Composers exposed

It’s a huge dose of music this week, and I’m loving it, but it’s hard to keep up. Here’s the latest: the Composition Concert from the Australian Youth Orchestra National Music Camp. This was a bit different from the others. Here, the performers are mainly tutors, and the compositions are the student efforts. There were four compositions. The story is the pieces were 85% written before the camp, with the final touches added following hearing the works in rehearsal during the camp. The rules were that they initially write for unpitched percussion then compose from that (rhythm is the theme for this music camp). The composers seemed to be a bit challenged by this, given their comments. The tutor said that composers usually start from pitch (melody or harmony) and the rhythm is a complement, so this turned things around. But the tunes were very interesting, reasonably diverse and eminently contemporary. And interestingly, three of the composers were graduates of the Sydney Conservatorium: I wonder who teachers composition there.

The first was A frost-making stillness by Chris Williams. This was written in response to a line from a Ted Hughes poem, but the words didn’t appear, so presumably it’s an emotional response to the words. The work played with timbres and developed rhythms in the changes of timbres and dynamics. Various sounds merging in and out; sliding, squeaking tones, bongos; swells that came and went in a few beats; some hint of a tonal centre, and presumably a time signature (given the movements of the conductor) but none too obvious. The next was Patterns II: Matryoshka by Peggy Polias. The Matryoshka are the nested Russian (we call them Babuschka=Grandmother) dolls that we buy on holidays . (You can buy them with ARL and AFL team colours in Prague tourist shops. Stranger than fiction, but I’ve seen them). Interestingly, Peggy is the copyist for Elena Katz-Chernin and Peter Sculthorpe, which must be a dream job for a student of composition. This piece involved revealing multiple layers as in these dolls and a concern with pulse. I noted some swing here, with cowbells comfortably on 2-4, sometimes a cantering feel, and some dotted crotchet syncopations which are common in jazz melody. The third piece was Holding patterns by Timothy Tate. I guessed ¾ time from the conductor’s baton, but again it wasn’t obvious. This was all timbre and drama and drum brushes for a watery sound and melodies on violin that sounded of echos, then a totally unexpected, short, fast, rising melody to end the piece on a query. The final piece was Buy a copy (of the Big Issue) by Aristea Mellos. Aristea had heard a constant call from one Big Issue seller at Circular Quay, every day for the four years she attended the Sydney Conservatorium. This cry, its pitch and rhythm, formed the basis of this piece, and she coloured it with percussion. This piece was the most accessible, most lively, most jazzlike of the four, with calls and responses (piano – percussion) and syncopations and tuneful melodies that reminded me and friends of Gershwin and Berstein. I have to admit liked this piece best, grooving away rather than concentrating on subtly changing and complex ambient sounds. But I’m unfair. They were all worthy works, and perhaps this last was the least contemporary style of them all. Whatever, all worthy music and a fascinating outing.

To end, I’ll mention a few composers’ games that they played at the music camp. “Who’s got the best manuscript paper” is obvious enough and more indulgent than educational. Another involved each person writing a line for 3 unpitched percussion instruments, then passing this on for the next to add another bar or line. Again obvious, but clearly challenging. Composing is a masterly and seldom considered craft, and it’s good to see it’s still alive today, despite endless concerts replete with the baroque/classical/romantic masters. The other point to mention is the fabulous playing by the performing tutors. I can just imagine what the score must have looked like, and they would not be easy to read. So congratulations all round, but especially to the composers, Chris Williams, Peggy Polias, Timothy Tate and Aristea Mellos.

Swell brass

The Australian Youth Orchestra’s Brass Ensemble was my third outing for the National Music Camp. Classical brass has a bell-like clarity that we don’t really hear in the jazz idiom, and it’s delicious. The trumpets (especially the little pocket trumpet) and trombones and even the big tuba ring with clarity that carries a mile. I guess it’s fewer overtones and big, sine-wave fundamentals that do it. I’m not too clear on this, but the cornets, with their differently shaped tubes (conical rather than straight then flared) sound softer and more intimate and perhaps closer to the French Horn, which also has conical tubing. The French horns sound different again to my ears, fatter and more a belching rather than clinical sound. When together, they sound so pure and swell so excitingly that it can give me goosebumps. And there were swells and courtly sounds a-plenty at the AYO Brass concert.

