Plexus: L’Invitation au château

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Plexus (Philip Arkinstall, Monica Curro, and Stefan Cassomenos) with Helen Morse and Paul English at Cranlana. Photo courtesy of the artists.

Surrounded by autumnal trees, lush lawns, and the Italianate outcroppings of Harold Desbrowe-Annear’s sunken garden, it is easy to forget that Cranlana is only twenty minutes from the city centre. The house is a cultural treasure-trove, with portraits of the Myer family surrounded by Chinese vases and dwarfed by a painting of Captain Cook, Sir Joseph Banks, and the Fourth Earl of Sandwich (yes, that’s the Earl of Sandwich). Described by Lady Marigold Southey as the “family function centre,” none of the Myer family currently live at Cranlana. The building still has the distinct feeling of a home, perhaps due to the steady stream of guests who gather there for lectures, concerts, fundraisers, and masterclasses. On this particular occasion Cranlana opened its doors for Launch Housing, an organisation dedicated to ending homelessness. On the initiative of Josephine Ridges, Melbourne’s serial commissioners of new music Plexus and the actors Helen Morse and Paul English volunteered a humorous and poignant concert combining music and the spoken word.

Launch Housing’s Deputy CEO Dr Heather Holst explained the frequent case of pregnant women accessing housing services because their current living situation is no longer suitable for raising a family. Launch Housing envisages a purpose-built apartment building that not only provides shelter to these women and their families, but also provides them with access to Melbourne’s cultural riches. While Plexus’ program had distinct ANZAC Day overtones, there was plenty to make one consider the themes of home, safety, and belonging.

Stravinsky originally wrote Histoire du soldat (The Soldier’s Tale) “to be read, played, and danced” by three actors and a septet of musicians. The performance may also include dancers contending with Stravinsky’s lively rhythms and constantly changing time signatures. Plexus and English had their work cut out for them and they rose to the challenge superbly. Plexus tore through the piece’s waltzes, tangos, and Stravinsky’s faltering attempt at jazz. English captivated the audience with a truly wicked devil.

The Soldier’s Tale tells the parable of a soldier returning home who trades his fiddle with the devil for wealth. Awakening from his dream of riches, he has been turned into a wraith-like figure who his friends and family can no longer see. In the original Russian tale the soldier is a deserter, but in The Soldier’s Tale his past is ambiguous. We are simply told that he is broken by war. Instead of divine justice, his trade with the devil is almost accidental, the result of seeing a genial enough face after so much hardship. The Soldier’s Tale draws the audience’s attention to the soldier’s experience rather than its cause. We might approach the issue of homelessness with as few preconceptions and as much empathy. A lack of shelter is a basic emergency to be dealt with before the effects of long-term homelessness take hold, including estrangement from one’s family, networks, and invisibility to society at large.

The theme of anonymity continued with the world première of And I Always Thought by the American composer Martin Bresnick. Bresnick is one of the most thoughtful of contemporary composers, treading a line between craft, art, and experiment. The piece takes as its poetic inspiration two poems by Bertold Brecht: “And I Always Thought”  and “Legend of the Unknown Soldier Beneath the Triumphal Arch”. The pathos of the former infects the subject of the latter. I take away from “And I Always Thought” dismay at a grinding condition of existence.

[…] When I say how things are
Everyone’s heart must be torn to shreds.
That you’ll go down if you don’t stand up.
Surely you see that.

The poem’s first phrase is an artistic manifesto in itself: “And I always thought that the simplest words / Must be enough”. But the poem’s last line “Surely you see that” calls the first into question, leaving Brecht’s “simple words” hanging in the air. This question  provides us with a way of interpreting Bresnick’s approach to the second poem. Legend of the Unknown Soldier Beneath the Triumphal Arch describes the relentless pursual of the unknown soldier “from Moscow to the city of Marseilles.” The soldier is captured, killed, and defaced. A monument to war is then built over his body “so that / The Unknown Soldier / In no circumstances stand up on Judgement Day / and unrecognisable / […] pointing his finger, expose us who can be recognised / To justice.” Chilling stuff. In Bresnick’s composition I like to think that the trio plays the role of the soldiers building the arch. Curro lays brick upon brick of slow, rising double-stops. Arkinstall plays a limping, persistent clarinet line. One begins to feel the weight of the growing arch in the dense piano chords. The piece is relentless, but so is war. Bresnick seems to give us a new manifesto for representing a grinding struggle: Simple words, repeated. But is this still enough?

Plexus have a knack of putting together balanced and varied programs and this concert was no exception with plenty of lighter pieces to offset Bresnick’s gravitas. You can almost taste popcorn in the soaring, filmic lines of Robert Davidson’s Lost in Light. A movement from Mary Finsterer’s “Julian Suite” dedicated to the human rights advocate and philanthropist Julian Burnside gave the audience space to reflect while the trees sighed in the wind outside the Cranlana ballroom. The audience was left in high spirits thanks to a hilarious performance of Jean Anouilh’s comedy L’Invitation au château, cleverly adapted and read by Helen Morse. Plexus played the incidental music with all of the good humour due to Poulenc, at times joining in the play itself. And so the audience stepped out of the château a little lighter of heart and pocket, having raised funds for other much-needed homes.

