Tag Archives: Georges Aperghis

Metropolis New Music Festival 2016: Forest Collective, Sensuality in the City

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In 2009 the clarinettist Richard Haynes played a piece by Richard Barrett naked but for a feathered head dress, Chris Dench on a surgical table wrapped in glad wrap and wearing a cock ring, David Young while pissing into an amplified 44-gallon drum, and David Lang while climbing a ladder in a hard hat and not much else. The concert, Listen My Secret Fetish, was an Aphids production directed by David Young and Margaret Cameron and it set the bar for explorations of new music and sexuality. Not everyone has to wee into a bucket, but sex and music is a thematic pair with as much room for exploration as, well, sex and music.

Forest Collective’s Sensuality in the City program at the Metropolis New Music Festival began promisingly. The audience was met at the door by a cardboard torso complete with a glory hole for happy-snaps (nobody took full advantage of this). Once in the salon, the audience sat through a tense minute of droning cello and gently pulsating piano clusters while the marvelously hairy bass-baritone Christian Gillett glowered darkly above us. After a while he stated emphatically “I wanna fuck Chris Hemsworth.” The original version of F**k forever by Philip Venables gives George Miles as the object of affection, but I think we can allow this local variation in contemporary performance practice.

From this point on artistic director Evan Lawson conducted a historical survey of urban sexuality divided into brackets addressing desire, sex, and conflict. The “desire” bracket included three sumptuous arrangements of pieces by Robert Schumann, Claude Debussy, and Franz Schubert. Soprano Rosemary Ball brought out the budding desire in “Im wunderschönen Monat Mai,” at least so far as singing about birds allows. The ensemble crowded around Rebecca Scully’s double bass, voyeuristically illuminating her visceral performance of Syrinx with torches.

The “sex” bracket approached sex most obliquely indeed. George Aperghis’ Recitation No. 9 received an unprecedentedly powerful performance by Ball. The soprano recites the sentence “Parfois je résiste à mon envie parfois je lui cède pourquoi donc ce désir,” which might be translated as something like “Sometimes I resist my inclination sometimes I give in to it why then this desire?” The phrase is revealed word by word from the end to the beginning, taking on different meanings with each iteration. In terms of suggestion—and Ball’s rendition was wonderfully suggestive—this piece is clearly still in the realm of desire. So too is Lawson’s Himeros, a piece dedicated to the pain in desire. Contorted Wagnerian strings send heart-strings thrumming before a sparse and delicate middle section lulls the audience to sleep. The audience is painfully awoken with a bang from the percussion as the brass begin to cry. If the association of Himeros with sex is obscure, then Marc Yeats’ Lines and Distances is absolutely cryptic. The measured, pointillist tapestry unfolds before the listener like a medieval love story, with clarinettist Vilan Mai carefully managing each turn of the tale. But once again we are in a world of courtship and managed proximities.

For the third bracket dedicated to “confusion, conflict and confusion” the audience heard a truly heartbreaking rendition of Schubert’s “Gefrorne Tränen” performed by Gillett, then music from an opera by Venables where members of a family and their maid “beat a mysterious bandaged figure lurking in the corner while discussing what they’ll eat for dinner.” The program felt like a film that cuts straight from a prolonged scene of flirtatious winking to a scene of domestic violence, skipping over physical sensuality entirely. The program’s lacklustre programming was not aided by some very unsexy intonation. Now I don’t know how you’d actually go about making a good “sexy program.” It seems a bit like someone asking you to “be funny,” you can’t just do it on the spot. I struggle to be half-way presentable most days. But someone out there has got to be able to get this right.

Sensuality in the City
Forest Collective
Metropolis New Music Festival
Melbourne Recital Centre
18 May 2016

Philip Venables, F**k Forever; Robert Schumann, Im wunderschönen Monat Mai; Claude Debussy (arr. Rebecca Scully), Syrinx; Franz Schubert (arr. Alexander Morris), Ganymede; Georges Aperghis, Recitation No. 9; Evan Lawson, Himeros; Marc Yeats, Lines and Distances; Franz Schubert (arr. Evan Lawson), Gefrorne Tränen; Philip Venables, Fight Music.

DOMICILE: Alone Together

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Review by Charles MacInnes

I set off to Carlton for the first performance of DOMICILE last Friday night, and even though I knew quite a few people amongst the group gathered outside, we remained mostly silent during the event. As we visited the different areas of the house there was a quick whisper on the stairs, a smile from across the room or a small nod of encouragement before something new began.

Straight through the downstairs section of the house, I landed in blacksnowfalls (2014 by Wotjek Blecharz) where Matthias Schack-Arnott had lithely joined himself to a single, slightly battered timpani. Like a teenager on the train I stared at the window and watched the sounds go by. The skin became taut and some sequences of letters formed, along with rhythms of copper under a body that moved and stretched to dampen the sounds.

