SHIFTING LANDSCAPES
Kathryn Moorhead
Move Records MCD 672
Adelaide-based flautist Kathryn Moorhead plays nine pieces of contemporary music in this, her latest CD for Move Records. She ranges between recently-deceased American Alison Knowles’ Proposition #2: How to Make a Salad from 1962, and two works from 2016: another American and a flautist herself, Nicole Chamberlain‘s Lilliputian for piccolo and music box, and the Pimento study for solo piccolo by British writer Edmund Joliffe, best known for his TV scores.
In between come species of flute-writing covering a wide spectrum: difficult Brit Brian Ferneyhough‘s Cassandra’s Dream Song of 1971, L’ombra dell’angelo by University of Mantua academic Paolo Perezzani from 1985, our own (sort of) Andrew Ford‘s 1993 Female Nude for amplified alto flute, East-and-West fuser American Elizabeth Brown‘s Acadia for flute and shakuhachi (Anne Norman) written in 1999, Laveringar of 2001 by senior Swedish writer Daniel Bortz, and Brisbane-born Damian Barbeler‘s 2006 Confession 2 for piccolo and electronics.
Despite this half-century time-span and variety of instrumentation, Moorhead’s CD is undersized, coming in at 54 minutes. Longest in the list is the Perezzani, almost 12 minutes; the shortest is Pimento which settles itself at a trifle over 80 seconds. The flautist takes on the very challenging Italian work first. This sets up a very physical angel’s shadow ambience with a lengthy sequence of trills from all over the instrument’s compass, giving a brilliant aural image of restless flight partly through the abrupt ‘fill-in’ flights between trills
The attack modes also involve the listener in what sounds like a violent series of curvets, often initiated by a burst of air as the player moves into the territory of over-blowing, although it’s mainly resulting in semi-harmonics rather than Bartolozzi-style multiphonics. What comes over impresses for its ferocity which is contrasted with almost inaudible soft phrases, so that you get some sense of the ethereal as lightning-fast which, in the later stages of the piece, flattens out into long sustained notes with a strange vibrato in the upper register that is produced by using a key (God knows which one) to generate a throbbing, like a wing in fluent action.
Barbeler follows. His piece features a meandering motif from the piccolo which acts as the voice of the confessor while the electronic tapestry that underpins the live instrument’s tale serves as a sort of subterranean admission of deeper deeds. And that presents the listener with a dichotomy in the best botanical sense. The live instrument dilates its opening material – a scale pattern coming down a 4th, then up a 2nd – while the backdrop moves from sustained sound blocks, across to burbling action, then to a concluding combination of both – in line with the composer’s aim of having his confession operate on two levels: the overt and the secretive.
Mind you, I don’t believe that you can achieve anything of the kind in music without words. You might want to believe that the flute represents a sinner/offender and the electronics stand in for the surrounding ambience or morally debilitating environment, but the intellectual construction involved reaches well beyond the probable. Barbeler might tell us the impetus behind his work but he gives us no pins on which to hang his metaphysics, just as Strauss fails to convince us in his score that Nietzsche’s Zoroaster spoke any of the ideas that populate his invigorating tone poem.
In similar fashion, Andrew Ford’s Female Nude for amplified alto flute with vocalisations probably conveys a lot to the writer but any listener would be hard pressed to find anything suggesting the title in this rather monomaniacal obsession with the note A that the composer keeps returning to after a few flights of angular modernity. Moorhead is required to articulate individual consonants and vowels on that same A (or occasionally, its neighbour) in medias res, which makes for a deft display of legerdemain from the performer, generating these noises while playing a rhythmically complex instrumental part which every so often asks for a fusion of voice and flute with some heavily forced notes to leaven the mixture.
As for Elizabeth Brown’s Acadia, the performers present an unnerving mirror of each other in their performance which at various points blurs any distinction between the two sound sources. As we have come to know and love from exposure to Riley Lee’s craft, the Japanese flute can bend notes significantly; in fact this elision process makes Norman’s shakuhachi melodic contour highly distinctive. In this reading, Moorhead can do something like the same on her orthodox Western instrument. In fact, the two lines intermesh with unusual ease and deceptiveness.