L’Invitation au château
Plexus with Helen Morse and Paul English
Launch Housing benefit concert
Cranlana
1 May 2016

Igor Stravinsky, L’Histoire du soldat; Robert Davidson, Lost in Light; Mary Finsterer, Julian Suite no. 1, movement 1: “Nobility”; Martin Bresnick, And I Always Thought; Francis Poulenc, L’Invitation au Château.

Rubiks Collective: Imaginarium (Marcus Fjellström Portrait Concert)

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Photo: Alan Weedon (alnwdn.com)
Rubiks Collective perform Imaginarium by Marcus Fjellström. Photo by Alan Weedon (alnwdn.com)

Readers of this blog will be familiar with the Swedish composer Marcus Fjellström from his Odboy and Erordog Suite, a darkly humorous new media creation that I have reviewed several times. Anyone with a healthy sense of childhood nostalgia or a pet whimsy for old computer games and antique horror will love this piece, which was performed yet again by Fjellström’s Australian champions, Rubiks Collective, at Melba Hall.

In Rubiks’ Imaginarium portrait concert, a packed auditorium was introduced to three other creepily entertaining works by Fjellström. Each work combined Fjellström’s characteristic animations with live performance in a unique and stimulating way. Klavierbuch #1 for video and keyboard (Jacob Abela) could be the product of a collaboration between the creators of Guitar Hero and the “beautiful” video game Limbo. And why shouldn’t an interactive piano primer be haunting and beautiful? The audience watches a projection of the simple and eerie piano music surrounded by stylised animations. In the first movement flowers slowly turn into spiders as the pianist progresses through the music. In another episode tears fall from a childishly drawn face. I would love to see Fjellström try his hand at a similarly traumatising music education app.

The Alchemist Dances is the closest Fjellström came to a conventional contemporary piece of concert music, though even this virtuosic percussion solo performed by Kaylie Melville included a quirky take on the genre, playing on the similarities between alchemical symbolism and contemporary musical notation. The audience sees the same arcane lines, cones, and dots as the performer, who interprets them as they see fit. It is common for audiences to see a performer’s graphic score, but often they don’t know where the performer “is” on the score, or how they are interpreting it. In this case, a single symbol is shown at a time and the audience has time to predict how it might sound and appreciate Melville’s creative interpretations.

In Imaginarium Fjellström goes straight to the source of his artistic inspiration: the childhood imagination. Fjellström takes drawings from workshops with children and turns them into arresting audiovisual episodes. A series of lines, spirals, and doodlings turn into a bus trundling through a nocturnal city. Lines radiate from the hands of a cosmic conductor perched atop a mountain, the stars exploding into a constellation of faces. Fjellström’s adult work is firmly rooted in a clear recollection of his own macabre childhood imagination (didn’t we all have one?), avoiding the assumption that children’s imaginations must be brimming with garishly-coloured blocks and bubble writing. Though, as the Mulligrubs generation found out, colourful and disturbing are far from mutually exclusive. Rubiks did the rapt audience at the New Music Studio concert a huge service in introducing them to this original musical creator.

Rubiks Collective
Imaginarium (Marcus Fjellström Portrait Concert)
New Music Studio concert series
Melba Hall
10 April 2016

Marcus Fjellström, Klavierbuch #1, Odboy and Erordog Suite, Alchemist Dances, Imaginarium

Melbourne Metropolitan Sinfonietta: Midnight Songs

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Second-hand musical nationalism emerged as a theme of the Melbourne Metropolitan Sinfonietta’s Midnight Songs program at Melba Hall, with composers arranging and imitating musical styles from Bulgaria, China, Russia, as well as the Communist International.

The 153 pieces making up Béla Bartók’s Mikrokosmos will be familiar to pianists who have jumped through the collection’s graded hoops as students. For this concert the composer and conductor Elliott Gyger gave six of the folk music-influenced tunes an orchestral makeover. Gyger focussed on movements with beats of unequal length, known as “Bulgarian rhythm.” By arranging the pieces for orchestra, it is as though Gyger has “coloured in” the monochrome piano pieces, or enhanced the piano’s limited colour palette. The Melbourne Metropolitan Sinfonetta, conducted by Gyger, painted the piece in beautiful brush-strokes while bringing the pieces’ rhythmic energy to the stage.

Moving east, James Wade’s Midnight Songs take as their inspiration a collection of Chinese yuèfǔ poems written  by an anonymous poet during the Southern Dynasties in the fifth or sixth centuries. The “simple symphonic poem on the changing of the seasons” shows masterful control of tone colour, with overlapping planes of senza vibrato strings melding into clear flute and woodwind tones, all underpinned by the rasping texture of double-stopped cello. The piece appeared to me an orientalist romp, to the extent that the opening, shimmering chords seemed a striking imitation of the Chinese sheng (mouth organ). The Wade explained to me afterwards that it wasn’t his intention at all to imitate the sound of the instrument, which just goes to show how much these interpretations can be in the ear of the beholder.

Julian Yu imitated the style of Shostakovich in Shostakovich’s 16th Symphony (Unfinished). The piece is brimming with clever imitations of Shostakovich’s symphonies, jokes that the ensemble clearly enjoyed performing.

