] a machine performing a task badly is aesthetically superior to a human performing the task wel.” The phrase is clipped because Ostertag’s responses are subject to Twitter’s 140-character limitation. The book is thus a product of the axiom that cheap-and-quick printing and cut-and-paste formatting are aesthetically superior to more manual production values.
Ostertag’s definition of dysfunctionalism only covers cases where automatism is pitted against human agency in the performance of a given task, such as in the construction of a print-on-demand book. But the cases of dysfunctionalism explored by the contributors are usually those in which a machine poorly translates or transmits human intentions (If I may add my own example, consider the joy derived from watching crappy robots fight each other compared to their better-greased counterparts). For instance, Ostertag cites an installation where Dr Rosenberg attempts to play a violin using ECG data. Another author relates the dysfunctional scenario of a Maoist TED talk by Judd Rosenberg. Plagiarism, new and old violins, jazz clubs, composition competitions and the instrumental innovations of violin metal are also evaluated as dysfunctional mediums.
The authors explore language itself as a dysfunctional medium. Academic language, theory language, art language, even mathematical language (the book is a pleasure for those on hand-waving terms with pure mathematics) all come under parodic scrutiny. One chapter is shockingly written in “Engrish,” with “l”s and “r”s interchanged. Another frequently drops articles. These caricatures of the language of people from Non-English Speaking Backgrounds are made all the more offensive by the use of pseudonyms as dysfunctional names. The pseudonym does not point the reader to any particular context. It is a reader’s dead-end. This is dangerous when a text hinges on irony, on knowing that an author “doesn’t really mean it.”
Dysfunctional names leads to dysfunctional readings, and here I cannot accept that dysfunction aesthetically trumps function. Only after clarifying with Jon Rose that the two chapters in question were indeed written by a Japanese and a Slovakian contributor respectively and that exploring dysfunctional language was an essential part of their brief was I able to read the contributions with any sort of sympathy.
There is yet the disfunctionality of culture critique that plagues the book. Lazy generalisations mar the contributors’ clever jabs at contemporary culture. One author paints a juvenile caricature of the Australian suburbs as a cultural wasteland devoid of music-making. Rosenberg is driven around the suburb of “Roselands” in a taxi and promises to double the fare if he can find somebody performing music. He resorts to door knocking after failing to find music at pubs and malls, but house after house is devoid of music-making. I call this caricature juvenile because I entertained it myself as a teenager in the southern suburbs of Adelaide. But then again, I was playing the cello every day from the back room of our triple-fronted, cream brick home, as were many other kids in the neighbourhood. I lament with the author the steady decline in public musicking since the nineteenth century, but they would better pose the question of why amateur music making is still largely delineated by class rather than shaming the working class, or indeed the economic middle class, for having apparently given up on violins. The Muslim taxi driver in this chapter is also a caricature the purpose of which mystifies me.
Several chapters in the book are quite tasteless, which is again part of the book’s design. In response to my inquiries about the book’s portrayals of class and religion, Rose stressed the point that he exercised no censorship in curating the contributions. Tasteless, too, is the Violin Museum inspiring the contributions, which features several exhibits that cannot be included among the thirty-one pages of pictures of the Museum. The museum, which actually exists, was once situated in the town of Violin in Slovakia. Rose has passed a dragnet through contemporary culture, from the high to the low and the experimental, picking up authentic Rosenberg modified violins and art works, as well as violin-themed nick-knacks and smut. After threats to the museum director’s life, the museum is currently homeless, but will soon be exhibited in Berlin, Bologna and Australia. Whatever the anti-censorship ideals behind the book, the use of dysfunctional names will lead the book to be judged on face value. The book’s irony will be flattened out.
The Arcko Symphonic Ensemble’s final programme of 2014 delved into the influence of two very different locales upon the ensemble, its conductor Timothy Phillips, and its composers. From Canberra, where a generation or two of composers and pianists have been raised by Larry Sitsky including Alistair Noble, Rohan Phillips and Joy Lee. The State University of Music in Karlsruhe, Germany, also introduced Phillips to Wofgang Rihm and Stephan Schneider.
With its refined swathes of musical texture, Noble’s cycle of three pieces entitled Glasteppich betrays a fascination with the music of Morton Feldman. Glasteppich I was written in Basel, where Noble lived for half a year while researching his searingly acute series of analyses of Feldman’s music. Noble had a folder of left-over sketch material and set about using them to make a new piece. The idea for the piece coalesced when he was examining homemade rugs made from recycled materials in Lenzburg. Inspired by the notion of weaving the different strands of his compositional output together, he imagined a rug made from a material that could be “variously transparent, translucent or opaque” (to quote the programme), such as glass. A few pointers from Beat Furrer later and Noble was ready to deploy his arsenal of weaving, layering, erosion and erasure processes in his Glasteppich or “glass carpet.”
