Ever wanted to be a percussionist?

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to be a percussionist?

I've always secretly wanted to play percussion. Rhythm is one of the most primal and powerful forms of communication. Percussionists get to dance around (often barefoot) on stage and always seem to be having so much fun! 

Now is our chance! Speak Percussion are putting a call out for 100 percussionists - NO EXPERIENCE REQUIRED - to participate in their performance at the Totally Huge New Music Festival in October.

Speak Percussion and guests will unite in the 13th THNMF to perform the WA premiere of A wave and waves by American composer Michael Pisaro, a massive 74-minute work for 100 performers on 100 instruments.

 

They are offering a rare opportunity to join with one of Australia’s most dynamic and risk taking arts organisations in an extraordinary new music project. A wave and waves is a project that redefines the way contemporary chamber music is presented.

 The Midland Railway Workshops will be transformed into a sonic and visual ocean of instruments and performers, creating an intimate experience of monumental proportions.

 No percussion experience is required – this call is open to all interested people. Participants will work with Eugene Ughetti (Artistic Director, Speak Percussion), Louise Devenish (Head of Percussion, University of Western Australia) and Tura’s production team.

There are 3 rehearsals before performances on 29th October.

Sign up here before September 1st.  More details here. Go on, be brave, be a percussionist!

June Gig Guide

June is a rich month of music for all the ages; dive in and enjoy! 

It is particularly action-packed  for the West Australian Symphony Orchestra who will present four mainstage orchestral concerts plus the explosive energy of Education Week with its multiple concerts for children and their families. 

On June 2/3rd WASO have a colourful program planned with Stravinsky's Firebird Suite and Debussy’s Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun plus winner of the Tchaikovsky International Piano Competition Ayako Uehara  making her WASO debut performing Bartók’s Piano Concerto No.3. On the 9/10th the guest artist is Stefan Dohr, principal horn from the Berlin Philharmonic, performing Strauss' Horn Concerto - WOW! Then the world of jazz takes over with concerts on the 16/17th with leading Australian stage and screen stars in a modern and audacious take on all-time swing classics from Sinatra to Bublé. On the 30/1st Chopin expert Louis Lortie Plays Chopin’s Concerto no 1 in a program which also includes Dvorak's Seventh Symphony 

This year for Education Week (19-25th) WASO has invited award winning British composer and music educationist Paul Rissmann us for a week-long musical adventure exploring gorgeous children's books across a variety of  interactive programs. The concerts include school shows Sir Scallywag and the Golden Underpants, The Beat of Your Feet and The Lion Who Loved  plus a Conductor Masterclass with Ben Northey. The Rusty Orchestra is also back with a concert on the 24th June featuring community musicians playing alongside WASO players in a concert with the biggest amount of heart you're likely to hear.

If you have children come with us on Sunday 25th - we will be checking out the family concert The Beat of Your Feet, about a music-loving dog and cat and their musical adventure to find the Greatest Orchestra in the World. The concert is a mix of music, illustrated projections and audience participation, based on the book Stan and Mabel by Jason Chapman with vocals by Libby Hammer. 

Meanwhile the rest of the music community has some lovely offerings this month, including two particularly stunning vocal concerts: the Giovanni Consort singing French Chansons on the 4th, and   Voyces on the 10th celebrating their fifth anniversary with a concert of all-Australian music and the launch of their debut album Hush.

On the 11th there is a a triple whammy with the Darlington Trio offering Brahms, Musica Viva launching their national tour of the Pacifica Trio (including a world premiere by Nigel Westlake) and the experimental trio The Necks presented by Tura New Music.

Perth Chamber Orchestra (the little sister of Perth Symphony) is performing an intriguing concert in Midland on the 14th called Steampunk Mozart, which promises industrial-inspired music, food, wine, a sound installation and the magic of Mozart conducted by Jessica Gethin. Then in larger form the Perth Symphony Orchestra will also perform on the 27th with the WA Academy of Performing Arts Gospel Choir in a concert dedicated to the music of George Michael.

Also on at WAAPA this month is the second and third year students performance of 42nd Street opening on the 17th. 

