BY MARK BOSCH
Spectral Tech
Ensemble Offspring premiering works by Alex Pozniak, Holly Harrison, and Tristan Coelho
Sydney Conservatorium of Music, 29 September
When it comes to championing new music, Ensemble Offspring walks the walk.
Since 2017, the collective has played an essential part in the AMPlify Indigenous Composer Initiative, this year’s edition of which culminates 30 November.
Since 2014, its emerging artists’ development program Hatched Academy has seen young composers and performers taken under the ensemble’s wing, so to speak, providing them with all-too-precious opportunities for growth. (Psst — applications for Hatched Academy 2019 close 12 October, so get cracking if you’re an emerging artist; if you’re an emerging female composer, you can also consider applying to the ensemble’s Noisy Women Commission for 2019, which shares the same deadline.)
Ensemble Offspring’s 2017 program was almost entirely made up of works by female composers, and included 27(!) world premieres.
I could continue listing milestones, but you get the idea. Ensemble Offspring walks the walk.
In a music industry that can often feel impenetrable — most of all for marginalised voices — its mission is not just honourable, but essential. In other words, it is not just doing the right thing, it is doing what’s necessary for the survival of new music in Australia.
Cue Spectral Tech, a cup-runneth-over with three new works by Australian composers Holly Harrison, Tristan Coelho, and Alex Pozniak. We spoke to all three composers last month and, predictably, Ensemble Offspring’s commitment to maintaining engaged working relationships with composers lay at the heart of all three’s remarks. Detailed, continuous workshopping, as Coelho puts it, lets the music “live and breathe”, and has resulted in three polished, intricate works.
But there was more than an ounce of individual brilliance in there, too. All backed by a different, static light display, and impeccably presented by the ensemble, the compositional nuances in each work were really allowed to shine.
Harrison’s Bend/Boogie/Break never compromised on character, with its three titular ideas neatly integrated into a simmering whole of, well, bends, boogies and breaks, without ever quite hitting a boil. Coelho’s A line is a dot that went for a walk didn’t so much boil as explode, with a ferocious latter section that challenged even Claire Edwardes, who flew solo on vibraphone and auxiliary percussion. The work’s opening section, however, was very restrained, and absorbing for all its tasty tone colours, from the purity of the singing bowls to the profane buzz wrought from a mallet with a small chain tied on near the head.
After Tristan Murail’s still more colourful yet outwardly formless Treize couleurs du soleil couchant (1978), it was a relief to have something to bounce around a bit to. Pozniak’s En Masse was the only conspicuously multi-movement work on the program, and, I suppose, its centrepiece; not just for its near-half-hour length, but the overtures given by Edwardes and conductor Roland Peelman, which elevated expectations greatly.
Suffice to say, those expectations were met.
En Masse was an enlivening foray into Ensemble Offspring’s full capabilities, one at times lyrical, at times mechanical, often somehow both. The piece’s emphasis on synchronicity meant that moments of fracture were particularly effective, putting the interplays of the Offspring ecosystem into satisfying relief. The players were completely concentrated on those interplays from start to finish. From Jason Noble’s expressive interjections on the clarinet to Edwardes’ exacting work on percussion, En Masse was a taut, energising experience.
I particularly appreciated that Pozniak was willing to indulge in the recognisable, namely the “soundworld [of] rock/metal music”. The creation of work untranslatable into genre confines is essential to maintaining the spirit of innovation intrinsic to new music – the same spirit that Ensemble Offspring embraces and does so very much with.
Image supplied. Credit: Matt McGuigan.
