Recital Programs Rooted In The Past

The Age

Thursday October 25, 2007

Clive O'Connell, Reviewer

CONCERT A

The Music Committee. At BMW Edge, Federation Square, October 22

MERCE CUNNINGHAM IN DISCUSSION

Cinema 2, ACMI, Federation Square, October 22

SOME extra entertainments added to the Merce Cunningham programs, which will animate the final days of the Melbourne Arts Festival, are two recitals from the musicians who support the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, the Music Committee.

These four performers, or sound artists, have a large body of work behind them; the best known, Christian Wolff, was part of the ground-breaking US school of composers and musical performers that developed in the mid-20th century around John Cage, Morton Feldman and Earle Brown.

Both recital programs are rooted in past accomplishments, either by the Cunningham company or these participating musician-composers. Both evenings feature the substantial For John collaboration, where members of the quartet contribute their own material and the consequent randomness establishes performance and aesthetic tension - if you're lucky.

The conceptual framework brought to sonic life in the BMW Edge has a history of about 50 years behind it, pivoting on Cage's indeterminacy creed in which the meshing process is everything and completely unpredictable.

The Monday night event opened tamely with David Behrman's Long Throw bringing into play a prepared piano and guitars of variable capabilities, played by John King and Takehisa Kosugi. The most unsettling quality was an electronically generated drone around which the live-sound performers fell into harmonic accord.

More challenging material came in King's Quadrilogic Unity which gives its performers a stopwatch-regulated temporal structure but plenty of freedom to operate, thanks to its four independent scores.

Here, the level of creativity moved up several notches, particularly in the violin manipulations from Kosugi and King. But the night's major Cage-dedicated work yielded the most intriguing sounds, particularly Kosugi's abrasive battery of microphone heads and Behrman's resonant forays on instruments that sounded like a koto-samisen and an autoharp.

OVERLAPPING with the Music Committee's first program, Cunningham was the focus of a strained discussion panel, which involved the choreographer's archivist, David Vaughan, and Australian dance writer Lee Christofis acting as moderator.

While you might have hoped for some insights on Cunningham's artistic and personal collaboration with Cage, little fresh information emerged from the participants, Vaughan's comments contributing little, although the openings given to him - like most of the information solicited from Cunningham - bordered on or stepped right into the banal.

Cunningham did make quite explicit his art-guiding motto of "doing", not planning to do or thinking about action. But every so often, he gave revealing glimpses of processes in the opening phases to his solid contribution to dance, tantalising images of Cage and himself going their separate ways to create, then coming together to settle on the finished product. Just how this merging was achieved, however, remained unexplored while far too much attention was given to light-and-easy topics, hardly stimulating for one of the seminal figures in American art, and downright disappointing for a well-disposed onlooker.

© 2007 The Age

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