BY MYLES OAKEY, 2016 CUTCOMMON YOUNG WRITER OF THE YEAR
The sci-fi genre plays on the human condition.
It’s a search beyond what is currently possible, an exploratory and exciting journey. It’s imaginative, but still within possibility. And so it plays with our desires and the nature of reality.
On his current Australian tour Cyborg Pianist, Zubin Kanga presents works that extend the possibilities of the pianist via the interaction between bodily gesture and technology. Zubin is fitted with 3D motion sensors, transplanted into films, virtually multiplied and layered, drowned in electronics, and combined with footage of the Australian Snowy Mountains and Hitchcock films.
It seems Zubin’s Cyborg Pianist tour isn’t an imaginative fiction; it’s the new reality of what is possible when a pianist’s gesture becomes intimately related to technology, which can visually and sonically augment and control, and to theatre and film in new interdisciplinary art.
As an internationally renowned performer of contemporary music – both as a soloist and member of ensembles, such as the Australian Ensemble Offspring – Zubin has premiered more than 70 works, and enjoys an academic career as a PhD graduate of the Royal Academy of Music, and postdoctoral researcher at the University of Nice, and IRCAM.
Zubin takes the time to share with us some fascinating stories behind the Australian and international works performed for his Cyborg Pianist tour.
You’re premiering Australian works by Marcus Whale, Damien Ricketson, and Kate Moore. Can you tell us about them and your relationship with the composers?
I’ve seen Marcus develop into a really interesting artist with a huge career in electronic dance music and poplar music as well as in contemporary composition. I wanted him to write something for me with all the resources of video and technology, so Marcus has used this amazing footage of aerial drone flying over the Snowy Mountains in Frontier for piano, electronics and video.
Damien Ricketson was the artistic director of Ensemble Offspring, who I’ve been with for 11 years, so Damien and I have been working closely together for a long time. Damien always writes something interesting and very unique. In The Day after Drowning he takes Erik Satie’s Gnossienne No.1 and gradually pulls it apart, in tempo and in pitch, and fills all the gaps with electronics so it feels as though the Satie piece is downing in electronics – hence the title.
Kate Moore I’ve worked with quite a lot for several pieces, but this is definitely the major work she’s written for me. She writes in this Dutch/New York minimalist style – strong, muscular minimalist music – and, for this piece, doubles the piano with these retro ’70s synth sounds that create this combination instrument between the piano and electronics. It’s a massive sound that is extraordinary to hear, and a great closer for the concert.
What is special about the performer-composer relationship in contemporary music?
Collaboration is a constant thing. You’re always communicating with a composer: if you’re playing a piece of Beethoven, you’re not only looking at the score, but looking at the life circumstances of the performers who worked with him, the traditional performers who have played since – there’s a whole network of relationships. And when you’re working with contemporary music, there’s a whole network of relationships that are very active because the composers are still alive, it’s all growing and happening around you, and you’re part of that network.
Some of your collaborations are ongoing during the compositional process. Involved with the innovation and design of technologies, you’re actually a part of that process.
The interesting thing about being a part of that process, and having a piece written for you, is that you do get written into the work. Everyone has a different way of moving and different bodies, but it sort of gets tailored to you. And that happens for any kind of piece that gets written for you, in a lot of ways, but with technologies it becomes an even more intricate relationship, particularly when there’s stuff with pre-recorded video. Your role is hardwired into the work.
There are two works where I appear on screen in quite different ways. A piece by a young British composer Adam de la Cour called Transplant the Movie! takes movies from the 1920s and 1960s with a standard plot line about pianists who get hand transplants from murderers, and the hands go on to kill – ‘transplant horror’ was a genre at the time. They all have the same plot line, so Adam was able to film scenes in that style and cut me into the storyline as a character. I begin accompanying the film, and then suddenly I’m in the film interacting in a much more complex way. It’s a lot of fun. And badly made horror is quite funny, actually. Adam knows how to handle humour very, very well; he’s a real master of that kind of piece.
And the other piece is by Johannes Kreidler, quite a major figure of the young German composers. For his piece Study for piano, electronics and video, I’m multiplied on strings: there are six versions of me doing a whole lot of different gestures – playing on the keys, plucking, playing harmonics, hitting the piano with a hammer– they’re all video screens popping up and accompanying me, at one point there’s 64 versions of me, all plucking a string on screen and creating this mass of sound.
In the compositions premiered, the pianist’s body is extended via technology that responds to bodily gesture. In this sense, the compositions explore the body-instrument relationship. How have you experienced this as a performer?
In Patrick Nuun’s piece Morphosis for piano, 3D sensors and live electronics, he uses motion sensors, which detect the orientation and speed of my hands, and I can control the electronics with them. Building this instrument was a very complex process: it’s easy to get data out of the sensors, but the challenge is to turn the data into something really interesting and musical. There are 12 sections, and the 3D sensors interact with me differently in each section. And the interaction is so complex in some of them that it’s impossible to control in advance; you have to explore it in real-time. It’s really interesting for me and the audience because it’s always different.
In terms of my own playing it’s been really interesting to consider how the visual aspect of performance works. All the works I’m performing on this Cyborg Pianist tour play with that visual aspect: they’re very theatrical and play with interesting interactions between myself and video. But that also affects how you think about all your other performing, and you realise that the visual aspect and the whole gestural aspect of performing is incredibly important, no matter what repertoire you’re playing.
What do you see as the value of contemporary music to music culture?
I think it’s essential to musical culture. I think it would be ridiculous, say, in the theatre, for people go see, or performers to act only in theatre of plays from 100 years ago; and the same goes for an art gallery. Contemporary music should just be a part of a culture. It contains the new, but also tells us a lot about the existing cannon while allowing us to reflect on how that music is evolving and changing today. It should just be a natural part of the culture, rather than being this niche in a strange box on the side. I think music is moving away from that classical tradition and interacting more with jazz and popular music and theatre and stand-up comedy, and interacting much more easily across the cultural spectrum. A lot of contemporary music is actively dealing with that movement. It’s happening particularly in Europe, but it’s starting to happen in Australia; there are more and more venues that promote this music, and it’s a natural fit for contemporary music in that scene.
Zubin Kanga will perform on solo piano, with live electronics by Benjamin Carey, in Cyborg Pianist at 7.30pm tonight, Sydney Conservatorium of Music.
Images supplied.
