Tag Archives: Nico Muhly

Eighth Blackbird

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The ensemble Eighth Blackbird have championed the  brighter side of contemporary American music since forming in college in 1995. Their energetic stagecraft has earned them global fame (at least as far as contemporary music ensembles go), including several tours to Australia. They also enjoy collaborative relationships with composers, often learning repertoire by heart and interacting in ways a music stand-bound performer cannot. During this tour, the ensemble collaborated extensively with the young Australian composer Holly Harrison on a rocking new work.

Nico Muhly’s “Doublespeak” is a homage to American minimalism and was composed for Philip Glass’ 75th birthday. Featuring a quotation from Glass’ Music in Twelve Parts, the piece includes a string of bitter-sweet instrumental pairings (especially effective when played with all the energy of the ensemble’s cellist, Nicholas Photinos), which build to moments of sinister intensity punctuated by kick-drum.

Bryce Dessner looked even further back in time to inspire his Murder Ballads. The seven reconstructions of folk songs displayed a stunning array of moods and textures, including some galloping wood-block effects by percussionist Matthew Duvall and even actual thigh slapping. The extended version of the Murder Ballads performed for the tour includes movements not included on the ensemble’s recording. The movement “Underneath the Floorboards” is recognisable as Sufjan Stevens’ incredibly creepy—and in this context entirely appropriate—song about the “killer clown” John Wayne Gacy Jr.

Eighth Blackbird worked intensively on Holly Harrison’s new work Lobster Tales and Turtle Soup commissioned by Musica Viva with support from Geoff Stearn and the Hildegard Project. The piece is inspired by Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. The hybrid gryphon and mock turtle in the story are musically figured with bombastic energy in a musical amalgam of rock, jazz, metal, hip-hop, blues, and funk. Dazzling riffs and solos are punctuated by fragments of text interjected by the musicians. The piece is driven by a powerful groove that has its apotheosis in an unlikely and spectacular bass clarinet and flute duo performed by Michael J. Maccaferri and Nathalie Joachim.

The program contained two works from Eighth Blackbird’s Hand to Eye project. For this series of compositions, composers were asked to respond to works in a private collection of visual art. Ted Hearne’s  By-By Huey is inspired by Robert Arneson’s painting “By-By Huey P.” The painting is a portrait of Tyrone “Double R” Robinson, who murdered a co-founder of the Black Panther Party, Huey P. Newton, in 1989. The portrait features a praying mantis superimposed over Robinson’s face. As the program states, “A guide at the Frankel Gallery told me Arneson included the mantis in the portrait because ‘they eat their own.'” The music is similarly self-destructive, with a variety of strategies aimed to silence the music including muting, instrument preparation, and sudden, sharp attacks resulting in vanishing splashes of tone colour. Timo Andres’ Checkered Shade takes as its point of departure the pen-and-ink “(variegated spirals)” by Astrid Bowlby, a picture consisting of just that, thousands of spirals of different thicknesses. The piece, likewise, is an elaboration of one see-sawing rhythm that is shared around the ensemble in rich overlapping textures.

Though Eighth Blackbird interact more on stage than most contemporary music ensembles, I would have liked to have seen them perform from memory and get away from their iPads. The program was an excellent insight into contemporary music from the States and a great opportunity to nurture a new Australian work.

Eighth Blackbird
Melbourne Recital Centre
28 February

Metropolis: Ensemble Offspring, Light is Calling

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Ensemble Offspring, photo courtesy of the artists.
Ensemble Offspring, photo courtesy of the artists.

Sydney-based new music group Ensemble Offspring continue the Metropolis festival with a colourful series of works for live ensemble and video. Their programme Light is Calling began with a great example of a minimalist work that uses less to achieve more. Light is Calling for solo violin, electronics, and video is an attempt to “make something beautiful” after the ugliness of the attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. Composer Michael Gordon provides a slow-moving violin part, devastatingly interpreted by Ensemble Offspring’s Veronique Serret. Reverberant and reversed samples form a finely-textured bed of electronic sound. Film maker Bill Morrison, who also contributed to Julia Wolfe’s Fuel in the MSO’s second Metropolis program, brings the piece to new emotional heights. Morrison’s film consists of a reprint of footage from the black and white 1926 movie The Bells. Morrison melts film footage of figures, faces and horses to produce hauntingly distorted images. As the film turns to yellow, brown, and black, the images smear and stretch across the screen. The echoing electronic part, lamenting violin and immolating film all seem mourn a long-lost innocence.

Nico Muhly’s It Goes Without Saying combines live clarinet (Jason Noble) with prerecorded metallic sounds including a kitchen whisk, bells and harmonium. The delicate sound world also includes pre-recorded clarinets that duet playfully with the live performer. The piece is accompanied by a video of stop-motion hair clippings on a white background. The hair slowly coalesces into a face, setting in motion a series of vivid animations including soap suds and metallic shards. Noble transfixed the audience with the hypnotic clarinet part. This was especially strong during the opening abstraction of drifting hair follicles.

Ensemble Offspring’s Metropolis programme included the world première of audiovisual artist Chris Perren’s Dive Process. In Dive Process, Perren builds on his recent experiments with musical and video phasing. Dive Process uses a retro video of a girl diving into water. The video is reversed and replayed at her point of entry into the pool, creating a rhythmic explosion and contraction of bubbles. Three versions of this film are then played side by side at different rates in a mesmerising phasing pattern. Perren’s score for percussion, clarinet, and violin mirrors the visual phasing pattern. Perren builds the intensity of this pattern during segments where dozens of copies of the video are spaced around a sphere. Continuing the theme of rhythmic counterpoint, the ensemble then played Steve Reich’s Vermont Counterpoint, a sister-piece to Reich’s Six Pianos, which Zubin Kanga performed in an arrangement by Vincent Corver earlier in the festival.

Ensemble Offspring reserved the second half of the concert for Damien Ricketson’s magnificent Fractured Again Suite. For this large-scale chamber ensemble work, Ricketson draws inspiration from the physical properties and sound of glass. In particular, Ricketson singles out the glass harmonium, a relatively popular instrument in the eighteenth century that has since fallen into obscurity. The closest thing one can hear to its ethereal tone nowadays is a dextrous performance on a row of tuned wineglasses. Ricketson builds the Fractured Again Suite out of fragments of compositions for the glass harmonium by Mozart, Donizetti and others. These fragments are then reflected, distorted and splintered like glass to form the arresting and sparkling surface of the suite. The rapid opening resembles an off-kilter clockwork automaton racing towards self-destruction. The glass-inspired video accompanying the work includes a brilliant array of coloured lights projected upon tubes, panes, and rods of glass. Some of these lights are reflected in repetitive, rhythmic ways, while at others they resemble the more timbral reflections of the piece’s later movements.

Ensemble Offspring
Light is Calling
Metropolis New Music Festival
Melbourne Recital Centre
14 May 2015

Michael Gordon, Light is Calling; Nico Muhly, It Goes Without Saying; Chris Perren, Dive Process; Steve Reich, Vermont Counterpoint; Damien Ricketson, Fractured Again Suite.