BY STEPHANIE ESLAKE
This month, the Melbourne Recital Centre is set to house a concert that may well be the biggest of 2018.
It boasts the inclusion of a Liza Lim composition (which, by the way, already wins us over). It will feature Speak Percussion. It is inspired by poetry. It will involve a crowd of about 20 musicians performing with cowbells and eating chocolate.
This is Atlas of the Sky. And it will be out of this world.
(Yes, we totally went there.)
You might’ve caught our chat with Katherine Walsh, an untrained performer who will take to the MRC stage as part of ‘The Crowd’ in this event. Now, we venture across to the other side of the show and introduce Jessica Aszodi – the featured soprano of the night.
Jessica is a globally renowned performer, and we jump at the chance to chat with her before she performs in one of Australia’s most prestigious venues.
Jess, thanks for the chat. Tell us everything about Atlas of the Sky.
Everything?! That’s tricky…I was brought into the project after a discussion with Speak’s artistic director Eugene Ughetti.
We’ve worked together in lots of little ways over the years, and thought it was time we found a more substantial project to do together. We share an interest in the body as a site for producing meaning in music, and went looking for an opportunity for exploring embodied and theatrical elements. After a long series of machinations on the part of Speak, this project came into being with Liza Lim (composer) and eventually Jo Lloyd (choreographer).
Liza has created something really special with this piece. It’s a multilayered, semi-staged ensemble work that takes poetry from Eliot Weinberger and Bei Dao, draws inspiration from a number of indigenous cultures around the world, and utilises the skills of all the bodies on stage without much in the way of ‘conventional’ musical instruments.
The central image is that of the stars, their mapping, and the way the revolving world alters its perspective around these crowds of tiny lights in the sky. That image of anonymous shining dots is then overlayed with images of human crowds of many kinds – crowds in religious ritual, protesters, mourners, armies, orchestras.
The work is a new one that uses an enormous range of timbres and colours – from different instruments to wide-ranging vocal tones and skill levels. How do you feel that your own voice and character fit in with this performance?
Everyone in this piece uses their voice, to varying degrees; from quite naturalistic speech to, in my case, challenging virtuosic vocal material. Liza has made use of the full range of my capacities as a singer. The vocal tone changes a lot, often very quickly, taking in a universe of style references from bel canto, to multiphonics, to imitations of katajjaq [Inuit throat] singing, to choral straight tone, to explosive nasal grinding, to Balkan folk-song and sibilant noise. And there are notes and rhythms, too.
It takes a lot of muscle memory practice. There are also sections which are incredibly restrained, and where the vocal line is more reminiscent of chant or trance.
How have you found the experience of working with Speak Percussion on this work, so far?
Speak percussion has a dynamic something like a family. They’ve been working very closely together for a long time. It’s a loving family, and I think I’m at the point now where I’ve figured out ‘who likes to sit where’ at the dinner table!
They’re super-energised sincere artists who are willing to take the time and effort to get things just right – which is an approach I just love.
You’ll be singing on stage with 20 trained and untrained musicians. Tell us about the ‘Crowd’ of performers, and what it means for you to sing with people who are at a different stage in their musical lives.
‘The Crowd’ is a group of individuals who perform a series of task-based activities, and spoken word events. They each bring their unique set of life skills and experiences to the rehearsal room, but ultimately have to work together to create a series of coherent, group actions. There isn’t much of an issue to be found in this piece around ‘singing’ with people who are not trained singers; there’s actually only a very brief moment in the piece where we sing together.
We’ve been doing lots of rehearsing together. In truth, up until this point, the soloists haven’t had a whole lot of time rehearsing without ‘The Crowd’. One of the most interesting parts of the work has been experimenting with ‘The Crowd’ on the best ways to realise the instructions in the score. With this kind of exploratory work, trained musicians are used to working alone or in small groups to problem-solve, experiment, and devise solutions. In a big group, with such a diverse range of skills, that can be quite a challenge but super interesting.
What do you think trained performers can learn from untrained performers?
They’ve been very patient, trusting, inquisitive and generous. We’re all super grateful to them for how giving, curious and open they’ve all been. That kind of feeling in the room can be an inspiring breath of fresh air for a group of pros.
Why do you feel there is such a strong vocal component in this piece? How does the voice represent Lim’s message?
Everyone has a voice, and that universality speaks directly to the themes of Atlas…
In a sense, every person and every object in the piece has a kind of spirit voice; a mouth, a text. Often, the percussion parts have specific lines of poetry, spoken aloud or in the head, that correspond to the inner monologue of the instruments. Woodblocks are transformed by the actions of their players into speaking mouths, cowbells are fed rice, ‘The Crowd’ speaks and sings and eats chocolates.
To me, voice and percussion are the two closest instruments to one another; neither having a direct relationship to one specific instrument. For both, the process of sound production is practised as a form of physical choreography driven more by the sounds we want to make […] The voice’s physicality is mostly unseen by the audience; though the choreographic element of percussion is more obvious.
We have so many cultures in this event – Australia, Greece, China, and Egypt. What does this work mean to you? How do you resonate with it?
Liza has an indefatigable curiosity. You can see throughout her work a deep engagement with influences from cultures, philosophies, people and places she encounters. I think this is one of the reasons her music as able to continue to stay fresh and growing – her mind is open to the ideas and experiences of her present moment – the residues of those moments are then transformed into markings on the page. Those notations serve as a prompt for performers to articulate her musical gestures as well as this swarm of reference-points, filtered through their own memory, habits, body and a generous amount of discussion with the composer.
In this way, the piece develops a language and culture of its own – drawing from experiences of specific places, but more essentially it comes to form a representation of the culture and bodies of the composer and performers as they go about realising the piece.
What message do you hope audiences will take away from this?
It’s hard to say exactly what the audience will take away – it’s the kind of piece where everyone is going to have their own reaction. There are so many interacting ideas and forces competing for attention – a life-like cacophony of influences spinning in constellation. Hopefully, everyone who sees it will find moments of identification and mystery that leave them with questions about our relationships with crowds, nature and objects.
And finally, why is new Australian music important for our culture?
Temporal art forms (like music, dance, theatre) are one of the few spaces left today where crowds of people come together under one roof for uninterrupted stimulation and contemplation.
We need to continue to produce music which is alive and reflective of our contemporary experience, contemporary practices, and contemporary cultural critique.
This kind of activity is not so much about entertainment or the reporting of events – though it can be that, too – its about a kind of creative querying of time and idea, activated through listening. For me, this way of being and listening is not just important for our culture, it’s essential for survival.
The Melbourne Recital Centre is waiting for you. See Atlas of the Sky at 7.30pm June 18 in Elisabeth Murdoch Hall.
The event is one hour long – so make sure you rock up for this exclusive performance.
We partnered with the Melbourne Recital Centre to bring you this story – have you read our interview with fellow Atlas performer Katherine Walsh, yet?
Images supplied. MRC credit John Gollings.