Like the Percussion concert, the brass players presented a range of styles and eras, although I didn’t feel the same sense of variation that I did with the percussion. Definitely the timbres were more consistent with the brass, but maybe also the musical conceptions. At one stage, a leader jokingly congratulated the audience for staying so long at a brass concert. It was self-flagellating, but brass can have such long periods of counting rather than playing on the symphonic stage, that I can understand the feelings. I attended with a mate who had played trombone in the Melbourne Youth Orchestra, and he commented that the pieces were only of a moderate level of difficulty, so there wasn’t quite the excitement of the virtuosic, speedy lines that classical players seem to master with ease. The ensemble sat in a semicircle with the conductor at the apex and the players moved in and out for the different pieces: trumpets to the audience’s left, through horns and tubas to trombones at the right with percussion over their shoulders.

The program started with early courtly music, Lully’s Music for the Sun King: a familiar melody and one that highlighted the bell-like beauty of the sound. Then a modern Australian arrangement of Wagner called Elsa’s procession that sounded of chromatic movements and swelling, gut-wrenching sounds. Third, a contemporary Australian piece, Siegfried fantasy by Matthew Hindson, with more dissonant harmonies and frequently changing time signatures and some repetitive rhythms and chordal movements that reminded me of jazz. Then eight French horns playing a modern piece that won a major international composition competition for horns: Stanhope’s Retreat and pumping song. This had two movements, including what seemed like a call to the hunt. Fitting for retreats or pumping, I’m sure, but not my favourite. Then back in time to JS Bach’s Passacaglia and fugue in C minor which was stately although busy with constantly changing scalar lines bouncing between instruments, and had a final cadence that sounded to my ears just like big pipe organ chords. I guess it’s those overtone structures, again. Then more big swelling chords in Grieg’s Funeral march. Grieg wrote this piece for a friend who died suddenly, and it was also played at Grieg’s funeral. The drum pattern clearly suited the funereal ambience, but some chordal and melodic movements seemed jagged and out of place and didn’t work for me: not a favourite. And a finish with another Australian arrangement of Wagner, Sigfried’s twilight, with repeating quaver pairs that apparently reference Wagner’s bi-syllabic character names. This was another exciting piece of swelling chords sounding like endless emotional resolutions and discovered sunsets.

So a capable concert with blissful clarity and swelling emotions and often dignified melodies and a fabulous intellectual encounter with Bach, but a bit short on virtuosic flings and tonal variation. Well played and very much enjoyed but I left feeling just south of elated.

The Brass Ensemble comprised: French horns – Jessica Armstrong, Julia Brooke, Sebastian Dunn, Emma Gregan, Angharad Johnson, Claire Lindquist, Sharn McIver, Kartini Suharto-Martin, Gillian Williams, Andrew Young; Trumpets – Daniel Ballinger, Dee Boyd, Christopher Day, Callum G-Froerer, Daniel Henderson, Louisa Trewartha; Trombones – Alistair Crawford, Matthew Harrison, Michael Ingle, Andrew Nissen; Bass trombones – Mitchell Nissen, Cassandra Pope; Tubas – Karina Filipi, Mark Leese; Timpani / Percussion – Joel Bass; Tutors – Andrew Bain, Shane Hooten, Nick Byrne, Gary McGibbon.

Getting rhythm

I’m taking whatever opportunity I can to hear the Australian Youth Orchestra while they’re in town. My second concert was the Percussion Ensemble and it was a hugely varied performance which was truly thrilling. I had struggled with classical percussion before and was never quite convinced, but this was different. This performance was varied and entertaining and occasionally overwhelming, and a great introduction to the art.

The first piece was meditative with long, ringing cymbal passages contrasting wildly with tympani and bass drum hits and features, all under discrete conductor control. It was a piece entitled Die Welle by Swiss percussionist Fritz Hauser (who I think I’ve heard in the Band Room). I found this a bit challenging to enter, especially soon after a busy day at work, but its calming and involving role was evident as the program continued.

