The Voice Alone 2: Invenio, Luminesce

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Invenio Singers in Luminesce. Image courtesy of Gian Slater.
Invenio Singers in Luminesce. Image courtesy of Gian Slater.

Invenio
Luminesce
Guild Theatre, Melbourne
Thursday 11 July

Gian Slater’s compositions are kaleidoscopic musical worlds of dazzling rhythmic geometricity and ecstatic jazz-inflected polyphony. In contrast to this brilliant musical space her lyrics deal with day-to-day struggles like mustering the courage to deal with paperwork. The result is an enchanted hyper-reality where the mundane becomes the cosmic, or perhaps an internal space of solace in the face of a dull external reality. It is a world embraced by her ensemble, the Invenio Singers, who never fail to deliver an impeccably choreographed and polished performance of a good hour or so of music (in this case two) from memory.

Luminesce focuses on the abstract, musical side of Slater’s work, occasionally delving into more spikily chromatic territory than is usual for Invenio. The work is a collaboration with musician, video artist and creative coder Robert Jarvis. Using his software Voxstripe, Jarvis transforms the seven parts of Slater’s composition into visuals that are then projected onto the white-draped singers. Jarvis’ visualisations are simple and effective, like Slater’s music, using shapes and primary colours to highlight the shifting rhythms and phonemes of each singer. It’s such a magical combination of sound and light that it would seem a shame to ruin the surprise of future presentations of this work, which is currently in a “pilot” stage. In short, pastels bathe the ensemble in a glowing rainbow as they fill the room with diffuse harmonies, geodesic spheres are poetically transformed into jagged burrs as though a spiritual transformation is being enacted with each note and apertures like the insides of eyelids reveal and eclipse each singer as though under the gaze of a seven-eyed musical consciousness.

As well as being intensely satisfying for the pattern-searching brain we all share, Jarvis’ visuals highlight the polyphonic nuances of Slater’s composition, which reconciles the worlds of abstract musical composition and the extended possibilities of the vocal organs. It is remarkable that interactive technology is so familiar and affordable these days that elegant pieces such as Invenio can be produced without reliance on any technological “wow” factor, but rather trusting to the poetic integration of interactive projections into the composition. I’ll keep you posted about future showings of this hypnotic work.

Forest Collective, Shared Lines

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Forest Collective. Photo by Meghan Scerri.
Forest Collective. Photo by Meghan Scerri.

Shared Lines
Forest Collective
Rosina Auditorium
Abbotsford Convent
Saturday 13 July

In Shared Lines an itinerant spectacle of theatre, sculpture and music unfolds beneath the stained glass of the Rosina Auditorium. Hidden deep within the Abbotsford Convent, the hall’s art deco proscenium arch frames the proceedings like a portal into another time, a time of dance halls and dusty boarding school assemblies. The connotations are not lost on the musicians dressed with Vaudeville flair, much less the schoolgirls, maid and eccentric master of the house of Fixation, a physical theatre piece woven through and bleeding into the musical fabric of the night.

Upon entering the hall one is confronted with a pergola of cupboardry by artist Isabelle Rudolph, a musical ensemble tucked away next to a wall and an impossibly small square of seating in the centre of the room. The seating is more a provocation than an amenity, facing away from the musicians and providing an ideal view for only about five minutes of the entire performance.

It would have been a shame to have heard Rosemary Ball’s enchanting rendition of Liszt’s Oh quand je dors with only one ear, so I hovered near Rudolph’s comforting structure of wood and paint. A maid entered the stage and began miming hanging up laundry surrounded by glowing firefly puppets. The ensemble quietly repeated fragments of Oh quand je dors, this time interspersed with whispers and rattles from the string and wind instruments. Directed by Stephanie Osztreicher—freshly returned from a spell at the École International de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq—, Fixation is a tumble of action, humour and drama centred around an extract from Don Marquis’ Conversation with a Moth (powerfully delivered by Scott Jackson, especially so because we were a metre away from him at the time). The performance also served to lead the audience around the space and direct them towards Pandora, an installation by Robbie James and Ben Delves where the audience modifies the visual representation of improvisations on shakuhachi, flute and guitar by passing around an ominous wooden box. Don’t look inside!