Perhaps the odd one out on this program was Liam Flenady’s Kampflieder. It doesn’t imitate any particular national style, but instead takes as its basic material revolutionary songs from a book given to Conlon Nancarrow when he joined the Spanish Civil War in 1936–7. Nancarrow fought with the International Brigades, an amalgam of liberal-democratic, socialist, and communist anti-fascist soldiers recruited by communist parties around the world. The Kampflieder were also brought together by the Comintern or Third International, even if some of the songs are more obviously communist than others. As was typical of this stage of communism, the book is an attempt to piece together a catholic, international communist culture from diverse nations. Communism, the Kampflieder seem to say, isn’t just something from Russia; it belongs to all.

A selection of these revolutionary songs are given a similarly “generic” treatment in Flenady’s composition. They are not treated with this or that national style, but instead treated with post-serial metrical, harmonic, and structural techniques that were also considered—once upon a time—to hold a certain pan-cultural legitimacy. I’m sympathetic to this idea that the inventions of modernist artists and musicians should be  accessible to all (whether people choose to learn about them is another matter), but like communist axioms their adoption in different contexts can have wildly diverging effects.

Modernist works should also be subject to local evaluation and appreciation. So, did Flenady’s process-based composition work in Melba Hall performed by the Melbourne Metropolitan Sinfonietta and surrounded by various national caricatures? Yes, for several reasons. The piece was an excellent contrast to the lyrical nationalism of the surrounding works. Like a detailed triptych by Hieronymous Bosch, the orchestra is divided into three sections playing in different time signatures, creating a complex rhythmic counterpoint. Against its more conservative foils, the piece also displays adventurous instrumental writing, with seething masses of high violins, wallowing woodwinds, and gritty bass strings. This grandiosity is punctuated by muted percussion, lending the texture a pathetic intimacy. You can’t make out the individual songs, but certain harmonic colours pass like clouds between the orchestral sections. I began wondering where the fight was in all of this textural refinement when a shred of melody turns into a cluster of notes run wild. Before I knew it the orchestra had exploded into a wonderful, blaring mess with a solo piccolo riding atop it with gentle upward glissandi. Not wanting to be too cliché in his socialist anthem, Flenady makes the piece amble to the end.

Modeled on the London Sinfonietta, the Melbourne Metropolitan Sinfonietta are filling an important niche in local musical life. In Midnight Songs they have brought together established and emerging composers for an accessible and challenging program.

The Melbourne Metropolitan Sinfonietta
Conducted by Elliott Gyger
Melba Hall
18 March 2016
Béla Bartòk, arr. Elliott Gyger, 6 Dances in Bulgarian Rhythm; James Wade, Midnight Songs; Liam Flenady, Kampflieder; Julian Yu, Shostakovich’s 16th Symphony (Unfinished).

Episode 1: Muntu Walunga

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The composer Jessica Wells discusses Muntu Walunga, her piece for solo harp inspired by Bakongo mythology and the extended harp techniques of Carlos Salzedo.

Thanks to Marshall McGuire for allowing us to illustrate the discussion with his recording of the piece.

 

 

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You can hear the full recording of Muntu Walunga over at Making Waves, a monthly playlist of contemporary Australian music. The Partial Durations podcast is produced with support from RealTime Arts.

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A musical reply to violence against women

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Gemma Tomlinson performs alongside the voice of Kaija Saariaho in Lisa Cheney’s When we Speak.

This year’s International Women’s Day saw institutions and individuals around Australia actively intervene in the contemporary music scene in the interests of gender equality. Today (just as a couple of years ago when gender equality was addressed on this blog) around a quarter of the composers studying, represented in concerts, and represented by the Australian Music Centre are women. As Delia Bartle wrote for Limelight Magazine, The Sydney Conservatorium’s new National Women Composers’ Development Program seeks to boost this number by providing emerging composers with two years of intensive mentorship followed by a prestigious commission. Lisa Cheney and Peggy Polias from Making Waves curated a special playlist featuring women composers including Clare Johnston, Maria Grenfell, Annie Hui-Hsin Hsieh, among many others.

In Melbourne, the composer Samantha Wolf produced a concert fundraiser for the Safe Steps Family Violence Response Centre. Entitled This Will Be Our Reply, the concert featured five thoughtful responses to the theme of International Women’s Day and violence against women in particular. Each of the five composers eschewed clichés to present an original musical response to these themes.

“Shrill, pretty, abrasive.” In Hystericus—and other (mostly) women’s words, Alice Humphries uses the language of contemporary music—its squawking, gritty vocabulary—to make the audience think about words often associated with women. In doing so, Humphries has created one of the most conflicting situations for the listener since Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony. A listener sympathetic to grating and buzzing extended techniques may draw comparisons between criticisms of contemporary music and misogynist language. “Too loud and complex!” “But you are choosing to focus on only particular, difficult pieces of music,” the audience member might counter. Or they might offer my favourite response (misremembered but courtesy of Adorno) “maybe you understand contemporary music too well, because it is speaking about real problems.”

A misogynist audience member (keeping in mind that misogyny and a taste for contemporary music are not at all mutually exclusive) might instead bring up the Lacanian dynamic of the Master and the hysteric often associated with the relationship of the critic and the artist. No matter what explanation or interpretation the psychoanalyst gives to the hysteric’s words, they will always counter “that’s not it.” “Exactly!” The misogynist new music skeptic might respond, “It is in the nature of both contemporary music and women to be unreasonable, repetitive, and exhausting!” In her program note Humphries doesn’t offer an interpretation of her own but lets all of these subject-positions linger in the air. Whatever your interpretation the compositional experiment was extremely satisfying to the ears, with two thirds of Rubiks Collective (Tamara Kohler and Gemma Tomlinson) teaming up with the rich tone of Kyla Matsuura-Miller’s violin and Aaron Klein’s bass clarinet to run a gauntlet of musical textures and moods.

