Review Details
ACOUSMATIC MUSIC from ANDREW LEWIS & PETE STOLLERY
Alan Cooper
06 May 2010
Zeste
There was not a huge turnout for the Acousmatic Concert at
Zeste last night; but I did overhear one young audience member enthusing
ecstatically to a friend on her mobile.This had been the most exciting concert she had ever attended and she
was keen to discover more about this kind of music. If the two composers had
heard this too, their spirits would surely have soared.
The four pieces we
heard, two each from Andrew Lewis and Pete Stollery covered only a few of the
almost infinite number of creative ways in which acousmatics can be exploited.
The performance began with Vox Magna by Pete Stollery. The sound sources for
this piece were taken from a former steel plant in Rotherham
which is now a visitor centre. It included recordings made by Peter Key when
the plant was still in operation and Pete told me that some of the workers and
their wives living nearby love to hear the sounds that remind them of their
past lives. There are even special orange lights which glow as night falls to
give the impression that the furnaces are still in production.
Pete Stollery has packed so many sound sensations into this
piece. The first impression that hit me full in the face was of the vast space
that the plant must have enfolded. The sounds and the way they were manipulated
gave the impression at times that they were soaring off to near infinity. The
piece included human voices and the clink of bottles which were set against
more machine derived sounds suggesting both the contrast between man and
machine and the way in which the two could interact. In addition to the
movements of the sounds within the vast space created by the piece there was
also the sensation of mechanical movement within the sound sources themselves
that emerged clearly from time to time. We must not forget though that this was
more than just sound, it was music too and there was an artistic intent clearly
expressed in the performance. This emerged powerfully as the work progressed. The
various mechanical sounds developed a rhythm which turned them into a kind of
percussion battery. This is another of the constant features of Pete Stollery’s
work. Sounds culled in the raw to establish a sense of place or identity are
mutated into much more free and exotic creations of the musical imagination.
In Scherzo –for the Stars – the first of the pieces by
Andrew Lewis which we heard, these two elements were more continuously merged.
The sound sources for this piece were the voices and some of the musical toys
of the composer’s three little daughters recorded in 1992. By now the girls
must be in their twenties and the piece is both a celebration of the happiness
and innocence of childhood and a lament for its passing. The young students in
the audience will possibly not have understood this concept, but one day, they
will.
One of the toys was surely a kind of rotating drum with
wheels on the end of a stick which rings and jingles as the child pushes it
along. This was transformed into a massive carillon of bells while the child’s
voice crying “Daddy” was extended into a kind of choral extravaganza. This was
a most moving and emotionally powerful piece.
I have heard and enjoyed Pete Stollery’s signature piece
“scenes, rendez-vous” at least five times now but this was the first time
without the accompanying film of a car journey at high speed through the
streets of Paris
filmed by Claude Lelouche. I had enough clear memory of the film to appreciate
the meaning of the different scenes in Pete Stollery’s sound tribute but it was
interesting on this occasion to be able to fully concentrate on just the music
itself. The sense of motion and of speed was all there but interestingly it was
only near the end of the work that the sounds seized the listener and projected
him forward at high speed. The rest of the time the listener was static while
traffic in one form or another whizzed past him. The sense of place and of
atmosphere was very strongly expressed and that contrast of unprocessed reality
set against the free reign of the imagination was a centre of excitement in
this piece.
The final and most extensive work in the concert was Danses
acousmatiques by Andrew Lewis. This work in nine distinct parts was largely
abstract.Only Shoal(No. 3) where the sound sources were based
on water, the bird sounds of Flock (No. 5) or Swarm (No. 7) in which the sound
of bees was used had anything that could be said to have an existence in the
ordinary world. Some of the things represented like Nebulum (No. 8) is chiefly
famous as an element that never did exist though it has been adopted by the
counter culture and apparently you can buy Nebulum t-shirts or mugs.
The overall idea of these movements is the motions of sound
units through space seen as dance. The first movement defines space as being
infinite while in the other pieces the cosmic dance of planets and stars,
atomic particles, birds or insects and finally people are celebrated in a
glorious explosion of sound-imagination. Andrew Lewis takes us on a journey
that dwarfs the equivalent cinematic journey, the mind-bending finale of
Stanley Kubrick’s 2010 A Space Odyssey (at least it was mind-bending when it
first came out in 1968 – perhaps a bit passé now that we have reached the actual
year of 2010).
Just one final note, Andrew Lewis is absolutely right in
suggesting that bees dance. My late father was a researcher with the North of
Scotland College of Agriculture and spent years decoding bee dances. Apparently
the hives send out scouts who return and perform dances where they run forwards
and back and spin round and round. From these movements they tell the rest of
the hive where the pollen and nectar can be found and even how much of it there
is. I never thought I would find that information useful in listening to music,
but in the astonishing world of acousmatics who knows what you will come
across.
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