Tura New Music’s biennial Totally Huge Festival of New Music is a major event in Perth. 2017 was notable for two immersive works which offered what one might call a “phenomenal” experience — DCC: Glitch and A Wave and Waves — which provided a combination of felt sound, perception of duration and the sonic dramatization of space. Featured artist Anne LeBaron was also superb, mixing an arguably more conventional concert model with outrageous fun in open-ended, semi-improvised provocations closer to her early work with avant-garde rabble-rousers Raudelunas.
A festival high point was the retrospective of American composer Anne LeBaron’s compositions for harp and other instruments. After the composer performed the solo prepared harp piece Doggone Catact, Perth harpist Catherine Ashley joined LeBaron for the duet Infrathin I, which explored more extended playing techniques, including agitating rubber balls across the sounding box and frame. Doggone especially offered a series of discontinuous miniatures, with slack sounding twangs as well as sharp attacks.
LeBaron, who has been producing works since the 1970s with both playful and demanding specifications, performs in a remarkably light and relaxed manner. Her notes seem to gently bend into the ear. The relatively young Ashley on the other hand performed with an intensity and hard grasp on the mechanics of the compositions which contrasted well with LeBaron.
I Am An American… My Government Won’t Reward You was a well-balanced but nevertheless angry denunciation of “blood chits” — printed offers in multiple languages of rewards for those in foreign countries who assist downed US airmen but which have been rarely honoured. Performed here on amplified solo harp accompanied by a recording of LeBaron’s premiere of the piece, it commences by evoking Jimi Hendrix’s famous shredding of the US national anthem, and then moves into spooky, scraped, echoed string sounds, together with a reading of the text of the chits, sounds of warfare and other material. Outside of this sense of fury and use of literal noises of destruction, I Am An American… is quite open and meditative, suggesting a metaphysical journey through modernity in its use of train whistles (shades of Steve Reich’s Different Trains), moving in an unhurried way towards a disappearing, bassy thrum at its end.
LeBaron also conducted re-workings of two other pieces, the structured improvisation Infrathin II (slightly marred by a tendency of the performers to rather urgently attempt to foreground their own signature sounds) and Concerto For Active Frogs. The latter was composed by LeBaron for Raudelunas — a Midwestern equivalent to Fluxus, Neo-dada and the Mothers of Invention. It employs a Folkways recording of frog calls as a sort of score. Here performed by a garbage-bag clad choir of singers, set against the extraordinary Perth experimental vocalist Sage Pbbbt as soloist, the piece was enormous fun, performatively engaging (Pbbbt’s grimacing producing a wide range of expressions from schizophrenic joy to grief) and quite acoustically complex. Highlights were the direct call-and-response sections between Sage and the choir, with the two groupings staring intently across at each other as croaks ping-ponged between them. A great piece of po-faced fun which also made for provocative listening.
Read More: https://www.realtime.org.au/totally-huges-sensory-dramatic-pleasures/
