The program order, and also the order of the broadcast, is:
Michael Finnissy: Aijal
Liza Lim: Invisibility
David Lumsdaine: Kangaroo Hunt
John Rodgers: Amor (from Inferno)
Percy Grainger: Random Round
Richard Craig, flute
Peter Veale, oboe
Peter Neville, percussion
Kerry Yong, piano
Séverine Ballon, cello
The first hour of the broadcast includes a conversation with Daryl Buckley. At the concert, the biggest surprises for me were the Rodgers and Grainger pieces. John Rodgers’ Amor involved wildly imaginative articulations and interactions, including, most theatrically and very effectively, the flute and oboe playing into one another in a progressively deepening V. Fortunately there is another ELISION video of Amor available on YouTube (this time with flutist Paula Francis).
The ensemble brought a strange, beautiful, and untamed sound world to Percy Grainger’s Random Round. In their hands, it sounded as if it had been written in 2011, rather than 1915. The total freshness of this listening experience do great credit to the imaginations of the performers, as well as the composer. I’ve heard and written about Liza Lim’s Invisibility before. This was the first time that Séverine Ballon performed it by memory, and it had a different quality of performance. It is wonderful to have a chance to hear the transformations that the piece allows, and even invites, from one performance to the next.
The second hour includes discussions by Julian Day (of “New Music Up Late with Julian Day”) with two Australian composers, Newton Armstrong and John Chantler, who also discusses Café OTO, a key new music venue in London. The program closes with Finnissy’s Red Earth.
Following up on my interviews with Mary Bellamy and Liza Lim, the composers she worked with on solo pieces for ELISION’s transference CD, I spoke with Séverine Ballon about collaboration, improvisation, and how she goes about finding new sounds on the cello.
How did you begin looking for these new sounds? Was it an accident, or curiosity, or a study, or some combination? What is your motivation in continuing to seek them out?
Even when I was young, I always had a personal way of playing the cello. I was never the typical classical player who wants to have one beautiful bright sound (although I think it is very important to be able to play like that). I always felt attracted to some sounds more than others—the fragile, unstable, breakable sounds are much richer to me. Sounds are colors and materials. Playing music is like cooking, or creating a sculpture with your hands. You feel how strong the vibration is, like earth, metal… Also, in playing a lot of new music, there is the influence of composers and also of the time we are living in, what we hear, see… When you play pieces, you discover sounds, you like them and you start getting them into your palette. Of course I am influenced by the literature I am playing.
As an interpreter and as an improviser, it was important for me to go into sounds and to discover where they take you, and also discover by them new materials. In the last two years I started working for myself on multiphonic and air sounds, really breakable sounds—also sounds really at the edge of sounds, mixing with air, or delicate. I am also working on split sounds on the cello, that can be with preparation on the instrument or with special bow techniques and fingerings. Right now, I’m planning to do a research project on these sounds. I try to improvise every day. It is very important in my practicing. I collect them in a notebook: I write all my sketches, almost like a diary. This work is not something I want to show in front of an audience. It is more a personal research. To be an improviser makes you look at the music in a different way. You focus more, not on the notation, but on what the composer wanted to write behind the notation, or the first idea. Improvising also changes the way of looking at musical structures in written music. My improvisation work helps me as an interpreter. But of course this work doesn’t mean that you “improvise” while you play written music. It is of course very important to be as exact as possible with the text.
What do you look for in a sound? What kinds of things have been surprising?
I’m looking for the vibration in a sound. I’m interested to find sounds which have inner life in them. You become aware of all these broken rhythms and noises and harmonics which are in a sound, almost like making things visible you would get in a microscope. Parallel to my interpretive work, I’m working as an improviser with a few artists, like Alexander Schellow, who draws. His work is really about vibration and density. It’s very interesting to compare the way he has to find a structure with vibrations, and the way I’m just organizing sounds and leaving them to create their own life. Sometimes improvisation is not about playing. It can be about leaving things to exist. I am also working with the photographer Evi Keller, who captures the vibrations of lights and creates a rich and poetic world with them.
What is important for you in your improvisation?
When I’m improvising, it’s very important for me to have a structure. It’s the thing I’m focusing on the most. The structure appears quite often very spontaneously, with the material I use. Because I improvise every day, I’m sometimes trying to give myself some directions, to start with materials I would not use instinctively—today take this sound to try to do something with it.
Can you talk a little bit about your collaborations?
When I’m working with composers, I like to show them what I found, also because quite often composers have no idea about how a cello could sound and how rich it is. Also, I like to have this open collaboration, in which the interpreter really gives ideas and some inspirations and a path. I love when composers get inspired by things you show them, and get ideas with them that I would never have had. I am now working with Rebecca Saunders on a solo. She likes to meet every few months to try sketches, to hear me play and improvise. It is a wonderful collaboration.