So much for the piece’s origin and inspiration, which are as ordinary as any. Composers (including Feldman) frequently reuse and cobble together old materials. Who hasn’t had a couple of pointers from Beat Furrer? The effect in this case, however, is marvellous. Michael Kieran Harvey gave the piece all the three-dimensional complexity it asks for, with its murky bass tones; lonely, brittle, beating chords and fragments of harmonic voice-leading. I have never seen anybody reach into a piano so insouciantly to pluck out a crystal-clear high tone. There was even something smooth about the way Harvey knocked on the bottom of the piano.
Superb performances were thick on the ground, with Kim Tan’s rendition of Glasteppich II for solo flute. After Glasteppich I, Noble envisioned two pieces that would fold the material inwards and outwards respectively. These pieces became Glasteppich II and III. The in-folded piece for solo flute is extremely dense, challenging the performer’s ability to make sense of the score, which is spread over several staves. Tan’s interpretation also gave the impression of complete control, professing the work with a beautiful agility that was aided by the friendly acoustic of the Northcote Town Hall. Tonal sounds are certainly not out of bounds for Noble, and the appearance of clearly diatonic fragments made for interesting pills within the irregular fabric of the piece. “Balance” and “restraint” are the words that best come to mind to describe Noble’s first two Glasteppich pieces, words that unfortunately cannot be said of the third.
Whereas the textures of the solo Glasteppiche were consistent, Noble took some liberties with Glasteppich III for the Arcko ensemble. A large-scale form emerges when the piano returns in the middle of the piece with material reminiscent of GlasteppichI. In doing so, the audience takes leave of the virtuosically-dark texture established so far. It is hard to explain just how grim this piece is. Eerie close string harmonies meld with the punctual piano and make futile pizzicato interjections. The piece just drifts along in this listless way, with directionless, whole-tone-based chords. It is a piece that benefits from its duration, holding its particular brand of desparation together through the startling appropriateness of each sound. Well there you go, restraint again. And a ternary form can hardly be called unbalanced. It must be said that superlative performances were also the norm here, with the strings in particular placing and shaping each note within the texture like a mournful jewel.
In Wolfgang Rihm’s terrifyingly-loud Chiffre II, the composer takes silence as a positive rather than a negative space, as “to be beaten.” The ensemble strains against the confines of silence in all registers, filling the hall with infernal dotted rhythms, string-scrubbing and endless bass drum and timpani. The piano, when it is heard, sounds absolutely tiny next to the gargantuan ensemble. But whenever a breath is taken, silence flows back in like water.
Stephan Schneider’s The Message is Simple sounds like a 1990s electro hit crossed with the House of Cards theme. It is a political piece of music in a popular idiom. The piece gives the lie to its moral, which is that “There are no borders in music, there are no frontiers in art. As an artist there is no reason to adopt the notion of being protected by borders.” Why is it that a popular idiom signifies borderlessness? Is it because everybody is supposed to like it (they don’t. Even the world of popular music divides itself into limitless antagonistic subgenres)? Or is it because the only borderlessness being advocated today is that of the free-trade agreements that ensure the frictionless passage of goods (and music commodities)? As a composer, of course one may range freely among musical materials, but many electronic music artists would staunchly defend the border between their music and Schneider’s.
Rohan Phillips’ Sarabande has a lot of interesting parts, but hangs together rather loosely. This may be tied to the piece’s composition over a number of years and its inspiration from baroque dance suites with their fleeting characters. It is billed as a piece for piano and small ensemble, though the guitar part (Geoffrey Morris) has a role that at least equals the piano (Joy Lee). I particularly enjoyed the simplicity of the violin part at the beginning, with its single note acting as a pivot for the harmony around it. The cowbells are a playful feature, one of the many almost independent-sounding parts to the piece. I imagined myself lost in a sea of music, invited to listen to one part and then another. In a rare moment of inter-instrumental solidarity the French horn reaches out and continues the resonance of the timpani.
Karlsruhe-Canberra
The Arcko Symphonic Ensemble
Northcote Town Hall
13 December, 2014
Programme: Alistair Noble, Glasteppich I, II, II; Rohan Phillips, Sarabande; Stephan Schneider, The Message is Simple…; Wolfgang Rihm, Chiffre II.
Carolyn Connors and Jenny Barnes in Youphonium. Photo Meghan Scerri.
For three balmy nights the Forest Collective filled the Abbotsford Convent with film, dance and music. The inaugural Flooding in the Garden festival included improvised extended vocals by Jenny Barnes and Carolyn Connors, dance by Elanor Webber, pop-elf William Elm and an independent film series also curated by Webber. The florid programme also included a series of contemporary notated works as part of Forest Collective’s own multi-disciplinary concert and Benjamin Anderson’s bass trombone recital Mixed Mediums.
