BY ANNI KALCO
Structures (Melbourne, ’66)
Ensemble Density
Melbourne Recital Centre Salon, 31 July
I don’t know if I felt transported back in time to 1966 Melbourne, or whether I witnessed a kind of ‘picking up where we left off’. The 1960s was an incredibly fruitful time for experimental music in Melbourne, and Structures (Melbourne, ’66) paid tribute to some of that decade’s greatest male artistic improvising composers and their processes of performance. Ensemble Density offered a unique glimpse into what these sessions may have been like.
The question posed ahead of this performance was: How blurred are the lines between performer, composer, observer and participant? – a question just as relevant today as it was 60 years ago. Today, recorded music is free, and interaction with online processes of composition, performance, and listening is more commonplace. Structures presented the possibilities of live audience participation in creating new works. It was exciting.
To call Structures a concert doesn’t feel right. It was more like a workshop or session inviting a pleasant informality. Director/trombonist Charles MacInnes gave explanations of each work with warmth and passion, including instructions for the first piece, Music for Monuments by Keith Humble. Combining pre-recorded soundscapes of children’s choirs with balloons and prepared piano, MacInnes conducted the audience as it became part of the ensemble; contributing shuffling feet, tongue clicking, and mobile phone sounds. There were moments when the combination really worked – sonic surprises that sounded composed. There were also moments of noise and chaos and jarring patterns.
One 1960s improvisation ensemble, McKimm-Rooney-Clayton, was paid tribute in Ensemble Density’s performances of three trios involving its own entire ensemble. MacInnes’ description of these works included the frustration many of Melbourne’s 1960s improvising musicians had about being too crazy for the contemporary classical and jazz worlds. While visual artists of this time understood the music and its many layers, music-making was more about the process as opposed to the end product.
The first trio had elements of free jazz with warm, mellow saxophone tones at times interrupted by awesome squawks. Muted trombone was eerie beneath pre-recorded tracks of jazz and chatter; and the music posed playful visual pictures produced by the musicians who were reading notated graphic scores. The second trio seamlessly emerged, darker in contrast with distorted bass and exquisitely angular trumpet over the top of flurries of busy streams of piano. The final trio descended like a blanket of starry nights with bubbling cello pizzicato, and looped folk violin amid electronically effected puffs of trombone.
MacInnes’ final work invited audience participation in its very composition and arrangement. Gazebosplayed is a piece determined by a set of instructions including pitches, techniques, and directions that are allocated by the audience. It was interesting to hear how a series of pitches assigned to certain instruments sounded, and then to imagine how different it would sound if these pitches were assigned differently.
As an audience member, I listen differently when I become a part of the piece. Ensemble Density offered an insight into the world of the Melbourne conceptual art and music scene of 1966, and an introduction to what happens when the lines between performer and observer are blurred. I left inspired, wondering what else might be possible.
Image supplied.
