In an ideal world we ought to have
the chance of hearing it again.
As an optional extra.
5\"\\1 .r}j+r~/'7, FRED BLANKS
The ether
and beyond
MUSIC
WAlT
Presented by Sydney University music department
and the Conservatorium composition school
Graeme Leak: percussion
Music by: Wesley-Smith, ShanahlD, Treloar,
Franklin, Schiemer, Hood, Fredericks
Downstairs Theatre, Seymour Centre, August 20
C
LOTHES bought straight off
the peg never fit properly, but
home tailoring takes a lot of
. time and patience.
For the electronic composer, it is the
same with sounds.
If you don't like your synthesiser's
house style, making your own sounds
can require hundreds of instructions for
a single note.
Even more difficult is discovering the
musical silk purses within these acous-
tic sow's ears through codes of musical
meaning which lie buried deep in our
culture.
The concert by electronic-music
group Watt provided a unique oppor-
tunity to study these problems, through
inventive musical application of a
dazzling array of recent technology.
Martin Wesley-Smith likes his
sounds ready-to-wear and revels in
their brittle and, sometimes, ironic
arcade-game glitter.
They have a neon sheen like the
geometric patterns projected by Jenny
and Melissa Lovrick's slides in Beta-
Globin DNA 2, curtailed on this
occasion by technological gremlins.
Jim Franklin, Ian Shanahan and
Anthony Hood all preferred varying
degrees of personal tailoring.
The galactic awe of Shanahan's
Arcturus Timespace was a musical
improvement on the instrumental ver-
sion heard earlier this year.
Franklin's ' The Transformations of
Light achieved an unusual personal
intensity , through the,., us,t( of live
performahce. ',
A drawback of both was the Yamaha
DX7 synthesiser which showed no
finesse in controlling the attack and
decay of each sound, bringing a
sameness to diverse musical gestures.
This was less of a problem with
Hood's eerie and evocative tape piece
Desert Voices .
Percussionist Graeme Leak exercised
a virtuosic command over a limitless
palette of repetitive sounds in Greg
Schiemer's monophonic variations, by
harnessing synthesisers and computers
to an electronic drum pad.
In Phil Treloar's Percussion Music
One, Leak threaded the sounds of
wood, metal, skin and electronics on to
a simple melodic chain in a suggestive
counterpoint.
Ian Fredericks explored moving
spacial effects and sophisticated home
tailoring in the service of outwardly
simple musical structures and, in his
Nuclear War, of an overt political
message.
The changing musical rhetoric
throughout this concert reflected an art
which, as yet, has laid no foundations,
preferring instead to hitch its craft to a
constantly changing ether.
Nevertheless, it is encouraging to
watch the gradual emergence of control
over resources whose greatest limita-
tion until recently has been that they
offer unlimited possibilities.
PETER McCALLUM
AC,O at its\.q,
chirpy best
MUSIC
AUSTRALIAN CHAMBER
ORCHESTRA
Director: Carl Pini
Music by Vivaldi, Respighi, Mozart and Bartok
Holy Trinity (Garrison) Church, The Rocks. August ,
21
E
VEN though some of its key
players appeared to have been
given the night off on Friday,
the Australian Chamber
Orchestra was its usual chirpy self in
the Garrison Church, which may claim
to have Sydney's best religious acous-
tics.
Unfortunately. what could have been
th e mo st interesting wo rk 011 the
progra m, th e Roundsfor Strings (1944)
by Ame rican composer David Dia-