reviewed 10/02

I haven't yet been to 175 East's Hopetoun Alpha home in Auckland for a concert, but I can't imagine the ensemble being better or more richly served when in Wellington than by the ambiences and street-theatre atmosphere of Newtown's "The Space", one of those venues whose darkly-lit, up-the-stairs welcoming aspect suggests the intimacy of a jazz club or coffee bar rather than the formalities of a concert chamber. Although it's a venue which the average concert-goer might well pass by, the same programme given by the same musicians in, say, the Ilott Theatre, might possibly have lost for its participants a good deal of recreative and interactive atmosphere. And, of course, the last thing new music needs when making its way is a presentation aspect whose conventions strangulate at birth any suggestion of shared three-way immediacy between composers, performers and audiences.

This concert was a great success for the ensemble and for the composers whose works were featured, in several instances as world premieres - it was possible to imagine this year's heat and sparks emanating from the creative forges of people such as John Rimmer, Rachel Clement and Michael Norris, and the ink still drying on the musicians' manuscript paper as the music variously roared, sauntered, flowed, spluttered or whispered for the first time in public. And of the other four composers represented, Marc Yeats and Dylan Lardelli contributed works also receiving their world premiere performances, and a third, by Chris Cree Brown, was written as recently as 2001. In fact, despite being, in a sense, the most conceptually innovative of the pieces played (realised?), John Cage's well-known 4'33" was the oldest (1952) by a couple of generations!

Chris Cree Brown's 2001 work "Memories Apart", a piece inspired by the arrival of the composer's first child, opened the programme. The music set episodes of reflective "forest murmurs" ambience against more immediate and visceral sonic irruptions throughout - the composer equated the more reflective and tranquil sounds with his own nebulous childhood memories, and the rumbustious sections with a child's first sensations of a world crowding into the vistas of conscious awareness. A three-note figure from the bass on harmonics initiated different sections in the music as the "then-and-now" kaleidoscope of mood-change revolved, the ambiently-coloured atmospheres of vague remembrance rudely shouldered aside by some full-throated attention-seeking behaviour. The final episode featured the recurring three-note figure set against a snoring bass trombone rumbling at the very bottom of its register, with colourings added by 'cello harmonics and bass clarinet pianissimos which gave the impression of being breathed more than sounded - a compelling conclusion to an enjoyable and highly imaginative piece.

Attention-seeking was very much the order of the following piece, "Mad Canary" by Marc Yeats, played on the piccolo with immense skill, terrific gusto and plenty of stamina by Ingrid Culliford. The work's title says it all, really - a kind of ornithological metabolagram in sound, though some birds of a more tranquil makeup might well be deeply offended by such a blanket description. Relief was provided by John Rimmer's concerto for bass clarinet and ensemble "Au", written for 175 East's Andrew Uren, the player on this occasion. The composer refers in a programme note to a number of associations evoked by the piece's title, the idea of the Aurora, the initials of the work's dedicatee, and the abbreviation of the Latin word for gold, all of which contribute to the piece's ethos.

Rimmer wove a richly-tapestried sonority at the piece's beginning, a lovely "layered" quality in all registers underpinned by frequent "note-sharing" among the instruments, creating long, sinuous lines whose textural evolutions call to mind Ligeti's "Atmospheres".Throughout the work, Andrew Uren's playing astonished with its mastery of colour, and chimeric agility. Amid the swirling, shifting harmonies the trombone for a while became the bass clarinet's alter ego, dreaming some lyrical, might-have-been dreams as a counterweight to the latter's more tangible utterances. And some long-breathed 'cello harmonics underlined the ever-increasing ductile nature of the material as soloist and ensemble floated the piece to an almost crepuscular "do I wake or sleep?" conclusion.

After the interval came Rachel Clement's "feeblebeast", a kind of "Queen Mab-scherzo" depicting the shadowy aspect of an imaginary creature whose characteristics are described by the composer in an accompanying set of verses, including

"Its tongue is forked, its eyes are red It could be crouched beneath your bed! But when confronted, people say, It quivers, quakes, and runs away….."

