Category Archives: Reviews

Partial Durations is a Matthew Lorenzon/RealTime joint project.

Austin Buckett: Grain Loops

Reviews
Cover of Grain Loops by Austin Buckett. Image courtesy of artist.
Cover of Grain Loops by Austin Buckett. Image courtesy of artist.

Austin Buckett
Grain Loops
Room40
Album review by Henry Andersen

Anything repeated enough times comes to seem different. When a scratch on a vinyl record creates a locked groove, the resultant loop of sound pulls itself away from the normal tension and release of the music around it. The natural choreography of the stylus is disrupted. (Imagine the stylus as Sisyphus pushing his boulder up the hill, only to have it fall back down each day. In this moment, Camus will tell us, “[o]ne must imagine Sisyphus happy.”) If you’ve ever left a locked groove playing for some time, or fallen asleep to the clicks and pops of a stylus on the cardboard centre of an LP, then you’ll know that there is joy to be found in stripping away the narrative function of music and letting it go nowhere for a little while.

Grain Loops is the latest LP from Sydney based composer and sound artist Austin Buckett. Though the album is released on vinyl, the loops from which it is constructed are digital, not analogue. That is, they have been made by cutting and repeating digital waveforms recorded by Buckett during a residency in Banf, Canada.  All of the recordings are made by passing sandpaper over the surface of four snare drums. This techniques is a favourite of Bucket’s, for the rich variation in noise colour that it can create. In most circumstances, the detail of this coloration would pass unnoticed but on Grain Loops with each snippet of sound bracketed by repetitions of itself, the finer details of the sound (call them grains if you like) suddenly become magnified. Hear that filter-like effect in the left channel? no? listen again. and again. and again.

The album’s drive to repetition is carried by its macro-structure as well. There are a total of 30 tracks – each track lasts for exactly one minute and is made of one loop (of around 1-5 seconds) repeated to fill its allotted, one-minute bracket. The decision to have each track last one minute seems quite arbitrary (for me it could have been longer) but the decision to keep each track at equal proportions to its neighbours is vital. Even as the sonic qualities and groove of each track change, the essential concept is repeated – like 30 manifestations of a single idea or 30 photographs of a single object. You could think of the form of the whole album as something like a ‘theme and variations’ – only without the theme. The album doesn’t have an ‘original theme’ in any traditional sense (proven by the fact that the album’s tracks could easily be shuffled without upsetting the form). If there is an ‘original theme’ it is the concept and it isn’t heard so much as it is hinted at by the common factors that span each variation.

If there is a chance to escape modernism’s morbid obsession with progress, it is through repetition. Anything that loops back on itself can’t be moving foreward. We can forget that grand narrative for a little while and just enjoy the feeling of going nowhere (what could be more comforting, and more endless, than the sound of windscreen wipers in a  storm?). As each track of Grain Loops plays, even as we know it will only last a minute, it feels like it could play forever – has played forever. It seems to stretch past the horizon in every direction. And then, all of a sudden, we are back where we started – with Sisyphus, the stylus and the locked groove. Anything repeated enough times takes comes to seem different…

By Henry Andersen

Partial Durations is a RealTime/Matthew Lorenzon joint project.

Speak Percussion: 8th Taiwan International Percussion Convention

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Speak Percussion
8th Taiwan International Percussion Convention
National Concert Hall, Taipei
27 May 2014
Review by Alistair Noble

Program:
Thomas Meadowcroft, Cradles
Anthony Pateras, Hypnagogics
Matthew Shlomowitz, Popular Contexts Volume 6
Simon Løffler, b

The Taiwan International Percussion Convention is a triennial event begun in 1993, the creation of Ju Tzong-Ching and supported by his own ensemble, the Ju Percussion Group. In 2014, the 8th iteration of the convention hosts 10 ensembles and 10 soloists from 14 countries around the world. The convention is titled ‘Taiwan’, rather than ‘Taipei’ for good reason, as it aims to bring percussion performances to venues around the island over a 10 day period, with the international and local performers undertaking tours to venues in Taipei, Taichung, Tainan, Kaohsiung, Hsinchu, Yilan, Changhua, Chiayi and Taitung. In terms of organisation, logistics and finance, this is a monumental undertaking, a music festival that has moved beyond the local to operate on a national front. Certainly, it serves to illustrate the extraordinary commitment and energy that can sometimes be brought to artistic endeavours in Taiwan, and the size of audiences seems to indicate that the convention organisers have been able to tap into a deep well of support at the community level.

