MUSIC: Composing for art

Transcription

1 Art installation MUSIC: Composing for art BY GWEN ANSELL, OCTOBER , 09:01

2 Refusal of Time. Picture: COURTESY OF THE ARTIST

3 Paper Mu FM Edition: October ON STAGE, a stately, schoolmistress-like Ann Masina instructs her fellow singer, an increasingly anxious Jo-Anna Dudley, in the Fanagalo terms for the uses of a tree a book; a pencil; a chair; ashes to a score by Phillip Miller. Projected behind them, artist William Kentridge s hands employ brush and ink on a canvas of book pages to reconstruct the tree, but also some much darker images: alongside the pencil, a gibbet and a coffin. At Florence s Bargello Museum, where the work Paper Music premiered earlier this year, the audience clearly appreciated one of the work s faces, the playfulness of its mood. On October 27, it aired again at New York s Carnegie Hall, at the start of the month-long, citywide Ubuntu season celebrating SA s two decades of democracy through music of all genres. In that context, as Miller points out, the music and libretto have many other resonances. "There s the problematic but rich history of that manufactured language and how it was used, and the reversal of historical roles as Masina teaches Dudley those words," he says. The playfulness has a manic edge, reflecting "what a crazy history we ve come through, and what a madness apartheid was". Paper Music also includes retrospective reflections on Kentridge s Soho Eckstein series, and other new songs including "a lullaby to put a Jo burg house to sleep" based on the tunes produced by urban alarm systems and the texts of their instruction books. It is one of two collaborations between Miller and the artist this year. The other, the critically acclaimed installation Refusal of Time commissioned for Dokumenta 2013 opens at the Johannesburg Art Gallery on November 9. Refusal of Time explores, from the starting point of conversations between Kentridge and American scientist Peter Galison, theories of time and the uses of time to discipline and punish populations.

4 The interlocked ticking of monstrous metronomes and other Kentridge images, are woven with brass, voices, dance from Dada Masilo and the concertina sounds of maskandi musician Bham Ntabeni. Both projects reflect Johannesburg-born Miller s fascination with the sounds of texts and voices, as well as the content of what they say. Over the years, Miller has worked on many different compositional tasks: film scores (including the Ingrid Jonker biopic Black Butterflies and the Emmy-nominated The Girl) but also historical works such as the Truth & Reconciliation Commission cantata Rewind, and documentaries such as Rehad Desai s Marikana investigation, Miners Shot Down. Collaborations with Kentridge and his texts have threaded through his career since "Whenever we return to work together, there s a wonderful sense of intuitive understanding, trust and sharing," Miller says. "Conventionally, one is handed text and then asked to score it. We no longer do that. There s an ongoing interplay of image and sound between us, with each challenging how one reads the other." He also reflects that Kentridge s studio context and the presence of other collaborators all build "an ensemble of creativity and there s joy in that. The notion of the artist or composer locked away alone in a garret somewhere creating is not what it s about." In music, the concepts underlying the Refusal of Time have many aspects. While any performance is, of course, finite, Miller says in his score for the installation he drew from African musical tradition a cyclical approach that rejects linear development. He focused on the time, beat and pulse of the music, and on polyrhythms, crafting a circular rhythmic structure that speeds up and slows down, mirroring what he calls Kentridge s "zoetrope visuality". Even so, is it possible for a composer to reverse time? Kentridge nominated a song from the height of 19th-century art music, Berlioz s Spectre de la Rose, whose theme is the brevity of life and love. Miller began by trying to reverse the music "but that would be meaningless for listeners who did not recognise the song". Then, having discovered Berlin-based Dudley s "extraordinary" approach to vocal material, he took fragments of the song and reversed and slowed the sounds of the words for her "and suddenly, you really are playing with time". The result became the track Berlioz Breakdown. There are other sonic links uniting Miller s music and Kentridge s concepts. The artist s musings on the pneumatic clocks of Paris find echoes in the pulses of air that make the sound of brass instruments and the squeeze-box concertina, for which Miller scored. Inevitably, those sounds recall SA s legacy music. But he feels labelling them merely "retro" misses another important meaning of sound through time for any SA composer. "It s certainly not nostalgia. For a start, it s not my nostalgia. But when my music is informed by working with Ann, or Bham, or a percussionist such as Tlale Makhene and their repertoire, that s part of a process of connection and reconnection that apartheid blocked," says Miller. "When I was growing up, a white Jewish boy in Jo burg, I d hear through, for example, a Shembe Church meeting with its robes and those long bugles on the Melville Koppies, an echo in the city of a huge and, for me, hidden wealth of cultural content. And then, five years ago, I was able to go to an actual ceremony and I was welcomed. That s not about the past. It s about something important happening to us, here and now," Miller asserts. Such striking interplay of past and present happens in Miller s other work, too. He is still touring and developing Extracts From the Underground, a cantata/installation about the lives and histories of miners. He s also completing the soundtrack for a major CBC television drama series based on Canadian writer Lawrence Hill s award-winning 2007 novel The Book of Negroes. The book narrates the story of West African slaves who eventually returned to Sierra Leone.

5 Touring in Italy, Miller had encountered West African griot and kora player Madia Diabate, and recruited him for the soundtrack. At one point, Diabate sings a historical slave song, "and that", says Miller, "was a real goose-bump moment for us all".