BY CUTCOMMON
To celebrate a number of special birthdays, Meanjin/Brisbane violinist Flora Wong has commissioned four new works to perform on her instrument (and with some surprising parts ranging from mechanical metronome to live electronics). The pieces make up her debut EP Geburtstag, and we’re proud to host the video premiere of her first single from the collection, Escapement.
In this interview and premiere, Flora talks you through her debut, the video, and the collaboration.
Read the interview, then watch the premiere.
Flora, congratulations on the video premiere of your debut single. It coincides with some pretty special birthdays!
Thank you! Yes, it’s the culmination of a project I embarked on in 2019 to celebrate 10 years of making music with my violin. It’s an instrument that was made for me by violinmaker Helge Grawert; I brought it home from Helge’s workshop the day before my 21st birthday!
I thought it would be fun to mark the milestone by commissioning four new Australian works for solo violin, and called the project Geburtstag — German for ‘birthday’.
I gave the premiere performance of the four works in October 2019, and intended to record them the following year. But as with many projects over the last few years, it got somewhat delayed. I’m delighted that the University of Queensland School of Music gave me the nudge I needed by inviting me to record this EP as the first release on their new record label Corella Recordings!
You’ve chosen to release this track Escapement as a single. Why did this one stand out to you? Does it give a great preview of the EP?
Escapement is written by my good friend and long-time collaborator Chris Perren. We’ve been working together as part Nonsemble for a decade now, and he was the first composer I approached for the project.
He’s a composer who comes from a post-rock background — some might know him as the guitarist from math-rock band Mr. Maps — and he has an amazing way of writing music that is rhythmically intricate: full of polyrhythms and process-driven, but also has a highly emotive pop sensibility.
When he told me early on in the writing process that he was thinking of incorporating a mechanical metronome into the work, I loved the idea, and we soon realised that it wasn’t just a solo violin work anymore — it had turned into a duet.
Talk us through the video. What was it like having a camera capture your every move?
It was filmed and edited by Greg Harm of Tangible Media. They do incredible digital documentation and collaborative work with artists. I first came to know Greg through the work he’s done with local legends Vanessa Tomlinson and Erik Griswold, and he’s worked extensively with Jodie Rottle as well — so I knew that he’d be the perfect filmmaker to capture this piece.
When Chris and I discussed recording the work, we realised that seeing the metronome being ‘played’ is really integral to the audience experience, so we decided to film the performance at the same time as recording the audio.
I love having performances captured on film. As a performer, I actually think capturing audio alone for a recording is far more daunting, because it reduces the senses through which you can connect with the audience down to just one: sound.
Escapement is the kind of piece that works best when performed and recorded in full, rather than broken up into sections. So we recorded several takes of the piece, and Greg set up multiple cameras in the studio to capture the angles he felt were most appropriate. Once we selected the takes we liked best, Greg used that footage and prepared draft edits for Chris and I to watch and give feedback on.
He has such a great artistic sense for capturing live performance that it needed very little tweaking. There were only a few spots where we made suggestions for different angles to use to highlight a particular aspect of the piece or performance, and we all agreed that ‘hard’ cuts between the camera angles felt more appropriate to the character of the piece than slow fades.
We wanted the focus to be on the two instruments, and I’m particularly delighted that the metronome, which was generously provided by Simply For Strings, is made of transparent materials. I love seeing the mechanism inside!
In the video, Jodie Rottle sits patiently with the metronome as it interacts with you, then plays it as an instrument. It’s like Jodie is taking control over the rigid structures that usually control us; a metaphor could be found in there somewhere…
Absolutely — Jodie is an incredible performer and composer who works with everyday objects alongside traditional instruments in her work, so in many ways she was the ideal musician to recruit as a metronomist for this piece! As someone who regularly incorporates objects from every room of the house — squeaky toys, egg timers, electric toothbrushes — into her performances, she has an amazing way of bringing humour and the element of surprise into her music. Art is important, but that doesn’t mean we have to take it seriously all the time.