A series of solo performances scattered the audience throughout the hall. I particularly enjoyed hearing the melodic sweeps of Chris Rechner’s Stem for clarinet (sensitively performed by Vilan Mai)  from the back of the hall and Britten’s Metamorphosen for oboe (programmatically an ideal piece for the space and playfully realised by Katia Lenzi) at close range. The concert was also an opportunity to hear Jessica Fotinos’ virtuosic performance of George Enescu’s Allegro de Concert for the slightly terrifying chromatic harp, all the more so because she had to make do with the garden variety pedal harp. Katriona Tsyrlin brought out the introverted intensity of Evan Lawson’s Keys and Locks, a remarkable solo piece that contrasts well with the composer’s ensemble extravagances.

As a curator Lawson is to be commended for coaxing the audience into participation by making it ever harder for them to experience the performance without moving, a dynamic culminating in multiple performances in multiple rooms. Concert curators desiring audience members to move about the space (a desire usually expressed in a hasty mumble at the start of the concert) would do well to take note.

The Voice Alone 1: Ellen Winhall, My Sister’s Song

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This review begins a series on the solo voice that weave together themes from contemporary performances with recent debate on the music, language and physicality of the voice.

Ellen Winhall at the Richmond Uniting Church. Photo by Michael Hooper.
Ellen Winhall at the Richmond Uniting Church. Photo by Michael Hooper.

Ellen Winhall
My Sister’s Song
Richmond Uniting Church
Thursday 11 July

Ellen Winhall’s recital for solo voice was an object lesson in the seamless integration of finely-honed classical musicianship with extended vocal techniques. The concert was also an opportunity to hear a remarkable body of repertoire for solo voice stemming from the English choral tradition including Australian premières of works by James Weeks, David Lumsdaine and Nicola LeFanu.

Aptly sung beneath the starry vault of the Richmond United Church, the concert was centred upon the nocturnal ruminations of David Lumsdaine’s 1974 composition My Sister’s Song. Based on love poems from a Classical Tamil Anthology translated by A. K. Ramanujan as The Interior Landscape, My Sister’s Song features a refrain evoking the calm passage of late-night hours:

The still drone of the time past midnight,
all words put out.
Men are sunk into the sweetness of sleep …

As a blogger has recently argued, the Tamil word originally used for “night” in this second–third century AD poem is related not just to the late night, but to a specific three-hour period, a midnight “watch.” The passage connotes not only the lucid quality of this period, but its quantity, a quantity that is developed throughout the poem in relation to the narrator’s singular loneliness. The author might be thinking of the period of reflective wakefulness some scholars believe divided the night in two before the invention of urban and electric lighting. As Roger Ekirch argues in At Day’s Close, Night in Times Past, long, dark nights encouraged people to go to bed early for a “first sleep” and rise for an hour or so to study, pray, or even visit neighbours before their “second sleep.” I can imagine David Lumsdaine composing the long, ruminative work during such a midnight “watch,” spinning out the slow, disjunct phrases like constellations on the page. So can I imagine Winhall, only the third soprano to perform the work since its composition for Jane Manning in 1974, humming the work’s melismatic decorations to herself during a period of nocturnal wakefulness. Every twist and turn of the atonal piece—part chant, part unaccompanied recitative, part expressive solo aria—was thoroughly internalised by Winhall, whose considered and precise execution was simply astonishing.

In her remarkable performance notes published as the two-volume New Vocal Repertory, Jane Manning writes that Nicola LeFanu’s But Stars Remaining is to be “sung as from a high rock, the voice flung across a spacious valley.” Winhall evokes the kestrel and the dove of Cecil Day-Lewis’ poem with all the exhilaration of the freely-soaring animals described, before retreating to the intimacy of whispers and half-spoken text.

Winhall’s dynamism and character as a performer blazed through the technical demands of Berio’s Sequenza III, where rapid sequences of phonemes are juxtaposed with hums, vowel-shifting tones, sighs and laughter. A similar carefree virtuosity marked Georges Aperghis’ Récitation 13, which concluded the concert with a playful series of mimicked percussion sounds. The only feature impeding the audience’s enjoyment of Winhall’s performance was perhaps the ABC Classic FM microphone stand limiting the audience’s view and Winhall’s physical mobility.

