andrewcsmith (Curator)

Jon Rose, Australian violinist and instrument builder, played last week in the most virtuosic display of fence-playing I've seen in at least six months. His instrument, which he reconstructed at ISSUE for his first U.S. performance in around ten years, is an excerpt of the 3,500-mile Dingo Fence in Australia, built to keep the wild dogs away from the sheep. It also happens to be the world's longest fence, and one of the longest man-made structures on the planet.

Through the weekend, Rose switched between this fence and his violin, during improvisations with Zeena Parkins, Alex Waterman, and Miya Masaoka, and it was clear that he explored the sound of the fence just as he pushed the sound of his violin. No kitchy effects were taken for granted, or exploited for cheap thrills, but the sound of the amplified wire comes through. Always verging on some kind of slack-stringed chaos, the wires rattle just until Rose grabs a node on the string and stops all but a single harmonic.

It's really a sound that you have to hear, or even see, to get the full idea, as any limitations you might expect from a fence-instrument are just blown out of the water. For this, check out Rose's site with some extracts from his book's DVD, and the recording of his ISSUE performance below.

To kick off ISSUE’s Chamber Music Month, downtown regular Elliott Sharp brought himself and Italian-born conductor/composer/percussionist Andrea Centazzo out for a few excellent improvised sets. As one might expect, it’s all good—check out Centazzo’s three cymbal trees in the above picture. Although according to the Wikipedia Centazzo’s a “minimalist” composer he, like Sharp, never seems to fit into that box. What they do both take from Reich & Co., however, is a concern with the effect of repeated sound on the sound. What they don’t take is diatonic harmony and pure “process.”

That downtown improvisation departed in style and content from minimalism is nothing new. This music turns a fixed process into an arbitrary element, and in that it seems to break the mold. Any aesthetic element of minimalism that seeps in—repetition, strong rhythmic pulses, ebow drones—is arbitrary and bound to change, and seems in active discourse and even disagreement with its downtown friend.

In the very last improvisation (below) just a few minutes from the end, Centazzo begins to play repeating patterns on his hanging gongs (parts of a gamelan? I can’t quite tell—check the above picture) and the decay of the gongs never really meshes with the next attacks from his yarn mallets. For one, the yarn mallet does not cause the sound to instantly appear, but rather draws the sound out a split second later, by which point he’s already moved on to the next note. It’s like looking at a spinning wheel that looks like it’s beginning to spin backward, where no percussive hits really make it through—they’re coming too quickly—and instead the focus is not on the actual attack, but on the point at which the tone from the gong becomes audible as a tone.

This takes maybe a half-second, by which point Centazzo’s already made it just about through his loop. Additionally, this repetitive auxiliary percussion calls to mind a certain someone, but evokes no tonality or central pitch, or even mode. This is why I suggested gamelan; these non-equal-tempered tunings defamiliarize a very familiar percussion pattern (extra credit to anyone who transcribes and analyzes these pitches). This is important: as the attacks quieten, and as the mallet sounds soften, the inharmonic sounds take over, and draw ears in. The attacks melt together, like fondue. All important things become as one and the differences have disappeared.

Sharp’s playing is always enveloping, a virtuosic display meant not to impress, and a rarity of form and ethos among musicians. Too often, those with the technique compromise or use it to replace real content, because they can get away with it. But in this—in never seeking to impress, only to convey—Sharp is in a rare territory.