TAKE A CHANCE!
The Music department continued its exploration of the avant-garde and experimental, with ensembles and soloists tackling pieces which leave elements to chance.
The Take a Chance! concert, in February, took the theme of aleatory music, or chance music, in which one or more parameters of the performance was totally random. This practice is older than one might expect: we were treated to 16 variations of Mozart’ s Musical Dice Game by as many performers. These works complemented the more out-there moments of the night.
Such moments included a performance of Cornelius Cardew’ s Treatise, whose enigmatic score prompted our performers to fire ping-pong balls into the chassis of the school Steinway, producing an otherworldly, chaotic sound. Visually stimulating scores included Montague’ s‘ When Autumn Leaves Begin to Fall’, in which gentle harmonies literally grow like fruit on a tree on the page.
With her performance of Cage’ s‘ Waiting’, Florence Lall( Year 11) provided the audience with the quietest point of the evening, the chance element being how long the player takes to begin the piece. In second place, however, must be Feldman’ s‘ Intermission 6’, performed by Theodore Jones and Arianna Aggarwal( both Year 11), who took turns to supply everquietening chords at the piano. Sudden bursts of improvisation within otherwise restricted pieces allowed performers to inflect their pieces with a bit of themselves, as Alan Hunt( Year 8) played Stephen Montague’ s‘ Dagger Dance’, Seia Yano( Lower Sixth) Rzewski’ s‘ War Song No 3’( partly with a blindfold), and Orphée Patricot( Lower Sixth) Monk’ s‘ Paris’. An eight-hand playthrough of Earle Brown’ s Twenty-Five Pages by a piano quartet showcased proportional time notation, in which bars of ink indicate note values proportional to a predetermined bar length in seconds. The theatrics of the piece were enhanced by all four players bringing timepieces to their pianos.
The largest ensemble was the Space Collective. First, they played Montague’ s Eine Kleine Klangfarben Gigue, a work exploring the colours achievable through playing the same melody on different instruments, including trombone and accordion. Next, an extremely challenging work: Music in Similar Motion, by Philip Glass, which methodically transformed one melody across 10 minutes. The random element? Me, dear Reader, nodding to lead the ensemble to the next section of the music. Lastly, Rock Piece, by Pauline Oliveros, where the audience could meditate among steady, random rhythms, overlapping mystically.
The final event was Cage’ s Musicircus, where all performers placed themselves around our Pamoja Hall, and simultaneously performed 40 pieces. The result was beautiful, irreplicable chaos.
Noah Davis, Lower Sixth
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