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Matthias Schack-Arnott performs blacksnowfalls by Wotjek Blecharz. Photo by Pier Carthew.

Next door were the honks and squeezes of Dale Gorfinkel’s installation Baby boomer. You pedalled while holding on to an old Zimmer frame and the balloons and hoses and brass relics came to life. The apparatus seemed to have assembled itself from the junk in the shed and it kept going even after we stopped pumping air through. My brass player self began to realise how accidental a lot of life’s noise is. Sound and its complex waves and vibrations already exist, and we players perhaps take a little too much credit for its creation, and are correspondingly also deflated when it from time to time falters.

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Vanessa Tomlinson plays on Baby boomer by Dale Gorfinkel. Photo by Pier Carthew.

Ascending the stairs, I overhear the Conversation (2004 by Georges Aperghis) between two women (Jenny Barnes and Niharika Senapati) in the bath. The bubbles obscure their bodies and the voices are a mixture of inwards exhalations and assenting disagreement. When I hear people arguing, I can quickly tell that most of the time they don’t know what they are arguing about. They become so used to their practised roles that a quip or jibe represents years of misunderstanding. The underlying root of the problem is long since forgotten—we’ve lost the ability to analyse—instead acting out our expected frustrations on whoever’s at hand.

Downstairs again, I sat in the chair waiting to be next in a one-to-one Audition (2014 by Angelo Solari) with Carolyn Connors. We were seated opposite each other and the script/score was open. She: Hello

[pause]

I (reading): hello.

We bounced back and forth following the lines, mimicking each other in normal voices. Often asked to overlap the dialogue, it got a little faster before a Martin was mentioned a few times. She sprung from her chair and left, returning with the electric kettle now full of water. While waiting for it to boil we had to stare at one another. I was strategically pessimistic about my efforts at doing well, but kept my gaze fixed. Blinked a few times. Much later in the garden after the whole performance was finished, she said I was one of the most natural ones because I didn’t try to act.

Now heading to the front room, I copied Aviva Endean’s filmed actions in A face like yours (2015) on the TV screen. This was a warping of space and time perspective because I had done this once already at this year’s Bendigo International Festival of Exploratory Music. This time I was alone as I put the squishy coloured earplugs in. My fingers, as I copied the screen, started drumming on cheek bones, moving to ears, neck, face, nose, forehead then squeezes and pullings at the the lips and teeth. The sound is magnified and distorted as it comes in through the strange connections of bones, tendons and nerves like a web of old water pipes in an apartment building. We arrived at the Adam’s Apple with a high pitched humming before ending with hands covering nose and mouth.

Tiny wisps of air made it through the clarinet in Lehadlik, also performed and written by Aviva Endean (2015) in the open dining room at the heart of the house. Two candles flickered from the clarinet’s presence and a crackly recording of an old man’s torah incantation came from under a chair by the hearth. The tones were long and suspended but low in the air. My mind wandered out into the garden and I looked again at the window I’d been staring at from inside by the timpani with the live projected image of him still playing. The pieces in the house were repeating over and over as the audience shifted and changed and I think they’re doing it again now as I write.

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Aviva Endean performs Lehadlik. Photo by Pier Carthew.

To get to the garage you had to pass through three or four bedsheets hung from the gables. Matthew Horsley was shaved bald and had on a pair of flimsy white cotton pants. ?Corporel (1984 by Vinko Globokar) was disembodied as if from another time and dimension, perhaps some edited-out character of Brecht’s insisting that we feel and understand the false glamour and artificiality of entertainment today? His chest and face and scalp become chafed red from the harsh contact of his hands, and it finished with a dramatic exit through the automatic roller door that would’ve done Bertolt proud. The last piece I heard was a couple (Aviva Endean and Alexander Gellman) in the upstairs bedroom performing Void. Walking slowly toward each other in a routine they’ve enacted many times before, the microphones in their mouths caused a screech and wail of feedback. Was it getting stronger as they neared or changing frequency? Or were our poor ears just getting used to the piercing, painful sound? When they kissed it stopped. But they walked out again to quickly reassume positions for another round.

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Aviva Endean and Alexander Gellman perform Void. Photo by Pier Carthew.

As the audience, we narrowed down the distance between each of us as we moved through the different floors and rooms of the house. As I glanced into the makeshift mirror of glass over a black and white photo on the landing, I was reminded just a little more of who I am. Music does this beautifully; we are connected but each engrossed in our own calm thoughts. In DOMICILE we circumnavigated sound and it came together under one roof with the utmost magic and beauty.

DOMICILE
A house in Carlton
4/5/6 December 2015
Directed by Aviva Endean
Presented as part of the New Music Network’s emerging artists program

Review by Charles MacInnes
Melbourne-based composer and trombonist Charles MacInnes is currently undertaking a PhD on the role of improvisation in new music. http://www.charlesmacinnes.com

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.