International new music legends in Perth

First we had the American all-stars Eighth Blackbird, now we have the Russians and the Brits! It is an exciting time over the next few weeks as Perth welcomes some of the legends of the international new music scene.

British experimental musician and filmmaker Mike Cooper arrives in Perth this week for a 10 day residency with Tura New Music.

Mike Cooper. Photo Leila Buongiorno

A week of workshops, masterclasses and solo performances will culminate in the presentation of Cooper's genre defining live original soundtrack to the 1928 black and white classic, White Shadows In The South Seas. Audiences will be able to hear Cooper create vast sonic landscapes using his trademark Hawaiian Lap Steel guitar and electronics. He calls his music ambient electronic exotica style which is appropriate for a Brit living in Rome who collects Hawaiian shirts!

Cooper began his career as a folk-blues guitarist and singer songwriter and his output has expanded to include improvised and electronic music, live music for silent films, radio art and sound installations. He is also a music journalist, a visual artist, film and video maker and appears on more than 60 records.

Residency details:
22 and 23 April - Group Improvisation workshops at Subiaco Arts Centre
23 April 5pm - Workshop Showing, Subiaco Arts Centre
24 April 8pm - Solo set at iMprov Bar 459, Rosemount Hotel
26 April 8pm- White Shadows In The South Sea – Film and live performance PS Art Space, Fremantle.

The Moscow Contemporary Music Ensemble will be arriving shortly after Cooper for a concert on May 2nd as part of the ensemble's first Australian tour. The group will perform as part of Tura's Scale Variable New Chamber Music series, providing a rare opportunity to hear Russian new music performed by their fellow countrymen. The program includes works by Russian composers Edison Denisov, Alexei Sioumak, Dmitri Kourliandski and Sergei Newski. plus the premiere of a new work by Australian composer Michael Smetanin.New Music

The group formed in 1990 and have since premiered over 800 works. The Perth line up will feature Ivan Bushuev (flute), Oleg Tantsov (clarinet), Mikhail Dubov (piano) and Vladisal Pesin (violin).

Tickets are available here.

Wood meets Metal in a night of Aussie/German percussion theatre

I managed to snap a selfie with composer Kate Neal last night at the world premiere of her work Never Tilt a Chair. The work sat most satisfyingly alongside Mauricio Kagel's iconic Dressur which was receiving it's long-overdue Australian premiere.

with composer Kate Neal

Hooray for Tura New Music and PICA for bringing it about. I am impressed again by Louise Devenish  - yet another awesome contribution to the Perth new music scene, with the support of her fellow leading theatre-music percussionists Leah Scholes and Vanessa Tomlinson.  I love concerts like these: so much to see, so much to hear.

The set for Never Tilt Your Chair

Leah Schole, Vanessa Tomlinson and Louise Devenish

My review is published by Limelight here.

April Gig Guide

The WA Academy of Performing Arts is in full swing this month. Concerts include Clocked Out Duo percussion stars Vanessa Tomlinson and Erik Griswold performing on the 4th and renowned English conductor Nicholas Cleobury leading vocal students in a performance featuring Tippett's Negro Spirituals on the 6th.

The school of music at UWA is also hitting full steam with a Mainstage Concert on the 9th featuring Shaun Lee-Chen and the student orchestra performing a world premiere by jazz composer Joe Chindamo. On the 28th the Schoenberg Project will feature student arrangements of Schoenberg's Six Little Piano Pieces plus an arrangement by Brett Dean from when he was a student - it could be very revealing!

Thank you Louise Devenish for this update: On April 10-11th an unusual gig at PICA called Never Tilt Your Chair Back on Two Legs brings together three of Australia's leading female percussionists for Maurice Kagel's music theatre piece Dressur.  Set at a formal dinner table, the theme of dinner time etiquette will also be explored in a new work by Kate Neal.

The Australian String Quartet take over Margaret River from the 21-23rd for a Chamber Music weekend - what's not to love?!

