BY STEPHANIE ESLAKE
South Australian composer Dan Thorpe recorded much of his new release Diaphragm on a porch in Wentworth Falls. Playing on a piano that had seen better years, Dan captured his music on vintage cassette tapes with a single microphone. The result is something real – exposing natural flaws in the instrument to share a stunning story.
Dan, who has also been accepted to the 2016 Soundstream Emerging Composers Forum, takes time to chat about his latest work. You can read more about Dan in his shop here.
In your latest album, you perform on a tired, broken porch piano. How did you even find the piano, and what inspired you to use an instrument that offers a lower ‘quality’ of sound?
So, this is actually a great story. Jonathan, who runs 3BS Records, came a show of mine in Sydney and tweeted about how much he liked my piece. Several DMs later and voila: friendship and an offer to come play this messed-up piano. He rescued it from being dumped; it had been in a nursing home for a long time (where, allegedly, a clumsy cat had fallen in it more than a few times), and it has lived on his porch ever since. The piano has really become something else in its decay: there’s an entire register of broken strings that sounds like a drum kit, there are notes where the strings are all different pitches, there’s microtonality, and – perhaps most surprisingly – the middle register is vaguely in tune!
How does the music itself complement this choice of instrumentation?
On this tape are three pieces. The first two, by myself and Jonathan Pizzay, were both written exclusively for that piano. Jonathan’s piece especially is very sensitive to the piano and, I think, really tells its story (but also the story of his porch, maybe) in a really beautiful way. My piece is very much about that piano as a sounding body, how it resonates and creaks and groans and generally sounds like it’s falling apart.
Diaphragm, the third piece and by American composer Sam Erin Cirulis, is another story all together. Zyr piece is the most incredible and unsettling thing to experience on your body as a performer. As a kind of performance experience of how ze felt about zyr body – through dysphoria, transition, queerness – it really opened my eyes to what I want and perhaps need as a queer performer from my art. To be able to embody and understand another queer person’s experience of their body really moved me; I actually cried quite a lot the first few times I tried to play the piece. The piece is notated as a series of constantly shifting tempi and complex tuplets, which are to be played silently and with constantly crossing hands. At first I was afraid of looking like a fool, then I was afraid of making sound, but then I knew I would have to at some point out of sheer impossibility (ze notes ‘not to rehearse so much’ in zyr performance instructions), then I was afraid of making the ‘wrong’ sound. It was very confronting but ultimately something that was done in a spirit of love and solidarity, and although I’ll never understand trans experience as a cis person it has given me an entirely different way to empathise and feel solidarity with my trans mates.
*Note to reader: ‘zyr’ and ‘ze’ are non-binary gender pronouns.
You chose to capture the piece on a single microphone and direct to cassette. Why was it important to you to use these technologies rather than modern recording gear?
I feel like medium is really important and underrated in instrumental art music recording. In this instance, tape was Jonathan’s idea and something I think was a really insightful choice made in the context of the repertoire. The idea of high fidelity recording as standard I think comes from this weird feeling that everything we do in ye olde grande tradition as being above reproach technically, culturally, politically etc. and I think there’s a great deal of value in making little efforts at interrogating that. In the case of these pieces, they’re all kind of dirty on some level from a classical perspective; Jonathan’s is for a ruined piano, mine is about a certain famous French composer taking ritalin, and Sam’s is about being queer. As a queer person myself, I’m of course heavily invested in dragging as much filth as I can over the (ugly, ’70s, shag) white carpet that is classical music – and I think, especially in a contemporary context, it feels vital to forcefully make space for alternate voices with everything we have at our disposal. What better than releasing a new music tape on a label alongside some of Australia’s best experimental (but much more danceable) music?
That being said, I think there’s something stunning about what this approach rendered that makes the sterility of studios and concert halls can’t achieve. A flock of black galahs flew overhead in the middle of diaphragm, and honestly it’s one of the most intimidating and gorgeously unexpected things I’ve ever heard. It’s like the applause at the end of John Cage’s Williams Mix to me, it starts so distant and familiar but ends up feeling overwhelming. You can hear Jonathan’s dog, Salome, scraping her cone of shame (poor thing) through my track. The hiss and crackle of the tape, and on the physical copies little traces of what was underneath poking through, is absolutely gorgeous and makes total sense in the context of pieces that are meant to be very quiet or silent and dealing with seemingly inherent notions of quality.
