Apologies for the break in blogging transmission. With any luck, this post will bring a resumption of normal programming.
We were in Richmond the weekend of October 20 to take our regular place as artists-in-residence at University of Richmond’s stylistically diverse, sometimes frustrating but always popular and entertaining Third Practice Electroacoustic Music Festival. You can read my comments about last year’s festival here, here and here.
According to Ben Broening, the festival’s Artistic Director and an all-round nice bloke, this year’s festival focused “on pieces that incorporate, reimagine, reflect or respond to musical instruments, practices, sonic environments and traditions from around the world.” Hm. That definition really covers all music written anywhere at any time, but I suppose Ben was hedging his bets a little. For the big new pieces, the “sonic environments” concerned were those of non-western cultures: Japan and Indonesia.
Each year at the festival, 8bb features on one concert program, and the major piece on our concert this year was a Balinesian shadow puppet extravaganza that was a collaboration between a whole host of folks from many different traditions, hailing from all around the world. You can read more about this project, and watch some video from an early music rehearsal, here.
Here is the audience flooding the stage after the entertaining work’s conclusion:
This picture shows the working space of Gusti, our entertaining master shadow puppetier. You can see his pile of shadow puppets, including, face up in the box, one of the monk characters that really stole the show. For this performance, Gusti went out on a limb, working for the first time in English and without a script, and still managed to have the audience rolling in the aisles.
Also on the 8bb program was the second performance of Ben Broening’s new piece for cello and electronics, Dark Wood. As you will hear, on the first of 8bb’s new series of composer interviews (that I will post tomorrow), the work was something of a departure for Ben, containing a substantial, fast, violent section. The video attached to this post was taken at Nick’s dress rehearsal of the work, with the composer twiddling the knobs, and consists of the work’s slow, almost eerie end.
Each year the festival commissions one or two new works for 8bb to premiere. Last year it was pieces by Michael Barnhardt and Ashley Fure; this year it was a new composition by the polite, soft-spoken composer Frances White, called The Ocean Inside. As you will hear on a forthcoming podcast interview with Frances, since 1995 the composer has studied the shakuhachi (a Japanese end-blown flute). She particularly loves “honkyoku, the traditional meditative music for this instrument.” These melodies function in their culture rather like Gregorian chant did in ours: “like chant, they exist not so much as “pieces of music” but rather for the purpose of devotion.” In her slow, soft, lyrical piece, The Ocean Inside, Frances used one of these tunes as a cantus firmus, and as such “it is the hidden melodic heart out of which the entire piece grows - ‘the ocean inside’.”
I played a virtuosic, totally madcap work for flute and tape by Australian composer Martin Wesley-Smith. The composer chooses to construct his tape part out of the simplest of all possible electronic materials, a pure sine-wave sound, but the rhythmic complexity necessitated by the improvisatory feel of the piece makes flute/tape coordination anything but simple. Reactions to the piece ranged from the very possitive to the downright, stubbornly offensive. One reason for this passionate range of reactions could have been the odd disconnect in the work between the extra-musical material of the piece (the final hours of five Australian journalists murdered in East Timor in 1975) and the almost hysterical high-spirits of much of the music.
To open the four-concert-long festival, So Percussion teamed up with guitar/hardanger fiddle duo Trollstilt for an hour-long, multimedia meditation of the nature of gardens. Highlights included a percussion quartet performed inside a wheelbarrow, and during the work’s thirteen movements several famous folks’ gardens were “profiled”, including those of John Cage, Henri Mattise, Georges Noel. Interesting ideas, but I found the sections overlong and the video component strangely anonymous and lacking in variety.
For my money the most interesting work of the weekend opened the Saturday morning concert, a work by Paul Elwood for banjo, voice and computer
(all provided/operated by Paul). Called BorderRadioX, it was a tribute to illegal, across-the-border radio stations in Mexico, which for many years pumped out country music tunes all across America, totally unrestricted by US law. The work was something of a melange of wildly different musical styles, as traditional folk/bluegrass tunes both sung and played on banjo collided with complex computer- and human-generated sounds. It should, by rights, have been baffling and frustrating, but somehow managed to be both funny and oddly fascinating.
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