Among the international guests at the 2014 convention are Speak Percussion from Melbourne, represented for this performance by Eugene Ughetti (artistic director), Matthias Schack-Arnott, Leah Scholes, and lighting designer Travis Hodgson. Australian fans will know this group for their polished and dedicated performances of works by contemporary European and Australian composers in particular. It is satisfying to see the group, with its flexible ensemble membership, making a strong impression at major international events like TIPC and MaerzMusik in Berlin.

Speak Percussion are more than just a virtuoso ensemble. They display a lively good taste in repertoire, and a strong commitment to the communication of their love and fascination for this music. They have a distinctive style of performance, combining a genuine jouissance with an unassumingly Australian theatricality, that brings to life even music that might seem alarming or pretentious in other hands.

In the cavernous space of the National Concert Hall in Taipei, I worried that the ensemble would be somewhat overwhelmed by the scale of the architecture, and that the audience might be small. On both counts, my fears were proven wrong. The hall filled rapidly with a large and enthusiastic audience, and the ensemble quickly took control of the stage and compelled attention by simply sounding terrific. Travis Hodgson’s lighting effectively transformed the gigantic space into something psychologically more intimate, with the performers lit only by narrow spotlights and the auditorium otherwise in complete darkness. A group of catholic nuns occupied the row in front of me—contemporary music fans? Or aunts and cousins of the convention organiser? I imagine them having a percussion ensemble in the convent and rehearsing Ionisation after Matins.

The concert opened with Thomas Meadowcroft’s Cradles (2013), a wonderful piece for two percussionists and Wurlitzer e-piano. The beautiful, chilled-out sound of the Wurlitzer (played by Leah Scholes) is the foundation for a work that contains a wealth of brilliant details. The two percussionists make use of a great raft of instruments, including finger cymbals, plastic castanets, Japanese toy drums, small shell chimes, medium shell chimes, a cluster of small Korean bells, and Chinese bells. The main work for the duo, however, is in playing the two reel-to-reel tape machines—pulling the unspooled tape by hand through the machines to create a complex and varied music of gurgles, rattles and chirps that is exhilarating and expressive, amusing and richly colourful. It’s as though Gregor Samsa (the post-rock band, not the character in Kafka’s story) were collaborating with 1950s Stockhausen, which is to say that Meadowcroft’s distinctive music is both intelligent and gorgeous. You can hear a recording of another performance of the work here.

Hypnagogics (2005), an 8-minute piece for a solo percussionist by Berlin-based Australian composer Anthony Pateras, is a richly rewarding, almost symphonically-textured work. This is surprising in some ways because the score calls for a carefully limited range of ultra-high pitched ‘micro instruments’—tiny little pits of wood, metal, skin, ceramic and glass—together with tinnitus (actually pre-recorded high-pitched electronics). This arresting palette of sounds becomes slowly more sinister as the music progresses, and then finally simply captivating. It is a clever and finely-crafted piece that rewards repeat listening. Matthew Shlomovitz spoke at Darmstadt in 2012 about the relation between musical material, and the engaged process of composing with, or investigating that material, proposing that ‘[o]ne way in which music might become critical is through investigating its own substance’. Pateras’ Hypnagogics would serve as a fine example of this notion in theory, except that the reality of the music is so much more than this. Eugene Ughetti, as the soloist, gave a brilliant and compelling performance. Have a listen here.

Matthew Shlomovitz’s four-movement suite Popular Contexts Volume 6 (2013), is a work for drum kit, vibraphone, midi keyboard and laptop (i.e. samples). It started very promisingly, rocking along happily. The nuns in front were tapping their feet and nodding appreciatively. And it continued more or less like that, for four inscrutably shapeless movements. It is fun music, and I really wanted to like it, but despite an excellent, energetic performance, something just doesn’t feel right. In another context, I might love it: it would be perfect music for a nightclub—a hip, glossy, fashion-magazine kind of bar, where you and I could sit in the corner and drink, watching the rich gangsters and the smart models. Or it might be a movie soundtrack–the scene set it in the same bar, overlooking the bay in Hong Kong, with John Travolta as a Russian oligarch who always wears dark glasses because he’s actually a vampire (you knew that, right?), drinking excellent, icy vodka to match his fine suit.

Like even the best movie soundtrack, however, this music is a bit long-winded and tedious in concert. It is stylish and cool (in a slightly irritating way at times), but ultimately insubstantial. As the piece wore on, the nuns withdrew into a more meditative state, perhaps saying some quiet rosaries or simply praying for it to stop. It would have sounded better if we were drunk. Get me a vodka.

