BY SAMUEL COTTELL
Last year, the Hourglass Ensemble made its debut in Sydney performing world premieres by Australian composers (including Andrew Kennedy’s Hourglass Beach) and a variety of Polish works. This year, Hourglass returns to expand the relationship between performers and audience in new and exciting ways. The group’s first concert for the year Ink Games explores the concept of games and the real-time creation of music, giving the players the ability to change and alter their music if they require. We caught up with artistic director Andrew Kennedy to chat about the upcoming concert, and what Hourglass Ensemble has been up to since its debut.
Ink Games will be your second concert in the Utzon Room, and it’s happening this month. Can you tell us a little bit about this concert and why it might be different from other recitals?
Ink Games is my latest composition, and it involves the interpretation of all kinds of printed symbols and other forms of ink. While there are other more traditional pieces to be heard, the movements of Ink Games are spread throughout the program and are theatrical and unbounded. The audience will be jolted out of the safety of the passive seating to try to figure out what the game is. These are games where there might not actually be a winner.
How is the process of writing music on the spot and playing games going to unfold?
Each of the different games comprises a movement, and each has a different amount of pre-planning, ranging from totally spontaneous, to somewhat organised, to completely premeditated (that is, regular notation). It’s going to cause discomfort for the performers; we’re not jazz musicians, we’re used to preparing a piece for months. Maybe a little bit of sight-reading is fun on occasion, and it will require a different strategy from me on how to write appealing music when I have five seconds and not much idea what it sounds like (especially composing while there is other music already playing). It’s a bit like theatre sports, toastmasters, or Pictionary.
How’d you come up with the idea for this concert?
I’ve been thinking for a long time about how old a lot of compositions are, and wondering whether the relevance of art music was diminished if the performers didn’t have access to the composer to ask questions, negotiate, illuminate the intentions. After all, the music is always interpreted differently, and the composer can exercise some rights in the boundaries of interpretation. Meanwhile, I was reading Andrew Ford’s new book Earth Dances and was inspired by a couple of points about performance practice. It was mentioned that since the advent of recordings, acting in theatre and film and television had become divergent, but music remained similar no matter how you consumed it.
Not only will I be writing music on the spot, the musicians will be allowed to change it, and alter each others’ parts, too! It should evolve to make a satisfying piece, and will demonstrate that really, all performers are also composers. This will produce an event that cannot be recorded or replicated.
Do you think this will challenge audiences’ perceptions of a concert? How do you think they might react?
I want the audience to be engaged in our music, and more so in games. They will wonder how the notes are coming to my mind, they will try to anticipate the moves of the other musicians, and they will take in the whole picture, the body language, the emotion, the connection between us. I hope they will realise how they are part of a three-way dialogue between composer, performer, and listener – and this, in fact, occurs in every concert they attend.
What other music will you be performing in Ink Games?
In curating a concert, I have to make a well-rounded experience for listeners of all kinds. I like to include beauty, sentiment, solemnity, fun and flash. Max Bruch wrote amazing Romantic music for viola and clarinet, which gives us proud, poignant art to centre the program. You’ll see the great friendship Michelle and I have in the connection and interplay of our parts. Szeligowski is a Polish composer with a somewhat ethereal and abstract quality – Ewa and Gregory will play his flute sonata and give an authentic Polish delivery. I’m taking up the challenge of providing fireworks with a somewhat unstable and outrageous Australian piece by Graeme Hair for solo clarinet. We’re also playing a very abstract modernist piece from Sydney-sider Alan Holley and a delicate and sweet piece from another local Kristofer Spike.
Hourglass Ensemble gave its premiere performance last year with a successful concert in the Utzon Room. What has been happening since then and what have you been working on?
We were very excited by the reaction to Hourglass Beach in October, and we were straight into the studio at Trackdown, then planning the expansion into a three-concert series for 2016. This year we have Ink Games, welcoming Michelle Urquhart on viola, and without singers. It’s a more adult, dark and sensual program. In July there’s an East Coast tour of Breath Sculptures planned, including the Utzon Room of course, with the Brisbane-based Barega Saxophone Quartet – that will be full of world premieres of Australian composers, and much more energetic and spunky. We’ll round up the year in the same vein as 2015, two world premiere song cycles, in both Sydney and Melbourne, and some amazing works for flute, clarinet, violin, cello, and piano from around the world.
Outside of regular concerts, we have been invited to perform at the Wroclaw International Summer Chamber Music Festival in Poland this July, and will be collaborating with lots of Ewa Kowalski’s colleagues, in premiere Australian music programs with harp, and with piano trio. Michelle and I are also performing the Bruch Double Concerto from Ink Games with the New South Wales Doctors’ Orchestra in May. On the way are commissions from several Australian composers like Andrew Ball and Margery Smith. We also are invited to play at the Australian Saxophone and Clarinet Conference in Brisbane, and finally we will be in the studio a couple of times, later picking out our favourites for a debut album.
You can catch the Hourglass Ensemble in their concert Ink Games at the Utzon Room on 15 April. For further information visit www.sydneyoperahouse.com.
Image supplied.
