The Earin Festival in Adelaide, which made its debut this year, sought to showcase new music and related visual art. The festival’s final concert Whaam! at ABC Studios was a high-quality smorgasbord of music and art informed by pop culture.
The ABC studios were an apt location, the outdated décor already paying homage to mid-20th century design. Added to this were a number of clever touches. Each seat had a yoyo on it and retro furnishings were sprinkled throughout the foyer and auditorium.
Most striking was the fabulous paneled work behind the performers. This piece by visual artist Ken Baker was a captivating mix of comic strip pictures and depictions of the Last Supper, complete with voice bubbles.
Not to be outdone by their surroundings, the performers were all very good, as was the musical selection.
The night opened with Martin Bresnick’s beautiful and moving composition, My Twentieth Century. This bright and brittle work was set perfectly to a Tom Andrews poem of the same name. The speaker recalls things they did in the 20th century, speaking in the same breath about the joyful, the banal and the horrific.
Next was Time Travel Makes You Hungry by festival co-Artistic Director David Kotlowy. With a fine balance of syncopation and repetition, this short piece was a strong depiction of time travel as ‘helpless headlong motion’.
Event Producer Kat McGuffie’s work, the down low, was an exploration of that phrase, and how such phrases can change their meaning over time. The composition was infused with a sort of limping walking bass and the lower range wind instruments created a cocooned, hidden feeling. Some notes were played across many parts, making a reverberating, uneven sound like bass speakers turned up too loud. Musical phrases were passed from player to player and changed like Chinese Whispers, and the whole thing ended with an incomplete feeling, as if this process was still going on even though the music had stopped.
Following this was David Lang’s Cheating, Lying, Stealing, in which the composer focuses on what goes wrong in the creative process. It was full of phrases that never quite worked themselves out and hesitant pauses. Overall it sounded like a composition made up of ideas that would normally have been discarded but it was nonetheless interesting and enjoyable.
During interval, the musicians played John Cage’s atmospheric Seven from his Number Pieces while the audience explored the art décor and ping pong up close.
The second half began with acdc, a work in which composer Michael Gordon contemplates electricity. In thinking about alternating currents, he has written themes and melodies that shift and flow, not so much modulating as changing instantaneously.
David Lang’s Sweet Air represented a total change of mood from the bustling works featured in the rest of the program. This piece, easily the most beautiful of the night, is based on the experience of Lang’s son, who was given laughing gas when frightened at the dentist. The floating, soothing sounds were wonderfully reminiscent of the sensation of artificial calm, while the music had just enough angularity and unease to remind the listener that there was something to be frightened about in the first place, even if that something can’t quite be recalled just now.
The finale was Gough, a work by the festival’s other co-Artistic Director, David Harris. The program notes for this piece cited a number of 1970s influences, including works from the worlds of television, music and arcade games. Not all of these influences were apparent upon listening but this was still an interesting, complicated and intriguing piece of music.
There were a lot of clever touches to the concert. The stage changes were accompanied variously by the Benny Hill Show theme, a baseball cakewalk, pop songs, and CWA-style announcements about the raffle – first prize being a meat platter. At appropriate moments, somebody held a large sign up at the front calling for ‘Applause’, as at a television recording. This humour, combined with the energetic accessible musical selections, made the audience feel comfortable and engaged. There was none of the condescension and snobbery which is too often associated with new music.
Unfortunately, one of the other stereotypes of the genre was lived up to, in that the concert was too long. It is hard to see exactly where cuts could have been made – there were no individual moments that dragged or bored – but clocking in at 2 hours 40 minutes the evening felt a bit too much like a marathon.
Nonetheless, Whaam! was a night of excellent new music which was approachable and enjoyable without trading off on quality.
Rating: 3 ½ stars out of 5
Earin Festival presents
Whaam!
Conductor: Robert Hower
Flutes: Melanie Walters
Clarinets: Peter Handsworth
Violin: Elizabeth Layton
Viola: Imants Larsen
Cello: Ewen Bramble
Electric Guitar: Dylan Woolcock
Percussion: Amanda Grigg
Piano: Michael Kieran Harvey
ABC Studio, Adelaide
11 December