The concert finished with a work titled simply b (2002) by young Danish composer Simon Løffler. Scored for three musicians, three neon lights, effect pedals and a loose jack cable, this might at first seem like a daft idea for a piece—but it sounded wonderful. The players knock out complex rhythms on the effect pedals while the loose jack cable. . . well, it does what loose jack cables do, crackling and humming, and the blinding neon lights flicker on and off in the darkened auditorium generating electro-magnetic interference (sometimes magnified by the performers grabbing hold of the lights and each other to make a direct-circuit contact). It is a thunderously exhilarating, dangerous piece, with a powerful theatrical element. In addition to the superficial thrills, on a deeper level the work is a superb critique (in the sense of compositional investigation) of some unlikely materials. The nuns were perched on the edge of their seats, eyebrows bristling with excitement and electro-static energy.

Alistair Noble

Speak Percussion are also performing:

7.30pm, 30 May 2014
Chiayi Performing Arts Center, Chiayi, Taiwan, R.O.C.

7.30pm, 31 May 2014
Performance Hall of Cultural Bureau, Hsinchu County, Taiwan, R.O.C.

2.30pm, 1 June 2014
Yuanlin Performance Hall, Changhua, Taiwan, R.O.C.

http://speakpercussion.com/

 

 

Partial Durations is a RealTime/Matthew Lorenzon joint project.

Arcko Symphonic Ensemble: Chamber View 4

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Arcko Symphonic Ensemble
Chamber View 4
Richmond Uniting Church
10 May, 2014

Every time a conservative party wins an election in Australia, or a social-democratic party sinks to new lows of cruelty in the treatment of asylum seekers, one would judge from social media that Australia were in danger of immanently losing its youth to New Zealand. Something of the sort did actually take effect in the late nineteenth century, when hundreds of disillusioned Australian workers set off to found William Lane’s socialist utopia, New Australia, in Paraguay. Showing that Australian progressives did not have a monopoly on racist national policy, the colonists beat them by some six years to the founding of a society based on racial exclusion. The collective floundered, split, and was eventually dissolved by the Paraguayan government. As does, quite intentionally, George Dreyfus’ setting of the settlers’ anthem “The Men of New Australia.” This opening of The Arcko Symphonic Project’s latest chamber music concert took us back a century to the brash marching rhythms, woodwind and brass of colonial music. The more resigned ending provides some wonderful antiphony between a lilting cello line and a mournful trumpet. It sounds like film music because it is, composed for Caroline Jones’ documentary And Their Ghosts may be Heard.

There are so many pieces about sounds of the Australian environment that they constitute a genre to themselves with their own history, forms, sonic palettes and, indeed, compositional clichés. As it happens, I lived in the Blue Mountains until I was seven years old, so feel particularly sympathetic to the genre, in particular to Wendy Hiscocks’ Rainforest Toccata for solo piano. Hiscock articulates soft thunder in the bass with chiming clusters in the treble reminiscent of bellbird song. Pianist Elizabeth Watson’s fluid, light touch lent the piece all the presence of the rainforest’s ozone-charged, pre-rain atmosphere.

After Hiscocks’ clusters, Elliot Gyger’s Threshold struck out across the piano into broader harmonic fields. The piece is a duet for two hands, with the rhythms and pitches of the two voices moving gradually together and apart. As probably the most romantic post-serial solo piano work, morse code messages representing Gyger’s name and that of his wife Catherine are written into the rhythmic material of each hand.

Nigel Butterley’s Laudes is a quietly busy work for mixed octet, reminiscent of the hushed, decorated interiors of four European churches and cathedrals visited by the composer. The piano, counting away in one corner, contrasts with the fluidity of gestures moving through the rest of the ensemble. The figures slowly coalesce into distinct instrumental sections like a religious procession at the Basilica of Sant’Apollinare. The Apse, Norwich Cathedral is represented by a consistent movement from loud, staccato gestures to legato, piano textures. This foundational movement is punctuated by isolated outbursts like the building’s pillars and arches. The ensemble only truly awoke in the third movement when painting the vibrant stained glass and trumpeting angels of King’s College Chapel, Cambridge.

The relative lack of instrumental colour in Laudes was highlighted by the novel instrumental groupings of Tim Dargaville’s Invisible Dances. The composer doesn’t hide the piece’s dance rhythms quite so much as he claims in the programme, which keeps things lively (with the help of a drum kit). First the cello and piano play in duet, before focus moves to the flute and harp. All the while a mysterious whistling sound keeps the audience guessing (I still don’t know who was making it). The duets swept my corner of the audience away, digging deep into the bass registers of the instruments before shooting back up. It was a delight to end the concert on such a mosaic of finely-balanced, jewel-like miniatures.

