ELISION: Philosophy Defining a
Performance Practice

Daryl BUCKLEY
Artistic Director, ELISION Ensemble

 . . .  an uncompromisingly radical attitude to the presentation of the music, treating each piece as a score for a total art work, involving installation artists to design the sets for their performances and taking their audiences on a journey, not only through the music but through the performance space itself.
--Edward SCHEER RealTime 18

In its ten years, ELISION ensemble has always grappled with some of the more difficult questions in new music: the relation of sound to body to environment  . . .  Their explorations feed into new works, feed new conceptions of musician and repertoire.
--Zsusanna SOBOSLAY RealTime 15

Two dynamics mark and define the late twentieth century. Globalism, accelerated by the internationalisation of the world economy and ever enhanced forms of communication through technological reach, co-exists in a complex way with the drive to the local, the specific, and the need to define a point of cultural closure as a solution to the crisis of identity.

The culture that does not exist in a sea of influences and change is an impossibility. Correspondingly, the idea of a pure or perfect monocultural condition is totally utopian. From this point of view all cultures are inevitably `multicultural´. The only possibility of any permanence that can be arrived at is by definition with a dead culture; one frozen in history books and locked away forever behind the simple signage of a museum exhibition.

At any one moment, a seemingly endless array of `surfaces´ offering points of exchange, contact, and cultural interaction exist and, of course, it is at these borders where such exchange takes place, that a lot of artistic endeavour strives to locate itself.

With respect to ELISION Ensemble, I have viewed these borders as crucial territories of investigation and as central to the character, and the narrative of the ensemble. These borders, I felt, were to be found within the instrumental history and practice of the Western contemporary music ensemble, the relationship between the performer and composer, and the types of performance that could be constructed, recontextualising the relationship between performer and audience as well as between different modes of performance practice.

It seemed critical, therefore, in realising a successful ensemble practice, to also focus upon a highly personal investigation of new music in order to develop new responses, new imaginings and in so doing, to redefine the possibilities for the ensemble as a performance vehicle.

To realise this sense of the personal meant the articulation of an `identity´--even at the most simplistic level, exploring the idiosyncrasies of players and instruments, ranging from er-hu to viola, angklung to marimba, guitar to sitar, and the corresponding variety of techniques available to them. These are experiences that can set in train an active examination of influences that are non-referential yet firmly possible through the elements of cultural exchange that are available to anyone today.

The placing of an ensemble's activity within international forums and the viewing of the ensemble as a vehicle for a variety of cross-fertilisations and global partnerships are essential aspects in the strategy of developing an interpenetrating and complex set of influences. The whole Italian strain of ELISION's activities emerged from this process as did in fact the original instrumental make-up, determined by 1985 Melbourne performances of Petrassi's Second Serenata Trio (for harp, mandolin and guitar). The recent PACIFICA programme, performed for the Fourth Brisbane Biennial Festival of Music, brought into play a raft of creative talent from Japan, Korea, Norway, the Netherlands and Australia. Works such as the River of Karuna II by Akira NISHIMURA demonstrated a successful timbral relationship between Japanese Court music and recent extended contemporary practice (multiphonics, glissandi, and string harmonics).

Another border, and a major area of cross-fertilisation for ELISION and its composers, is contact with other art-forms, accessing the pre-disciplinary creative impulses that can spill out in this type of exchange. Composers engaged in a dynamic conversation with other artforms can spark a reconceptualisation of musical thought and extend the reach and form of available documentation, thereby creating a labyrinth of influences further `individuating´ the role of the ensemble.

The resultant outcomes displaying these strands of thought include the collaboration with Handspan Puppet Theatre of 1989 and, more recently, The Oresteia of Liza LIM and Barrie KOSKY, the Bar-do'i-thos-grol, Opening of the Mouth and scherbentöne  . . .  ausgewirbelt installations, as well as the chamber works Koto, negatives and Sei Haiku.

Opening of the Mouth is a site specific installation for 10 musicians, two singers and conductor using electronics and tape developed with composer Richard BARRETT and installation artist Crow. The work was written for ELISION and commissioned by the The Festival of Perth, Australia.

`Opening of the Mouth´ is a name ascribed to a ritual performed in ancient Egypt during the souls transition between life and afterlife. The dead person's mouth is touched by one or more amuletic objects to restore the powers of speech to that person, a recovery of language and experience, thereby enabling the dead soul to bear witness to the events and actions of its life.

