Alemania
First the music, then the light
Jesse Simon
Music and moving images are, on their own, such strongly individual artforms that it is virtually impossible for them to co-exist on an equal footing. In narrative cinema, sound is almost always subservient to image, sometimes intensifying the visuals or, in the case of many mainstream films, supplying an emotion otherwise absent. In the opera house great music will often bolster a lacklustre production, while in the concert hall images are entirely superfluous. When music and image are presented together within a single work of art, certain questions inevitably arise: which of the two is the dominant force? And to what extent could the individual elements have stood comfortably on their own?
The combination of sound and moving image – defined in the loose sense of constructions of light reflected from a screen – formed the central theme of ‘Allegories of Light’, a concert given at Kontakte, the biennale for electroacoustic music held over four days this September at Berlin’s Akademie der Künste. The programme consisted of five small-ensemble works by living composers, each of which featured projected images as an element within the piece. The approaches to the integration of sound and light varied considerably from work to work, resulting in a consistently stimulating evening for the senses.
The programme opened in the gallery space adjoining the Second Hall of the Akademie with a performance of Olga Neuwirth’s !?dialogues suffisants!? for cello, tape and video monitors. The live cello part consisted less of identifiable notes than a series of events drawn from the extremes of extended technique; it was given a thoroughly committed performance by Anna Carewe whose grand gestures as often as not resulted in very quiet sounds. The tape, which was played through a series of loudspeakers set up in the room, contained a fairly extensive percussion part, in addition to some surround-sound echoes of the cello. On a blank wall next to the stage there was video footage of a percussionist playing their way through a room densely clustered with gongs and drums, but what was happening in the images seemed only passingly related to what we were hearing on the tape. A duet for live cello and live percussion might in the end have been more musically satisfying (and less prone to technical difficulties) but would have also missed the disorientation that comes when sound and image refuse to fall into their expected synchronisation.
The audience moved into the larger Second Hall for the remainder of the programme’s first half, which featured one longer piece bookended by two shorter works inspired by the experimental films of Walter Ruttmann. The longer piece, Tu m by Malte Giesen, opened with a passage for heavily processed guitar but soon expanded into a full ensemble piece with the addition of cello, trumpet, trombone, piano and two percussionists. It was accompanied by video projections featuring a series of abstract forms created through extensive digital manipulation. While the forms were not inelegant, they seemed to exist somewhat independently of the music which had enough strong ideas that it would not have suffered from being played as a standalone chamber piece.
Of the evening’s pieces, Bildstudie: Ruttmann Op. 3 by Clemens Gadenstätter – the first of the two Ruttmann-inspired pieces – came closest to creating an ideal marriage of sound and light, and was easily the evening’s most engaging work. Walter Ruttmann, although best remembered for his silent classic Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt (1927), was also a pioneer in the field of abstract animated cinema and his series of four silent Lichtspiele shorts were, as their opus numbers might suggest, an attempt to give purely visual form to musical ideas. Yet Mr Gadenstätter’s piece was no mere soundtrack; instead Ruttmann’s Lichtspiel Op. 3 served as something closer to a silent soloist in a brief concerto. The film, which started after and ended before the music, may have been the focus of the piece, but it was so well integrated into the ensemble that it was difficult to imagine one without the other.
The score managed to catch the dark energy of Ruttmann’s restless imagery without any obvious references to the machine-age modernism of the 1920s; it did, however, call for one of the musicians to double on film projector, and for both of the percussionists to include flashlights in their arsenal of instruments, suggesting that the very concept of Lichtspiel – a German word for cinema, but literally translated means ‘play of light’ – was not confined to the film elements alone. The second of the two Ruttmann pieces, Lichtspiel Op. 2 by Ludger Brümmer, served as a more straightforward soundtrack, but its interplay of live and recorded sound offered an inventive and agreeable accompaniment to the moving images that inspired it.
The evening’s second half was devoted to the world première of Alegorías de la luz, a new work by José M. Sánchez-Verdú scored for small ensemble, live electronics and several film and video projectors. The work occupied a curious space somewhere between performance and installation: the members of the ensemble performed different sections of the music from various points throughout the hall, and the visual elements were projected onto one of four screens. Although the seats were grouped into four sections at the corners of the hall, the extent of the work could not be apprehended easily from a single vantage point; the piece seemed to encourage the audience to wander around the room during the performance (which some eventually did).
The piece itself was divided into seven sections (plus prelude, interlude and postlude), each named for a specific colour of light – although not the traditional gradations of the spectrum – and much of the music deployed single instruments or small groups in a largely percussive capacity. During one of the early sections, a single guitar created a bed of loosely rhythmic plinking that was delayed, repeated and manipulated until it devolved into static; a similar effect was achieved in a subsequent section with trumpet and trombone. The effect was a kind of musical pointillism intended perhaps to evoke the flickers of projected light. Even the machinery seemed essential to the sound world of the piece: the incessant clacking of the 35mm projector – which played film loops held suspended by a majestic Rube Goldberg device of weights and rollers – was as much an ‘instrument’ as the cello or the trombone.
Hermann Scherchen with his rotating loudspeaker. © Hermann-Scherchen-Archiv, 2017
At the centre of the piece was an electronic interlude played on the Nullstrahler, a rotating loudspeaker designed by Hermann Scherchen during his time at Gravesano. Unlike the Leslie speaker, which was built specifically to create sonic fluctuations, the Nullstrahler, which rotates on two axes simultaneously, was conceived as a means of normalising the fluctuations that occur when projecting amplified sound. The machine, which resembled a disco ball made of speakers, was recently rediscovered in the archives of the Akademie der Künste, and put to use on this evening for the first time in decades. Although it was difficult to tell where the ratchety spinning of the ball ended and the sounds coming from the speakers began, it was fascinating to see and hear Scherchen’s forgotten device at work.
With the exception of the prelude and postlude, projected light was used in different ways throughout the piece, growing both darker and more textural as the work progressed. The 16mm projectors were restricted mostly to pure colour and the 35mm loops recalled the jazzy, hand-painted reels of Norman McLaren, while the digital projections offered slower shapeshifting textures. The music necessarily stopped short of attempting a fixed representation of the different colours and forms, but the piece remained immersive, compelling and intensely thought-provoking for the whole of its nearly fifty-minute duration.
In addition to the concert, the biennale featured a number of installations spread throughout the various rooms and courtyards of the Akademie der Künste (including one delightful work by Camilla Vatne Barratt-Due and Alexandra Cárdenas entitled Respire Tune, in which a series of motorised fans blew into various reed chambers removed from old accordions; the sounds were then run through a mixing desk and amplified, resulting in a constantly shifting but strangely harmonious ambient soundscape). The sound from one installation would occasionally carry over into the next room, causing moments of disorientation. As much as the concert itself, the experience of walking among the installations forced one to listen more carefully to the world around them.
Comentarios