Australian Voices: Stuart Greenbaum

Reviews

Australian Voices Series
Works by Stuart Greenbaum
Melbourne Recital Centre
Curated by Jessica Fotinos
Thursday 8 May

Stuart Greenbaum’s transparent textures and unabashedly diatonic harmonies leave space for the audience to consider the poetry and art with which his works are often coupled. The timbral and rhythmic subtlety of his work lends itself to the harp, which featured in all three of the works in this concert curated by ANAM harpist Jessica Fotinos.

Nine Candles for Dark Nights for solo harp, performed with great sensitivity by Fotinos, features a meditative, wandering ostinato inflected with harmonics. Fotinos integrated the melody’s cross-rhythms into the gentle flow of the piece with absolute ease like the “bending arcs of flame” of the nine memorial candles flickering in Greenbaum’s poem.

Ross Baglin’s poems set in Four Finalities for female voice, cor anglais and harp take their cues from the refined imagism of T. S. Eliot. The catalogues of luggage, clothes, furniture, snow and flowers—including snow filling flowers!—; the ruminations on “the time / It takes a finger to decide” and the peal of bucolic church bells are put to good use by Greenbaum. The first song of the cycle, with soprano Lotte Betts-Dean throwing herself into its swelling, keening melody, could be one of the more soulful Eurovision winners. The sparing interjections of the cor anglais (David Reichelt) fit the charm of these pensive poems wonderfully and constitute some of the most captivating moments in the cycle.

The eight miniatures of Greenbaum’s Mondrian Interiors are filled with skyward gestures of weightless optimism. Startling tutti chords strike out at the audience like the Mondrian’s Red Tree while a lighter texture paints the blue sky behind. The cubist Tree (c.1913) was evoked with a minimalist canon. Echoing the bold harmonic palette of Composition with Red, Yellow and Blue, the fifth movement has the bravado and syncopation of the introduction to a 1990s morning show. The fourth movement has the conciliatory tone of the end of a children’s movie from the same decade with its swooning, edgeless chords resembling the pastels of Composition in Oval with Colour Planes.

While communicating directly and succinctly (with the help of a spirited execution by the performers), Greenbaum’s painting of his points of inspiration can come across as overly simplistic. I wonder how Greenbaum’s engagement with his subjects extends both him and his listeners beyond their existing musical comfort zones and into the unknown.

 

Partial Durations is a Matthew Lorenzon/RealTime joint project.

Next Wave: Fluvial

Reviews
Matthias Schack-Arnott in Fluvial. Photo by Jesse Hunniford.
Matthias Schack-Arnott in Fluvial. Photo by Jesse Hunniford.

Matthias Schack-Arnott
Fluvial
Next Wave Festival
North Melbourne Town Hall
1 May, 2014

Hundreds of sheets of metal, aluminium pipes, tiny metal piano tuning pins and glass bottles hang above or lie upon two long, raised platforms that run in parallel through the centre of the space. There is just enough room between them for the percussionist Matthias Schack-Arnott to move, the sole percussionist in the installation-performance Fluvial.

“Fluvial” may describe the changes wrought upon an environment by streams and rivers. Forever moving, sometimes gentle and sometimes violent may well describe Schack-Arnott’s performance. The show begins and ends with graceful, poetic gestures. At one end of the metallic array, Schack-Arnott sends four thin metal pipes, hanging parallel to the ground, into motion. When struck, they emit clear tones that pulse as they rotate. Schack-Arnott watches their orbits narrowly avoid each other, as though he were some modern-day Copernicus turning his calculations from the heavens to the pressing terrestrial matters of the age.

Things take a chaotic turn after this harmonious vision. Schack-Arnott brings the pipes in collision with the granite tiles beneath them, juxtaposing the pipes’ ethereal tones with the dead clunkings of stone. Moving through the centre aisle, Schack-Arnott strikes a deeper set of pipes that lie across a fulcrum on the granite tiles. As they rebound from the stone they emit a sharp sound like rain on a roof.