Richard BARRETT comments that

`the "mouth" of the poet Paul CELAN produced a complex constellation of images including that of giving a voice to the dead, to those whose mouths were empty before being closed. Celan's language itself is a language from beyond the destruction of the German language by the Nazis, the "thousand darknesses of deathbringing speech" in Celan's own words, its "bearing witness" also a witness to its own impossibility as, between 1945 and 1970 (the year of Celan's suicide by drowning), the poems were distilled from lyric utterances to hard and opaque fragments: concretions of a need and an inability to articulate something which is both more and less than memory.

`The composition of the music began from a contemplation of these two strands of influence, resulting in a work which embeds settings of four Celan poems within a large musical structure as a kind of journey through an (inward) underworld.´

Also existing in the work are two streams of thinking, one compositional (Barrett) and one installation-focussed (Crow), that share in common an obsession and interest in the decay and collapse of structures which are simultaneously involved in the growth and proliferation of new forms. These structures also then collapse to give rise to further `organic objects´ in states of decay, mapping the ambiguities that are brought into play through the interaction and collision of images produced by the overlaying of Celan with the Egyptian Book of the Dead.

These ambiguities inform the music: not only in the obvious use of text, but in the work itself, as a `soundscape´ through which the listener voyages across the harassment of an industrial sound nightmare into acoustic then alternatively electronic sections--notated and then again improvised. At even smaller levels of compositional detail, there is a journey through changing worlds of notation, intonation systems, ancient and contemporary instrumental technologies and ultimately the very dissection of the work itself into a collage in the manner of cutting and splicing a film.

Foundry, Midland Railway
Workshops, scene of
Opening of the Mouth.
Photo: Ashley de Prazer

The Midland Railway Workshops in Perth, Western Australia, site of the initial performances of this work, was a centre for a community of people who lived and worked in that area since the turn of the century. Recently made non-operational through government decisions, the site has fallen into disuse but still contains artefacts and objects belonging to the recently departed workforce. The workshops offered a highly suggestive location for the installation. The multiple presences of graffiti, keys, tools laid down to rest, huge crucibles, the metal basins of the washrooms, dust and web covered machinery previously used for transforming molten metal into rolling stock and detritus strewn floors constantly being marked and remarked by the passage of nocturnal animals that have now made the workshops their home; all of these elements provided the raw material for imbuing the work with sense of transformation, a flickering and constant transition between the Egyptian and Celan texts as sources of influence.

One room of the installation was semi-divided by photocopy toner spilled evenly across the floor to form a perfectly black surface, initially featureless, bordered by wine bottles partly filled to different levels with milk. In some of the bottles small metal or wooden objects were placed, perhaps a nail, a piece of wood, a stick or refuse. The resultant discolouration from the leaching out of substances from the inserted material and the variegated coloured moulds that came to fill the bottles, paralleled the daily redesign of the surface laid out by the photocopy toner. Roof debris would drift down to provide yet another layering and the tracks of insects, snakes and marsupials would constantly reform the mosiac, tracings and hieroglyphic scratchings they had imparted to the black `sand´ in previous days.

From Crow's installation,
Opening of the Mouth.
Photo: Ashley de Prazer

Former acid vats filled with decaying fish heads and skins, tables and cupboards littered with crushed skull-like melons, dessicated peppers jammed tightly together, strange-looking exotic fruits, a metal bowl filled with tar into which carrots were impacted, causing, in the heat of the Perth summer, the tar to bubble up and form a scrotum around the withered vegetables, potatoes crucified with large nails and impacted hard onto shattered red screens flinging a bloody light on to a sand pit masking the tender placement of small candles in the shrine of a burnt-out oven; all these installed and found objects generated a landscape that scattered the curious audience in its meanderings to a concert performance at the end of a foundry.

The location of the workshops between urban Perth and the surrounding rural and bush environment also neccessitated a very real journey for the audience to a place familiar through recent controversy but, in reality, for most, an unseen geographic presence. The name `midland´ referred also, aptly enough, to some in between place, an edge of civilisation and `knowing´, announcing a stop-over point in long-time past stock journeys made between Perth and distant stations throughout Western Australia.

Richard BARRETT,
Opening of the Mouth
Mary OLIVER's part for
hardanger fiddle
Large version

Interestingly enough, the composition itself began from Barrett's contemplation of the players involved--their names formed the score page rather than their respective instruments and their instrumental and vocal abilities are directly incorporated as compositional parameters.

Previously, in the Bar-do'i-thos-grol (Tibetan Book of the Dead) installation-performance realisations in Lismore (1994) and also at the Midland Railway Workshops (1995), ELISION had explored aspects of the nature of the apprehension of sound and the positioning of musicians across the `wastelands´ of a car and house wrecker's yards. Recycled elements and the circumstances that formed them were brought to the fore. Vehicles contained histories of families and individuals, abandoned personal spaces earmarked by graffiti and lost letters, tiny amulets and toys still suspended inside the car-the inanimate animae of human existence also evident in the worker's footprints in the sand at the railway workshops.