Elanor Webber’s The Texture of It. Photo Meghan Scerri
Moving between the distressed art-deco rooms of the Convent, each new medium was an unexpected delight. William Elm festooned the Rosina Auditorium with fairy lights and lamps for his set of puckish accordion duets. The breathtaking physicality of Webber’s The Texture of It exploded in the Chapel. The venue was lit from inside and outside the building, recreating lighting effects from different times of the day. Rays of afternoon light streamed in through the stained-glass windows, nocturnal lamp-light lit the contorted bodies of the dancers and a diffuse morning glow filled the space. An ensemble including Benjamin Harrison, Rob McDonald and Jennifer Mills performed instrumental textures in tight coordination with the dancers, leaving one guessing where composition left off and improvisation began. Later that night Webber transformed the hall into the Chapel of the Independent Film, with a series of experimental and cine-dance films exploring shape, colour and texture.
Mixed Mediums
In Benjamin Anderson’s recital, the audience was confronted with a projection of the movie-star face of General MacArthur and a recording of his 1962 speech to the Corp of Cadets. MacArthur declared the dawn of a “new age”: the space age. So too was it a new age for Australia, one defined by the move away from our traditional British defenders and towards tighter military ties with the United States. Perhaps no moment exemplified this shift more than MacArthur fleeing the Philippines to Australia in 1942. A plaque at a disused railway platform in the miniscule South Australian town of Terowie marks the spot where he famously claimed he would return to the Philippines. He quickly assumed control of the Australian Forces as Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in the South-West Pacific Area, setting up his base in Brisbane. So, this digression argues, we have at least some reason to project this speech in a hall in Melbourne today. Anderson walks in dressed in a military parade uniform and begins playing Robert Erickson’s General Speech. Erickson transcribes MacArthur’s speech for the bass trombone, focussing mainly on the pitch of MacArthur’s voice (admittedly he has to exaggerate, MacArthur’s delivery being fairly monotone). There are scored coughs and sips of water, the only relief from what is a fairly dull setting of the text. The piece was composed in 1969 and I can imagine composers today, with their greater familiarity with extended techniques, would make a more inventive transcription. It would be good to hear several different transcriptions of the speech by different composers, or perhaps transcriptions of a more recent speech by an Australian politician. As the musicologist Linda Kouvaras explored in a recent paper at the Musicological Society of Australia’s annual conference, Youtube is already rife with this sort of musical play. With General Speech, Anderson established a theme of the concert: the bass trombone as caricature. Anderson is a tall young performer with loads of character, making him the ideal performer for these works.
The parodic bass trombone reached its zenith with Andrew Aronowicz’s The Physiology of Taste. Here the bass trombone is the nineteenth-century gastronome Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin as he slurps and degustates his way through his famous treatise The Physiology of Taste. The first movement, “The pleasures of the initial tasting,” consists aptly of tentative, pattering little bursts occasionally punctuated by a sucking smack of the lips. Everything about this movement is about the lips and the tip of the tongue. The second movement, “Relishing the Texture and Composition of the Delicacies” explores longer tones of different timbres, from the purest high note to the instrument’s flatulent bass. It was at this point in the concert that I questioned why I ever go to concerts by established ensembles, younger performers being often more inventive, daring and downright humourous. The third movement, “The Savours,” presents the four tastes: salty, sour, bitter and sweet. Anderson brilliantly executed the dry, shaking, stabbing “puh puh puh” of salt; a puckered and wheezing sourness (exaggerated by a nasal double mute); the cracklingly-low bitterness of espresso coffee (as Brillat-Savarin writes of Melbourne’s favourite way to make coffee: “I have also tried to make coffee in a high pressure boiling apparatus; all I obtained however was a fluid intensely bitter, and strong enough to take the skin from the throat of a Cossack.”). Aronowicz’s depiction of sweetness attempted to reflect “every refinement of temptation” with which, Brillat-Savarin writes, we must use to convince the diner, who has already satisfied their hunger, to indulge. The final movement, “The Irrepressible Urge to Gorge,” represented Brillat-Savarin’s least favourite diner, one who cannot resist overeating and getting drunk. Anderson played higher and louder in between great big gulping sounds. I imagined the waiter in the Monty Python scene (“but it is wafer-thin”) as Anderson finished with a series of tiny toots and then a burp.
In Charles MacInnes’ cirque, “stuck in traffic, an out of work clown tweets about his daily annoyances to a growing audience hungry for the next distraction and amusement.” The impression I got from Anderson’s repeated checking of his phone and restless fidgeting was more of a music student struggling to get down to their daily practice (or perhaps a PhD student writing reviews instead of their thesis).
Character pieces were only one facet of Anderson’s immense programme. Wuorinen’s trio for bass trombone, tuba and double bass ranges between low, pulsing phrases and lyrical episodes exploring the instruments’ baritone registers. The brighter double bass played by Miranda Hill cut through the mellower brass with agile lines. It is a transparent and self-contained chamber work out of place, perhaps welcomely-so, in this character-driven programme.
