Ten Part Invention & Andrea Keller
The Sound Lounge
April 17 & 18
Reviewing yet another book on why audiences hate modern classical music, The Sydney Morning Herald’s chief book critic Andrew Riemer noted that during a recent performance of Bartok’s Music For Strings, Percussion & Celesta the percussionists found themselves augmented by the clatter of departing heels. Money talks from the feet up. Heads held high, heels clattering. Why couldn’t one of them have given me their ticket and stayed at home, instead of going to the trouble of putting on a ghastly outfit with repulsive wet-mouth lipstick and a sort of scraped-shiny effect at the cheek bones? We all have our prejudices, from the rich down. Where is Marcel Proust when we need him?
One of the problems is that classical music is played predominately to a fairly posh audience that is innately conservative. This is a sweeping generalisation based on experience rather than on one of the proliferating surveys that will soon chart every aspect of human existence – only to be rendered out of date by succeeding polls. I have when I could have afforded it sat amongst the claques and factions of whom I speak, and then listened to more of them at interval as they sneered in toffy constipated voices at anything later than Wagner. Strangely, the audiences who go to hear Ten Part Invention and a number of other bands, and who listen to New Music generally, hear modernistic textures and harmonies and roar their appreciation. They are a better type of person altogether.
The Sound Lounge was full both nights of Ten Part and Andrea Keller, though it has to be conceded that the combined numbers would have been lost in the space of the Opera House concert hall. Yet again, there were good crowds in this space for Ornette Coleman and Sonny Rollins. Andrea, a superb Melbourne pianist and composer, had been invited to bring some music up for Ten Part to play, and she led this from the piano; but the first half each night was given over to TPI playing from their own repertoire. They were rough on the first night, but exciting nevertheless. On the second they nailed it brilliantly and were quite inspiring.
One of the highlights of the first section was Sandy Evans’s Invisible Man, written in memory of Roger Frampton. This had an intent, requiem-like feeling, moving slowly over a Latin shuffle. In one section the same chord was repeated by an ensemble grouping, but it moved to different positions and was held for differing bar lengths with the entries staggered. Then the voicings changed, but the chords still came with the same sweet, poised deliberation, in a mosaic-like effect. Then it became briefly contrapuntal, then blazed. Through the final stages Warwick Alder played a beautiful trumpet solo. This was closer than anything else Ten Part played to the Keller music that would follow after interval. Although: the beginning of Andrew Robson’s The Serpent consisted of fragments of the ensuing tune swapped about in seemingly random order, until it suddenly snapped together and jumped from the gate. Before crossing interval, we should note that Miroslav Bukovsky’s The Arrival of Captain Coke movement from his Bi-Centennial Suite (played much more sharply the second night) is one of Ten Part’s most effective pieces, though it is rarely played.
Keller’s first piece For Bernie was the only one that used romantic changes and harmonies. The writing reminded me somewhat of Ralph Burns. Ken James played the first theme beautifully on tenor and Andrew Robson’s alternately intricate, slicing and singing alto solo hugely expanded the energy of the music without losing contact with it. Other titles by Keller included Lines On My Face, Peacock Song, Galumphing Around Australia, Rain Outside and Singing On A Sinking Ship. In all of these an effect of continuous canon was used in a hypnotic way. That is to say, sections of the ensemble would overlap each other in a sonorous polyphony at a moderate but steadily rising volume. Intricate as they were, with parts advancing on you and being overtaken as in a vast rail terminus or switching yard, some had the effect also of sustained outpourings of monophonic sonority. They were tremendously powerful, but in a different way. These are not exactly warm sonorities. They are often cool, limpid, or sharp, but there is a kind of eye-smarting beauty, and a tenderness preceding increases of volume that moved like pressure waves into the room, though they were not terrifically loud.
Some classical music was suggested, notably a Stravinsky Mass and Carl Ruggles. The pinnacle was reached with Singing On A Sinking Ship. This began with one of Keller’s rare piano solos On the first night she produced a few a steps in parallel sixths, as in the introduction of Monk’s Misterioso. This led her elsewhere, but it made me think that her touch could be like Monk’s, but her lyrical/percussive/delicate lines are quite different. Steve Elphick and John Pochee sounded wonderful beside her and Elphick then played one of the great solos I have heard on double bass, stately yet fluid, grave and moving. Then, a huge, hymnal and inspiring melody arced over a choppy sea, through a deluge of percussive textures. Good heavens, this was something. Singing On A Sinking Ship. Precisely.
In the closing stages of the lovely, uncannily evocative Rain Outside Sandy Evans was given a series of cadenzas on tenor saxophone between solemn repeated chords from the ensemble. Her tone was absolutely magnificent, and at first I thought that Keller had written these sections for her, so masterfully were they constructed. Not so. By coincidence on the first night it sounded to me as if Sandy would essay a fugue without counter subjects, but the line went elsewhere. In fact the opening of Bartok’s Music For Strings, Percussion and Celesta, mentioned above, begins with a great monothematic fugue. As it happens Keller’s ancestry is Hungarian. Which reminded me that I knew some badly dressed people who would have walked out on all this long before the end. Ah where is Marcel Proust to put it all in perspective?