Author Archives: flutietoot

SoundSCAPE Concert 3: Sudbury Guitar Trio

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9pm, Sunday July 7th, Church of San Materno, Maccagno, Italy

Though almost flawless on both a technical and ensemble level, this concert of works for guitar trio failed for the most part to excite me. I’m not sure whether it’s because of the available contemporary repertoire for this ensemble, or rather because of the group’s personal musical preferences, but all the works in the first half sounded rather similar! At no clear point was there any texture other than three guitars playing together, which created a wash of colour where I was keen for a little more definition. Very few of the instrument’s extended techniques were properly explored, and though the musical language was undoubtedly contemporary, there seemed to be nothing about any one work or movement that made it stand out from the others.

Thank goodness, then, for the three SoundSCAPE commissions which concluded the concert! Each of the three composers had contemplated the capabilities of the ensemble, coming to a range of conclusions as to how to make it sparkle. It was here, I felt, that the ensemble was used to its greatest effect, with challenging use of extended techniques in Mutations by Devon Yasamune Toyotomi. However, the stand-out work of the concert was lace/leaf by Lydia Brindamour, using delicate, spacious gestures to great effect. After the deluge of notes and textural wash present in so many of the other works, this care for time and the minute came as a welcome, meditative repose.

SoundSCAPE Concert 2: Resound Duo

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New music, soprano and percussion seem made to go together, and the Resound Duo of Jennifer and Tyson Voigt certainly didn’t disappoint. Then again, they are married!

The relatively short program featured two duos: selections from Alan Smith’s Songs of Wandering and Matthew Shaver’s Songs of Liberation, as well as a performance of the Berio Sequenza III (soprano) and Le Corps a Corps (percussion) by Georges Aperghis. It was a stunning selection, opened with Jennifer Voigt’s captivating rendition of the Sequenza. Bubbling and murmuring, Jennifer’s mark was made by her expressive eyes and thorough commitment to the musical line.

Le Corps a Corps, placed third on the program, was at once intriguing and utterly captivating. The piece calls for a combination of zarb (a small hand-held African drum) and voice to produce highly syntactical percussive lines that finally break into speech (in French) at the work’s climax. As with both the duo works, it was performed from memory, and Tyson Voigt’s engagement with the music and his audience was absolute.

The wonderful thing about this duo was their sense of dramatic persona. Complete musical understanding as much as their performance from memory let nothing get in the way of their communication of ideas to the audience. Both the Smith and the Shaver were executed with complete focus and admirable musical intent. Without the constraints of a score, Jennifer was free to walk around the stage, using this to great dramatic advantage in the narrative arc of Songs of Liberation in particular. Thought the concert was long enough to showcase the duo’s diverse colour palette and incredible energy, I could easily have listened to more!

SoundSCAPE Concert 1: A Liturgy of Hours

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9pm, Friday July 5th, Church of San Materno, Maccagno, Italy

An intriguing start to the SoundSCAPE festival concert series, flautist Lisa Cella presented a single, hour-long solo work, A Liturgy of Hours by American composer Stuart Saunders Smith. It was both curious to hear this work and dubious that it could hold my attention for an entire hour, and found myself surprised. Not only was my attention firmly held, the piece is stunning both on form and content, reducing the hour of performance into what felt like twenty minutes at the most.

Though the transparent opening is not the most promising moment, the piece unfolds into a meditative arc, juxtaposing occasional flurries with generally spacious writing. Towards the half-hour mark, the flautist begins also to sing, an effect that carried beautifully in the resonant church space. Cella’s mastery of this was absolute, allowing the audience to relax into the wash of sound created.

The work concludes with a short recitation:

My life, a mere breath
The first, is breath.
The last is breath.
In between we continue, breath in our moments, in this our moment
While darkness is my companion, I woke the earth of the heart.

This final utterance asked more questions than it answered, forcing us to examine the interplay of simplicity and complexity in the work, as well as our own understanding of exactly what it was all supposed to mean. A stunning piece, and a genuinely sparkling performance!

Tomorrow in Australia

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My most challenging set piece for the festival was Tomorrow in Australia, a solo flute piece by American composer Paul Richards, to be played in a concert of his music on the first Friday. I was able to work with both the flute teacher Lisa Cella and Paul Richards himself on the piece, and really enjoyed both the learning process and music itself.

Being an Australian, I was really surprised by the title of the piece. After a little Internet searching, I turned up a program note and was able to form some ideas of how to approach it in terms of the post-apocalyptical inspiration. It turned out that Nat (the festival director) and Lisa has been looking through Paul’s catalogue to work out the concert program and decided that it would be funny to give me the piece purely based on the title. Program aside, though, I came to realise that everything I needed to know about the piece and its interpretation was written in the music – as it always should be!

I had been practicing Tomorrow in Australia for about two weeks before arriving at SoundSCAPE, and felt that it was in pretty good shape considering that. I had worked my way around the slides, tongue rams and tongue pizzicato, and felt that I was doing all the various extended techniques quite well.