With their roots in the English choral tradition, the compositions of Weeks, Lumsdaine and LeFanu present an inversion of the usual emotional dynamics of contemporary repertoire. Winhall’s programme oscilllates between troubled, inward reflection and outward jubilation. It is such a pleasure to hear music where “loud” does not immediately connote “wrathful” and “quiet” “sensual.”

Winhall’s concert was recorded for ABC Classic FM. When we hear about a broadcast date we’ll keep you posted.

Concert guide: 10–16 July

News

A curated list of upcoming concerts. See also the Australian Music Centre concert calendar and the New Music Network concert series.

Thursday 11 July. Gian Slater and the Invenio Singers perform Clarion/Whisper and Luminesce at Guild Hall, The University of Melbourne, at 7:30pm. Luminesce is a collaboration with video artist Robert Jarvis using voices as triggers for lighting events and is in part composed through Jarvis’ Voxstripe software. Second show Friday 12 July, 7:30pm.

Friday 12 July. Saxophonist Emma Di Marco performs four world premieres for solo saxophone by the Australian composers Michael Bakrnčev, Samantha Wolf, Christopher Healey and Paul Ballam-Cross. Recital Hall East, Sydney Conservatorium of Music, 3pm.

Syzygy Ensemble perform works by Adès, Mantovani, Saariaho, Whiteoak and Murail as part of DeClassified Music‘s Long Weekender at 7pm, Fireworks Gallery, 52a Doggett st, Newstead, Queensland, Australia 4006.

The Queensland Symphony Orchestra presents an international programme of works featuring solo flute and trombone including Lovelock, Vine and Hindemith. 7pm, QSO Studio, Southbank, Brisbane.

Saturday 13 July. Michael Fulcher and the Choir of Trinity College, Melbourne perform works by Gabriel Jackson and Eric Whitacre at 6pm, St John’s Cathedral, Brisbane.

In the Artology Remix 20 teenage artists work with Cathy Milliken, former head of education at the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, to reinterpret Picasso’s masterpiece Les demoiselles d’Avignon in visual art, music, literature, film and choreography. 6:30pm at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

The Forest Collective present Shared Lines at the Rosina Auditorium, Abbotsford Convent, Vic, from 7:30pm Saturday 13 July, then 9:30pm Saturday 13 July and 5pm Sunday 14 July. Part installation, part theatre and part New Music, the show promises to be another immersive Forest Collective experience.

Sunday 14 July. Composer Damian Barbeler continues his reinterpretation of sacred hymns sung by six singers from across the Torres Strait, or Ailan Kores. The Torres Strait’s linguistic and cultural distinctiveness is explored through songs from the Eastern, Central and Western language groups at 9:30am, St Andrew’s Uniting Church, Brisbane.

Ensemble Offspring present Sizzle, an afternoon of genre-defying music and beer curated by Bree van Reyk at the Petersham Bowling Club, NSW, at 3pm.

Tuesday 16 July. An all-star ensemble consisting of Peter Knight, Joe Talia, Brett Thompson and Matthias Schack-Arnott share a night with none other than Jon Rose at the Make it up Club at Bar Open, Fitzroy, Vic. 9pm.

 

Concert guide: 3–9 July

News

A curated list of upcoming concerts. See also the Australian Music Centre concert calendar and the New Music Network concert series.

Thursday 4 July. The interabilities sound art organisation The Click Clack Project presents The NIS at the Footscray Community Arts Centre, Vic, in collaboration with the Amplified Elephants and the BOLT Ensemble at 8:15pm. Performances also on Friday 5 July at 1pm and Saturday 6 July at 8:15pm.

Improviser and composer Sam McAuliffe curates a night at Conduit Arts, Vic, from  8:30pm.

Friday 5 July. Decibel performs works by West-Australian composers Stuart James, Christopher Tonkin, Rachael Dease, Sam Gillies, Johannes Leubbers, Henry Anderson, Cat Hope and Lindsay Vickery in two concerts as part of their residency at PICA, WA, 6:30pm. Second concert on Saturday 6 July.