The WA Symphony Orchestra go retro with The Best of British on the 7th before a Sibelius fest on 20/21/22 with Asher Fisch conducting the second symphony and concert master Laurence Jackson in Stravinsky's Violin Concerto. On the 28/29th the Zuckerman Trio join the orchestra for Beethoven's Triple Concerto with Pinchas Zukerman also featuring in Berg's Violin Concerto.

Let me know if I've missed anything. See you at a concert soon!

A fitting homage to Roger Smalley

In the seventies English composer Roger Smalley performed in the pioneering electro-acoustic ensemble Intermodulation. But he discarded his electronic explorations when he moved to Perth in 1976 and thought the style would mean little to the Australian public. Times have changed and Cat Hope and ensemble Decibel have brought the little-known repertoire back to life. Their concert which opened Tura's Scale Variable series on Tuesday paid fascinating homage to Smalley who died in August last year.

The program was a surprisingly neat fit for Decibel which is similar in make-up to Intermodulation. Impulses (1986) could have been written with Decibel in mind as it was scored for flute, alto trombone, percussion, piano, cello and synthesiser. The ensemble revelled in the precision of Smalley’s fugal layers and moments of soloistic virtuosity.

Then there were the moments where Didgeridu (1974) brought to mind Cat Hope’s bass-heavy compositions with the sliding pitch and rhythmic patterns of the didgeridu manipulated through an archaic four channel tape machine.

The virtuosic early piano works Transformation (1968) and Monody (1971) performed by Adam Pinto and Stuart James respectively displayed Smalley’s first attempts at electronically manipulating live sound.

Decibel performing Zeitebenen at the Underground Studio c Bohdan Warchomij

Hope’s curatorial sleuthing unearthed the score for Zeitebenen (1973-75) – a pivotal work composed while Smalley was touring in Stockhausen’s ensemble – from behind a cupboard at the UWA School of Music. The 45 minute work for four instrumentalists, live electronics and tape was Smalley’s first attempt at expressing politics in music. The work's three sections and 21 ‘moments’ (similar to Stockhausen’s Momente) and the rhythmic patterns derived from the Fibonacci series reflect Smalley’s career-long fascination with structure. His richly imaginative sound world included slowly evolving vowel sounds (referencing Stimmung), waves of electronic noise derived from the four natural elements and a section of street noise. The work started with the same melodic pattern as Monody and moved via a gradual downwards glissando to an electronic and acoustic battle against the industrial destructive aspects of humanity, ultimately resolved by a victorious thump on the bass drum by percussionist Louise Devenish. 

This review copyright The West Australian 2016.

Anime Concert review

Cat Hope is establishing a formidable reputation as a concert curator. On Saturday the Anime concert as part of Tura's Scale Variable series showcased the genre of animated notation which combines graphic notation (traceable to the 1950’s and even the medieval era) with computer animation. The intriguing concert featured eight premieres with the scores projected on a screen and the performers interpreting the colour, size, patterns and codes of the images.

Each piece displayed a different facet of Decibel, an electro acoustic six-piece ensemble with an ever-expanding capacity for persuasive improvisation. In Lindsay Vickery’s ...with the fishes... the violin, viola, and cello sounds were electronically manipulated to create a murky, bubbling depiction of sea pollution as represented by the industrial structures and paint splashes on the score.

Hope’s bee-inspired Erst required performers to respond to tiny scattered squares and the delicate sounds were layered over an electronic drone with overtones thrumming like the wings of swarming bees. Dane Yates’ politically inspired [under] had a decaying, strangled sound world while Stuart James’ Existence éphémère created a humming gentle sheet of sound. Felicity Wilcox used footage of a train journey as her score for EXIT resulting in a plaintive piece built around the rumble of bass guitar and occasional pulses of percussion.

Some works had a playful element: Ryan Ross Smith used the motion of a cursor landing on dots to draw spatterings of sound from the instrumentalists and Bergrún Snaebjörnsdóttir invited two guitarists to interpret light patterns on the floor.

The piece that lingers in my mind is Jonathan Mustard’s Primorph. Each performer was allocated a clay-like shape on the screen and the sliding, tapping and blurting of the alert instrumentalists gave personality to the images as they twisted, sighed and sagged above them. Here image and sound met; composer and performers united to create compelling spontaneous art.

