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Extravaganza .-e .
sound and danc-e
NTERPRETATIVE and
I
. creativ.e informality, musical
impulses varying and
enriching written scoring,
spoken and intoned words/syl-
lables and dancing engaged in
alternating and interacting with
responsive instrumentalists.
. These were the ingredients of
AustraLysis's first and generally
stimulating 1994 program, wl,lich
illustrated the series' overall title
of "Superimpositions" through
shifting combinations of the pro-
cesses of composing and impro-
vising, much of it in work by - or
at least stemmipg from - British
composers.
Barry Guy's Bird Gong Game
(1992) took an easyfrrst place for
double-jointed charm and voluble
high spirits in its interplay of
. soloist and ensemble and its sly
movement in and out of tradi-
tional chorale and glee club
harmony.
The soloist was the ultra-
resourceful recorder player Ian
Shanahan, pro.ducing elaborate
and fanciful twitterings and stut-
terings. Taking off the top joint of
a bass recorder, he teinporarily
convert~d the rest of the instru-
ment into a kind of didgeridoo,
with characteristic leaps from
fundamental tones to punctuating
upper notes. . quite different.
Graham Jones and Jepke
Goud~mit of Kinetic .Ener,y
joined instruments in a commls-
sioned piece, TimeDancesPeace
(1991), in which the dancers,
sitting on chairs, began with a
repertory of winks, head-turnings,
eye-roIlings and small movements
within and away from a seated
position. The brilliance of the
instrumental patterns, evolved by
AustraLysis players, encouraged
the dancers to. mo.ve thro.ugh an
extensive range o.f mo.vements, in
the co.urse o.f which it seemed to.
me that they lost - perhaps
deliberately - so.meo.f the pie,ce's
initial focus, only recovering that
focus fully at the end o.f the work.
In Jo.nathan Harvefs Round
the Star and Back (1974), the
players worked from quasi-circu-
lar scores in which the single-line
. staves radiated like spokes ()r
swirled in a vo.rtex on the page.
The music developed in varied
and ' staggered parallels (hetero-
phony) which became indistin~
guishable in some passages fro.m
polyphony, giving an impression
of a constantly adjusted balance
between discipline and impulse.
Kelvin# . .. was a piece attrib-
uted to Anthony Braxton, tho.ugh
Roger Dean's program no.te and
. spoken introduction made it rea-
sonably clear that Dean himself
.,'q~~., ,made a kind of layered
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MUSIC
AUSTRALYSIS
Director: Roger Dean
With Kinetic Energy (Graham Jones.
Jepke Goudsmit)
Music: Braxton. Harvey. Guy. _
Smith/Dean. with improvisations
Joseph Post Auditorium; February 19~
ROGER COVELL
the composer, in arriving at the
preconditions of the ' evening's
performance. Members of the
audience had to take on trust
Dean's assurance that the integra-
tion of the pieces, coupled with
the interesting imp.-ovisatorysteps .
arising from them" would be
.recognisallly Braxton-like. '
After the diverting and con..
cisely measured first half of the
program, I confess . to some
disappointment with the evening's
major work, Nuraghic Echoes, by
Dean and Hazel Smith.
Silent Nuragh~ a taped piece
heard . in the 1993 AustraLysis
series, was an impressive response
to the domed towers surviving
from an ancient civilisation in
Sardinia. That piece is inc6rp..
orated,to. some extent in Nurag1ric
Echoes, but the total effect of the
new and much longer work is
'
9
Hazel Smith s spoken and
intoned words ' now ptesent :. a
three-part journey from an imag-
inary ancient Nuraghic culture
through life in present-day Aus-
tralia and on to a global culture of
the future" in each case , ~ewed
through the responses and condi-
tion of women.
The future global culture is '
provided with a plausibly cadenced
invented language. The' passages in
which syllables and phrases, through
taped interaction, could form cir~
cuits and combinations seemed, of
outstanding interest; .and .the piece
dramatically isolated a Smith poem,
using stones as a metaphor o.f
possession and heritage~ which had
no instrumental aceompanimentat
a11.Malaria was a recurring refe..~
ence in the fIrst two. sections at least:
at o.ne point the word'seemed t~ be
the signal for the release o.f a torrent
o.f recorded sound, a truly staggering
piece of invention. '
Let me at least reveal my own
biases by admitting that I found
much less pleasure or interest in
the passages where Smith's words
became, no. doubt deliberately,
fact'u al, prosaic, discursiv.e o.r
argumentatiye. Dean's keyboard
pU,nctuation of these passages
suggested that he was evolviri'g a
tec,h liique of .all-p.,,!rpose. '. sel(-
effacement which . might be well
o.n the'waytowards'definmg'ala{e
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