Lisa, however, opened my eyes to the fact that I was being rather too polite with everything. For a start, I needed to make slides more pronounced and be confident to slide with my embouchure even if I couldn’t do it with fingerings. I had been erring on the side of caution and dropping out any effects that didn’t seem convincing, where as what I actually needed to do was work on the unique sounds that extended techniques create. The same was true for breathy tone – the reason I didn’t like it much as an effect was that it sounded too close to my normal tone with too much pitch. I needed to (and still need to) work on creating something that is less beautiful and more airy. This technique was particularly important at the piece’s climax, and made for a much more dramatic gesture when it was clear that I was giving everything.

My tongue pizzicato, which I had been quite happy with before SoundSCAPE, was also up for review. The sound I was producing was more of a clipped airy sound than true pizzicato, and we worked on using the tongue between the teeth to create the necessary pop rather than putting air through the instrument as I had been. Tongue rams, while not quite such a disaster, were improve by making sure that the seal of the lips and the flute was tighter. Finally, we talked about exploring the realms of vibrato a little more. The slower sections of the piece called for a varied, highly pronounced vibrato that I had thus far been trying to achieve with a little too much delicacy. I need to be confident enough to take a step away from the ‘bel canto’ style of flute playing and accept that sometimes vibrato can take over the sound entirely rather than being within it.

Considering how long I had had the piece for, I was really happy with the way I played it at the concert on the first Friday. I had learned a lot about creating the intensity the music demanded, and felt that I gave a convincing performance even if a few notes were a little different from those on the page. Paul Richards also seemed pleased. However, I feel that I can still go a lot further with the piece in terms of both attention to detail and dramatic intensity. I will certainly play it back in Australia (despite this seeming to contradict the title) and would very much like to fit it into my Masters recital later this year. The thing that strikes me most about this piece is its rhythmic intensity – there is so much energy and drama!

Improvisation – Part 2

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Finally I return to writing a little about my experiences over the last two weeks. SoundSCAPE was busy and life is short – I decided it was better to enjoy my time in Maccagno (and the occasional few hours of sleep) rather than forcing myself to write every day. E alora, I find myself at the end of it! All went far too fast, but I am still keen to reflect on what I’ve learned…

Improvisation continued to be one of my favourite classes, and I now feel much more confident with ideas of structure, form and timbre in free improv. For the rest of the first week we continued to experiment with some set ways of controlling the piece. As ABA form is quite pleasing, we worked on small group pieces where Tom walked back and forth along the front of the auditorium to indicate transitions from A to B and back. It took us a while to be confident in arriving at a B section that was radically different from the A section, either in terms of texture or motivic material. Not playing all the time is one way of achieving this, and knowing when to sit out is important. For me, wedded to the flute as my mode of expression, it was good to try and get away from the instrument. The range of sounds on stage is so much more interesting if we also make use of vocalisation and any percussive ideas that spring to mind.

In the second week, the aim was to achieve interesting, unified improvisational without clear direction from a conductor or external force. A lot of this comes from listening to others, borrowing ideas and knowing when to lead or follow. I often found that this was a groove that it took a while to get into; the first improv I did in each class would be pretty average on both an individual and sometimes a group level. Once we had done a few, the process began to feel more natural and the pieces were both more unified structurally and more daring.

Our one piece of ‘homework’ for the week involved creating the structure for an improvised duet. I was with Jessie, and with two flutes we needed a plan that would create structure and interest through something other than the fundamental difference of our instrumental timbres. We decided to control structure by our physical placement on the stage: we would start on opposite sides and come together, then return. When far apart, we would toss ideas back and forth, sharing motivic material and elaborating on what the other had played, but waiting for them to finish before we began. As we moved closer together we would aim for increasing density in our texture, still sharing material but interrupting when we felt like it and being more direct with our musical statements. I really enjoyed experimenting with this idea; the duet form made for intense interaction and Jessie is great fun to improvise with. Though we weren’t over the moon about how the performance went in class, a commitment to really ‘go for it’ in the concert on Thursday made for a fun, engaging piece.

Following a game of Cobra, duets and some small ensemble free improvisations, the concert concluded with a piece called Blurred that Tom had brought along. This was once again improvisation with constraints – the piano played a cyclic chord progression from a score and we (in surround sound) played notes that we heard in the chords. We could start playing notes once we heard them, but didn’t have to drop out the moment they stopped, creating a blurring of each chord into the next. In the classes we were mostly playing with long notes, but for the concert changed to more rhythmic statements on a given pitch. While this wasn’t my favourite piece, it was great for ear training and the audience seemed to enjoy the effect!

Now my dilemma is how to continue working on improvisation, as I do think it is a wonderful skill and one that we don’t explore nearly enough as students of western classical music. Playing alone is one thing, and I will try to incorporate it into my practice. But I also need to recruit some friends to practice and explore with, and I think it’s something that needs to happen with relative frequency. Food for thought, and for a musically open mind!