This review copyright The West Australian 2015.

THNMF cello recital - Friedrich Gauwerky

It’s not often you hear a concert for solo cello. Even rarer to witness one where the music is drawn entirely from the twentieth century. And German cellist Friedrich Gauwerky raised the stakes higher again for his recital as part of the Totally Huge New Music Festival by limiting his program to Australian and German composers predominantly from the New Complexity school.

Gauwerky, with sonorous tone and inclusive glances at the audience, translated complex musical notation and dissonant sounds into conversational and often dramatic storytelling. The program drew on works from the seventies and eighties with the exception of Hindemith's early modernist Sonata for Cello (1922) with its echoes of Romantic melodism and Felix Werder’s dissonant Violincello Solo 1 (1993).

The German repertoire included Klaus K. Huebler’s iconic Opus Breve where the score directed physical activity rather than specifying a desired sound, and Stockhausen’s surprisingly lyrical Amour arranged for cello by Gauwerky in cooperation with the Stockhausen estate. Hans Werner Henze’s lively Capriccio was played with theatrical energy although Gauwerky’s quality of tone and pitch accuracy suffered in the upper range of the cello.

The Australian composers included Thomas Reiner, a student of Henze, who’s contrasting Three Sketches included siren effects from slides up and down the cello neck. The concert highlight came from German-Australian Volker Heyn who’s Blues in Bb was an exploration of the eerie harmonics resonating from extremely soft pedal notes.

This bravely executed program was difficult for performer and audience alike. It felt one-dimensional at times - there was a notable absence of multimedia or electronic effects - but that in itself was subversive; just a cello, a man and notes on a page. And there is plenty more on the menu because  THNMF's’s expansive program continues until May 24^th.

This review copyright The West Australian 2015.

Lisa Moore review

The New Yorker describes Lisa Moore as the “queen of avant garde piano” but she’s the most down to earth sovereign imaginable. In a genre renowned for eccentric performers and unapproachable music Moore was calm, friendly and all about the music. And the music was good.

Her program for the Tura Scale Variable series was devised around works for singing pianist. Moore’s clean, smooth technique and transparent musicality spanned a range of intimate emotions, from the quietude of Philip Glass’ Metamorphosis I and IV to humour of Brett Dean’s Equality with its wild rumbling piano scales and Moore’s unrestrained bellowing “All men are bastards”.

 

Australian composer William Gardiner was present to introduce Little Room, a compelling theatrical piece about “Australia’s first refugees” – the Irish orphans sent to Australia during the great famine.  Electronically-produced sounds of sloshing of water and fragments of text formed a cocoon of sound with Moore at its centre reading poetry, accompanying herself on piano and playing a folk tune on a melodica.

Martin Bresnick’s Ishi’s Song delved into existential questions about cultural legacy and loss. A simple native-Indian melody was developed with the clarity and complexity of Bach. Chords clustered around the melody building into complex polyrhythms with Moore’s light, even touch bringing a twinkle to the high notes.

Moore and Martin Bresnick

Moore is a pianist, not a singer, as was obvious in Ted Hearne’s Intimacy and Resistance. She declaimed the text without vibrato over Hearne’s bluesy syncopated piano chords making the piece more Sprechstimme than ballad.

But her piano skills were beyond reproach. The centrepiece of the recital was Rzewski’s De Profundis, was a complicated weaving of text by Oscar Wilde with body percussion and complex piano writing. Moore howled, slapped her cheeks and delivered feverish pointillism from the piano in a display of impressive virtuosity. A whistled interlude provided thoughtful reflective space while her conversational approach brought intimacy to Wilde’s deeply hopeful words.

Despite the huge technical skill required to deliver a recital of this kind (Moore read the scores from an Ipad using a Bluetooth foot pedal to make page turns), the overall impression was of a musician of refreshing naturalness. Randy Newman’s rambling conversational I Think its Gonna Rain Today was a fitting conclusion to a recital of unadorned authenticity.