After playing on stereotypes of women’s voices, Lisa Cheney brought us the voice of a woman, indeed, one of the greatest living woman composers. Cheney’s When We Speak combines live and prerecorded cello with a manipulated recording of an interview with Kaija Saariaho. While Saariaho’s voice is usually manipulated for its sonic value, moments of Saariaho’s reflections on gender politics in the music industry are clear. Cheney’s resonant electronics part is an atmosphere of unfathomable spaciousness. Clouds of voice fragments swirl around the space along with clouds of her solo cello composition Sept Papillons. In the middle of this environment the cellist Gemma Tomlinson struggles to be heard, playing strings of extended techniques with her characteristic commitment and control. At times the live cello becomes one with the prerecorded track or has a fleeting solo moment. This piece could be heard as a solo woman struggling to be heard in the male-dominated music scene, except all of the samples are of women and the piece is composed by a woman. It could also be heard as a woman engaging or even struggling with the history of women composers and the weight of Saariaho’s legacy. The piece ends with one solution, in Saariaho’s voice: “Create something personal because that’s the only thing that counts.”

Kyla Matsuura-Miller returned to the stage to perform Jessica Wells’ Sati and Satya, a two-movement piece for piano and violin inspired by Buddhist notions of “mindfulness” and “truth” respectively. The piece relates in a very concrete way to the concert’s theme, the first movement being composed for HSC students and requiring a certain tonal restraint. The “truth” movement expands on these restrained ideas in a more personally meaningful way for the composer. The composer likens this process to the way she finds herself moderating her behaviour to suit social norms and the difference between one’s “inner” and “outer” selves.

May Lyon’s On the Inside begins with a similar duality before expanding on this theme in multiple directions. The piano trio for flute, clarinet, cello, and piano is a journey of developing harmonic and rhythmic nuance. From simple thematic beginnings the piece gathers colour, variety, and character. Beneath this fine instrumental writing is a sophisticated critique of notions of beauty and gender roles. The piece’s title, On the Inside, suggests a binary between inner and outward  beauty, but the composer is quick to point out that many conventionally “beautiful” moments in the piece have been retained because “perceived beauty is not something to be ashamed of or feared.” Instead of simply busting the binary of inner and outer beauty, the piece explores “a woman’s life, from growth to complexity (as opposed to innocence to uselessness).” Lyon also contrasts the view of a developing, rich inner life to other supposedly emancipated, developmental views of a woman’s changing social value as maiden, mother, and crone.

Samantha Wolf’s The More I Think About It, the Bigger It Gets closed the evening with an affecting theatrical gesture. Footsteps resound through the speakers while Kohler, Tomlinson, and Matsuura-Miller attack their instruments with darting gestures. Audio samples from news reports and talk-back radio describe acts of violence against women, placing the blame on women’s shoulders. The program note described the footsteps and musical gestures as representing a woman walking home at night and the fears and received rhetoric that swirl around her mind. The tension was palpable, showing yet another way in which the techniques of contemporary music can be used as critical tools for interrogating issues of gender and violence.

This Will Be Our Reply
A Fundraiser for the Safe Steps Family Violence Response Centre
Melba Hall7 March

Alice Humphries, Hystericus—and other (mostly) women’s words; Jessica Wells, Sati and Satya; Lisa Cheney, When We Speak; May Lyon, On The Inside; Samantha Wolf, The More I Think About It, the Bigger It Gets.

Do You See What I Hear?: If I am a Musical Thinker

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If I am a Musical Thinker. Photo by Adam Casey

The latest installment in Carmen Chan’s experimental music/visual art/performance art project Do You See What I Hear? took place on someone else’s stage. La Mama squeezes its music series around the scenery and props of current productions, leaving Brigid Burke’s projector, Warren Burt’s tangle of electronic gear, Adam Simmons’ arsenal of wind instruments, and Chan’s cello intimately perched in front of an enormous screen.

The American composer Benjamin Boretz originally wrote If I am a Musical Thinker in 1981 for his graduate students at the University of Texas. The aesthetic, social, and spiritual credo is one of the most influential documents of 1980s experimental art and was here spoken by Clinton Green alongside improvised music and video.

I have to confess that I haven’t had the pleasure of reading Boretz’s text. It wasn’t part of my own graduate program and I haven’t had the opportunity to chase it up since the concert. As such, what follows relates only to what I remember from the concert and is probably a misrepresentation of Boretz’s actual words.

