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Review Details:
TEATIME RECITAL: ELECTROACOUSTIC MUSIC with PETE STOLLERY & PAUL RUDY
Alan Cooper
03 May 2007
Picture Gallery, Marischal College
Pete Stollery began his contribution to Thursday’s performance by taking the audience on a dizzying car ride at breakneck speed through the streets of Paris courtesy of the French cinéaste, Claude Lelouche. The caption at the start of the film, C’était un rendez-vous, informed us that no trick photography had been used. I am glad I was not in the car with M. Lelouche, the experience was at once exhilarating and terrifying. If the performance had stopped there, it would have been worth coming just to experience this amazing film, but Pete Stollery himself had gone to Paris and retraced the journey, albeit on foot and rather more slowly. Recordings of the street sounds made en route became the basis of his piece, scènes, rendez-vous, which was not music to accompany the film, but rather Pete’s own reaction in sound to what we had just seen. And the sound pictures were no less startling and entertaining than the film. There were pauses when the street noises were allowed to speak for themselves, then these sounds were altered and sculpted to open up an infinite world of sonic colour. Sometimes the sounds would seem to be rushing past us as we sat in our seats, then we felt ourselves lifted up and carried along at breakneck speed with them. Police sirens were transformed into a kind of gamelan or traffic sounds would become wind and water. Finally human voices in the street brought us back to earth and this dizzying trip was over.
Pete Stollery’s special guest for this performance was the American composer, Paul Rudy. If Pete’s piece was redolent of the sounds of the city, Paul’s were of the wide-open uninhabited wilderness and deserts of America. Love Song was a very personal piece. Its opening seemed to be from right inside the composer’s head. Later on, spoken words pointed us to the desert and to the strange fauna and flora that live there. Sounds as of shifting sands, tumbling rocks or the scurrying of strange insects or rodents seemed to be suggested. Finally rain and rushing waters allowed a release of the tensions that had been built up in the landscape and in the composer’s own private emotions - though it was only his own words spoken as an introduction to the piece which suggested that to me.
November Sycamore Leaf brought together sound and video in a stunning combination. The visual changes, which the composer had orchestrated within the picture of the leaf, were nicely matched by the development of the sounds. This was a truly beautiful piece.
The concert ended with Paul Rudy’s Degrees of Separation “Grandchild of Tree” inspired by the music of John Cage. Here Pete Stollery and Paul Rudy performed a duet on two cacti which had been “miked up”. The result was remarkably clear in its structure as Paul Rudy picked out the lead part on his cactus while Pete Stollery provided an accompaniment that was sometimes percussive, sometimes harmonic. Just by cupping his hands round his cactus he could make it sing out like an organ, and with that the piece was over. It was quite something. I wonder if it hurts to play a cactus?
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