BY CUTCOMMON
Ensemble Offspring is gearing up for four concerts that it claims will “take listeners into a new stratosphere of sounds”.
The Echoes and Orbits program — to be performed by artistic director and percussionist Claire Edwardes, and cellist Blair Harris — features an impressive line-up of music from the past few decades. So we decided to ask some of the featured composers about their own stratospheres — how this music came to be, and the way it interacts with the rare combination of instruments you’ll hear at the shows.
Here’s what they had to say.
These interviews have been lightly edited for length and consistency.
Christopher Cerrone – The Pleasure at Being the Cause (2021, arr. 2022), world premiere
I’m looking forward to my first collaboration with Ensemble Offspring, who I know by reputation and their excellent live documented performances.
I wrote this piece at the request of Claire Edwardes for this program. She really liked my Pleasure of being the cause, originally written for prepared piano and cello. The idea of making a version for cello and percussion appealed to me immediately — I love percussion, and it opens up new sonic possibilities!
My entire piece is based on a single idea — a kind of bouncing on the cello on the string to create ricochet effect. With percussion, I could replicate this sound exactly — a mallet bouncing on the keys of the vibraphone. But of course, the other thing is that you can make so many connections. The pizzicato in the cello and the gongs and cowbells that Claire plays are the ‘glue’ that holds it all together.
Stuart Greenbaum – Lunar Orbit (2011)
As fate has it, I will be on the other side of the river examining the music of our own student composers at precisely the same time [as Echoes and Orbits]! So I’m promoting the event on my personal artist website, and looking forward to hearing how it goes. Tempo Rubato is only a suburb away from where I live, so for many of us who live in the ‘fashionable north’ it is our art music local.
I originally wrote Lunar Orbit in 2011 for NZTrio cellist Ashley Brown. We needed a cello solo to round out an album of mostly piano trio music with some duos and solos as interludes (800 Million Heartbeats – ABC Classics). So I wrote it fairly quickly, and Ash and I worked through it shortly after he touched down in Melbourne.
We recorded it at the Melbourne Recital Centre two days later. Since then, other cellists have played it – notably Blair Harris who made this quite amazing distinctive video of it at Phoenix Central Park.
My music has been a classical/jazz/pop/minimalism crossover since before I got my driver’s licence, so it’s not a new thing for me. I didn’t choose it, but it did take me a little time to recognise that it was playing out in every line I ever wrote.
I love contemporary jazz so if you give me cello, I can’t resist accessing its inner jazz bass aspects and all the pizzicato hammer-on, pull-off, and glissando colours that come with that. But I’m equally drawn to Bach’s solo cello writing, so the cross-string arpeggios featured in the opening and ending do owe a little to Bach’s technical model.
Keep listening to new music – especially as played by its most dedicated proponents. The world is a better place when we have time to be immersed in the ethereal.
Katy Abbott – Spel (2016)
Claire Edwardes rang me one day a few years ago and said she’d heard and loved the ending of a piece of mine, and asked me to write something with that ending in it. As it happens, it’s probably my favourite ending to any of my works. So I happily agreed, understanding the challenge would compose something ‘same-same but different’.
The ending is very fragile, delicate, and a highly exposed moment for the performers asking for control, balance, and to capture the essence of something nebulous – longing for ‘home’. This is expressed by artificial harmonics on the cello and soft rolls on the vibraphone. I guess it’s virtuosic in an obtrusive and quiet way.
The title comes from the ‘echo’ of the original piece, and I’m delighted to have heard many interpretations of this piece by various duos. I love Blair Harris and Claire’s take on the work. It’s rich and lush and delicate and moody.
Mary Finsterer – Tide (2023), world premiere
Tide is an Ensemble Offspring commission. It has been a pleasure to compose Tide, and to work with Blair Harris and Claire Edwardes. The orchestration and compositional style explore the cello and percussion (vibraphone and crotales) through a vast range of colour and technique. [The music] has been influenced by polyphonic writing from the Renaissance.
Silva (2012) and Tide (2023) have offered me the opportunity to explore soloistic writing within a compositional style that draws influence from early music [through Ensemble Offspring collaboration].
Matthew Shlomowitz – Hi Hat and Me (2010)
I wrote Hi Hat and Me in 2010. I wrote it on the GarageBand software program, assembling a mock up together with a MIDI hi-hat and recordings of my voice.
As for the convergence of classical and pop, […] whereas engaging with pop a few decades was to stick out a middle finger to modernism, now we just do it, looking for the creative possibilities in a non-dialectical and non-neurotic kind of way. I am sure there is a critique of this easiness, but that’s where I am with it.
View the full Echoes and Orbits program on the Ensemble Offspring website. Claire Edwardes and Blair Harris will perform in Melbourne (10 and 11 May), Orange (12 May), and Sydney (13 May).
Images supplied.