Elliott Hughes’ Underdogs, with regrets is about iterations of forms, inspired by Jasper Johns’ exhibition “Regrets,” in which he recreated a photograph in multiple mediums. Hughes repeated gestures inspired by Charles Mingus with several different mutes and musical variations. It was not unlike the way one mulls over and replays regrettable moments in different lights. The piece uses subtle and tasteful uses of electronics. The spatialisation of captured trombone sounds expanded slowly over the duration of the piece, subtly producing a chorus of distant-sounding, growling and erupting brass.
Martijn Padding’s Schumann’s Last Procession for bass trombone and harp slowly takes apart a loping, bluesy duet where the two instruments also play a kick drum and a hihat. The piece devolves until all that is left is the percussion and a low, drawn-out note from the trombone. I only learned afterward of the programme: the walks Schumann was allowed to take to the statue of Beethoven in Bonn while he was receiving brutal, experimental treatments at Endenich, Europe’s first psychiatric hospital.
Peter De Jager’s Timescales for solo trombone and lighting design is comfortably dense. I quite liked the choice of hyper-real purple, green and blue lighting for different moments in the piece, not unlike an updated version of Scriabin’s colour organ. In another Scriabin-esque gesture, the piece presents three formal levels depicting cosmic, human and atomic time scales, from drawn-out modal pitches to expressive harmonies to chromatic interjections. In terms of pitch and rhythmic material it was by far the most complex piece on the programme and well deserving (if not requiring) another listen.
The bass trombone rarely receives a whole recital unto itself, though as one audience member mentioned after the show: “I didn’t know what to expect, then I realised it was a music recital.” As the title “Mixed Mediums” further suggests, Anderson’s programme encompassed so much more. Costume, lighting, performative elements and even food (petit fours representing the four flavours were served at interval) contributed to this series of new works by young composers, keeping the audience thinking for the duration of the concert.
The Mingled Yarn
The Mingled Yarn. Photo Meghan Scerri
The mixed-medium theme continued with Forest Collective’s theatre-and-music programme The Mingled Yarn. The five contemporary soliloquies based by Samuel Yeo inspired by characters from Shakespeare’s plays were in turns powerful (Sam Lavery’s Caesar) and hilarious (Julia Lamb’s Juliet). Musically, the Forest Collective took a little time to get their ear in. Was this because of the abrupt beginning, where Lawson walked in and immediately started conducting? It was a clever, informal gesture in the streaming afternoon light of the backstage area of the Rosina Auditorium, but intonation issues plagued William Byrd’s “Kyrie” from the Mass for Three Voices, which was played by violin, viola and cello with occasional humming from the vocalists in the style of John McCaughey. By the time of Evan Lawson’s Winter Canticle, however, the ensemble was focussed and responding well to Lawson’s energetic and inspired conducting. the piece is a reworking of previous material, taking the emotional structure of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale as a formal basis. An introductory episode of drones and vocalises gives way to an astounding rhythmic explosion. The three vocalists declare “Winter!” as febrile string phrases scurry about. The voices speak and whisper phrases from the play in an emotional polyphony, accompanied by energetic scrubbing in the strings. Lawson has learnt well from his twentieth-century heroes including Britten and Vaughan Williams; even at its dynamic peak the ensemble is always colourful, transparent and mobile. Throughout the concert, the three female vocalists each had their time to shine. Christine Storey’s performance of Flow my Tears was a true interpretation, with an expressive reading of the text and appropriate tempo and use of vibrato. Stefanie Dingnis’ rendition of My Thoughts are Wing’d presented an uncommonly clear and sensitive voice, while Rosemary Ball’s Chant D’Ariel by Arthur Honegger was a tour de force.
The Flooding in the Garden Festival is an excellent way to spend some warm late-spring nights in Melbourne. While the diversity of the programme is appreciated, perhaps the organisation is currently a bit diffuse. A single schedule and map of the Convent would have made planning one’s evenings easier. Here’s hoping this was the first of many.
Flooding in the Garden Festival
Abbotsford Convent
11–13 December, 2014
The view from Kew. You can’t see them very well, but the fruit bats are stepping out for the evening.
Throughout 2015 the virtuosic Peter Dumsday will be exploring the piano sonatas of Aleksandr Skryabin. Of the entire romantic repertoire, this body of work has had perhaps the greatest influence upon twentieth-century music. Skryabin’s later works explore an almost axiomatically-founded harmonic world with an imaginative gift for texture. His earliest sonatas, composed in the early 1890s, show him prodding the boundaries of tonal harmony. In his first programme of the Ascent series, Dumsday separated Skryabin’s first two sonatas with the Bagatelles of that other great alternative to Wagner, Béla Bartók. At the centre of the programme, destroying and recreating the romantic gestures surrounding it, was Australian composer Helen Gifford’s Shiva the auspicious one.