The text begins with a phenomenological epoché, a momentary suspension of all preconceptions about musical experience. “If I am a Musical Thinker,” the audience heard, “I want to know what it is I am thinking about.” The musicians strike up a beautiful and spacious atmosphere: whisper-soft clarinet, rubbed clay pot and the odd electronic sound. Boretz heads straight for a teleological or ends-oriented definition. Music is a medium of expression. Like Leonardo DiCaprio in The Revenant, Boretz begins If I am a Musical Thinker at the farthest reaches of his journey and then has to find his way home by an unfamiliar route (but hopefully in less horse carcasses). If music expresses, what does it express? Identity. How? In one of my favourite lines Boretz asserts that expression is not just “raw evacuation” of identity. Instead, we form our selves in relation to and through pre-formed musical conventions. Boretz posits a dialectical world of musical discourses negating one another. Against this headlong pitch into abstraction a recording of Boretz’s text is layered and amplified in a trippy web of voices.

Eager to return the individual into the mix, Boretz turns to the experience of listening to these discourses. When we listen we recompose the music we hear, reacting to it insofar as its forms are already within us. For this performance Burt has sonified the ink blot illustrations throughout Boretz’s text and turned them into a bank of different sound effects. Like ink blots, we try to match music to our ever-evolving and complex bank of musical experiences. In this way “music,” Boretz argues, “expresses us.” I understand this in the same way that something enrages us. The external object resonates with a pre-existing bias. We do not use the term “enjoy” in the same way (one enjoys something, not the other way around), though I think it would be nice to say that a piece of music “enjoys us.”

The essential musical unit is then not the musical work, but the musical occasion where this magnificent process of reflection-recomposition takes place. The reason for the musicians’ live semi-improvised performance then becomes clear. While Boretz is arguing that all musical experience follows the model of the musical occasion, an improvised performance provides the opportunity for a form to be dredged out of one consciousness and—hopefully—communicated to another. The black and white drawings and text of Burke’s projections give a hallucinatory, half-significating feel to the swirling mass of musical forms taking place before us.

Boretz opens the discussion out, making some judgements about music education. He claims that in the brow-beaten world of conservatorium education the urge to express oneself is transferred on to the need for external approval. Discipline replaces engagement. And so Boretz finds his way home a little wiser and a little bloodier, claiming that his original decision—that music is expression—is important because expression is the key to our musical salvation.

But this is precisely the problem with Boretz’s method. His return journey is only used to justify—rather than question—his original decision. This method will be familiar to anyone who has walked to a 7-Eleven for milk and returned with a jar of Nutella. When Boretz set out on his thinkspedition he already knew deep down that he wanted Nutella, so that’s what he got. Evidently he had pre-formed opinions on the hot-housing methods of some music institutions and fabricated the scenario of an unbiased phenomenological investigation to bolster them. I would like to see this text turned around. A future Do You See What I Hear? performance could start at the end, looking for the reasons behind musician burn-out. They could ask why musicians emotionally disengage from their musical experiences when placed in a highly critical environment, coming to the conclusion that they have divorced their need for musical expression from their musical practice (it all seems fairly redundant and self-explanatory this way around doesn’t it?). Then, instead of the walk of shame, they should walk straight out into the wilderness asking the tough questions: Are composing, playing, and listening really comparable experiences for the individual? How about for different people? To what extent can two people claim to have the same musical experience? Does Boretz discount experiences that we might like to call “musical,” but which do not correspond to affective states at all? These are huge questions raised by just the first sentence of Boretz’s text. I think I’ll leave them until I get back from the shops.

If I am a Musical Thinker
Do You See What I Hear?
La Mama Courthouse Theatre
15 February 2016

Australian Art Orchestra and Ensemble Offspring: Exit Ceremonies

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Ensemble Offspring and the Australian Art Orchestra perform Alvin Lucier’s Swings. Photo by Mia Forrest

The grand organ is a true feat of engineering. Most concertgoers won’t realise that behind the organs gracing our town halls and churches are chambers containing forests of pipes of different shapes and sizes. Some bass flues are so large you have to climb inside to clean them, while each pipe needs to be meticulously maintained and tuned. The organists who harness this incredible machinery have to contend with baffling lag times and instrumental idiosyncrasies, but the outcome is an astonishing timbral palette. Given the awesome presence of these instruments, their history, and the considerable expense involved in maintaining them, it is surprising that so little contemporary music has been written for them. One thinks of Messiaen, Ligeti, and Xenakis, but there most people’s knowledge of contemporary organ repertoire stops. The Australian Art Orchestra and Ensemble Offspring’s recent commissioning program for new organ works is therefore of international importance. The AAO and Ensemble Offspring’s performance at the Melbourne Town Hall was the first complete showing of the program, including the world premiere of a work by the “phenomenological music” pioneer Alvin Lucier.

Austin Buckett’s Aisles begins with a stunning, brassy explosion involving the whole ensemble of strings, percussion, trumpet, turntables, voice, and organ. The sound echoes off the back of the hall (or was that the live sound processing?), giving it a wave-like, viscous force. The instruments’ differing levels of decay give the wave a shimmering, multicoloured tail. The piece progresses by looping such gestures and then juxtaposing blocks of loops. The interstellar explosions are replaced by Sonya Holowell’s solo voice singing intimately into a microphone. A cavernous, spacious racket returns for a while before we finally hear the common, pitched sound of the organ. It is a high wail above the ecstatic chatter of ride cymbals played by Claire Edwardes and Joe Talia on either side of the stage. So the dynamic atmospheres of Aisles continue, a ritualistic procession as varied as it is enchanting.

