BY STEPHANIE ESLAKE
What’s a percussion instrument?
Perhaps a drum springs to mind. Or cymbals, glockenspiel, or — if you’re feeling adventurous — tubular bells.
There are so many instruments in the percussion family. But there are even more instruments beyond it.
You don’t need to step into a music shop to buy a triangle when you could, for instance, set up a machine that hurls clay toward custom-made objects. Travelling at 100kmph, you can guarantee there’ll be a clatter and bang when those clay projectiles strike.
This may sound like a highly specific example of how to create an instrument out of pure imagination. But it’s a real idea, which will be presented in a real (and really unusual) concert in the Melbourne Recital Centre.
Pigeons – Speak Percussion will take over Elisabeth Murdoch Hall with a concert featuring three “Olympic trap machines firing real full-size clays on stage” according to the project’s creator Eugene Ughetti.
Eugene, who is the co-artistic director of Speak Percussion, “wanted to create a muscular work – something that engages with the overt physicality of striking in percussion”.
“I was also intrigued by the spectacle and precision of trap shooting; it’s a strange sport that I thought could provide a point of creative and conceptual tension in the work,” Eugene says.
He imagined a “performance space littered with flying fluorescent clay targets, smashing, striking, and sounding the stage in their wake”.
Musicians will be kitted out with protective gear and helmets from a costume designer — just in case they’re struck during their attempts to “duck, flap, glide and slide among the projectiles, in a frantic search for safety” as the listing describes.
Eugene adds: “I never deliberately put the performers in the line of fire. However, if we make a mistake in the performance there’s a strong chance of a direct hit.”
The idea of musicians ducking and diving – and the novelty of never knowing when the clay will strike the instruments (or players) – sounds rather amusing. But amusement is just one of the reactions this work is designed to evoke.
“I’ve thought a lot about amusement and laughter in music, and I believe we respond this way when things that are outside our frame of reference or dislocated from reality,” Eugene muses.
“But beneath the drama and surface, it’s a melancholy work.”
The three trap machines are placed to unsettle the audience. Why? Because the machines are “both autonomous and dangerous” – not too far fetched from reality after all, perhaps.
“Fundamentally, Pigeons explores power relations, human-to-animal and machine-to-human violence, and the existential threat to both classical music and humanity.”
The flight path of the clay is controlled through “automated platforms that tilt and direct the machines towards their targets…like dangerous robots that I have composed music for”.
“Their movement produces a glissing pitch that is amplified in the space, and the rhythmic attacks of the smashing clays are fully composed into the structure of the work and, of course, syncronised to the live percussion playing.”
The instruments in question have been forged from metals and timber, and will look a little bit like slot machines, or make reference to duck shooting.
“This imagery is about pointing to gambling and chance, and the ethical troubling of that,” Eugene says.
“The audience can never be sure whether the performers are percussionists or pigeons because our actions, costume, and function on stage moves between both roles.
“Through these multiple readings, multiple meanings are made manifest.”
Despite the theme of Pigeons, Eugene says he’s never tried shooting – but has researched and watched the sport at clubs.
When this experience is mimicked inside a concert venue, one might expect things to get loud. Speak Percussion has added a sensory warning into the event listing, which describes in detail the unpredictable nature of the sound, as well as visual projections and brightness.
“We should never underestimate the sensitivities and needs of our audience,” Eugene believes.
“Pigeons is a multi-sensory experience: it will be sonically rich, visually spectacular, and full of crafted theatrical dramaturgy.
“This is wonderful for providing audiences with ways of entering and understanding the work, but the intensity of this can be overwhelming or triggering for some people.”
Speak Percussion encourages you to bring along your headphones if you’re sensitive to sound. (Earplugs will be available from the venue, if you need them.)
“People should be free to laugh, block their ears, cry, look away, and squirm if this is what makes them feel comfortable.”
Melbourne Recital Centre, Speak Percussion and RISING present Pigeons – Speak Percussion in Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, 7.30pm June 14.
Image supplied. Featured image of Pigeons credit Jeff Busby; Eugene and Kaylie by Darren Gill.
