A new slant on creating
I mUSIC for modern life
T
HE latest prog.r am pres-
ented by Australysis
seems to represent a
broadening of scope in
style and method that entitles this
group to claim a more representa-
tive stand on behalf of new music.
Its newest scores vary widely
in the kind of impulses that led to
their creation.
Ian Shanahan's Lines of Light,
for example, has ancestry of the
most honourable kind in drawing
compositional decisions from pro-
portions and correspondences in
the realms of nature and mathe-
matics: the colours and wave-
lengths of a rainbow, in this case,
and the relationships of ancient
number mysticism.
The notion that this kind of
preoccupation need cramp the
quality of music was magnifi-
cently disproved as long ago as
the early 15th century in
Dufay's motet Nuper rosarum
flores, which translates into
musical structure the propor-
tions of Florence Cathedral, for
which it was written.
Shanahan, probably the world's
leading authority on the develop-
ment of new playing techniques for
the end-blown fipple flute or
recorder - the University of Califor-
nia Press will publish his book on
the subject next year - played
amplified recorder himself in this
piece, in company with Daryl Pratt
(percussion) and Roger Dean (syn-
thesiser keyboards).
The work fulfilled the hope
expressed by the composer that
it might appear to have some-
thing to do with the idea of
luminosity, even if you knew
nothing about its sources.
Its texture was a metaphor in
fragmented light; cool and
abstract in its pulsed elegance.
Martin Wesley-Smith's Timor
et Tremor, in contrast, assembles
details in quasi-documentary
style of a heart-rending real-life
story: that of Quito, a 26-year-old
schizophrenic musician and song-
writer, who escaped from the
Indonesian invasion of East
Timor when he was 11.
Quito was shot in the neck by
Darwin police and charged with
10 counts of attempted murder
after making threatening ges-
tures with a knife during one of
his recurrent bouts of psychotic
delusion.
The charges against him were
dropped, the composer tells us,
the day before he was to be tried;
but Quito did not live to hear that.
Hehang~d -himself in Royal
Darwin Hospital on May 26,1990.
The punning LaUn title of the
piece, Tim'or et Tremor (Fear
. and Trembling in translation),
is a phrase from a teJ;t setby the
CONTEMPORARY
assembled at random and specify-
ing a creative process for each of
MUSIC its three players.
AUSTRAL YSIS
Director: Roger Dean
In this performance, it came
out as voluble fantasy, with notes
Music: Dench, Pratt, Dean. White.
Shanahan, Wesley-Smith forming shapes as closely packed
and shapely as a bunch of grapes.
Joseph Post Auditorium,
November 27 Roger Dean's computer-
generated taped piece, Silent
ROGER COVELL Nuraghi, contemplates the idea
of an ancient civilisation
Flemish master Roland de Las- remembered by its monumental
sus (Orlando di Lasso, as he is tombs in Sardinia and tries to
more widely known) in the 16th imagine what sort of music
century. might go with it.
Wesley-Smith makes a musical Dean's projection here is a
reference to this source and, as continuum resembling the
usual, draws on a wide range of sound of innumerable birds
musical styles, from recitative to whistling in a high wind and
his personal version of barber- punctuated by heavy, ritualistic
shop pop. stamping figures in the bass
David Hamilton (tenor) car- register.
ried the burden of the elements of Chris Dench's new Heterotic
heightened eloquence and expres- Strings for flutes, double bass,
sive pathos in the story, inevitably cor anglais, bass clarinet and
and appropriately making a con- violin should not be read, I
trast between the shining timbres gather from the composer's
of his voice and the raw misery of notes, as having any derivation
the subject. from "erotic" in its title but as a
Chanted and spoken words word formed with the prefix
supplied deflationary facts. "hetero" (different, diverse) to
The chamber group of instru- describe a mathematical string
ments worked vigorously and in closed loop form with unpre-
economically to project the con- dictable tendencies in direction.
frontations between hope and Dench's score finds a musical
analogy to this, though perhaps
not a completely satisfactory
'With its directness musical experience, by being fully
composed in each part but with-
of style, occasional out determining the vertical coin-
cidences of the parts.
theatricalised gesture Greg White's The Silence of
and the additional Eyes, another Australysis com-
mission, puts instrumental
resource of its sound in partnership with
words generated and processed
digitised visual by computer. Hazel Smith
projections, Timor et spoke words prepared by the
composer and her typing of
Tremor should make them also projected them ,(or
appeared to project them) legi-
a worthwhile project bly for the audience on a screen,
where they were rearran'g ed
for a short film or and analysed and (I think)
television feature. , translated into sound by MIDI.
The relationship between the
text process and the overall sound
of the piece was not entirely
grim reality. ' convincing. '
With its directness of style, The best moment came at the
occasional theatricalised gesture end when the composer stepped
and the additional resource of its down from the control panel to
digitised visual projections, Timor exhibit his text, with the aid of a
et Tremor should make a worth- computer mouse, in the form of a
series of pull-down menus.
while project for a short ~ or
television feature. ' ," Disparate the works may have
been, but the unifying, element in
It might help to rescue ABC the program was a high standard
TV arts programs from the of performance, which increased
tame-cat banality that character- respect further for the contribu-
ises m9st of them. tion made by Australysis to the
introduction of new music and
Daryl Pratt's Frame, in its new new ways of thinking about
version, uses a graphic score musical creation.