Each episode of the piece presents a truly intriguing new sound. While percussionists will be familiar with a tremolo on pipes with soft mallets, the effect of a dozen pieces of sheet metal, suspended from their centres, being thrust onto a piece of granite and then released will be a revelation in the extremes of muting and uncontrolled resonance. As will Matthias’ dramatic throttling and submerging of a bunch of glass bottles in a sink of water and the cacophonous (the only truly ear-splitting moment in the piece) collision of a flock of metal sheeting with a cloud of microtonally-tuned wind-chimes.

The installation is as thought-provoking as it is beautiful. The system’s forces hang in a state of equilibrium. Each piece of metal and granite is microtonally tuned in clusters around different pitch centres. This helps to separate the different sound sources for the listener and at times produces a ritualistic, chant-like quality to the performance. One is also aware that nothing is absolutely static or ordered in this musico-environmental model. As the audience enters, the air movement they produce occasionally causes a bottle to moves against another, or a finely-balanced chime finally tips over into a new position. Schack-Arnott is no prime mover in this environment, but one who powerfully interferes with its balance of forces. Theatrically stunning, aurally stimulating, Fluvial is an unmissable experience at this year’s Next Wave festival.

Fluvial runs 1–4 and 7–11 May.

Partial Durations is a RealTime/Matthew Lorenzon joint project.

Metropolis: Syzygy Ensemble, Logic

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Logic
Syzygy Ensemble
Metropolis New Music Festival
Melbourne Recital Centre
11 April, 2014

Syzygy Ensemble’s concert at the Metropolis New Music Festival established them as Australia’s most unique contemporary music ensemble. These four hyped-up new music nerds have hit upon a winning strategy of disarming the audience by tittering amiably at them before striking fear into their hearts with faultless virtuosity.

Syzygy gave pride of place to an accomplished work by Elliott Hughes, the inaugural winner of the Melbourne Recital Centre Composition Commission. The title, Arcs and Sevens, describes the two movements of the work that play on energetic, colourful polyphony on the one hand and a stricter 7/8 metric plan on the other. The piece opens with syncopated lines that erupt from the ensemble. These eventually settle into a slower, more lyrical, minor-mode polyphony of melodies. Eventually even these lines settle into held notes like vibrating geological strata. The shorter, swinging second section sees lines imitated throughout the ensemble. The two parts of the work are in reality very well integrated, so that Hughes takes the audience on a colourful journey, rather than juxtaposing contrasting ideas.

The ensemble’s intensity only increased as they tackled Nicholas Vines’ Economy of Wax, which is based on a portion of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of the Species dealing with the emergent structure of honeycomb from the autonomous action of bees guided by the evolutionary principle of the economy of wax. It was difficult to tell whether the work was conceived with an economy of notes in mind as the ensemble navigated the work’s metric modulations and various structures based on the number six. The instruments buzz with a sort of autonomy, each regurgitating enough musical ideas for a lifetime of composition. Above them all, Judith Dodsworth sang the text ecstatically loud and high, less a queen than another buzzing worker in the hive.

Logic forms the first of three concerts in which Syzygy Ensemble explore the medieval trivium of grammar, logic and rhetoric. In this first concert pragmatism, automatism, arithmetic and nature were variously traded as synonyms for logic. Toshio Hosokawa’s exquisite Stunden-Blumen reflects upon nature and time in a refined palette drawn from French mid-twentieth-century composers Jolivet and Messiaen (ending with a lovely glissando-trill-tremolo!). John Luther Adams’ The Light Within continued this “nature” theme with a minimalist drone that changed like the shades of the sky at dawn. All in all, I am not sure that the pieces chose did the “logic” theme justice. A stricter interpretation of the word, considering logical properties and their relationship to composition, would have made for a much less colourful show. However, it remains to be seen how Logic will contrast with the remaining two concerts in Syzygy’s series to describe the limits of each concept.

Kate Soper’s immensely entertaining Only the Words Themselves Mean What they Say perhaps came the closest to a reflection on logic as such, which is only capable of determining whether an argument is valid, not whether it is true. A valid argument is one in which, if its premises are true, then its conclusion will be true as well. Whether this argument is about bees or, in Soper’s case, human relationships, is immaterial. Laila Engle and Dodsworth’s performance was by far the best that I have seen of this popular piece. This may seem ridiculous, but it helped that Engle and Dodsworth are almost exactly the same height and that, as well as taking the piece a little faster than usual and being impeccably coordinated the whole way through, they choreographed their body language and facial expressions so that they seemed to meld into one variously sad, angry and staring body.