Simon James Phillips’ Flaw begins with Martin Ng performing some of the quietest turntabling that you have ever heard. Breathy hums (from the organ perhaps?) are slowed down to subsonic frequencies then back into a somnambulent mid-range. Edwardes plays a shell chime and the sound is captured and transformed to sound like rain. Among this artificial pastoral scene a prerecorded bird can be heard. This meditation on technology and the natural world continues for half an hour, with swelling, arpeggiating strings and crackling speakers slowly rising and falling in the hazy texture.

Flaw and Lucier’s Swings make for an interesting juxtaposition. Simple ideas and static textures can be either numbingly boring or deeply fascinating. There is a thin line between one and the other, a line that no doubt shifts from individual to individual. Swings is based on one idea: shifting the pitch and timbre of an organ pipe by covering the open end with one’s hand. For the performance at the Melbourne Town Hall, six pipes were extracted from the bowels of the grand organ and mounted on stage, connected to the mothership through snaking black umbilical cords. The overall effect begged comparison with an H.R. Giger illustration. Four performers stood around the pipes, their hands clad in white gloves like surgeons or museum curators (scaaaary museum curators!). The strings and organ provided a steady drone as one by one the performers slowly bent the pitch of each pipe. Subtle beating filled the air. I was mesmerised as each new pipe modulated the sound of the others and the instrumental ensemble. So used to listening for pitch and rhythm, new dimensions of sound unfolded for the listener as the overall timbre became more complex with the introduction of each new pipe. At the central climax of the piece the air becomes alive with what seem aural hallucinations. Mobile, distorting, ringing ghosts of tones fill the hall. Then the sound is disassembled tone by tone. It was fascinating as an audience member to witness the construction of this sound that turned out to be so much more than the sum of its parts.

Exit Ceremonies
The Australian Art Orchestra
Ensemble Offspring
Melbourne Town Hall
6 February 2016
Austin Buckett, Aisles; Simon James Phillips, Flaw; Alvin Lucier, Swings

What to look out for in 2016

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With programs taking shape around Australia, here are some gigs to keep an eye out for in 2016.

Elision

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Elision performing the world-line cycle of Richard Barrett at Storey Hall, RMIT. Vicki Jones Photography.

Australia’s prodigal new music ensemble Elision will be in the country to celebrate their 30th anniversary. An exhibition dedicated to the ensemble at the RMIT Art Gallery in Melbourne, September 9-22 October, will feature concerts, talks, and film. Throughout the year audiences can expect to hear Elision perform some of the most innovative and challenging contemporary music at the Metropolis New Music Festival, the Melbourne Recital Centre, ANAM, and beyond. The season features world premieres by Liza Lim, Ann Cleare, Brian Ferneyhough, Aaron Cassidy, Richard Barrett, Matthew Sergeant, Jeroen Speak, and Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf.

Chamber Made Opera

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Permission to Speak. Photo by Daisy Noyes.

This year two new works emerge butterfly-like from their long development-coccoons in 2016.  If you missed the audacious opening of Chamber Made Opera’s 2016 season Another Other by Erkki Veltheim and collaborators, be sure to catch Permission to Speak later in the year. This interview-based work brings together performance auteur Tamara Saulwick with some of Melbourne’s favourite contemporary musicians including the composer Kate Neal (of recent Semaphore fame), the always-scintillating sound design of Jethro Woodward (Minotaur Trilogy and a million other things), and the choral harmonies of Gian Slater (Invenio) and friends.

Decibel

Perth’s resident new music ensemble Decibel are poised to present a series of concerts based around the French electro-acoustic pioneer Eliane Radigue. They’ll be premiering a commission in the WAAPA Main Auditorium at 7:30pm on 23 March, then teaming up with the clarinetist and composer Carol Robinson as part of Radigue’s OCCAM OCEAN series.

Forest Collective

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Evan Lawson conducting during the Forest Collective Launch at the Abbotsford Convent. Photo by Matthew Lorenzon

Forest Collective recently launched their season with performances by featured artists at the Abbotsford Convent. It’s just as well they started early, as they have nine epic programs to get through. The launch gave audience members a taste of what is to come, including medieval polyphony-meets-Benjamin Britten, a concert by Forest’s guest ensemble the Allotropy String Quartet, and Kate Bright singing Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire. Of the nine concerts I’m particularly excited about three later in the year: Forest will team up with the University of Melbourne’s New Music Studio to perform Grisey’s final work, Quatre chants pour franchir le seuil on 17 September. Pierrot Lunaire follows at St. Stephen’s Church in Richmond from 17–19 November. The final concert of the season at the Abbotsford Convent features rarely-heard works written during the time of the Nazi regime, including music by Strauss, Orff, Eisler, Weill, Schreker, Goldschmidt, Ullman, Dutilleux, and Messiaen. From censorship to libertinage, Forest’s multimedia Metropolis concert “Sensuality in the City” will feature sculptures by Melbourne-based artist Jake Preval and the Australian premiere of Philip Venebles’ “F*** Forever.”

Ensemble Offspring

Ensemble Offspring are promising a collaborative 2016 season, beginning with Exit Ceremonies, a first time collaboration with the Australian Art Orchestra involving new works for pipe organ. Adelaide residents can enjoy Ensemble Offspring’s collaboration with the early music ensemble Ironwood in the Adelaide Hills. The ensemble will also visit the Four Winds Festival and the Peninsula Music Festival to perform Philip Glass’s epic Music with Changing Parts with fLing Physical Theatre. Ensemble Offspring continue to support young artists through their Hatched Academy, which will culminate in a weekend long mini-festival entitled Kontiki Racket.