The Stuart & Sons studio grand piano. Note the extended range, fourth pedal and striking grain of the sassafras timber.
Dumsday followed in the footsteps of Melbourne’s Chamber Made Opera in performing within a domestic setting rather than a concert hall. While this is always refreshing for the audience, the real draw card to Tony and Fiona’s remarkable modernist home in Kew was their Stuart & Sons studio grand piano. The banded, blond-wood piano has an extended range and a fourth pedal that brings the hammers closer to the strings for softer playing. The instrument is also not cross-strung allowing, so the theory goes, for a more sustained, singing tone. The silvery treble was particularly noticeable in the first Scriabin sonata, while the end of the Bartok Bagatelles showed off a growling bass.
I must confess that I am eminently unqualified to review this show. First of all I rode to the concert and the enormous hill on Studley Park Road delayed my arrival, meaning that I missed the beginning of the Allegro con fuoco of Scriabin’s first sonata. Then, as Dumsday ventured into the pensive depths of the final Funebre movement, my phone rang at top volume and, startled, I leapt through the nearest door, which proceeded to slam behind me. Cowering in shame behind a garden wall, I missed the applause at the end of the movement and had to sit out the first bracket of Bartók Bagatelles.
Even from my vantage point by a water feature, I could tell that Dumsday’s focus and clarity came to the fore in Bartók’s miniatures. Dumsday brought out a humour in the sprightly Allegretto molto capriccioso too often missed. The highlight of the concert was by far Skryabin’s second sonata, and not just because I heard all of it. From the opening questioning phrases to the andante movement’s glittering, cascading finish (thank you Stuart & Sons!), Dumsday exerted breathtaking control and craft. The Presto gave Dumsday a chance to display what he sees as the key to Skryabin’s music: An especially dextrous left hand; the result of an injury sustained two years before the composition of the second sonata that required the composer to focus exclusively on left-hand technique. In the middle of all this, Gifford’s Shiva stood as a reminder that this tradition of bold, demanding piano music is alive and well today. I’m looking forward to following Dumsday down the Skryabin rabbit-hole over the next twelve months.
Peter Dumsday
Ascent concert series
Concert 1: Ultra-romantic
A private location, shh.
9 December, 2014
Programme: Skryabin, Sonata no. 1 in F minor, Op. 6; Bartók, Bagatelles, Op. 6; Helen Gifford, Shiva the auspicious one; Skryabin, Sonata no. 2 (Sonata-Fantasy) in G-sharp minor, Op. 23.
Partial Durations is a RealTime/Matthew Lorenzon joint project.
Peter de Jager is among the most versatile and virtuosic young Australian pianists, as much at home in a baroque ensemble as he is playing one of Chris Dench’s more difficult works. De Jager is also an imaginative composer, a skill that he showcased in the concert Arianna on a Bridge of Stars by contrasting two brand new works with compositions by Brett Dean and Claudio Monteverdi.
The audience was first serenaded by the French horn of Georgia Ioakimidis-MacDougall, a prolific young performer who is currently completing her fellowship with the Australian National Academy of Music. In the solo horn piece Arianna Meandering, fragments of Monteverdi’s Lamento d’Arianna pass through convoluted chromatic territory, displacing the audience from the MRC salon to another realm. It was an excellent preparation for Dean’s captivating Night Window, which celebrated its twentieth birthday last year. A remarkable aspect of the concert was that the vintage Dean sounded characteristic of De Jager’s spiky, muscular repertoire, while the De Jager sounded like one of Dean’s more moderate contemporary works! Like Carter’s Night Fantasies and Richard Meale’s Incredible Floridas, Night Windows has an unmistakable creative optimism that shines through the musical bureaucracy. Why would someone move on from that? The performance was, of course, the day of Gough Whitlam’s death and I couldn’t help getting a little emotional about the lack of creative vision in both politics and music today. We now find ourselves more in the condition of the piece’s fourth episode, where a bunch of quibbling, nibbling little lines eat away at the piece’s integrity. Towards the end of the piece, a descending line in the bass clarinet and viola reflects one of the most recognisable baroque gestures of mourning and loss. It was a well-placed segue, as Hana Crisp proceeded to sing the Lamento d’Arianna, the only surviving fragment from Monteverdi’s second opera L’Arianna.