At Lismore, Domenico De CLARIO's interpretation of the chakras (a system of energy centres) within a site resulted in a work of seven two-hour interpolations (the `performance´) into a week where the non-performance times and spaces were viewed as being integral to the structure of the work. As with Opening of the Mouth, the elements of the work combine to provide hints, ambiguities and traces that an audience can reconstruct in their own mind both during the performed event and at a later date. De Clario is a non interventionist artist. His work refuses didacticism. A future installation project, EAR/th, to be located within the silver and copper mine of the University of Queensland, will involve Timothy O'DWYER, composer and improviser, as well as de Clario.

Within the domain of concert hall activity two composers who have been central to the ensemble's history have been Liza LIM and Richard BARRETT.

Koto by Liza LIM, scored for 13-string koto, flute/piccolo, oboe d'amore, flügelhorn, viola, two 'cellos and percussion consisting of a steel drum, bass drum and five glass bottles, was composed for ELISION in 1993.

Satsuki ODAMURA
at the koto, with
Geoffrey MORRIS
Photo: Heidrun Löhr

Lim thought of the total ensemble as a single entity, as a gigantic gong within which each single instrument sounded its own set of rich and complex inharmonic partials of that gong. The koto acts to seed sound, providing a central thread in this vibrating mass and the manner in which this seeding takes place is informed by the observation of Satsuki ODAMURA's performance.

Lim says:

`Two characteristics of the koto as an instrument give clues as to how I deal with the rest of the ensemble and the shape of the piece in general: the percussive playing action of striking the string with the plectrum; and the subsequent resonance of the string which the musician inflects by depressing and releasing the string on the other side of the bridge as the sound decays into silence  . . .  I was also fascinated by the choreographic and calligraphic nature of the koto performance, the fluid movements of Satsuki Odamura, always playing with a sense of the silences within and between the notes.´

Liza LIM Koto
Bars 1 to 3
Large version

The koto provides the plucked attack characteristic, with its resonances amplified by the viola which is also engaged in modifying the sound through its inflections. The viola's resonance opens up into a spray of harmonics that are a kind of gateway for the entry of the two 'cellos playing harmonics, making calligraphically determined movements over the string.

During the course of the piece, there is a movement away from the very precisely notated inflections and ornaments to the graphic representation of these figures. The musicians, in the course of the piece, learn a style of ornamentation with which they can then embellish notes in their own way and which varies radically from performance to performance.

Liza LIM Koto
Excerpt from near end
Large version

With the composer Richard BARRETT, the specific location of his compositional explorations in the musculature of the player also reinvents the players' relationship with their instruments. A choreography of movement and technique, physical and mental stamina, evolves in dealing with a piece that can be at times violent in its demands upon performers. This approach is particularly evident in Barrett's negatives cycle, and its evolution through rehearsal to concert and recording has structured, in turn, how the composer himself can hear sound.

Previous works such as Another heavenly day had centred upon the idea of simultaneous but unconnected musics, exploring their way through various extremes until extinction. The negatives cycle, also surrounded by a rich plethora of non-musical influences and experiences, traces for the composer some kind of journey, in this case a `river´ terrain. This is blatantly illustrated by the titles of individual movements: delta, archipelago, and enstellt prefaced by the description `shattered landscapes of percussion´. The final moments of the cycle expressed in a flute and violoncello duo override with crushing intensity the jangled, plucked, and scraping utterances elicited from the ensemble as it winds down in a somewhat distorted `march of drunken welsh dwarfs´. Highly virtuosic solos for the 10-string guitar, mandolin and trombone, leave their resonances. The cycle, in some sense, is a river that carries its own material with it, a highly transgressive flotsam and jetsam.

As an artistic director, I have regarded ELISION as a composition in itself, a vibrant cross-fertilisation of influences and processes. At the micro-level, this involves the histories of the individuals who have been involved with the group (performers, composers, writers, artists, and others). At the macro-level, there is the dynamic and contrapuntal weaving of these elements in which a richness of surface activity (concerts, cross-media events, recordings, other kinds of documentation) is underpinned by a depth of engagement with the evolving histories of the group's cultural environments.

A version of this article first appeared in the Australian Music Centre's Sounds Australian magazine, and is reprinted with permission. Score excerpts are reproduced with permission of United Music Publishers (Richard BARRETT Opening of the Mouth) and G. Ricordi, Milano (Liza LIM Koto).