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CONTEMPORARY MUSIC REVIEW
May 1, 2004
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By David Bithell
Theater is seduction. The power of the human body moving on stage, creating manifold forms of visual and verbal expression, easily entices an audience. It has also ensnared composers — often drawing their attention to the narrow divide between bodies performing as musicians and bodies performing as actors. Bay-Area-based Paul Dresher, composer and director of the Paul Dresher Ensemble, has investigated this connection in his music theater work Sound Stage. A collaboration between Dresher, the contemporary music ensemble Zeitgeist, Rinde Eckert (text, direction), and Alex Nichols (lighting and visual designer), Sound Stage is the result of a several years of development, planning, construction, and rehearsal, and is, as Dresher freely admits, not a one-man show. Performed at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Forum this past week, it features a blended visually stunning set, with inventive instruments, and energetic performances.
The set is a striking collage of large, sculptural instruments (designed and constructed with the help of Daniel Schmidt), the centerpiece of which is a seventeen-foot A-frame suspending a long pendulum that ticks its slow metronomic pulse throughout the duration of the hour and twenty minute performance. The musicians climb in, through, and on the frame revealing multiple layers of instruments built into its walls: tuned box drums, harp-like strings plucked by the musicians or strummed by the arm of the pendulum, and a gauntlet of other small percussion instruments.
In addition to this central pendulum instrument, one of the more elaborate set of instruments was a course of strings stroked with gloves impregnated with rosin -- a technique used by Robert Erickson (one of Dresher's professors at UCSD) on aluminum rods, but here ingeniously applied to 70-foot-long “singing wires.” Stretched from the back of the stage over and behind the audience to wooden plate resonators, the stroked strings send a shimmering, sometimes screeching, wave of sound spatially throughout the hall.
Another instrument relying on long strings was based on the composer Ellen Fullman's aptly named The Long String Instrument. The 4-meter, four-string instrument is plucked or bowed, using mainly natural harmonics or “bottle-neck” guitar techniques. Due to the excessive length, many non-tempered partials are easily articulated which, in combination with various extended techniques, contribute to an impressively eerie sound quality. Through a series of interwoven musical compositions and text-based dramatic episodes, these impressive instruments are slowly introduced and explored by themselves or in combination with the traditional instruments of Zeitgeist's members: percussion (Heather Barringer), clarinets (Pat O'Keefe), piano (Anatoly Larkin), and violin (Yuri Merzhevsky). The music balances between a pulse-based post-minimalism style, jazz, and groove-based improvisations. Paul Dresher and the members of Zeitgeist gave very committed and high-energy performances. Their collective talent as improvisers as well as performers of notated music was clear and helped to sustain intensity throughout. Based in Minnesota, Zeitgeist has been a frequent and passionate champion of new American music. The players moved quickly and adeptly between their varied roles as instrumentalists, percussionists, speakers, and actors.
While it would be hard to conceive of this performance as a “concert” of independent compositions, the connective sequences that bound each musical section together lacked depth. Alternating between academic descriptions of the acoustic properties of strings, columns, and pendulums and a more lyrical description of a child's evolving sense of home, the texts served as a vehicle for a rather superficial air of self-referentiality and, in doing so, had a confining feel. Rather than opening up the musical language to new vistas and generating interesting connections, the language used always looked in on itself describing that which was already apparent, repeating and stifling. The most successful theatrical effects were when the theater appeared the least “conscious” — most especially in the more overtly musical compositions or as the performers explored the percussive potential of the set and various invented instruments. In those moments, the complex set added visual and theatrical energy to the groove-based music — music that would have been difficult to appreciate or even imagine in a traditional seated concert of new music. A “natural” choreography that resulted from the players moving about striking the A-frame pendulum or gracefully stroking the “singing wires” was more convincing than moments of more contrived motion on stage.
(David Bithell is a composer/performer based in the East Bay whose work explores the connections between music, theater, and language. He is co-director of the sfSoundSeries.)
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Paul Dresher