The music of Philip Glass has never been more hypnotic

BY STEPHANIE ESLAKE

The first time I hit ‘play’ on Erwan Keravec’s recordings, I find it hard to convince myself that I’m listening to a traditional Scottish wind instrument.

The hurried and repetitive notes of Music in Fifths by Philip Glass (track 9 here) sound more like they’re coming from a synth or organ than the bagpipes. The tone is unwaveringly consistent to the extent that it’s hypnotic. The texture is so thick that the instruments, and their overtones, transform the original composition into something equally original.

When I tell Erwan I’ve never heard any recordings like his, I receive a generously empathetic response.

“I understand that it might be surprising to see a bagpipe playing this type of music,” Erwan says of his work.

“However, it seems to be both very well suited to this genre and, at the same time, a source of curiosity that remains alive today.”

Erwan is a bagpipe virtuoso, but he hasn’t followed a traditional path with the instrument – although it’s how he took his first steps.

“I learnt to play the bagpipes through traditional music. I came to other forms through musical improvisation and contemporary dance,” Erwan says. He has built a performance career through new works that could challenge almost anyone’s preconceptions about what this instrument can do.

Glass’ Music in Fifths is one of the works that will feature in Erwan’s concert at the Melbourne Recital Centre. He is artistic director of 8 Pipers for Philip Glass and will perform alongside several other instrumentalists who play bagpipes, bombard, and biniou.

You may wonder about the juxtaposition between Glass’ famously minimalist music and what’s arguably one of the least-subtle instruments of all time (a maximalist wind instrument, you might say). Oddly, Glass and bagpipes are a perfect match.

“The bagpipe’s bag is designed to produce continuous blowing to feed the reeds without interruption. Traditional music uses this continuity of sound to induce trance in listeners and/or dancers,” Erwan explains.

“So when you add the drones of bagpipes to the repetitive music of Philip Glass, you get a hypnotic trance.”

It was a recent discovery for Erwan. While he usually commissions new music, he started to take an interest in the older works of Glass after enjoying American bagpiper Matthew Welch’s cover of Two Pages (another work on the Melbourne Recital Centre program).

Erwan started looking deeper into Glass’ works and found three compositions from 1969: Music in Contrary Motion, Music in Fifths, and Music in Similar Motion.

“They represent a compositional path from unison to orchestral music,” Erwan says of these pieces he’ll perform. The latter two were designed to be played on any combination of instrument – and “astonishingly, they seem like they’re written for these instruments”.

The types of bagpipes that’ll feature on this program are “well known to Australians; they’re an adaptation of the Scottish bagpipes played in pipe bands”.

“So I’m curious to see how the Melbourne Recital Centre audience will react to this familiar instrument playing unfamiliar music.”

Some of Erwan’s fellow musicians tend to wear earplugs because of how often they play their instruments, which are known for projecting sound across considerable distances in outdoor performances. But between the walls of Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, Erwan assures that “listeners will be immersed in a bath of enveloping sound, powerful without being deafening, presenting different situations depending on the musical pieces”.

Erwan even engaged a lighting designer and costume designer “to push things further” while honouring the nature of Glass’ music through visual elements.

Australian composer-pianist Nat Bartsch (pictured below) will also feature on the program, performing Philip Glass’ Etude No.2.