Archaic symphonies

Music so sweeps us along that we become inured to the details.  For example, we are rarely aware of the otherwise inexplicable dinner jackets of the orchestral players.  Some groups have chosen to make their uniforms emblems of their modernity, rejecting  this nineteenth-century hangover.  But even they remain blind to another anachronism, one so deep-seated that it hardly seems an issue.

It is a question of instruments.  Like the dinner jacket, the instruments of the orchestra are essentially fossils, the orchestra a snapshot taken a hundred years ago.  Even the most iconoclastic music of its time – Schoenberg, Varese, Stockhausen, Boulez – has been largely written for the same instruments that Beethoven would have known.  Musical instruments are latter-day Vicars of Bray, analogues of the transparent characters who seem to thrive whatever the regime, the style, the rules.

It is true that some composers have dabbled with new possibilities.  Percy Grainger was fascinated by alternative tunings for pianos; Cage has “prepared” pianos by inserting objects between the strings; and Stockhausen is only one of a long line of composers who have seen synthesisers as a way of extending the range of sounds available.  Yet all of these concentrate on the result not the means, and remain tied to the physical forms of earlier instruments, notably the keyboard.

A step beyond these limits was made by the performance artist Laurie Anderson.  By placing contact microphones on her head, her shoulders and her torso, each of which triggered a different percussion sound generated by a synthesiser, she was able to “play” her body.  In a way she had fused the formerly peripheral act of body movements with the instrumental consequences which flowed from them.

This procedure has been refined in Michel Waivisz’s instrument known as “The Hands”.  As its name suggests, this consists of a pair of glove-like devices, fitted over the hands.  When worn, they look like weird prosthetic limbs trailing wires to distant and controlling computers  In fact they control the computers which in turn control banks of synthesisers feeding loudspeakers placed around the performance space.  Each “hand” has a series of buttons worked by the fingers; in addition it has sensors which can detect the orientation of the hand – whether it is turned up, down or to the side – as well as the relative position of the hands with respect to each other.  Different orientations and positions result in different sounds emerging from various speakers.

The result is extraordinary.  Waisvicz stands on the stage, his hands weighed down with these bionic extensions.  By moving his fingers and flipping his hands he seems to conjure sounds out of the air like a shaman, hurling them around like rocks.  He acts out everyone’s fantasy of causing music to be, simply by conducting it; but unlike a conductor who shapes details, he truly creates.  Moreover, he achieves this cerebral feat with a physicality not usually seen outside discos: he is dancing too.  In the face of this totally absorbing and uniquely novel experience, it is a nice irony that Waisvicz calls his work “The Archaic Symphony”.

(17.10.89)

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