Readers may recall that this weekend is one in which many, particularly those with a taste for the more adventurous side of repertoire, will have a hard time making choices. My own predicament was somewhat alleviated last night by an invitation to sit in on the dress rehearsal for Unseen | Unheard, the program that the Dresher | Davel Invented Instrument Duo will be performing at ODC Theater both this evening and tomorrow afternoon. Both performers, Paul Dresher and Joel Davel, were involved with the invention of the instruments being played. Of the four works on the program, Dresher composed three and Davel composed one.
The largest instrument on display was the Quadrachord, whose extent supports a string length of 160 inches. The four strings are of equal length but different gauges; and they span two bridges, each of which is next to an electric bass pickup. The instrument can be plucked, bowed, prepared like a piano, played like a steel guitar, and subjected to different kinds of percussion techniques. The length of the strings facilitates the realizing of natural overtones as high as the 36th harmonic (and probably higher).
Paul Dresher and Joel Davel playing the Quadrachord with Davel adding metallic discs below the strings (photograph by Nina Roberts, from a Chamber Music America event page)
Clearly, there is enough room for two players, and much of its performance last night involved Dresher and Davel sharing the overall length of the instrument. This amounted to a striking (pun intended) twist on the side-by-side playing of four-hand piano music; and each performer’s awareness of the other was as focused as one would encounter at a good four-hand recital. However, particularly in Dresher’s “Glimpsed From Afar,” there was just as much a sense of free-spirited jazz jamming involving “trading fours” of rhythmic patterns. For that exchange, Davel extended the diversity by inserting an array of metallic discs between the strings and the instrument’s body, thus making the wildness of the spectacle even wilder. As might be expected, execution involved as keen a sense of choreography as one of musical technique, entirely consistent with the fact that most of the performances one finds at the ODC Theatre are the results of choreographic invention.
The other large instrument on display was the Hurdy Grande, a latter-day rethinking of the medieval hurdy-gurdy. The original version involved a rosined wheel stroking strings as it is turned by a crank, usually on a frame small enough to fit on one’s lap. As its name implies, the Hurdy Grande is larger (about four times the length) and free-standing. While it is much shorter than the Quadrachord, it easily supports two performers sharing the space; and it was involved in the other two Dresher compositions on the program, “Moving Parts” and “Three for Two,” the latter being given its first performances.
The remaining two instruments involved were both created by Don Buchla with Davel’s participation. Both of them are, strictly speaking, controllers, rather than instruments. In other words they provide digital input to software that has been designed to parse the input and then interpret it as synthesized sound. The surface of the Marimba Lumina resembles the layout of marimba bars; but inputs are provided not only by where and how hard those areas are struck but also from signals emanating from the mallets themselves. Davel’s performance thus involved designing the right software to process all of these signals, as well as the physical act of “playing,” which, to most observers would appear to be the movements of any other marimba player.
Davel’s other instrument was the Buchla Lightning, a pair of handheld wands whose positions and movements can be sensed to provide input to the processing software. This instrument was used only in Davel’s solo performance of his composition “Out of Thin Air,” in which most of the signals from the wands seemed to be cueing a diverse assembly of sounds based on prerecorded material. As might be guessed, Davel appearance resembled that of a conductor, perhaps one whose ensemble resided only in his mind. The overall rhetoric was delightfully witty, playfully suggesting yet another setting in which “listening to music” had found its own way to break with convention.
Indeed, what makes these performances by Dresher and Davel particularly compelling is that the attentive listener is guided as much by what is being done as by how it is being done. In that respect the one disappointment came with the projection of a video created by Naomie Kremer as part of the performance of “Three for Two.” The fact is that there is always more than enough to watch in how all of these invented instruments are being played, allowing mind to build its own bridges between the “how” and the “what.” Kremer’s video never seemed to offer very much to contribute to either the “how” or the “what;” and I, for one, could not shift my visual attention away from the instruments and how they were being played.
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