Saturday 6 July. Soprano Ellen Winhall performs Australian premieres for solo voice at the Richmond Uniting Church, Vic, at 8pm, including works by David Lumsdaine, Giacinto Scelsi, Christopher Fox, James Weeks, Jo Kondo and Brian Elias.

Sunday 7 July. The Song Company premiere the satirical cantata Howls of the House in collaboration with Oriana Chorale, con voci, University of Newcastle Chamber Choir and Leichhardt Espresso Chorus at Llewellyn Hall, The ANU School of Music, ACT, at 4pm.

Gentleness-Suddenness, Bruce Crossman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nonsemble, Practical Mechanics

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Nonsemble
Practical Mechanics (album review)

Practical Mechanics was a British hobbyist magazine that ran from 1933 to 1963, providing instructions on how to build anything from a bathtub to an airplane alongside articles on the emerging technologies of the space age. Composer Chris Perren has marvellously painted the magazine’s techno-utopianism in a five-movement composition for his Nonsemble, drawing on the machinic rhythms and open harmonies of post-rock and minimalism.

Thanks to a beautifully-typeset score, the album can be performed by anyone with ready access to junk percussion, a sampler, a piano and a string quartet. Perren ingeniously overcomes the notational clutter of long, syncopated “simile” passages by giving each instrument’s cell, number of repetitions and cues in relation to the other instruments. The score is also a great pleasure to read alongside the album, with the notation realising the love of mysterious technical geometry proper to the period.

Practical Mechanics by Chris Perren
Practical Mechanics by Chris Perren

The first movement The Great Awakening opens with a piano thumping underneath a vintage vocal sample. The piano sounds like the mechanical heartbeat of the watch listed in the sample alongside the elevator, airplane and other modern inventions. Swelling strings punctuate the anxious piano before launching into multi-geared polyrhythms that reach their climax in a magnificent breakdown of harmonic and metrical modulations. This thrilling opening to an album suffused with cold-war nostalgia benefits from comparison with Kinetic Work, the opening of the Montreal viola and percussion grindcore duo Hanged Up’s album Kicker in Tow. While Perren’s polyrhythms provide a greater sense of tumbling, racing freefall than Hanged Up’s energetic changes, Hanged Up use rusty, grimy production values to cast a more cynical pallor over the era’s myth of progress. Like the chrome space-phalli adorning the covers of Practical Mechanics, Nonsemble’s album is impossibly shiny and almost saccharine in its major-mode tonality. It is itself a testament to the spread of affordable technology.

With all my love of technology (more! Better! Faster!) I cannot help thinking that the period in question—with its proliferation of nuclear armaments—and the myth of technological progress in general deserves a healthy dose of morose musical criticism, if only for the gothic-horror kicks. But this would be selfishly steering Perren and Nonsemble towards an entirely different set of musical reference-points, Godspeed You! Black Emperor and Lutoslawski rather than Mogwai and Glass.

Concert guide: 26 June–2 July

News

A curated list of upcoming concerts. See also the Australian Music Centre concert calendar and the New Music Network concert series.

Wednesday 26 June. Tonight RoBA perform their last show before the group disperses to different corners of the globe. If you have not heard RoBA’s eclectic and energetic art music/jazz comprovisations, then get along to LongPlay, 318 St Georges Road, Fitzroy North, Vic at 7:30pm.

Friday 28 June. The Song Company perform works by Britten, Ford and Wesley-Smith at Wollongong Town Hall, NSW, 7:30pm.

Saturday 19 June. Gentleness-Suddenness, even the titles sounds great. Hear Lotte Latukefu (mezzo-soprano), James Cuddeford (violin), Claire Edwardes (percussion) and Michael Kieran Harvey (piano) perform contemporary works based on draws on traditional Chinese opera and Australian contemporary music at the Campbelltown Arts Centre, Campbelltown, NSW, at 8pm.