Clement's droll humour, which made pieces such as her "knitting dust" so entertaining, again enlivens her material, setting mock-solemn tunes on their heads, framing a ghostly harmonic sequence with frenetic movements and characterising the evanescent nature of the beast's menacing behaviour with hollow-voiced mutterings from the bass trombone that seem to scare their own perpetrator away. Even more evanescent was Dylan Lardelli's "From Flying Birds", a fleeting sound-impression of a vista stirred and shaken by the flurry of wings - Katherine Hebley's 'cello voiced a passionate opening flourish, followed by a few soft pizzicato chords, before allowing the silence to surge softly backwards.

Silence, of course, is the essence of John Cage's famous (or notorious) 4'33" which then followed, on this occasion as an "ensemble" performance, one sanctioned by Cage himself, though the first performance of the work was by a solo pianist. The work is in three movements, lasting 30", 2'23" and 1'40" respectively. In the first performance, the pianist indicated the beginnings of the movements by shutting the piano lid, and opening it again at the end of the allotted times. In 175 East's performance, the director Hamish McKeich used a downbeat at the beginning and a concluding gesture at the end of each movement. The players sat motionless, holding, but not as though they were playing, their instruments.

Though the work is often referred to as Cage's "silent" piece, the composer always qualified such a description. An experience in 1951, when he visited an anechoic (echoless) chamber at Harvard University, taught him that there was no such thing as human perception of silence, and therefore no objective dichotomy between sound and silence, but only between the intent of hearing and that of diverting one's attention to sounds. Another contributing experience for Cage that same year was seeing paintings by his friend the artist Robert Rauschenberg, plain white canvasses which the composer described as "mirrors of the air". 4'33" is Cage's attempt to draw people's attention towards "the sounds of silence" and to value these sounds: - "I have felt and hoped to have led other people to feel that the sounds of their environment constitute a music which is more interesting than what they would hear if they went into a concert hall."

Being a visual theatre piece as well as an aural experience, 4'33" relies upon its performer(s) to give indications to the audience that something is happening. Some performers have used the piece questionably, miming the actions of playing instruments, or introducing additional characters enacting a kind of "dumb show". Such distractions focusing on the performers instead of the environmental and incidental sounds clearly contravene the composer's intentions. 175 East's presentation properly challenged its audience while keeping the focus firmly on the aural spaces, as Cage intended.

Michael Norris, the composer of the concert's final piece "…dans les débris du temps", doesn't go quite as far as John Cage in his attempts to establish a hegemony of omnipresent aural ambience, but his work suggests an almost compulsive awareness of what he calls an "unvalorised sonic backdrop". By choosing to employ sounds which inhabit extremes of instrumental register (and the borders of audibility) Norris creates "fugitive gestures" whose insubstantiality creates a sense of precariousness, formations as likely to disintegrate as cohere. Flurries of activity and raucous instrumental shouts are as much evidence of anxiety as strength and confidence, and the use of glissandi enables incredible harmonic liquidity as well as adding to the sense of a constantly-changing set of relationships within the organism.

Altogether, Norris's piece suggested an eerie kind of "doppelganger" identity, one whose surface intention and subplot seemed in a constant state of flux and exchange, a process which in a surrealistic kind of way seemed to "melt down" towards the end, though the outcome resembled dissolution more than amalgamation , with the instrumentalists' sounds becoming increasingly spectral, devoid of bodily substance. As with the same composer's "Vitus", which 175 East played in Wellington last year, one hopes to hear a repeat performance of this fascinating music before too long.

The works by Michael Norris, Rachel Clement, John Rimmer and Chris Cree Brown were all commissioned either by 175 East or the group's individual members, with the help of funding from Creative New Zealand, whose assistance continues to prove invaluable to the performing arts in general in this country. One can only report that the organisation's advocacy has been more than repaid by the skill and integrity of the work produced by the composers represented during this concert And, of course no small thanks are due to the musicians and support personnel of 175 East, whose on-going commitment to the cause will hopefully continue to inspire local composers to tell it how it is for our pleasure and enlightenment.