Moderne Sounds:
New York (Part 1)Trickling minimalism from China's Tan Dun and the strange tones of Harry Partch's quadrangularis reversum fill Martin Longley's ears during his latest foray into NYC's experimental music scene.
Photo: Ulrich Krieger toots his tiny toy saxophone.Roulette is a long-established performing space in the SoHo area, with the bleached whitespace look of an art gallery, lending itself to a purist concentration on sound. As part of the ongoing Interpretations season, Mode Records presented a programme drawing attention to a pair of its new releases. Eve Agoyan was performing Maria De Alvear's Asking, an extended work for solo piano, demanding great concentration from both herself and the audience. There's a hanging stasis to the piece, full of pauses and sudden rumbling outbreaks, gradually building up over time that, in the end, seems shortened rather than lengthened by the listener's necessarily meditational state.
The other disc release was a collection of early compositions by Yorkshireman Gavin Bryars, from the days when he was more obviously attached to his jazz youth, playing upright bass with guitarist Derek Bailey and drummer Tony Oxley. These are the pieces that he composed from 1966, into the 1970s, when working with John Cage, Cornelius Cardew and John White. It could be argued that Bryars has been continually pursuing the majesty of his early pieces that were released on Brian Eno's Obscure label, The Sinking Of The Titanic and Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet. Originally written for Derek Bailey, The Squirrel And The Ricketty-Racketty Bridge was here given a three-guitar reading, and was the most successful piece of the evening, this incarnation sounding more influenced by the rock music that has followed in the decades since its conception.
Made In Hong Kong employs a table-top of plastic toys, and nothing but, with Ulrich Krieger following a fairly open score, setting tiny, scurrying creatures free to contribute their own improvisations. He toots a tiny toy saxophone, but these semi-chance movements don't sound particularly interesting: he's too slow in their activations for this to be the case, adopting too little control. Conceptual extremity was achieved during 1,2,1-2-3-4, which demanded that the rock band configuration of players don headphones, with each listening to their own personal backing track, which just happened to be in different tuning and time phases. Well, a moderately interesting idea, but these distant deformities of what sounded like Beatles songs resulted in quite a quease-making listening experience, and I speak as a fan of deep sonicboarding. The overall end-products of these early Bryars experiments were useful for mild cerebral stimulation, but the ultimate conclusion is that superior results can usually be produced via a totally free improvisation, which almost inevitably unshackles the performer from the self-consciousness that was often present here.
Musical visits to the Japan Society might be rare, for the uninitiated, located as it is on the far eastern extremity of 47th Street, but their programme contains frequent sonic delights. Speaking of which, how about the first performance of the Californian composer Harry Partch's Delusion Of The Fury since its not entirely successful Los Angeles premiere in 1969? The composer himself was not the least dissatisfied with the production, but surely he would have warmed to this four-nights-only exhumation, employing a host of his exotic self-built instruments. At an early stage, Partch started to develop his own intonation system, and therefore required tailor-made tools to realise the music in his head. For a goodly while, he rode the railroads, living a hobo life, and by the 1950s, he'd begun to idealise the performer as a combined musician, dancer, singer and storyteller. Much of this conceptual stance is found in Delusion Of The Fury. How can this work be described? As music theatre? Partly inspired by Japanese noh, Partch ended up creating a completely unique hybrid, equipped with a narrative, articulated by a flock of dancer/actors, and transpiring in a musical realm that's typically the composer's own, sung and intoned in his invented tongue, played on his invented instruments, which include the chromelodeon, the quadrangularis reversum, the crychord and various cloud chamber bowls. Still looking quaintly futuristic, these instruments are full of polished-wood curves, sweeping lines, bulbous glass clusters and rickety dangles. They sound very much like they look. The entire verbal, bodily and aural language might be unfamiliar, but the work's unfolding events make their own internal sense, with knockabout humour, dramatic twists, exhilaratingly shambolic choreography and massively organic melodies. Partch adored the sound of wood, metal and glass being gently distressed. If only all music theatre were this way inclined, we could say, but maybe it's best that it isn't, thereby leaving Delusion completely out on its own as a hugely spectacular work that probably won't get repeated for a goodly number of years, if at all.
