BY MYLES OAKEY, EUROPE CORRESPONDENT
Systems_Theory
Ensemble Thing, Emily De Simone (cello)
Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow, 30 June
The cello, in its brooding tonal richness and tender sustain, is, perhaps, one of the most instinctively emotive and sonorous voices heard across contemporary music. Adept in resonating with inner human frailties, the instrument often plays to its vocal-like lyricism. New music composers – in adopting electroacoustic, audio-visual technologies, and other interdisciplinary artforms – are exploring alternative expressions of the instrument and roles of the cellist-performer. Leaving lyricism on the cutting-room floor – or otherwise stitches it back in, sparingly – composers are writing to hear and feel and see the instrument differently.
In Glasgow, a network of composers, commissioners, and new music groups – such as Ensemble Thing, Red Note Ensemble, and Glasgow New Music Expedition – are contributing to a community of quiet creativity and active ferment. In her solo concert Systems_Theory at Glasgow’s Contemporary Centre for Art, cellist Emily De Simone, a member of Ensemble Thing, performed a curated hour of contemporary classical works from Scottish, Australian, and American composers. In a back-to-back performance with only silent brief pauses, the collective writing of these composers extended the cello’s melodic fragments into expansive multilayered textures and audio-visual live cinema. With three fresh works written in the past year, Systems_Theory presented new compositions by Glasgow-based composers Thomas Butler, Shona Mackay, and John De Simone, which shaped a program of geographical and temporal locality.
In a work that suggested a caution towards technology, Thomas Butler’s Irreplaceable You (2019) established a visual connection to the bow strokes and fragmented gestures of Emily’s playing. In writing remarkably distant from lyrical solace, Butler organised various repetitions of short gestures, their duration and tempo mirrored in the movement and shape of graphic representations. In an almost play-like manner, a black bar moved across a screen matching the duration and direction of the bow. As the work progressed, the texture of filtered synthesised piano intensified the cellist’s gestures while the graphics became more complex constellations. The once simplistic visuals gradually overlapped and expressed gestures independent of the cello: a Black Mirror-esque warning in an age drifting towards technologies and sound.
As the stimulus of technologies altered our psyches and wellbeing, we were advised towards the stillness of meditation. Between those moments of stillness, the mind is a flicker of erratic thoughts. Originally written for Jennifer Langridge as part of Psappha New Music Ensemble’s Composing for Cello scheme, Shona Mackay’s Cloud Hands (2018) drew on tai chi and meditation practice to structure musical and visual gesture. The performance video work made use of focus, movement, and stillness in which the cellist-performer became meditator. With the live performer Emily meditating on stage, the cellist was featured in the video work projected behind. Throughout Cloud Hands, Mackay used a three-note pizzicato figure, interjected with heavily bowed double stops and erratic runs that used the full range of the instrument. Visually, these figures were connected to focused cinematic shots: the cellist’s hand movement and bowing, her physical presence, and the negative black of stillness. Finally, the light returned to the cellist on stage as she opened her eyes.
Returning to the natural world, composer and artistic director of Ensemble Thing John collaborated with Emily in a musical response to the sound of Hannah Imlach’s film fieldwork, a recording of the wild Scottish peatland environment interacting with Imlach’s audible installations. Performing at the conclusion of the Imlach’s film, John’s work flow (2019) used the sensory texture of natural elements to inspire a felt immediacy through an improvisatory compositional process. The result is an overlapping texture of acoustic and electroacoustic sounds that scattered fragments and harmonics that drifted in and out with a sense of indeterminacy and organic form.
Reaching beyond Scotland, Emily expanded the Systems_Theory program to include two works for solo cello that have secured popular status in contemporary repertoire. Originally commissioned by Ashley Bathgate, Lisa Moore, and the Australian Council for the Arts, the textural warmth of Velvet (2010) by Australian-Dutch composer Kate Moore expanded the soundstage of a live single instrument through the layering of eight multitrack cellos. The performance required a delicate mixing in order to retain the intensity of the live performance. Kate’s work, inspired by light and shade in renaissance paintings, asked the same dynamic and tonal contrasts in its performance. Emily’s interpretation was, at times, lost in the dense multitrack recording; and while not exerted in her physical performance, the cellist drew the audience in with delicate tonal varieties of expression in the gritty scratch of bow hair and the energy of stabbing polyrhythms.
The oldest piece of music on the program, Light is Calling (2004) by Michael Gordon, gave a comparative sense of the trajectory of how composers have incorporated electroacoustic sound and visuals into their work over the past 15 years. Opening with a filtered bell-like electronic texture, in which the sound envelope is reversed, Gordon’s cello writing was the contrasting voice within the program: idiomatic, lyrical, and sorrowful. The piece was a response of beauty in wake of the horror of September 11, 2001. Accompanied by the original visual by Bill Morrison, Emily performed with elegant glissandi and vibrato that shifted in character and pitch as she interacted with the manipulating electroacoustic texture.
Systems_Theory tied together a program that moved away from the lyrical and heart-wrenching lines that make the cello an identifiable voice. Instead, we heard irregular and inquisitive approaches to writing that one can imagine crossing over to multiple instruments of similar or replicated attributes. In this way, Systems_Theory revealed how the interdisciplinary approaches of contemporary composition recontextualise instruments and their performers towards new communicative experiences in art.
Images supplied.