I recently had the pleasure of collaborating on a work with circus performers, and I found it so refreshing to be part of a creative process that valued playfulness, exploration, and human experience over the perceived attainment or execution of a particular artistic ideal. So I loved the idea of taking a practice tool and subverting the audience’s expectations of the role it plays in music-making. At first, it seems to be performing its normal function of providing the beat, but soon the violin part shifts, and suddenly the metronome’s tick is a cross-rhythm instead.
Chris loves to play with metric modulation in his music, which in many ways is like musical sleight of hand. That pulse that you thought was a 4/4 beat? Ta-da — it’s now a rhythmic counterpoint!
Speaking of the metronome and timing, this must be atrociously hard for you to play. How do you keep so well in time when it’s ever-changing like that? In the notes, composer Chris Perren said he was inspired by your “richly expressive yet tenaciously precise playing” when writing this music.
Basically, I had to learn what every drummer does: how to keep time internally, instead of relying on external guides like a metronome or a conductor, or responding to another instrument playing a key rhythmic part in the ensemble. That’s what most Western classical music training teaches you to do. You internalise a certain level of consistency with tempo, but once you’ve achieved that, you’re then encouraged to manipulate the duration of notes and the spaces between them as an expressive device. Not only do composers give us explicit time-based directions like rallentando (gradually getting slower) and accelerando (speeding up); we also apply rubato (‘stealing’ time by stretching some beats and contracting others), and manipulate the tempo around significant key or dynamic changes in order to increase their impact.
When I first started playing Chris’s music in Nonsemble, I had the realisation that different styles of music require different approaches to time and rhythm. I had to ‘unlearn’ the habit of being flexible with time, and practice playing expressively without manipulating the tempo. In Escapement, the metronome can’t respond to rhythmic variation in my playing the way another player in a string quartet can — its pulse is unwavering and inevitable. The piece requires the violinist to take full responsibility for maintaining consistent tempo to ensure that the rhythms interlock in exactly the right way.
One trick that I learnt from hearing my jazz-trained partner practice is simply a different way of using a metronome: instead of having it outline the strong beats, as most classical musicians are taught to do, you use the metronome’s pulses as an off-beat. It showed me immediately how reliant I’d become on hearing and responding to a beat, and trains you to feel the subdivisions of the beat as strongly as the beat itself.
Watching your video feels uplifting. Is this what you’re going for?
Absolutely! Chris’s music always fills me with a mixture of pensiveness and optimism. It’s a quality you commonly find in the music of post-rock artists like Toe, Tortoise, and Godspeed You Black Emperor, who were all significant musical influences for Chris.
I hope the piece gives people pause to think about how and why we make music, and to interrogate why promoting a practice tool to a musical instrument might bring us amusement or delight.
When the full EP comes out, it’ll feature a bunch of terrific-sounding works. How did you curate the rest of this EP, and can you give us a hint into what else listeners can expect?
In addition to Escapement, the EP features works by Connor D’Netto, MJ O’Neill and Kezia Yap.
I wanted the works I commissioned to push the boundaries of what we consider solo violin music, so I approached four musicians with totally different approaches to music making. I’m so glad they all came on board, and their pieces turned out as wildly different as I’d hoped.
Coincidentally though, both Chris’ and MJ’s pieces begin with a steady plucked open G on the violin.
We ended up with a collection of works that includes a piece that combines samples recorded at climate protests with densely layered live-looping violin, a piece inspired by a Chinese poem that uses live electronics to produce ethereal effects, a work that pushes the absolute limits of what is physically possible to achieve on a solo violin — and of course, a duet with a mechanical metronome.
Parting words before we watch the premiere?
Please watch it all the way to the end — I don’t want to spoil the ending, so all I’ll say is that final note still makes me smile every time!
Watch the world premiere of Flora Wong’s debut single Escapement, right here on CutCommon.
Keep up to date with Flora Wong’s new release Geburtstag on her website.
Images supplied. Production photos by Greg Harm. Flora’s portrait by Connor D’Netto Photography.