BIFEM

The Bendigo International Festival of Exploratory Music is characteristically tight-lipped about their 2016 program, which will be announced in May. All we know is that it will be the biggest BIFEM yet, with over 90 musicians engaged for the September weekend.

Metropolis New Music Festival

I know you can’t wait until September to immerse yourself in new music, so thankfully the Metropolis New Music Festival will fill the Melbourne Recital Centre with its quality and catholic program of contemporary music in May. This year’s theme is “Music of the City,” embracing Byzantine-contemporary mashups, algorithmic sonification of Melbourne’s skyline, turntabling–meets-experimental jazz, and hazy landscape-rock. The festival’s Salon series will feature Australia’s most exciting contemporary music ensembles including Plexus, Syzygy Ensemble, Forest Collective, Press Play, and a not-to-be-missed concert by Elision in their thirtieth year. The Melbourne Symphony Orchestra concerts provide a rare opportunity to hear contemporary music writ large and will feature my personal highlight: pieces by emerging composers from the Cybec 21st Century Australian Composer Program. A new series of concerts in the foyer will open the festival to the city and there will also be a ton of Messiaen dotted throughout the program, which is always nice.

Another Other: A self-fulfilling prophecy about the death of art

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Image 1_Chamber Made Opera –Another Other_Caption – Erkki Veltheim, Sabina Maselli, Natasha Anderson and Anthony Pateras_Credit – Jeff Busby.jpg
Erkki Veltheim, Sabina Maselli, Natasha Anderson and Anthony Pateras in Another Other. Photo by Jeff Busby

Waiting in line at the North Melbourne Meat Market, I spot the corpse. A humanoid shape lies wrapped in black plastic bags. The sound of clocks (or are they shovels?) emanate from it. A program essay by Ben Byrne tells us it is the body of art. He quotes Ingmar Bergman (The Snakeskin, 1965) who claims that art is basically unimportant, deprived of its traditional social value. Like a snakeskin full of ants, art is convulsed with the efforts of millions of individual artists. Each artist, including Bergman himself, is elbowing the others “in selfish fellowship,” in pursuit of their own insatiable curiosity. To celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Bergman’s film Persona, Natasha Anderson, Sabina Maselli, Anthony Pateras, and Erkki Veltheim have crawled inside the film’s 79-minute skin.

The four artists sit facing each other beneath red digital clocks counting down the opera’s duration. Pateras works his Revox B77: a machine with a loop of tape and multiple heads that can be manipulated live to produce a stunning array of sounds. Veltheim nurses his violin, which he processes through a laptop running  MaxMSP. Natasha Anderson festoons her Paetzold contrabass recorder with an array of sensors and microphones. Sabina Maselli commands an arsenal of projectors and spotlights, including reels of custom-shot 16mm film.

Once inside the film’s skin, the collaborators throw out its organs of character and plot. The artists instead motivate its mise-en-scène. Maselli’s deeply-textured footage of hands, faces, and landscapes mirror Bergman’s own sumptuous images. The close-miked sounds of violin, recorder, and water echo the conspicuous detail of 1960s foley. Spoken text references monologues in the film, notably Alma’s story of a foursome on a beach. And so the ideas cycle: hands—faces—landscapes—text, interspersed with solo episodes for each performer, until the time runs out.

Image 2_Chamber Made Opera –Another Other_Caption – Anthony Pateras and Erkki Veltheim_Credit – Jeff Busby.jpg
Comparing hands. Don’t they know it’s bad luck? Photo by Jeff Busby

After the third extended shot of intertwined hands, I wondered whether the artists were labouring under a category mistake. Texture and materiality were the bread and butter of contemporary arts throughout the 1980s and 1990s, but the structures of plot and character are surely now considered as much part of the artistic “surface” than image and sound. Thanks to the fashion of basing new music on old films, there are counterexamples. For instance, Alex Garsden’s Messages to Erice I & II, which uses the familial relationships of the characters in Víctor Erice’s 1973 film El Spíritu del Colmena to structure the algorithmic relationships of four amplified tam-tams.

By throwing out plot and character, the creators of Another Other struggle to address the original film’s themes of identity, motherhood, art, and being. The film’s iconic shot of Elisabet and Alma’s juxtaposed faces is critical of traditional gender roles precisely because the characters struggle with those roles. The repeated superimposition of the artists’ faces in Another Other is less critical than narcissistic.

While stating that art’s traditional social function is dead, Bergman’s essay affirms the personal significance of art, a belief that is reflected in Elisabet’s first scene in Persona. Elisabet is an actress who stops speaking because she harbours a burning will to live authentically and shake off the role of motherhood. She laughs at a radio soap but seems affected by a piece of music. In Another Other no such distinction is made between inauthentic and personally authentic art. Veltheim plays the Chaconne from J.S. Bach’s violin Partita no. 2 while the artists’ faces are shown through a day-time soap vaseline lens. I will accept that universally authentic art is impossible, but I struggled to find even an affirmation of personally authentic art in Another Other. Unsure of the artists’ belief in their own work, I failed to commit as an audience member.