The piece that followed was Peaux by Iannis Xenakis from his larger piece, Pleiades. Xenakis wrote more widely, but was introduced here as the “Beethoven of percussion”. From this I guess classical percussion must be a new idiom, as he only died fairly recently. Peaux was a mathematically informed, clearly structured poly-rhythmic piece that says percussion to me. I felt more comfortable with this piece than the previous one, I think because its essence is defined by rhythm and pitch rather than timbre (much more jazz-like). Six players each had stood in an island of drums for a total of 44 drums on stage. The players were widely separated and arranged in a semicircle across the Llewellyn stage, with a conductor off stage centre. The complement of drums varied slightly between players, but was very close to this: four players with bongos, one conga, two toms and a tympani; two players each had an additional mounted bass drum. All played with sticks. Imagine the complexity of pitch and rhythms that’s possible. This was loud and varied and grooved with hugely complex interplays and occasional solo-like features. Fabulous.

Piece three was Djilile by Australian Peter Sculthorpe. PS is renowned for representing the Australian experience. This piece borrows from an Aboriginal melody of the north (Kakadu?) and was commissioned by the Sydney percussion ensemble, Synergy, and premiered at the Adelaide Festival of Arts in 1990. It starts and ends in the dark with the sounds of thunder, so it’s obviously of the top-end. The core (excluding the thunder) is played by 3 musicians sharing one marimba, and a fourth on vibraphone. The core is a pretty and beguiling tune and I seem to remember an insistent bass riff or lower pitched chord pattern which spoke of popular song. I particularly enjoyed the contrasting timbre of the toneful but thuddy wooden marimba against the sustained and reverberent, metallic vibraphone.

The last piece moved further afield to Japan and its taiko drumming tradition. It was called Yataibayashi, and was a TaikOz arrangement of traditional music from a day-long festival held annually in a Japanese village for the last 350 years (I missed the details). This was performed by 8 players on three large taiko, four small taiko, and a triangle-like instrument that played a surprisingly cutting metronomic eighth-note beat throughout the performance. I noted the formality of presentation and performance, the different Japanese-style techniques including heavy mallets held in clenched fists, the repetitive rhythms, and what seemed to be a totally square (I mean notes spilt into two not three and unswinging) rhythms. And the volume and the sweat and strained muscles on the performers, of course. I guess this was new to some of these performers, but they did it well, and the audience loved it. Powerful and steady and insinuating and Japan-formal.

Such a wonderful program! Variations of styles and approaches and rhythms and tonalities. It seemed to me to be a perfect introduction to classical percussion and impeccably enticing. The Australian Youth Orchestra Percussion Ensemble comprised Robert Allan, Sophia Ang, Joel Bass, Catherine Betts, Rebecca Lloyd Jones, Brent Miller, Robert Oetomo and Anna Zeltzer and they were tutored by John Arcano, Ian Cleworth and Tim White.

Delightfully different

I’ve been trawling different arts and musical forms recently in these pages – pop/rap for NY Eve and AYO is in town and a blow out. But from the jazz side, Steve Newcomb and Hannah Macklin were visiting Canberra from Brisbane and fit the bill. They performed for the first new year gig at Trinity as part of their CD release tour, and this was delightfully different. I knew what to expect. Steve had sent me a copy of the EP/CD, and I was enamoured with the delicacy and complexity of the voice, the worthy and absorbing lyrics and the ethereal accompaniment, and some whispy and musically demanding harmonies that were to-die-for. I’d wondered how they could present this out of the studio, with just two performers in a live situation. I shouldn’t have doubted. There was not a load of tech, but it was clever stuff. And the performers were a dream. Despite unplanned accompaniment of bar voices and laughter and occasional cocktail-shaker percussion, the duo carried off a subtle gig with aplomb and goodwill. Great show.