Metropolis: Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, Frescoes of Dionysius

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Frescoes of Dionysius
Melbourne Symphony Orchestra
Melbourne Recital Centre
9 April, 2014

This year Helsinki-born Olli Mustonen conducts the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra at the Metropolis New Music Festival, bringing with him his extensive knowledge of and experience with Scandinavian music and composers. In particular, his mentor and friend Rodion Shchedrin has been singled out for special attention, with three Australian premieres of Shchedrin pieces programmed in the festival.

Wednesday night’s performance began with Shchedrin’s haunting Frescoes of Dionysius for nonet. A sculptural clarity pervades the smooth lines of the work, which proceeds through a steady pulsing between two notes that are variously transformed through savage Bartok pizzicati in the strings and foggy winds. Occasionally the celesta punctuates the plodding surface, or a violin strikes up a folksy double-stopped line. Dissonant chords rumble underneath. The timeless quality of the pulse is decorated by the instrumental intrusions like the natural and human world around the Ferapontov monastery where the frescoes are painted.

Mustonen’s sonata for violin and orchestra can be heard as an expansion of the Frescoes into a larger form. The rumbling chords appear in the winds as Kristian Winther’s violin line mulls over short sequences of notes in the most beautifully preoccupied way. Winther carried the audience through the piece with presence and conviction in what was not just an execution but a true performance. The pulse appears and builds to a climax in contrary motion in the treble and bass of the orchestra. If this description sounds simplistic, it is because Mustonen’s orchestration of sonata’s original piano part is simple. This simplicity lent an elegance to the first third. However, after the solo violin whips the orchestra into a frenzy with a folk dance tune, the piece dissipates into a sort of Hollywood score of indistinct menace and wonder, with tired filmic harmonies standing exposed and undecorated in the strings.

Cybec finalist Lisa Cheney’s The Pool and the Star is based on Judith Wright’s poem of the same name. The poem tells of a pool watching a star rise in the sky. The star is reflected in the pool all night until, when the star sets, the pool and the star appear to kiss. A short timbral introduction with bowed cymbals quickly gives way to an intensely thematic piece. Keening melodies dance in the woodwind and on the harp before some excellent, bold brass writing tells of the intensity of the pool’s desire.

Shchedrin’s “sotto voce” concerto for cello and orchestra was originally composed for Mstislav Rostropovich, whose reputation as a strong player made him perhaps a novel choice for a concerto exploring the quieter end of the dynamic spectrum. The audience has to wait a while to hear it, though, for the first movement is as intense as that of any late romantic cello concerto. The principal theme is repeated several times over the murky watercolour background of strings and brass, becoming quieter and quieter each time, until the final, truly sotto voce statement. It would definitely have been possible in the magnificently resonant Elisabeth Murdoch Hall for cellist Marko Ylönen to exaggerate these dynamic contrasts. Though the thematic material of the first movement seems a little formulaic for what I would expect from a Metropolis concert, the concerto gets better as it goes along. A magnificent solo bursts forth with a wash of resonance and instrument-sound. The instrument vibrates to its absolute limits as Ylönen scrubs across all four strings. The string section pick up this thick, marshy texture and the principal theme returns. I wonder sometimes which musical effects are only possible with a long build-up, with extensive preparation from the composer and attentive listening from the audience. Perhaps the finale of the “sotto voce” concerto is just such a moment. Alarming in its simplicity, bells and a folk-like chant on tenor recorder (played by Genevieve Lacey) appear out of the romantic dross. The work is wonderfully bipolar from here on. The orchestra rushes in like a bulldozer. When the recorder returns, the tune is imitated high up on the cello. The piece ends with the cello playing a tremolo on a false harmonic glissando to the top of the instrument, with the distant sound of stones knocking together in the distance.

Metropolis New Music Festival: Six Degrees, Garden of Earthly Desire

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Garden of Earthly Desire
Six Degrees
Melbourne Recital Centre
Metropolis New Music Festival
9 April, 2014

Three works of immense clarity and character filled the program of Six Degrees—a new ensemble including some of Melbourne’s best-known contemporary musicians—at the Metropolis New Music Festival.  Somei Satoh’s The Heavenly Spheres are Illuminated by Lights began with the almost mystical experience of Justine Anderson’s voice filling the room from everywhere and nowhere. An improvised-sounding piano part plays around Anderson’s phrases, which hang in the air like mist. Peter Neville wrought sustained tones from the percussion battery with superballs, bows and soft mallet tremoli.