What do you like about this rawness in music?
In the case of this tape, I think if you’re looking for an example of rawness then the best is in the rawness of Sam’s wounds, and how they fit uncomfortably on my body. It’s incredibly vulnerable and real in a way that sits outside of these quality/authenticity/fidelity ideas, and that feels very important to me. So maybe I’m less interested in rawness as a stand-in for some sort of authenticity narrative and more interested in art that is raw emotionally, that tells me something about being alive in 2016. And the rest of the time I’m content with sounding out my body through a piano.
Soundstream this year. Congratulations! What work of yours are you featuring in this?
My work for the Soundstream ECF is called Front Pockets, Back Pockets, Jacket Pockets. It features five poems by fabulous Sydney-based poet Stacey Teague, and is scored for soprano, cello, clarinet/bass clarinet, and toy piano. Stacey’s work fascinates me, we met at a reading of hers at bar in Sydney. She walked up to the mic, and, in the section where she was to present a biography started quietly reading a poem: ‘Shout out to Drake… Shout out to crying in bed… Shout out to the Maori language… Shout out to birds…’. Her book, Takahē exists in a world that seems real in the detail, but like Stacey in that bar there’s something about how everything fits together that makes it feel anything but real. There’s a friction between realities being presented, like the poem is pieced together from multiple accounts from a distance, yet somehow feeling startlingly close. Front Pockets, Back Pockets, Jacket Pockets is the same, it drifts and, sometimes, jolts between musical realities. To me, these four poems are about reconciling our internal worlds with terrifying vastness of nature and human experience. They’re about licking the wounds caused by our own solipsism, but also recognising the complexity and necessity of acknowledging that we experience life as individuals. It is my absolute honour to be able to set these texts to music, and to be able to share them with you all (including all of y’all not in South Australia for Soundstream, it’s being recorded by our good pals at the ABC).
How are you looking forward to the mentoring?
I actually can’t wait. Beyond my well documented admiration for Cat Hope’s music, I’m really looking forward to getting to meet Gao Ping, Alison Isadora, and Simon Emmerson. I also must add, if you’re not aware of her, you ought to be aware of Soundstream’s artistic director Gabriella Smart. I don’t think I’ve met anyone who quite so passionately advocates for young Australian composers in the same way that ECF does. Make sure you apply next time around, young composers.
What do you gain from working with and observing other Australian composers in the program?
I was in Sao Paulo when I got notification that I was a finalist, and I immediately added people on Facebook, made a group chat, and checked everyone’s work out. It’s hard to remember sometimes that it’s possible that there are people in this small scene that you might not have heard of someone, or their music, and let me tell you I am in good company in this forum. Alex Turley‘s orchestral work is stunningly beautiful; the way he unfolds these sound worlds from tiny little textural gestures is really astonishingly good work. Mitch Mollison’s work with Flatline is equally fantastic in a totally different way. Mark Woolf‘s music sounds like it was put together in inches, with this level of detail and care that I really admire (I’m much more slap-dash, naturally). Finally, I’m joined by recent Adelaide-convert Leah Blankendaal, whose work I’ve already had the pleasure of presenting (it’s phenomenal, if you were wondering), as well as getting a dry run on introducing the rest of the composers to my beautiful city.
In terms of working with this group, I think what will be most eye opening is that we are all so different – as people, and in our work. I think we’re all going to learn a lot about how to work with the ensemble through each other’s approaches, as well as (of course) new insights into our own work. I can’t wait!
Diaphragm is available through 3BS records. Check it out online. Soundstream takes place in Adelaide from November 28-30.
Want to listen to some more of Dan’s music?
homecoming (three years later). Dan Thorpe. Full album. [purchase_link id=”5317″ style=”button” color=”red” text=”Add to Cart”]