The finale was De Jager’s extended work Model Universes. To help follow the piece, De Jager provided the audience with a sheet of notational fragments grouped into five categories: architecture, cosmos, nature, machine and city. Each motif had an evocative label like “serene polygon birds trace arcs through a pearly sky,” “a sculpture forest of towering monoliths,” and my favourite, “wandering the universe on a bridge of stars, passing fountain-like galaxies, each a spray of mint and lime.” Now, it is not impossible that De Jager actually swims in a 256-colour sea-punk sonic fantasy. An apocryphal story: Somebody turns to De Jager and says “I can’t find a harmony for this line.” De Jager responds “you can turn it off?” But some of De Jager’s ideas struggled to convince. I certainly do not have a permanently-harmonising chorus in my head, but I felt that the relationship between the voice and the ensemble suffered from too many long vocal lines over fast-moving instrumental material. The voice rarely joined the fray, leaving it commenting from one side of the room. Or perhaps, continuing the bad-photoshop theme, the voice was awkwardly superimposed over the electric-blue background. On my sheet, I have written ticks all over the “nature” section, in particular the ecstatic polyphony of quaver triplets and crotchet downward glissandi. The gloss reads “a frothing, teeming membrane of cells, splitting, merging, mutating, and eventually bursting after an ambush by an army of phages. The joyful dance of life spirals on.”
Arianna on a Bridge of Stars
The Melbourne Recital Centre
21 October, 2014
Programme: Peter de Jager, Arianna Meandering (WP); Brett Dean, Night Window; Monteverdi, Lamento d’Arianna; Peter de Jager, Model Universes (WP).
Des canyons aux étoiles
Georgia Ioakimidis-MacDougall
ANAM fellowship concert
South Melbourne Town Hall
26 November, 2014
By Andrew Aronowicz
It’s difficult not to feel an air of ceremony at performances of Messiaen’s music. And I don’t think it’s just due to the overt religious references; it’s because we hardly ever get to hear it live. Messiaen in Melbourne is sadly all too rare a treat, but a treat it was to gather on Sunday evening at the Australian National Academy of Music to hear the 40th anniversary performance of Des canyons aux étoiles…, one of his most sublime orchestral creations.
Written to celebrate the bicentenary of the founding of the United States, the work is at once grand and profoundly intricate in its design. The canyons in question are the majestic gorges and rock formations that define the desert landscapes of Utah. Much of the score’s sparkling edifice suggests these bold, rugged features, constructed from finely wrought orchestral chords, and the angular language of birdsong.
The orchestra for Sunday’s performance was mostly from ANAM’s current cohort, though fleshed out with some friends and local freelancers. The ensemble met the challenges of the work head on, producing a glittering tapestry of sound replete with startling chord changes, dramatic extremes and choruses of sparkling, rustling gestures evoking the birds of Messiaen’s inspiration. At the helm was conductor Fabian Russell, who maintained complete control over the frequently wild score.
Of the 44 individual instrumental parts, four soloists dominate the kaleidoscopic texture of the work, perhaps the most demanding of which is the solo piano. Jacob Abela handled the awe-inspiring complexity of the piano writing with consummate skill and flair, achieving a timbral range befitting the work’s dynamic demands. His performance of Le moqueur polyglotte, a fiendishly challenging catalogue of tricksy Mockingbird calls, was brilliant to behold.
Ben Jacks made a golden sound in his robust performance of the french horn solo. His reading of the Appel interstellaire (Interstellar call) was hauntingly beautiful, and featured a fascinating display of technical wizardry with delicate colour changes and stratospheric exploration of the instruments upper harmonic spectrum (apparently designed to evoke the plaintive cries of wild coyotes). Similarly, Kaylie Melville and Peter Neville each showed expert handling of the intricate rhythms and colours of the solo xylorimba and glockenspiel parts, respectively.
The performance on the whole came off as impressively accomplished, and any ensemble issues were easily forgiven thanks to the dedication and spirit of the players. The work is long (twelve movements and over an hour and a half of the French master’s dazzling colour onslaught), but the sense of cohesion and logic was generally well maintained.
-Andrew Aronowicz
Partial Durations is a Matthew Lorenzon/RealTime joint project.
Speak Percussion and SIAL Sound Studios
Richard Barrett Percussion Solos
The Spatial Information Architecture Laboratory, RMIT
26 July, 2014
Richard Barrett’s music is one of the most refined and uncompromising legacies of the complexist movement of the 1980s and 1990s. “Legacy” is important here because Barrett does not associate himself with the complexist label as such. Barrett’s fiendishly difficult instrumental parts and frantic electronic atmospheres are perhaps more properly associated with the composer’s energetic intellect and love of rigour, characteristics evident in his music as much as his speech or his committed politics.
Speak Percussion’s choice to mount a programme of Barrett’s percussion works is a recognition of the importance of Barrett’s contribution to the language of contemporary percussion music through works like abglanzbeladen/auseinandergeschrieben (part of the larger 1996 work Opening of the Mouth). Like the ancient Egyptian ceremony intended to allow the spirit to breathe and eat in the afterlife, the Barrett percussion portrait is its own ceremony performed upon the body of Barrett’s works while the spirit, alive and breathing in the room, continues to evolve, compose and create.
