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CONTEMPORARY MUSIC REVIEW
Time for the Music of Edmund Campion
June 5, 2001
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By Benjamin Frandzel
UC Berkeley's Tempo Festival, a weeklong spotlight on musicians whose creativity is linked with technologies, continued last Tuesday with the music of UC professor Edmund Campion. Despite the bank of computers and their operators that lined the front row of Hertz Hall, and the wide-ranging investigation into their expressive possibilities, Campion's deepest creative concerns are really quite ancient, as he searches for alchemies between music and theater, text, movement, and ritual.
This connection with other idioms was most clearly and beautifully articulated in the concert's closing work, l'Autre. Written for two very busy percussionists, harp, horn, and speaking/singing vocalist, all amplified and frequently processed, the piece is a bold trip through worlds of sound and states of being. Campion's highly individual sense of form was at its most effective here.
Ferocious stretches of music were balanced delicately against each other — a brief diatonic episode could have as much impact as minutes of intense percussion work. Floating, processed vocals were built steadily before suddenly being cut off for a new section to emerge. The sudden changes and shifts were both surprising and right, with Campion's broader logic apparent at the end of this rewarding 20-minute work.
Campion is essentially an impressionist, writing music based on gesture and its expansion, often accomplishing this with a refined sense of color and texture. Although electronic processing goes a long way in making imaginative colors possible, these possibilities were explored with equal success in the evening's sole work without electronics, Domus Aurea, for piano and vibraphone. Small fragments and gestures begin the work, establishing a clarity that remain in effect even as the music unwinds into longer, more ornately beautiful lines. In an excellent performance by pianist Karen Rosenak and vibist William Winant, lovely counterpoint was balanced by strongly executed unison passages, as rapid runs and lengthy trills develop into more substantial ideas. Campion's fascination with text — as pure sound, as a veil or vessel of meaning — is the basis for two works written in collaboration with his brother, poet John Campion. In Name Calling, a prelude to l'Autre, John Campion's text was first chanted by soprano Lauren Carley, then continued by the poet himself. Meanwhile Edmund Campion's sampling keyboard became more and more involved, playing back, in processed form, the names of endangered peoples that formed the text of much of the poem. Although on a much smaller scale than l'Autre, which followed, this prelude was just as compelling, a coherent synthesis between text as pure sound, entering the realm of music, and text employed for evocation.
In two works, Campion also utilized real-time computer feedback for theatrical purposes as well as improvisatory inspiration. In Corail, saxophonist Vincent David , standing in the middle of the hall, began playing simple diatonic figures. As he wove his way into more dissonant territory and extended techniques, the speakers lining the edge of the hall echoed him with changing timbres and at different rates, until, in an effective closing touch, David simply walked to the stage and exited out the back. Campion's vision was a little less clear in the works that began both halves of the program. In Sons et Lumières, early film footage of everyday scenes was projected around the hall, from one wall to the next. A player piano and shadowing pianos, heard through surrounding speakers, provided the music, in an often beautiful mix. But the connection between music and visuals seemed only peripheral, until the very end, when repeated high notes were coupled poetically with an early dance film. Campion's Natural Selection used similar technology to respond to his improvisations on a midi-equipped piano, with the computer's responses circulated around the room. Campion's connections to his collaborators were again less clear. Choreographer Carol Murota sent her dancers running through the hall as their names were called, finally leaving Campion alone on stage to produce a lengthy structured improvisation, until a text heard over the speakers framed the work. It's rare to find a composer looking so intently for inspiration in nonmusical realms and clearly finding it. The search for new forms was always apparent. Even in moments of lesser success, the search itself was rewarding. (Benjamin Frandzel is a Bay Area musician and writer. In addition to writing concert music, he has collaborated with dance, theater, and visual artists, and has written about music for many publications and musical organizations. He is currently a graduate student in composition at San Francisco State University.) ©2001 Benjamin Frandzel, all rights reserved |