Come back soon Lisa Moore.

Lisa Moore - the stuff of legend

Lisa Moore is finally coming to Perth. The Australia pianist is based in New York but returns to Australia regularly and this time Perth is first on her schedule.

In fact this isn’t her first visit to WA; if you were watching closely you would’ve spotted Moore when the Steve Reich Ensemble performed in Mandurah in 2003. But this is the first opportunity to hear someone the New Yorker described as the ‘queen of avant-garde piano’ in recital mode.  

Moore’s fearsome technical skill and compelling story-telling is the stuff of legend in New York. Her reputation as a performer who will do absolutely anything has inspired composers the likes of David Lang, Brett Dean and Elena Kats-Chernin.

On the concert platform she has performed symphonic works under Pierre Boulez, Edo de Waart and Richard Tognetti. Moore was a founding member of the Bang on a Can All-Stars and toured with them for 16 years. She still plays with the Steve Reich Ensemble, although they don’t perform as often anymore.

“We’re getting old,” laughs the 54 year old on the phone from New York.

Lisa Moore and Martin Bresnick

Moore has just finished a strategising breakfast with her husband, composer Martin Bresnick, who she met while playing his music in Bang on a Can. Bresnick is professor of composition at Yale University and the couple will be involved in lectures, performances and masterclasses during their week-long visit to Perth.

Moore was born in Canberra and studied at the Sydney Conservatorium before transferring her degree to the University of Illinois in 1980. She remained in the USA to complete a doctorate at the State University of New York and in 1999 she married Bresnick. In her mind, she explains, she still intends to return to Australia.

“I always think ‘when I go back...’ but it hasn’t happened yet. There are things I prefer about America. I don’t like the way women are treated in Australia, it is a very macho country. It has more of a culture of criticism, whereas people in America tend to be more optimistic.”

photo c Mark Ostow

Optimism is essential in Moore’s freelance career as she often doesn’t know if she will have work in six months time. Currently she is hosting a piano program on national public radio, performing chamber music and teaching piano at Wesleyan University, Connecticut.

“Like any freelance life it is hectic, running around doing a bit of this and that. It is exciting and frightening and tiring and I wonder how much more I can do.”

Where does she find the energy to keep going?

“I keep going back to what I loved originally: sitting at the piano and playing the repertoire of the greats – Beethoven and Haydn. It keeps me in touch with that great tradition instead of all the logistical crap of a working artist.”

It might come as a surprise to hear an artist renowned for championing modern repertoire draws her strength from music hundreds of years old.

photo c Nina Roberts

“I never gave traditional repertoire the flick; maybe it has flicked me. Publicists get confused when you don’t fit in a box, they prefer to market from one particular angle. But I love to keep my fingers in the repertoire. I am planning a program of ‘last sonatas’ and have recently started working on Beethoven’s Sonata No 32.”

Her recital at the Octagon Theatre on Saturday August 9^th as part of the Tura Scale Variable series has an intimate focus and is titled ‘From Me to You’. The theatrical program includes works such as De Profundis by Rzewski; Intimacy and Resistance by Ted Hearne, and a setting of Leunig poems by Brett Dean. Moore will also premiere Little Room by Australian composer William Gardiner which includes text she has compiled drawing on her Irish roots. The program requires great vocal as well as pianistic skills; Moore must sing, hum, narrate, hit and rub her way through the music.

A singing pianist is not a common sight in classical recitals and Moore says the experience has given her great respect for performers like Billy Joel.

“It is extraordinarily difficult singing against a hardcore piano rhythm. But I find it spiritually easier. Normally a pianist isn’t supposed to groan or grimace, we just walk on and off like performing monkeys. But with words you are breaking the ice, you can have humour, it is much easier to communicate with the audience.”

The singing pianist

On Thursday at the University of Western Australia Moore will feature in a lunchtime concert dedicated to the works of Bresnick and in a lecture given by Bresnick for the Institute for Advanced Studies. She will perform on Friday with the UWA New Music Ensemble and in recital on Saturday for Tura’s Scale Variable.

This article copyright The West Australian 2014