Though still as busy as ever, Speak’s programme brought out the changes in the textures of Barrett’s works over the years. The percussion solo from Opening of the Mouth, performed by Barrett’s long-time collaborator Peter Neville, imagines the sound of the Tree of Life, a Holocaust memorial in Budapest in the form of a willow tree with thousands of metal leaves that each bear a name. The piece is built out of musical oppositions, such as chords and single pitches and high and low sounds, which coalesce and are then distributed throughout a growing battery of instruments. The piece tests the limits of how far a solo musician can realise a gradually bifurcating structure that saturates the sound space.
If saturation is the final effect of abglanzbeladen/auseinandergeschrieben, then the world premiere of Codex XIV, a structured improvisation for three percussionist and live electronics, bears witness to the balance of Barrett’s contemporary classicism. In his solo electronics improvisations as much as his latest compositions, nothing is lost on the listener. Barrett always finds the space to let a timbre speak, or the counterpoint of different musical strands to be heard. It is perhaps for this reason that Barrett eschews the complexist label: his music tends toward clarity rather than saturation. Speaking of classicism, even the sound palette of Barrett’s improvisations has something established about it. His electronics sound very electronic, with the usual suspects of static and gurgling, wheezing sounds. Codex XIV begins with one of my favourite percussive sounds: the hard, dry sound of a mallet striking and being held to a wooden or metal instrument. Almost pitchless, all that one can register is the direction and volume of the sounds. Some successful percussion bowing joined the texture. More hard noises entered, including chains in ceramics and heavy pieces of metal struck with brass mallets. Like sparse hail on a tin roof, it was a scintillating atmosphere to sit within.
As much as I love the pink seating, black polka-dot walls and pink ambient lighting, the Spatial Information Architecture Laboratory at the RMIT is not kind to vibraphones, which are naturally amplified to painful levels in the space. When three of them were wheeled out for the finale, the world premiere of Urlicht, my heart sank. My apprehension was soon compounded as the electronics failed and the engineer continued to studiously turn his score. While some of the writing held its own, there were moments where the instrumental parts were awkwardly exposed, obviously intended to feed sounds into the system. I am sure that the audience would have forgiven a restart of this major piece, which we will hopefully have the opportunity to hear in full in the future.
Golden Fur
The Bendigo International Festival of Exploratory Music
The Old Fire Station
3:30pm, Sunday 17 September
After the marathons of Friday and Saturday, the concerts at BIFEM on Sunday all seemed a little more light-hearted. This was even the case for Melbourne’s Golden Fur, a trio of incredibly talented performers from Melbourne (now based in California) who are not known for their levity. They had all previously performed at the festival. Cellist Judith Hamann performed a solo recital late on Friday; pianist James Rushford performed Henning Christiansen’s organ work Eurasienstab: Fluxorum Organum at the Sacred Heart Cathedral and two of his compositions were showcased on Saturday; and clarinettist Samuel Dunscombe was the engineer for the reboot of Manoury’s Pluton.
The concert began with Dunscombe in a state of grace. Having not seen Dunscombe perform for some years now, the control he brought to Chikako Morishita’s solo bass clarinet piece Skin, Gelatin, Soot was breathtaking. The piece ranges widely amongst the instrument’s extended techniques, from barely audible breath to “dinosaur” clarinet. It ends with an enigmatic poem in Japanese with as many interpretations as the score itself which, ranging across three staves, requires split-second decisions by the performer.
Rushford and Hamann took everybody by surprise with the concert’s second piece, Ivan Wyschnegradsky’s Méditation sur deux thèmes de la Journée de l’existence. The piece was composed in 1918–19 (that is, well before Barraqué’s Sonate pour violon seul, which I had previously said was the oldest piece in the festival). Hearing the piano’s romantic introduction was like ordering a jam sandwich from the school canteen and biting into Vegemite (I will never forgive you, canteen lady). I will, however, forgive Golden Fur, because the taste this time was wonderful. The composer had an epiphany in 1917 and decided to compose a work that would send the entire world into a mystical rapture. The Méditation forms one study toward the final piece, exploring semi- quarter- third- and sixth-tones. Despite the avant-garde pedigree it is gorgeously kitsch and provided an excellent point of contrast to the rest of the works in the festival. It was interesting, having been listening for so many different things throughout BIFEM, to suddenly feel myself “switch” into romantic cello-mode and find myself listening for bow changes, shifts, long phrases and the like (all of which Hamann executed superbly). From a programming perspective, the piece had the nice effect of inverting the practice of major ensembles to include one modern piece in the middle of an otherwise direly-conservative programme. It would be great if everyone played predominantly new music but still kept some older repertoire on the back-burner.
The surprises continued with Pateras’ Nekkersdaal Eden. The piece begins in the usual Golden Fur fashion of barely-audible bow sound, but is broken after a minute by a deafening squawk of static. I had barely noticed Dunscombe standing at the back of the stage with his laptop half-hidden behind a music stand. Every time he reached for the touchpad the audience would flinch, until he finally did trigger the horrible noise again, and again.
You can listen back to the concert as part of New Music Up Late on ABC Classic FM.