Helen Gifford’s Music for the Adonia was an opportunity (after Deborah Kayser’s performance of Iphigenia in Exile in 2010) to revisit the composer’s musical world inspired by ancient Greek mythology. An elemental anakrousis (thankyou Nick Tolhurst for this term) of clanging percussion, grunting cello and erupting winds gave way to a gentler texture of rattling percussion and plucked strings. Anderson’s vocal line is an imagined ancient language. She chants repeated consonants and vowels against the bone-dry ensemble, reimagining the Feast of Adonis celebrated exclusively by women.

I recently spoke with Liza Lim about The Garden of Earthly Desire, her first work for the ELISION Ensemble. Though the piece was originally intended as music for a puppet show by Handspan Theatre, it retains its sense of drama and character without attendant theatrics. Moreso than other complexist works of the eighties, one has the sense of sitting amongst a crowd of detailed characters. There is a sense of discovery in focussing on one instrument of the ensemble at a time. Sections also differentiate themselves with fluttering string textures and keening, seagull-like flocks of winds. Lim’s language of the time—with a preference for declamatory, speech-like instrumental lines—lends a certain rhythmic monotony to the proceedings. The wild energy of the piece was sustained, however, by semi-improvised sections allowing for much slap-bass and bass-slapping by Miranda Hill. Charlotte Jacke’s cello also returned several times in different duo and trio combinations, sporting a truly virtuosic range of colours across the entire pitch range of the instrument.

Samuel Wagan Watson: Smoke Encrypted Whispers

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Samuel Wagan Watson, photo courtesy of the artist
Samuel Wagan Watson, photo courtesy of the artist

Samuel Wagan Watson
Smoke Encrypted Whispers
Melbourne Recital Centre
24 March, 2014

For the first concert of the Melbourne Recital Centre’s Australian Voices series for the year, 23 composers wrote two-minute pieces in response to 23 poems by Samuel Wagan Watson, one of Australia’s most important living poets. The composers were all chosen because they had some connection to Watson’s home town of Brisbane during the Bjelke-Petersen years of Watson’s youth. Watson’s poems follow him beyond his childhood, out amongst the hoons, Satan-worshippers and humming electricity pylons of the outer suburbs; deep into the last outposts of rural Queensland; then overseas to Wellington and the Berlin wall.

The format, alternating readings by Watson with musical performances, reflected its original commission for the Music and Words series at the State Library of Queensland. Watson’s poems combine brooding interiority with colourful exteriority. Reflecting the often contradictory mood being evoked and picture being painted tested the versatility and sensitivity of the composers.

Where the mood and images of the poems were aligned, the piece could serve simply as an evocative counterpart. Many of Watson’s poems recall his childhood in “Tigerland,” the area of Brisbane around Mt. Gravatt in Brisbane where Watson grew up. Paul Dean’s piece based on the poem “Tigerland” used racing rhythms worthy of Stravinsky and lush, Gershwinesque harmonies to paint busy street scenes. Two poems about Watson’s childhood fear of the dark rendered strikingly different results. Richard Mills’ “Scared of the Dark,” where Watson remembers “Bjelke-Petersen policemen at [his] parents’ back door” and the shadows of truck headlights on his bedroom wall, was sung in an eerie Brittenesque soprano line by Judith Dodsworth. Stephen Stanfield’s piece based on “Author’s Notes #1” used more traditional horror movie soundtrack trills and angular wind and piano lines. “Author’s Notes #2” reflects upon the act and experience of writing. Sean O’Boyle’s transparent, major-mode miniature captures the liberating moment of blue-sky optimism that Watson writes about when confronted with a blank page.

More complicated poems yielded mixed results. The threatening undertone and final conflagration of Capalaba house was eschewed by composer William Barton in favour of a whimsical (but extremely beautiful) duet for oboe and piano and then a trio for oboe, bassoon and piano. Barton was, notably, one of the only composers to compose for less than the entire ensemble. Watson tinges “Ghosts of Boundary Street” with menace, despite the poem describing all people made equal by hangovers on New Year’s Day. Despite the contrast and detail of the poem, Lisa Cheney’s piece paints the poem entirely in asphalt-grey. Similarly, Watson’s ambivalent feelings on visiting Wellington are pasted over by Tom Adeney’s saccharine, filmic setting.

I recently commented on the difference between cultural engagement and cultural appropriation in contemporary music, arguing that we needed the former while being careful not to slip over into the latter. Smoke Encrypted Whispers is a model of such  responsible engagement, where an Indigenous perspective is being offered (rather than assumed) and composers are contributing to the project as equals.

Partial Durations is a Matthew Lorenzon/RealTime joint project.

