Programme notes for Turning Circles by Leigh Harrold, Syzygy Ensemble, September 26th 2019

2019 Concert Series: Turning 10 Concert 2: Turning Circles

Melbourne Recital Centre Primrose Potter Salon September 26, 6pm

Programme Programme: Liza LIM: The Turning Dance of the Bee (2016)

1. Solar

2. Lunar Tansy DAVIES: Grind Show [electric] (2008) Andrew BYRNE: Ghosts in the Machine (2019)

1. Ghosts in the Machine

2. The Orchid and the Wasp

6. The Here and Now Sean SHEPHERD: Lumens (2005)

Serene – Mercurial – Benediction

A Quartet for the End of Time

The Earth is burning. It may not be dead just yet, and we may well just save it, but the Earth and the species who inhabit it are to have any longevity, the way humans live their lives on this blue marble will have to drastically change.

Almost every system in the Universe exists through a combination of cyclical and linear processes. The planets revolve around the sun with predictable regularity, even as the gravitational pull of the sun shreds a small amount off each of their consecutive orbits; our own bodies renew and refuel themselves via a multitude of circadian rhythms, yet no one cycle is a perfect replica of the one before it, and as the imperfections mount up we undergo this process called ‘ageing’; the Earth has its own cycles and seasons too of course – predictable up to a point, but subject to a whole heap of meta-variables, the most worrying of which is currently the enormous amount of carbon dioxide being pumped into its atmosphere.

While tiny variants in cycles go unnoticed for the most part, their accumulation will, sooner or later, result in very noticeable consequences. A planet nudged slightly off course enough times will eventually collide with another celestial body; us humans will eventually each amass enough imperfections to end our lives; and the Earth – well, it’s burning. The line separating productive equilibrium and annihilative catastrophe is frighteningly thin, and yet examining this border – the membrane that separates order and chaos – gives us the tools we need to understand ourselves and the Universe that much better.

Tonight then, four works that have been born on this knife’s edge – that toy with the idea of predictable cycles on the threshold of falling apart. In a way, we have four visions of the apocalypse, although perhaps that’s being slightly pessimistic. Not all of these works take us past the brink, nor do they all paint cyclical collapse as being wholly bad. Nonetheless, they all zoom in very closely on a particular tipping point, giving us plenty to think about as a result.

the Be

The Turning Dance of the Bee

ee

Liza Lim’s The Turning Dance of the Bee is a work of circles within circles. It begins with a circle: the hypnotic sound of a stone tracing circular patterns on concrete. It also traces through its two movements (Solar and Lunar) one complete circle – one twenty-four-hour cycle of a honeybee’s life. But there are other circles embedded within the piece. Each movement is itself a cycle, and these two cycles are selfsimilar without being exactly the same. Each movement follows the same broad outline – a beautifully-wrought improvisatory-sounding opening, largely dominated by the solo violin, which gradually leads to a ritualistic gathering of the whole ensemble, before the bass clarinet breaks free to dominate the texture, having the last word in both movements.

The first movement certainly celebrates everything that makes the daytime joyful, with everyone getting their moment in the sun, as it were. The momentum builds inexorably until the bass clarinet and piano become entwined in an ecstatically repetitive groove. This is the ‘turning dance’ of the title. Known in biological circles as the ‘waggle dance’, it is a navigational dance that bees participate in to direct others in the hive to fresh pollen.

It’s Lim’s hope and belief that the dance has aesthetic and ecstatic meaning for the hive that goes beyond the purely practical. In the second movement, the regular pulse may have disappeared, but the waggle dance concept is exploited in another way. It’s night now, so we need to navigate with our ears alone: Lim asks that each ensemble member take a turn to lead the group using a rhythm of their own choosing, freshly chosen each time. This makes each performance of the piece different and forces a sort of heightened ‘hive mentality’ in order to maintain ensemble cohesion – a ‘turning dance’ method of conveying musical information down the line. The bass clarinet closes this movement too, but the ecstatic mood is gone. Fragmented and doleful, the coda of the work is a reminder of the important work that bees do, and the tragic environmental consequences of their pollen cycle being permanently broken.

Grind Show the Bee honest sounds of the natural

In Tansy Davies’ Grind Show (electric) the barrier between regularity and chaos is literal – it’s the four walls of a dance hall. Dance music, of course, has its own sequences and cycles. By definition it is choreographed revelry, and its predictability is what lends itself to organised human movement. The containment of this revelry is represented quite overtly on the stage as well: it is the five ensemble members on acoustic instruments who portray the inner world of the dance hall, while one rogue player on a sampler keyboard provides the chaotic, inhuman sounds of a storm raging outside. But as straightforward as the divide may seem, there are certainly overlaps and complications. The piece is called ‘Grind Show’ after all – a phrase heavy with burlesque connotations and the suggestions that there’s more going on in the dance hall than just dancing. And while the acoustic music may have a pulse to it, there is very little here that allows us to toe-tap with any confidence – some beats are cut short without warning; successive phrases sometimes lurch drunkenly forward or fall laboriously behind; and for the majority of the piece it seems like the treble instruments are engaged in a different dance to the bass ones.

All the while, the electronic storm rages. At first very much in the background, it gradually makes itself known as the piece progresses, threatening to engulf the ensemble at times. As the acoustic players struggle to assert their dominance, their sounds become more angular and jagged – and somehow less human as a result. The storm on the other hand – while generated through electronic and ‘artificial’ means – provides us with the very real, honest sounds of the natural world. By the end of the piece, a casual visitor to the scene might be forgiven for choosing to brave the storm outside the dance hall rather than the hysterical, orgiastic gyrations within.

