Pendulum Music - Steve Reich
Sole Injection - Zack Browning
Time Texture - Leon Milo
Their Silence - Ana Mihajlovic
Hitch's Bitches - Todd Winkler
Stripsody - Cathy Berberian
Tik - Maarten Altena
The idea of playing an instrument without any physical contact is not a new one. The earliest electronic instrument, the Theremin (staple producer of other-worldly warnings in 1950s science fiction movies), dates from 1920, and is played without a keyboard, by hand movements in the air.
American composer Todd Winkler has been exploring this particular domain of activity with video cameras and computers, enabling musical performance by individuals ranging from dancers to paraplegics. Hitch's Bitches, premiered by the Crash Ensemble on Sunday, is for a dancer, Cindy Cummings, who makes an over-the-top, off-the-wall, up-the-wall (sometimes literally) gestural journey through mannerisms of Hitchcockian Grand Guignol. The accompanying music and looping film clips stutter, yaw and yelp in puppet-like subordination to the dancer's crazy will. While not all of it was fully convincing, it was both engrossing and entertaining, and it's clear that Winkler and Cummings (the work is essentially collaborative) are on to something good. The rest of the programme was variable. Stephie Buttrich had the vocal virtuosity, range and flexibility to animate the comic-strip inspired sounds of Cathy Berberian's Stripsody but not the style of delivery to hold the attention in Ana Mihajlovic's jazzy e.e. cummings setting, Their Silence. The performance of a second jazz-inspired piece, Maarten Altena's Tik, for large mixed ensemble, with insistent, ticking percussion and tortured, scraping guitar solos, was stronger.
The opening work, Steve Reich's Pendulum Music (four feedback-producing microphones set swinging over four loudspeakers until the sound evens out), proved the height of inanity. Time Textures for piano (John Godfrey) and electronics by Leon Milo didn't succeed in transcending a reliance on post-Webernian cliche. And while Zack Browning's zany Sole Injection for amplified violin and amusingly robotic computer-generated tape was delivered with real pzazz by Brona Cahill, the nasty, raspy edge of the amplification proved a barrier to enjoyment.