The title refers to a national park on a Maine island and probably has some reminiscences for those who know the place. For the rest of us, I’d suggest, our minds inevitably turn to the Japanese archipelago, the less populated parts with suggestions of bird calls and remoteness. Brown’s language proposes a juxtaposition of the two instruments’ timbral possibilities but something more profound than this in that the flute and shakuhachi become more than complementary, but rather inextricably linked so that only the occasional high note from the flute or a breathy near-overblow from the shakuhachi allows for some momentary distinction to be made. A remarkable exhibition from players and composer.
Cassandra’s Dream Song, which remains one of the outstanding flute solos of (nearly) our time, enjoys a spirited reading from Moorhead. The score itself is fearsome, evidence of Ferneyhough’s nomination as an (the) outstanding member of the New Complexity school – which term has always struck me as odd because, although it might be complex, it’s not really new, is it? You can trace the modernization of the flute throughout 20th century decades and find pieces presenting just as many challenges as this one, not least the attention to detail that the composer sets out in his page of sound-manufacture description.
Leaving the order of line performance to the interpreter is not that much of a risk because you will wind up hearing an entity rather than a series of fragments. Further, as an American academic has pointed out, one of the standout performances of the work has not changed over time, the interpreter sticking to his original choices across the years. Not that this matters too much because the piece itself is a nightmare to play and experience; the prophetess is prefiguring the disasters that happen to her home city, its inhabitants, and her own fate when Agamemnon brings her back to Mycenae. Moorhead accounts for the breaths, splutters, note suffocations and piercing bursts of clarity with impressive authority, making a dramatic scenario that does justice to Aeschylus’ doomed concubine.
We move back to a child’s world for Nicole Chamberlain’s gesture towards the Part One of Swift’s novel. The music-box is set up beforehand by the performer punching out the requisite roll, then presumably playing along with it. As far as I can tell, the 6/8 piece in F minor doesn’t move outside that rhythm or key and the results would be quite suitable for a Play School sound track. But it sits uncomfortably in the shadow of the previous track on this CD with only a small downward bend on the last note to queer the surface orthodoxy.
Laveringar‘s subtitle is Tinted Drawings, and is the plural (in Swedish) of the painting term lavering, referring to a wash or thin coat. This is another substantial solo which initially oscillates between urgent upward rushes of demisemiquavers and clarion calls, then quiet moments of near-stasis with long semibreves to calm the action. Bortz also has an initial penchant for bending notes but soon leaves them alone until his final staves. In fact, he embarks on a narrative path that I find hard to follow.
This is in part due to the composer’s quite proper view of his laverings as differing from one painting to another; he isn’t confining his washes to one type or genre but is splashing his colours around with lavish abandon. Which means he can follow his own fancy, of course, as can every writer, but it means that the piece must be, by the act of lavering, inchoate. As the painter allows his/her wash to spread or constrict in alignment with whatever constitutes the standard of composition (if s/he has one), so Bortz’s musical lavering can lead anywhere. To her credit, Moorhead follows each sprouting of colour with enthusiasm, giving each furioso as much care as she does every corresponding piu lento.
The third piccolo piece on this CD, Joliffe’s brief bagatelle, gives a musical picture – as far as one can – of the sweet pepper named in its title. It is very active, a sort of rapid toccata, with variable time signatures and some quirky sound production changes about half-way through. But the piece is quite brief, just long enough to raise your estimation of Moorhead’s precision and agility.
To end, an instance of music in the everyday. Knowles instructs the performer/s to engage in the cutting, slicing, dicing, scraping and mixing that are the aural concomitants of making a salad. This performer makes the required sounds for about 2 1/2 minutes. As with most of these presentations, it’s more engaging to see than to hear, as I found way back when first coming across similar efforts from Cage and Stockhausen (in his later years) where the event had nothing to do with written music but concentrated on (usually minimal) instructions on making sounds and noises that became music, in the best Fluxus sense. Nothing too hard about that; the interaction between art and everyday has become a long-standing (well, several decades off a century) practice in many fields of art.
Yet I feel that this finale to Moorhead’s album will wind up being the least heard of the nine tracks she offers. A nice idea and an unexpectedly relevant celebration of Knowles’ passing less than three months ago, yet Proposition #2 doesn’t quite fill out the spaces after a preceding sequence of works that offer more meat on the bone. Nevertheless, this CD makes a welcome addition to the faltering number of recordings that deal with the flute as it is used in our time.
O'Connell the Music 