After fifty minutes I even started believing that art was dead. Thanks to the clocks high above the stage I could regret every minute left. The saddest thing was that I respect the work of each artist in their own right. But four good artists in a box does not an opera make. At the end of Another Other the artists imagine a different ending to the film. The doctor says that Elisabet’s silence was just another role that she sloughed off in the end, not a real existential crisis. She was perhaps also depressed and infantile. The doctor concludes “But perhaps you have to be infantile to be an artist in an age such as this.” I laughed. It made me particularly glad I trusted them with an hour and a half of my life.

Another Other
Chamber Made Opera
Meat Market
18 February 2016
Natasha Anderson, Sabina Maselli, Anthony Pateras, Erkki Veltheim.

Rubiks and Forest Collective: Sunrise

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Rubiks set up for Morton Feldman's Why Patterns? on a steaming-hot December evening.
Rubiks set up for Morton Feldman’s Why Patterns? on a steaming-hot December evening.

Forest Collective teamed up with their ensemble in residence Rubiks to provide a folk-inflected final concert of 2015.

Michael Bakrnčev’s The Virtuous Woman with the Watermelon is a lighthearted piece for narrator and small ensemble based on a Macedonian folk tale. Commissioned expressly for this concert, the piece was an appropriate companion to Berio’s Folk Songs. The narrator (Stefanie Dingnis) tells the story of the ideal married couple receiving visitors, but all is not as it seems. The fussy husband constantly sends his wife back to the market to buy a better watermelon for their guests and the wife simply returns to the kitchen and polishes the watermelon until the husband declares that she has indeed found the very best watermelon in town. I’m not sure what the moral of the story is. Don’t be a demanding partner? Do make pragmatic shortcuts? “The husband and wife are a team” explained Bakrnčev after the concert, the story hinging on our guessing at the husband’s knowledge of the wife’s actions and the slow transformation of the meaning of the word “virtuous” in the story’s title. Bakrnčev accompanies the story with a mock-military march. A flute trembles stertorously over a snare drum. At one point the narrator vocalises beautifully over a cheery piano tune. Next to the Folk Songs Bakrnčev’s musical accompaniment sounded very light indeed.

There is always time for another performance of Berio’s Folk Songs. In arranging eleven folk songs from the United States and Europe (including two original compositions), Berio sought “a unity between folk music and our music.” I assume that by “our music” he means contemporary art music rather than the classical tradition more broadly. Berio surrounds the folk tunes with an atmosphere of extended techniques evoking natural environments. Thorny instrumental interjections paint a sound-world far removed from the singing tones of a modern orchestra. Does the listener really hear the spirit of ancient music brought alive to modern ears, or a fantasy of a lost world? Whether real or imagined, in 1964 Berio constructed a bridge between pre-modern tones and the overblown, underbowed techniques  of contemporary music. This bridge has since grown to a widely acknowledged superhighway between early and contemporary music. The Folk Songs may have been a striking statement in 1964, but this conduit has now passed over into ideology and is ripe for interrogation.

Today’s culturally-aware listeners are sensitive to issues of cultural appropriation. Performers need to carefully balance their preconceptions of ancient and modern music. Too “folksy” a performance and the performance will slide into parody, too straight a performance and the songs will lose much of their appeal. Stefanie Dingnis chose a relatively restrained performance style, letting the beauty of the tunes speak for themselves. Dingnis came alive in the Sicilian song “A la femminisca” with its clashing, explosive opening that cannot be mistaken for anything but an invitation to let loose. The ensemble, conducted by Evan Lawson, provided plenty of colour in their masterfully balanced accompaniment. The sensitive articulation of harpist Samantha Ramirez and thrilling execution of the piece’s signature viola solo by Anthony Chataway deserve special mention.

Listening to and watching old recordings, I wonder whether anyone could or would want to perform the Folk Songs with the same accents and dance moves today as the Songs‘ dedicatee Cathy Berberian.

The concert also included a stunning performance by Nicholas Yates of Berio’s Sequenza VIIb for soprano saxophone. The piece’s drone was provided by string players spaced around the Richmond Uniting Church. So subtle was their movement and quiet was their playing that I became conscious of the ethereal sound over a minute or so. What a beautiful effect. Yates’ agile execution of the popping, pointillist piece was something to behold! The concert concluded with Morton Feldman’s Why Patterns? performed by Rubiks Collective. Jacob Abela (piano), Tamara Kohler (flute), and Kaylie Melville (percussion) move through their sparse parts at their own rate, coming together at certain  vertiginous moments. These meeting-points become moments of great focus as the performers become aware that they are a page or so away from each other. The performers have to make so many decisions in executing their part that I was put in mind of Alistair Noble’s recent lecture on Feldman at the Melbourne Music Analysis Summer School. Noble argued that, given the tight-knit community within which Feldman’s works were composed and performed, he assumed a certain stylistic palette when composing indeterminate elements in his works. For the most part we cannot hope to—and may not want to—recover the assumed stylistic traits of the early performances of Feldman’s works, but there is certainly interesting work to be done in that direction.

Sunrise
Rubiks and Forest Collective
Richmond Uniting Church
19 December 2015

Michael Bakrnčev, The Virtuous Woman with the Watermelon; Luciano Berio, Sequenza VIIb, Folk Songs; Morton Feldman, Why Patterns?