Cathexis: Attacca

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Cathexis, photo by Asher Floyd
Cathexis, photo by Asher Floyd

Attacca
Cathexis
Northchote Town Hall
26 February, 2014

“Attacca” will be familiar to musicians as the performance marking to move on to the next movement without pause. Melbourne’s newest contemporary music ensemble Cathexis took the direction as inspiration for an immersive performance experience combining music, lighting, sound design and stagecraft.

Entering the Northcote Town Hall’s West Wing performance space, the audience is surrounded by  red light and swirling, pealing tones. Joe Talia’s sound design and Bronnwyn Pringle’s lighting provided continuity between the repertoire.

Joe Talia’s four-channel atmosphere reached a climax and abruptly cut out, at which point Peter de Jager launched into Michael Hersch’s Vanishing Pavilions #34. Thundering chords and descending runs alternated with serene counterpoint and a glistening, high melody.

While Hersch’s work rumbled away at one end of the room, the rest of the ensemble crept into a corner and prepared a swift volta into a bar of Valentin Silvestrov’s Trio for flute, celesta and trumpet. No sooner had they stopped than Matthias Schack-Arnott was starkly lit sitting on a balloon.

So began the most anticipated piece of the evening, Luke Paulding’s breath transmuted into words transmuted into breath, a piece based on sounds lifted from gay pornography. Schack-Arnott squeaked and popped balloons to the gentle moaning of an accompanying tape track. He then rubbed, shook and pummeled his array of unconventional percussion instruments as things heated up. The tape track was no match for the colour of the percussion setup, however, and interesting contrasts or correspondences failed to emerge. Considering that they can accompany some of the most sublime moments of our lives, it is remarkable how limited and monotonous the sounds of sex can be. It was perhaps for this reason that the most effective moments were those where the percussionist focused on one, repetitive sound, such as the opening solo or the squelching of a couple of plastic pigs in water at the end.

Cat Hope’s Black Disciples takes the symbol of the Chicago street gang Black Disciples, “III”, and turns it on its side to represent a polyphony of three voices. The work is haunting, with three low voices droning into microphones, their sometimes-distorting, saturated tones melding with the static of radios. Cloaked in hoodies and huddled in the dark, the work raises the issue of cultural appropriation that has recently re-risen (indeed it never went away) in the contemporary art world with an address by TextaQueen at Gertrude Contemporary Art Space. Further urgency is given to this topic by the fact that people in Australia will soon have the perfect right to appropriate whatever they want to whatever offensive ends they wish. The use of “primitivist,” African-American and orientalist musical tropes by white, western composers is as common and uninterrogated today as it was at the dawn of the twentieth century.

However, having cried “appropriation” at every opportunity ever since I learned the word, I now try to distinguish between engagement and appropriation. Learning is a process full of gauche mistakes and I would hate to see someone’s attempts to understand another culture stifled because of their unknowing misuse of that culture’s symbols. Musicians adopting another culture’s symbols need to make a few things clear: What do they think they are appropriating and how and why are they altering it? How do they think members of the appropriated culture would respond to the work? Hope’s borrowings are in fact minimal and, while offering her an inspiration, do not necessarily add to the audience’s enjoyment of the work. It seems to me that Hope adopts only the symbol “III”  from the Black Disciples. The close-held microphones are taken from hip-hop culture more generally, though they produced a distinct musical effect, and the costuming and manner of presentation was probably an addition by Cathexis. Hope then transforms these appropriations through her own noise art aesthetic into a sort of metal/fantasy Gregorian chant, the effect of which is transfixing, whether one knows about the Black Disciples or not. As to the community’s response and the musician’s eventual edification, this would requires a dialogue that members of the appropriated cultures may prefer not to engage in. As TextaQueen points out, people of colour shouldn’t have to dish out this education for free.

Beat Furrer’s Presto for flute was a tour de force for Lina Andonovska, who stalked the score like a lioness. The mosaic patterns between the piano and flute, where the flute “filled in” the piano’s rests, were coordinated to produce a single, carefully-honed, variegated surface. The voices found their independence joyful abandon and Andonovska seemed to relish the opportunity to blast out a series of impossibly loud, long notes.

Cathexis contribute to a tendency in contemporary music for ensembles to adorn their performances with production values that create a sense of continuity and spectacle. While this is often welcome, I am not sure that a seamless performance is always a better one. Nor do the gravitas sound and lighting provide the desired continuity. This is ultimately a job for the concert’s curator in finding convincing links and contrasts between works, an excellent example of which was the unity in variety of the Elision Ensemble’s recent concert at Melba Hall.