The following night, another music theatre piece was to suffer by comparison. At the Brooklyn Academy Of Music, Chinese composer Tan Dun was presenting The Gate (from 1999), which also adopted a narrative, ritualistic, folk tale approach. Here, the pompous, semi-operatic posturings of the lead performers were disconnected from the music's tranquil stasis, to such an extent that this listener would have preferred a completely non-theatrical perversion, with the Brooklyn Philharmonic left to its own devices. Tan Dun continues his preoccupation with trickling minimalism during the opening Water Music, with its carefully arrayed bowl soloists, and once this had merged into The Gate, the thematic interludes between each of the piece's three solo 'characters' provided similar oases of calm reflection. The storytelling was so unimaginatively straightforward, so tediously symmetrical, that it became easy to ignore its content. Also, the obsessive use of video cameras to screen close-up images ended up being distracting, defeating the efforts of the work's general staging. If these images had been abstract additions rather than stadium rock concert enlargements, The Gate might have fared better. Mister Partch apologises for stealing your thunder...
Musical visits to the Japan Society might be rare, for the uninitiated, located as it is on the far eastern extremity of 47th Street, but their programme contains frequent sonic delights. Speaking of which, how about the first performance of the Californian composer Harry Partch's Delusion Of The Fury since its not entirely successful Los Angeles premiere in 1969? The composer himself was not the least dissatisfied with the production, but surely he would have warmed to this four-nights-only exhumation, employing a host of his exotic self-built instruments. At an early stage, Partch started to develop his own intonation system, and therefore required tailor-made tools to realise the music in his head. For a goodly while, he rode the railroads, living a hobo life, and by the 1950s, he'd begun to idealise the performer as a combined musician, dancer, singer and storyteller. Much of this conceptual stance is found in Delusion Of The Fury. How can this work be described? As music theatre? Partly inspired by Japanese noh, Partch ended up creating a completely unique hybrid, equipped with a narrative, articulated by a flock of dancer/actors, and transpiring in a musical realm that's typically the composer's own, sung and intoned in his invented tongue, played on his invented instruments, which include the chromelodeon, the quadrangularis reversum, the crychord and various cloud chamber bowls. Still looking quaintly futuristic, these instruments are full of polished-wood curves, sweeping lines, bulbous glass clusters and rickety dangles. They sound very much like they look. The entire verbal, bodily and aural language might be unfamiliar, but the work's unfolding events make their own internal sense, with knockabout humour, dramatic twists, exhilaratingly shambolic choreography and massively organic melodies. Partch adored the sound of wood, metal and glass being gently distressed. If only all music theatre were this way inclined, we could say, but maybe it's best that it isn't, thereby leaving Delusion completely out on its own as a hugely spectacular work that probably won't get repeated for a goodly number of years, if at all.
The following night, another music theatre piece was to suffer by comparison. At the Brooklyn Academy Of Music, Chinese composer Tan Dun was presenting The Gate (from 1999), which also adopted a narrative, ritualistic, folk tale approach. Here, the pompous, semi-operatic posturings of the lead performers were disconnected from the music's tranquil stasis, to such an extent that this listener would have preferred a completely non-theatrical perversion, with the Brooklyn Philharmonic left to its own devices. Tan Dun continues his preoccupation with trickling minimalism during the opening Water Music, with its carefully arrayed bowl soloists, and once this had merged into The Gate, the thematic interludes between each of the piece's three solo 'characters' provided similar oases of calm reflection. The storytelling was so unimaginatively straightforward, so tediously symmetrical, that it became easy to ignore its content. Also, the obsessive use of video cameras to screen close-up images ended up being distracting, defeating the efforts of the work's general staging. If these images had been abstract additions rather than stadium rock concert enlargements, The Gate might have fared better. Mister Partch apologises for stealing your thunder...
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