Included below are videos of three different performances of Liza Lim’s Invisibility. It’s fascinating to see and hear the differences between the performances. There is another chance to hear Ballon play the Invisibility live, coming up at the City of London Festival on July 15th. I’ll be there.
1) On Thursday, Letter Piece Company will perform Play at Chisendale Dance Space. On Friday, they will perform at the Soundwaves festival in Brighton, which is called, this year, “An Evening of Music, Movement and Dance.” Here is part of the show, as it was performed at the Transit festival in October 2010.
From this video and the others available on the site, as well as my own live experiences of Tom Johnson’s and especially Matthew Shlomowitz’s work, the intersections of movement, pattern, sound, and external references are highly thought-provoking and enjoyable.
Described as ‘duet-Tourettes’, Letter Piece Company brings together ideas and
elements from contemporary music, dance and theatre in genre defying
performance pieces. With shifting combinations of music, physical movement
and text (always with a beat!), prepare to experience abstract sequences of
virtuosic face dancing, vampires, cowboys, sporting moves, thievery and a
mathematical tale!
In 2007 Matthew Shlomowitz began a series of short duos for performer and
musician called Letter Pieces. Each piece has a score, positioning a small number of
physical actions and sound events in a fixed order. They are called Letter Pieces
because the scores use letters to represent these sounds and actions.
In 2010 Matthew developed these ideas with Shila Anaraki in two longer Letter Piece
Quartets as part of a one-hour show the Letter Piece Company created for the 2010
Transit (Belgium) & Huddersfield festivals. This July we present this show again in
London and Brighton.
The work transplants sounds and scenes from popular culture and the
everyday world into an alien space that allows the familiar to be seen again in
strange ways, creating a conceptually rich as well as light and humorous tone.
PROGRAMME
Anaraki / Shlomowitz – Five Finger Discount
Shlomowitz – Northern Cities
Tom Johnson – Narayana’s Cows
Shlomowitz – Australia, Bolton, Clinton, Dachshund & Echinacea
Anaraki / Shlomowitz – Mixed Doubles
DETAILS
Thursday 14 July 2011
Chisenhale Dance Space, East London
Show starts at 8pm
£8/5 – tickets on the door
www.chisenhaledancespace.co.uk
Friday 15 July 2011
Soundwaves Festival, Sallis Benney Theatre, Brighton
Show starts at 7pm (event also features other acts)
EVENING PASS £10 (Earlybird price £8) arts.brighton.ac.uk/soundwaves
2) On Friday at 6pm, the ELISION ensemble is performing at St. Andrew’s Holborn.
Concert-City of London Festival
Date: Friday July 15th 2011
Place: St Andrew Holborn, 5 St Andrew St, London EC4 3AB
Time: 18:00hrs
Michael Finnissy • Aijal (1982) for flute, oboe and percussion Percy Grainger • Random Round (1912-1943) for variable instrumentation Liza Lim • Invisibility (2009) for solo violoncello David Lumsdaine • Kangaroo Hunt (1971) for piano and percussion John Rodgers • Amor (1996) for flute and oboe
ELISION musicians
Peter Veale | oboe, Richard Craig | flutes, Kerry Yong | piano, Peter Neville | percussion , Séverine Ballon | violoncello
Australia’s foremost international contemporary music ensemble, ELISION, perform a programme almost exclusively given over to a celebration of love, doom and music influenced by perceptions of the Australian continent and its inhabitants.
David Lumsdaine, 80 this year, is a major figure known as much for his remarkable recordings of the music from the natural world as for his concert compositions, and is represented here by his colourful Kangaroo Hunt. It is with pleasure that we return to the music of David Lumsdaine who in the early years of ELISION’s history composed and worked with the group in Melbourne, Australia.
The music of Liza Lim and Michael Finnissy draw upon understandings and experiences of Australian Aboriginal themes and aesthetics. Percy Grainger’s ‘Random Round’, described by the composer himself as ‘an experiment in concerted partial improvisation’, embraces an earlier period of Australian invention. John Rodgers, keen to reconceive instruments and their use is represented by ‘Amor’ – a duo for conjoined flute and oboe highlighting the plight of two lovers whose tale is told by Dante. Caught and killed in the act of adultery they are physically inseparable and melded forever in one of the outer circles of hell.
3) The third and final music we’d like to hear concert of the year is taking place a short walk from the ELISION concert at 7:30, and I’ve established that there will be time to get from the one to the other.
This write-up on the facebook page sums up some of my own anticipation of the concert:
After a great turnout last Friday for a host of ocarinas, a resonant egg carton and various objects moving across the floor, it’s time for “any sound producing means” this Friday. And two violins of course, with the marvellous Angharad Davies and Sara Hubrich playing hotly anticipated Chyoko Szlavnics and Jürg Frey scores.
And here is the program:
VIOLINS with SOUNDS
performed by
Angharad Davies, Sara Hubrich (violins) Parkinson Saunders (any sound-producing means)