Voice and words are particularly human expressions, so it’s not surprising it’s the first thing I noted. Hannah’s is a wonderfully trained and flexible voice, slipping over wildly varying intervals with pitch and precision, each note carefully formed with musical purpose, and melodic and soloistic lines that linger or move within scales and substitutions like a horn. This is not just emotion, but a clear display of high level intellectual craft. And not just written, because you hear it in her improvised interplay with keyboards, where the pair bounces fiendish little responses back and forth, each line morphing as they chatter. And finally those divine harmonies I’d heard on the CD; they appeared towards the end of the night, as Hannah played an effects unit with her left hand, looping and layering vocal lines as harmonies that seemed not quite so complex as those on the CD (but may have been). And not just harmonies, but also looped clicks and whistles and later mic taps for a percussion intro to one tune. Human expression but hinting of electronica.

Steve was even more the electronics dabbler. Maybe he does the right hand solo thing (I think he did once last night) but he seems to me to be closer to the tune than that. I could say accompaniment, but not just that. This is interpretation where the sounds and movements of the inherent chords are explored, not just set down and played over. And not just with piano. Although he mostly used Nord and Rhodes tonalities, there was a deep organ bass that often appeared in the left hand. And then later, perhaps looped, portamento slides and robot whistles and echoey squeals and squeaks and things percussive and toylike in the right. Again, bouncing from the voice, not featuring, but closely pairing for a Bjorkian otherworldliness. In fact, they played one Bjork number, Unravel, and the style of left hand riff and ethereal, rhythmically indeterminate overlay appeared in this and a few other original tunes from their CD. They also played Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock and even Otis Redding with a vocal style that I found authentically bluesy-gospelly and even growly, although the vocal timbre would have been unusual at the Blues Club. But mostly the night was originals from the EP/CD. Genuinely interesting lyrics from a mobile voice with deep grooves and that ethereal overlay. All strangely open and childlike at times, and sometimes anomalous (“Buried in the closet, underneath the vacuum cleaner … lies are skeletons” or “my heart comes undone, the devil collects it with a grin, he never returns it”) despite frequent lyrics of love and emotion.

Mate Andy Campbell sat in for two tunes, but he played it appropriately restrained, so the essence of the music changed little with the addition of a few guitar solos. It was all a refreshing change, and an authentic and intriguing voice of modern Australian culture. Much, much enjoyed. Hannah Macklin (vocals) performed with Steve Newcomb (keyboards) and Andy Campbell (guitar) sat in for two tunes.

Summertime gem

The Australian Youth Orchestra. What a way to wile away the lazy days of early January when the jazz is quiet in Canberra! Something like 300 students and tutors are in residence at the ANU for their annual National Music Camp, and we are the lucky ones who get to appreciate the music live. The rest of Australia has to listen to selected concerts on ABC FM. There is a string of concerts this year, throughout the second week of the camp. We attended the first orchestral concert so we got the big guns. Other concerts feature percussion or chamber or original compositions or brass, and there are 4 orchestral concerts on the program.

First on the program was Veni Creator Spiritus by Australian composer Ross Edwards. It’s a modern work in two movements. The first movement is a restatement of the plainchant performed for the Catholic feast of the Pentecost, and celebrating the coming to Earth of the Holy Spirit. The program notes observe that “the ethereal effect ... is enhanced by omitting the double basses”. Certainly, they had little to do here. The second movement is jubilant and energetic. Busy violas and sharp violin counterstatements; again little work for the basses. I felt it as wind and sail, but this is Australian music and spells country. The piece was played by the Tuckwell Chamber Orchestra directed by Howard Penny.

The other piece before interval required a stage reset for a much larger orchestra. I always measure the size of an orchestra by the number of double basses. There were 8 here and 7 for the other orchestra, the Alexander (for interest of the bassists reading this, five played German bows; three played French). The Bishop Orchestra was led by Lutz Koehler of the European Youth Orchestra and played Smetana’s tone poem, The Moldau. It expresses the life and flow of the Moldau River which runs through Prague, with scenes the merging of two streams, a wedding on the banks, rapids, a path through Prague, and more. I heard it as folk melodies, grand rural scenery, a dance presumably for the wedding and a triumphant ending.