Perhaps the apocalypse has already arrived with Andrew Byrne’s Ghosts in the Machine. The references to circles here are numerous – stylistically, the music takes us into the world of dance electronica where pulses are regular, cyclical, and hypnotic; the tail always joining the head.

Further circular emblems are suggested in the nods to loop stations, disco balls, and turntables. But, as the title suggests, the music has been white-anted. The musicians are forced to excavate sounds from their instruments (or from the instruments of others) in strange and foreign ways – resulting in sounds that are timbrally inventive, but unreliable in pitch and stability. As a result, an ensemble of highly-trained classical musicians is transformed into a band of skeletal minstrels – they are the ‘ghosts’, as they dutifully, almost mindlessly, create a ‘machine’ not of their own choosing, layer by layer. The similarity to bees in a hive springs to mind…

In the self-titled first movement, the machine in question is the piano, and everyone abandons their ‘regular’ instrument in order to crowd around it. Just like the scene of techno electronica largely exists underground, so here does it feel like the players are ‘mining’ the sounds from the instrument, releasing them to the surface. The interior of the piano is slapped, scraped, beaten and dampened, and – gradually – the ungainly machine lumbers into life. As it ambles over the horizon and out of earshot, we enter the world of The Orchid and the Wasp – the second movement of the work. Here, the pianist painstakingly ekes out a melody – an ‘artificial’ one because the note that is struck on the keyboard never changes; only the position of the pianist’s other hand on the internal string. This is payback: in the first movement the string players were made to play the piano; here, the pianist must act like a string player. The final movement sees a uniting of forces across the motley crew for The Here and Now. This feels like a sort of Dante-esque version of a folk dance – an otherwise festive romp bent out of shape with irregular phrase lengths and an unrelentingly high tessitura.

Still, it’s nice to know that there’ll be partying in hell, post apocalypse.

Ghosts in the Machine

Lumens And then, to the heavens. A ‘lumen’ is a unit of light, and a single lumen is not particularly bright. Sean Shepherd’s Lumens (plural), on the other hand, is a pellucid, optimistic work that conjures up imagery across the whole spectrum of illumination, from single candles through to blinding solar radiance. Shepherd is currently resident in Pittsburgh, USA, and this work knows its lineage – it channels the language of Aaron Copland, brilliantly reimagined for the 21st century, with a sophistication that demands a great deal from the players while being immensely rewarding in return. Part of the work’s difficulty lies in its sparseness – in its uses of instrumental unisons and its insistence that every player be treated like a soloist. This realisation is somewhat surprising – for a piece that is so inviting and lyrical, a close examination of the score reveals many angular, awkward intervals and – unusually – a very, very sparing use of vertical layering. The majority of the 15-minute work is a single, snaking line with only an ambiguous, implied harmonic framework. The richness of the work comes from the way this single line is ‘set’ – the instrumental colours that comprise it; the sudden bands of light that unpredictably ‘thicken’ the sound at various points; and the pointillistic sparks that often dance around the melody. The sum total of all this interplay is a complex, rich work, saturated with colour and rooted in old-school chamber music virtuosity.

The structure of the work is satisfyingly cyclical too. It opens with the solo clarinet, imploring and lyrical, dotted with pinpricks of light from the crotales and piano. In fact, if we were to continue to talk in terms of light analogies, it isn’t hard to imagine a full solar eclipse here – the clarinet is like a stoic, black disc, bathed in a corona of light. As the clarinet develops its melody and other instruments gradually join the corona, we eventually reach a flash point. All the instruments combine in a virtuosic unison and then splinter and refract, alternatively swooping, sparkling, pairing and splitting – it feels like that moment in an eclipse where the moon’s shadow begins uncovering the sun and the first blinding spray of light streams out from behind it. Once this passes – when sun and moon are once again separate – we reach a section that Shepherd marks ‘Mercurial’. Here the music is at its most Coplandesque – vistas are illuminated, sunbeams intersect and diverge, celestial bodies spin through the heavens. Alas, although this is the longest section of the piece, such a mood can’t last forever. The shadows fall again as the moon passes between the sun and the Earth, and the piece moves in reverse – we get the ‘flash point’ music again, before telescoping back down to the single clarinet line. Rather than the cycle continuing again though, something breaks it. We pass through the looking glass into a final section marked ‘Benediction’. Although this coda is hushed and still, we finally get the lush, close harmonies that have eluded us up to this point. Shepherd has written elsewhere that this piece for him is about “gratitude”, and while there are many interpretations of this ending, there really is a profound Messiaenic transcendence to it that suggests some sort of final, grateful release. This, for me, is why the piece is so generously optimistic. We get 12 minutes of the most joyful, light-filled music, and then an epilogue that implies whatever lies beyond the light might not be so bad either.

Lumens, on the oth is a pellucid, optim work that conjure imagery across the spectrum of illumin from single candles to blinding solar ra

Getting off the treadmill means something different for everyone, perhaps. Our own individual cycles will all end one day. The Earth’s will too. Here’s hoping, though, that there’s many more turning circles left in it yet. © Leigh Harrold 2019

Syzygy Ensemble Laila Engle; flute, piccolo, alto flute, piano interior Robin Henry; clarinet, bass clarinet, piano interior Leigh Harrold; piano Jenny Khafagi; violin, piano interior Campbell Banks; cello, piano with guest artists Daniel Richardson; percussion Anthony Lyons; electronics

Syzygy thanks ZoĂŤ Engle: programme design and format Kim Chalmers: and all at Montevecchio wines Daniel Richardson and Anthony Lyons: for their artistry and friendship Ben Smart, Matthias Shack-Arnott, Ben van den Akker, Timothy Phillips, Leah Scholes: for providing much needed percussion instruments Melbourne Recital Centre: for its ongoing support

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