by George Grella
“Against The Prevailing Order” Joan La Barbara + Ne(x)tworks, “Angels, Demons and Other Muses” // Yael Acher-Modiano + Irina-Kalina Goudeva
Joan La Barbara presented an opera in progress, Angels, Demons and other Muses, with Ne(x)tworks as part of the Interpretations series at Roulette last week. Her stated goal is to produce an abstract work that conveys the struggle and process of artistic creation. How this will ultimately play out is not clear, as without knowing what might be currently missing from the piece it’s impossible to fairly judge it as a work that succeeds or fails at its goals, but the performance was involving and mysterious, with a sense of time and motion that seem appropriate for the subject and moments of dramatic music. The playing seemed to be about producing a dream state, or revealing one in a way that involved the audience, who were seated around various stations around the floor, surrounding the musician located at each. The score at violinist Cornelius Duffalo’s stand was a mix of instructions, set in a particular sequence, along with a few passages of specifically notated pitches and rhythms – a minor key scale here, a series of sustained notes there. La Barbara, wandering dreamily through the crowd, vocalizing into a hand-held mic, led the musicians through their cues. Her voice was reproduced on a surround sound speaker system, and the sense of her being both right there and everywhere tickled alluringly at the base of the neck.
Opera is drama, and because the experience of people singing their drama is artificial and abstract, interior drama is an ideal field. The interior artistic process is as abstract a human drama there is, perhaps even impossible to convey, and so Angels is a tremendously ambitious and challenging idea, and what was heard hints that it may work. It began with what could pass as an overture, with a crescendo of voice, percussive playing of the piano strings and a lamenting, minor key phrase passed around the strings. An audio file of sounds that could have represented both an interior and exterior environment bridged the piece to a quiet, pixilated part; this all could be heard as an interior journey. The emphasis was on texture and moods, extremely dreamlike, an effective representation of the wandering mind seeking insight. The sounds of the piece — and it is the timbres that mattered most — seemed to be excavated from the recesses of memory and imagination; the ensemble includes bells and a glass harmonica, and those instruments already have a mysterious psychoacoustic power to evoke memories, even false ones, and La Barbara adds some particular features, including the string players blowing into their F-holes and a striking moment when the players put down their instruments and pick up hats. They stage whispered into the crown, opening it up like a plunger mute on a trumpet, and with this technique wandered through the audience, whispering into people’s ears. I thought I could pick out the words ‘nemos’ and ‘fish,’ but perhaps that was my imagination playing tricks with me, which may indeed be the point. It was tantalizing.
After this, the music made a transition to a series of microtonal chords, the returned to the lamenting quality heard at the start. This sounded like a natural ending, a circumscribed expression of the essence of Romantic poetry, but the performance continued for a few more minutes, although with a loss of focus and invention. The structure of the music was best served when it was wandering and developing a landscape, while repetition seemed to add the weight of a frame that didn’t quite fit. The ideas and the music were involving, though, and this is a work that deserves a full performance.
Angels was followed by more dramatic music that worked out ideas of structure and improvisation, an involving and powerful duet performance from flutist Yael Acher-Modiano and Irina-Kalina Goudeva, who danced, sang and played the bass, at times simultaneously. From the first vocalization by Goudeva from behind a curtain, the music and performance went without pause through a series of pieces by Acher-Modiano, Julia Tsenova and Bo Jøger, comprising Two-Walk: A Multi Media Electro-Acoustic Performance. The playing was committed and accomplished, but the music expressed a difficult aesthetic. This was, fundamentally, ritualistic but without the context of known ceremonies to gain some insight into significance and meaning. Goudeva caressed and seduced the bass in a soliloquy, then sang while accompanying herself with bowed and plucked notes.
The ease of her playing was deeply impressive, but what she was playing seemed at a tangent to my experiences and comprehension. Acher walked in slowly from the wings, wearing a catlike mask and playing the flute; that it had a meaning was clear but the meaning itself was opaque. Her sound was frequently processed and in particular stretches she played along with a buzzing, beeping, burbling electronic accompaniment. Both women improvised expressively, seamlessly integrating their playing into the idiomatic structure of each piece. There were familiar sounding elements, especially a bluesy little flute line in Acher’s Audio Mirage, and a repeated fluttery figure she fell back on. Goudeva improvised on her instrument, her voice, and appeared to be making up text and abstract narrative on the spot during Shoshana Shelli (The Flower). But these elements were as disturbing to me as they were attractive and admirable; the flute sound was processed in such a way as to create a timbre that had a strong touch of the unnatural, the bass playing, singing and movement seemed to belong to a culture so alien as to be unearthly. The music was overwhelmingly affecting, but in an almost horrific way for me; I thought of Artaud, Huysmans, and a particular short story by Brian Evenson, which, in it’s combination of inventively baroque language and nightmarish subject, is constantly compelling and frightening in equal measure. An extraordinary performance, but not for everyone.