The Alexander Orchestra with conductor Lawrence Renes played the final piece, Tchaikovsky’s Symphony no.4 in F minor, Op.36. The program notes talk of fate and the traumatic experience of his short marriage and divorce. This was big and powerful music. Ending the first movement, we muttered that it was clearly Russian music. There was a passion that kept escaping, only to be reined in for another round. The same excitability returned in the final movement, and I felt my insides knotted with tension and excitement. I think it was the clarinet that had a major part in the second movement, and I took note of an intriguing passage where a flute plays a sustained solo-like melody against sustained quavers from the strings (do I remember this correctly?). But the most notable aspect of the piece is the sustained pizzicato for the whole string section in the final movement. Detailed and delicate and very unexpected. And there’s an odd spot where the pizzicato lines originate in the double basses on the left (this was an unusual arrangement for an orchestra), and moved like an early stereo sound effect from left to right through first violins and cellos to second violins. The whole ended with elation, from both performers and audience. The youth players were stamping their feet, and a goodly part of the audience joined in with a standing ovation and long applause. Then an encore which divinely repeated the pizzicato segment. To me this was even better than the first statement: conductor and players were obviously relaxed and having fun; the ppps were seriously, almost inaudibly quiet, the dynamics and interplays were alive. All evidence of a youthful exuberance that was evident and openly expressed. They are clearly working hard, probably playing hard, and obviously having a great time. Keep it up.

The AYO is quite an institution, with a history of camps dating back to 1948, and a program for this year that includes an international tour with performances at venues including the National Centre for Performing Arts, Beijing, the Royal Albert Hall, London, and the Concertgebeouw, Amstrdam. Truly impressive, in performance and conception and organisation. Along with the burbling V8s and pristine, detailed engines of the Summernats, this is a Canberra summer gem. And the morning after I am still glowing and the Simandl Etudes I got for Christmas seem so much easier.

Australian Youth Orchestra website

AYO National Music Camp website

Once in a blue moon

It’s rare that I will attend a big public event to hear a party band, but I did last night and the band was Who’s ya Daddy. It was truly a rare night, that of a blue moon that fell on New Year’s Eve at the start of a new decade. A blue moon is the second full moon falling in any one month (in the most common definition). It happens because the lunar month is shorter than most calendar months (the synodic month, timed from new moon to new moon, is just over 29.5 days). But a new moon to mark the New Year’s Eve of a new decade is not common. Neither is my party banding, although I usually enjoy it.

Who’s ya Daddy? is an odd name and I’m still pondering it. But the members are well-trained Jazz School graduates playing for the corporate scene, and so they are good. I heard one set, and it was literally a barrage of non-stop danceable pop from early R&B through a good dose of Michael Jackson to hip hop. One long medley of endless snippets of tunes: perhaps 30 or more in their 45-minute set. What a lot of work! All arranged and charted and tightly played. Solid, heavy stadium drumming from Hugh (drummers must love big PAs and so do I); unpretentious but reliable grooves from Phill on bass; busy and involved performance from Damien on guitar with occasional keyboards and harmony vocals. There was a tight, full-ranged horn section up front of Tim, Niels and Richard on trumpet, tenor and baritone sax and even some bari features, which I liked. And Della up front on stratospheric Michael Jackson vocals or smoother soul or very convincing rap. The PA was pumping, the band was jiving and the audience was dancing and counting down to the new year. I was thinking how horn players never feel the groove quite like the rhythm section. Bassists must get it: Phill did and was obviously enjoying himself. Good, clean fun (it was a dry event) and a memorable celestial event on a cool evening. Much enjoyed, and recommended for your next corporate event.

Who’s ya Daddy? is a Canberra corporate band playing party music with a twist: much more than your average covers band. Anthony “Della” Dellamarta on vocals and keyboards; Damien “Axle” Foley on guitar, vocals and keyboards; Phill Jenkins on bass; Hugh Deacon on drums; Richard Burns on baritone sax; Niels Rosendahl on tenor sax; Tim Bowyer on trumpet.