Partial Durations is a Matthew Lorenzon/RealTime joint project.
Sirius
Music theatre by Karlheinz Stockhausen
Bendigo International Festival of Exploratory Music
Bendigo TAFE Old Library
10:30pm, Saturday 6 September
The Old Library at the Bendigo TAFE is one of the finest specimens of Victorian-era working men’s college libraries. The beautiful two-storey building features bookshelves on all walls and a fabulous vaulted dome, much like the La Trobe Reading Room at the State Library of Victoria, but in miniature. The dome is a perfect setting for Stockhausen’s music theatre piece/mystery play/opera Sirius for two reasons. Firstly, it represents social engineering in the service of a cult, namely that of Stockhausen in Sirius and of capital in the educational policies of the Australian government today. The spread of working men’s colleges in the 1800s was about improving productivity without social mobility. This ideology is alive and well in contemporary Australia where the Minister for Education Christopher Pyne talks about deregulating university fees to help students access degrees that are “right for them.” The implication is that only rich people will want to access expensive degrees and only poor people will want to access cheap degrees. Of course, the talk about supply and demand hides the deeper conservative ideology that somebody from a working class background should attend a TAFE course rather than clog up the Melbourne University Juris Doctor program. But the skyward equilibrium of the Old Library’s dome also represents some genuinely lofty ideals. There were many who truly believed in working men’s colleges and university extension courses as means to universal education for its own sake. By the same token, Stockhausen’s belief in a higher life that is in harmony with nature was part of a fairly harmless—if not prescient for the age of global warming—1970s, New-Age ideology.
Make no mistake, Sirius is the most egotistical, self-aggrandising, pseudo-religious tripe ever composed. Wagner’s Parsifal or any of Boulez’s fruitier outbursts in the press cannot hold a match to it. In Sirius, for the first time, Stockhausen effectively makes public his belief that he is from a distant star called Sirius that is populated by higher beings. In the piece, four of these beings come down to earth and (spaced evenly around the balcony of the dome) discourse widely on the cosmic harmony of the genders, seasons and the constellations of the zodiac. The soprano (Tiffany Du Mouchelle) represents the South, water and summer. The bass (Nicholas Isherwood) represents the North, earth and winter. A trumpeter (Tristram Williams) represents East, fire and spring while a bass clarinettist (Richard Haynes) represents the West, air and autumn. A better ensemble for this work could hardly be imagined. Isherwood himself has been performing the work for decades, many times under Stockhausen’s direction. Du Mouchelle was a powerful presence on the balcony of the dome, fluidly accompanying the performance with arcane gestures. It is wonderful to see Williams and Haynes perform again in Australia, their prodigious talents usually taking them far from our shores. The ensemble pitched the performance perfectly, their wide-eyed rapture evincing absolute commitment that could also be taken as an elaborate hipster joke. The spectacle was augmented by costume designer Désirée Marie Townley’s excellent costumes, which teetered somewhere between Flash Gordon and a Jodorowsky film.
As wonderful as it looked and sounded, the audience still had to contend with the music. The music for Sirius is based in part upon Stockhausen’s Twelve Melodies of the Zodiac, twelve cute tunes that Stockhausen composed for music boxes and percussion. In his illuminating talk on Stockhausen’s late work earlier in the evening, the legendary musicologist (and Stockhausen’s teaching assistant) Richard Toop referred to these melodies as “Stockhausen’s twelve-pack of Für Elises.” He questioned whether they could truly carry the 90-minute work. Certainly, having them tinkling along in your right ear for an hour and a half diminished my belief in the musical superiority of these higher beings. As Toop remembers, the original reception was “to put it mildly, mixed,” and the piece should certainly not be treated with reverence today.
As a sympathetic listener I was surprised at how little I could find to appreciate beyond the presence and virtuosity of the performers themselves. One is not even able to excuse Stockhausen’s New-Age diatribe by appealing to the music. Stockhausen gives you so little to latch on to for so long. Over an hour of the piece is taken up by the central “Wheel” of constellations, where all four performers sing and play more or less autonomously while the music boxes whine away in the electronic part. One moment breaks the monotony: when all four performers come downstairs to perform together in the middle of the floor.
Audiences once had Stockhausen’s personal presence, or perhaps that of his cult, to keep them motivated throughout the Wheel of Sirius. Without that aura, there seems little incentive to sit through it. By the end of the performance I felt as though I had just disembarked from a long haul flight and I’m not sure that is how I want art to make me feel. Sirius is not an indictment on contemporary music, but a wake-up call to think about what sort of music we want to make today. To return to the education analogy, once the carrot of capital is taken away, should education disappear too? Perhaps a certain sort of patronising, jerry-rigged education should, but then the dome of the Bendigo TAFE library should shelter the aspiration it represents.
Partial Durations is a Matthew Lorenzon/RealTime joint project.
Partial Durations 