 

Australian Voices: Gordon Kerry

Reviews
Gordon Kerry. Photo by Keith Saunders
Gordon Kerry. Photo by Keith Saunders

Gordon Kerry
Australian Voices (curated by Marshall McGuire)
Melbourne Recital Centre
11 June

The Australian Voices series, presented by the Melbourne Recital Centre and ANAM, celebrates established Australian composers with a night of performances by some of the country’s finest young musicians. For the performers and audience members, the series is an important education in recent and ongoing musical history. For the composers, the night is an opportunity to hear some of their works performed for perhaps only the second or third times. The intimate Salon is the ideal venue for such an event, with Kerry briefly introducing his works and thanking the concert organisers for “dusting him off.”

Kerry’s works between 2002 and 2008–from which the programme was drawn—play with shifting textures and formal convolutions (in the sense of a piece’s overall shape). Figures tumble over each other and episodes are reduced to glimpses through open doors as they are juxtaposed, superimposed and brought into lyrical contact with each other. The series curator Marshall McGuire commented on this aspect of Kerry’s compositions when he likened them to poems. Indeed, many of Kerry’s works are based on poems and it was particularly helpful of McGuire to read some of them out. If Kerry’s chamber pieces are poems, then, despite the lengths of their namesakes, they are sagas. And the Nothing That Is, Blue Latitudes and Nocturne all rely on their sprawling forms to achieve their full effect. As Wallace Stevens writes in The Snow Man, the inspiration for And the Nothing That Is: “One must […] have been cold a long time to behold the junipers shagged with ice […] and not to think of any misery in the sound of the wind.”

Kerry’s representations of snow and ice in And the Nothing That Is reveal a sensitivity to the still and crystalline forms of nature. Pointillistic piano decoration and pure string harmonics are scattered over the cold ground of a single cello note. The angularity of And the Nothing That Is contrasts with the fluid gestures of Blue Latitudes, where a flute springs over a ticking harp line. Not all is light and clear, however. Kerry’s music also has a dark side, as in the wandering, Wagnerian strings that precede the flute and harp duo.

A solo trombone piece and a marimba duo broke up the concert with interludes of energetic humour. As McGuire noted, Aria for trombone, performed by Iain Faragher, contrasts the lyrical and theatrical aspects of the instrument. The boppy marimba duo Out of the Woods sees two improvisatory lines converge upon a repeated hook.

The concert’s concluding work, Nocturne, was played beautifully by the ANAM students. Anthony Chataway attacked the dominant viola line with passion and precision. Lloyd van’t Hoff’s clarinet haunted the Salon from outside the space before entering to play a surging duo with the viola. Creeping figures met each other in the dark to engage in some midnight counterpoint, apparitions flickered across the ensemble and a repeated, descending piano figure tolled the hours.

As a lesson in history, the concert was a monument to the enormous body of post-impressionist music, for want of a better term, produced in Australia over the past thirty years in reaction to the brief dominance of the Boulezian aesthetic in our music institutions. Students of my generation, who were not traumatised by serialism, naturally ask themselves whether post-impressionism is still an interesting compositional path. When Boulez sits innocently next to Boyd on the shelf it seems no more valid to appeal to a piece’s listenability as a marker of its quality than it was to appeal to its complexity once upon a time, especially if that listenability devolves into tired word-painting and another faun-like flute line. After a few “rain” pieces that Boulez on the shelf looks mighty tempting. That said, Kerry’s chamber works form a worthy monument, with a three-dimensional discursivity betraying no lack of construction.

Concert guide: 19–25 June

News

A curated list of upcoming concerts. See also the Australian Music Centre concert calendar and the New Music Network concert series.

Thursday 20 June. The Stanhope piccolo concerto gets its second outing with the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, 6:30pm at the Adelaide Town Hall.

Friday 21 June. An Improvised Sound Project launches at PICA, Perth, WA, at 6pm. The exhibition features work by Australian sound artists Lyndon Blue, Lauren Brown, Matthew Gingold, Cat Hope and Kynan Tan.

Saturday 22 June. Claire Edwardes performs the world première of the Daniel Rojas chamber concerto for marimba and orchestra at the Independent Theatre with The Metropolitan Orchestra. Also, Sunday 23 June at the Balmain Town Hall.