BY STEPHANIE ESLAKE
Feeling “ecstatic” would be a pretty reasonable response to the idea of a three-day arts festival celebrating contemporary performance, right?
The Supersense Festival of the Ecstatic kicks off today in the Arts Centre Melbourne, and its audiences will be enveloped in “experimentation, beauty, extremity, transcendence and ritual”, according to curator Sophia Brous.
*Cue expressions of awe and enlightenment*
We chat with one of the festival’s featured artists, local composer-performer James Rushford. He’s performing on an organ you’ve never seen before (seriously — it was tailor made just for him). He’ll present to you an exclusive new take on Medieval keyboard works. Read on to learn about his unique method and approach.
James, tell us what ecstatic means to you.
I like to think of it in the universal sense as a ‘removal to elsewhere’. Music can be ecstatic, most simply, as a form of practical engagement with one’s environment.
Does it go without saying that you’re ecstatic to be taking part in Supersense 2019?
Of course I’m excited about the festival, and am very curious to see how the two day-long events, Minimal and Maximal, will play against each other. People really should go to both: the program is very very special.
So you’re reconfiguring some Medieval keyboard music, hey.
The idea for my show comes from the literary practice of ‘glossing’, or marginalia, specifically the Medieval tradition of annotating ancient legal texts.
I wanted to perform some very early examples of Western polyphonic keyboard music for this year’s festival, and as I started researching particular scores, I became attached to the idea of presenting simultaneous musical ‘commentary’ in the form of semi-improvised fragments.
The tradition of marginalia has, personally, become a rich field of creative research, opening up new ways of reading, hearing and recontextualising historical musics.
Your organ has been tailor-made — tell us a bit about the instrument.
I’ll be playing a portative organ, modelled on a Trecento-period instrument, with some modern adaptations, including re-tunable pipes, and wider pipe languids for greater timbral variation. The instrument was built by Stefan and Annette Keppler in southern Germany. It took a long time to build!
Why do you like to look outside tradition and create new sounds?
I actually feel like the concept of ‘new sounds’ is deeply informed by tradition in the case of my practice. For example, ‘Medieval Gloss’ has a very expressive approach to instrumental performance vis-à-vis Medieval music, certainly going beyond the scope of what might be called ‘historically informed’ technique. But my approach comes from an intention to heighten and augment the original music.
I don’t think of it as looking ‘outside’ of tradition, as much as opening up spaces of play within traditional forms.
Your upcoming performance as described by Supersense generates “harmony and meaning through a 21st-Century lens”. What does this mean for 21st-Century listeners?
This comes back to the concept of ‘glossing’. Just as annotations help harmonise conflicting information in a text through comparing various sources and historical perspectives, I hope that my show, as its own kind of commentary, will help illuminate something new about this historical music.
What would you say to get audiences ecstatic about coming to listen to you?
I guess it’s not every day you get to hear some of the earliest documented keyboard music in history, alongside some world premiere material. Also, there really aren’t many portative organ concerts in Australia. Also, this picture of St Cecilia playing one is pretty great:
See James Rushford perform at Supersense Festival of the Ecstatic on August 24. Visit the full festival program (August 23-25) on the Arts Centre Melbourne website.
Image supplied.
