Perhaps it's something of a 70's zeitgeist, but for most musicians if you mention
the word electroacoustics it conjures images of an anaemic little world of wires,
tape-loops, oversized speakers, strange disembodied sounds worthy of Startreck
and imposing mixing desks of almost Byzantine complexity.
Mercifully, the two concerts organised
by Durham University and the SPNM - on the 1st and 2nd of May - roundly disproved
such banalities by presenting a broad spectrum of musics from Australian British
and Canadian composers and digging into the stuff of sound. I shall pick highlights…
Canadian composer Barry Truax opened
the concert with Sequence of Earlier Heaven, which derived its material from
instruments found in various cultures along the Pacific Rim. A truly exotic
array of sounds which, if eventually repetitious, lacked nothing in terms of
a strangely rich theatrical impact.
As the title suggests, David Lumsdaine's
Near and Far is a study in musical perspective. An apparently unaltered soundscape
of birdsong, this piece avoided the "gilded lilies" of electronic
sound manipulation. As such it couldn't have been more at odds with the rest
of the evening's music, and was perhaps the most profound in its revaluation
of how we hear sound.
The current director of Durham's
Electroacoustic Studio, Peter Manning, was heard next with In Memoriam CPR.
This exhilarating piece took its raw material from Murray Schaeffer's 1950s
sound archives of the Canadian Pacific Railway trains. The sheer diversity of
sounds and textures within this piece were both remarkable and vibrant.
The second concert, once more in Elvet Methodist Church, proved to be no less
exciting. Here, a solo violin - played by Meiko Kanno - joined the eight speakers
and mixing desk.
Michael Clarke's Tim(br)e opened
the concert: this brilliant essay in the various forms of sound granulation
- or slowing a sound down to the point that each vibration sounds like a beat,
hence the syntactically intriguing title - exhibited a remarkably subtle ear
for sound and its potential.
A similarly remarkable compositional ear was heard next - this time in two of
the Six Caprices by the Italian composer Salvatore Sciarrino, whose music is
heard rarely in this country. Sciarrino exploits those sonorities that exist
at the edges of an instrument's range in a way quite similar to that of most
electroacoustic composition, and in the two Caprices heard in this concert the
harmonic series was pushed to the fore to magical effect.
Annoyingly enough, I can't remember
the title of Irish composer Michael Alcorn's piece, which was heard next, but
it was exceptional in its highly athletic movement of sound around the concert
hall. Made all the more exiting and surprising given that all the sounds heard
were derived from common-all-garden jam-jars, tins and other household ephemera.
The final piece, Autumn Voices for
solo violin and electronics, by the composer/conductor/percussionist James Wood
was not merely something rich and strange but also brought this concert and
the previous night's events to a satisfying conclusion. Drawing on birdsong,
Wood's work - dedicated to Meiko Kanno - made use of the harmonic material which
fanned-out, up and down, providing a rich and constantly shifting series of
harmonic layers to expose as the piece progressed. If all this sounds a tad
bewildering, the effect wasn't and, like many things heard over those two day,
had to be heard to be believed…
Douglas Bertram