Rubiks Collective is a joyful and highly respected ensemble that has played a big role in performing new music. Rubiks’ four members are especially committed to promoting the works of female composers around the globe. Their dedication to collaborating with young Australian composers is an inspiration, with premier performances given pristine and skilled artistic presentation; the Primrose Potter Salon is a perfect venue for uniting musicians, audience, composers, friends and students in an intimate setting for their regular performances.
With a Ph D in composition, highly educated and creative Cypriot composer Maria Kaoutzani is based in Chicago. Her work has been described as focussing on “colour and texture as the central elements” with “instruments functioning as a unified entity that evolves in time”. Program notes were essential to describe her Five Love Songs as pieces exploring five emotional states. 1. Leave It Open began with a repeated colourful fanfare-like tonal chord that dissolved and softened to a single sustained pitch on solo flute, replaced next by a long held high cello tone, and percussion and then piano adding scattered repeated short abstract tones. Solo cello formed a link to 2. Thru Traffic, a more energetic, but quite restrained and orderly segment driven by busyness and lightness from drumkit and closed high-hat activity, with piano also adding random or regular patterns, softening and sustaining, to link with 3. Yield. Sparse and gentle, vibraphone ostinatos suggested an Oriental calmness in 4. Merge, with 5. Only Time re-visiting elements from previous movements, instruments sharing sustained or percussive solo lines to gradually close the piece. However, the “distinct emotional states, virtuosic solos or rich counterpoint” described in the program notes were not significantly recognisable in the structure of the score. Repeated elements of sustained pitches and short instrumental solos offered little musical variety or gave the audience a true showing of Rubiks’ performing capabilities.
A two-time finalist in the APRA Art Music Awards, creative composer Alice Chance approached her work Heirloom, also within a frame of minimalism, by using some colourful musical elements from outside Western culture; but much repetition with few building blocks – her reflections on immigration and mother-daughter relationships – were connected through voiceover readings and one songline text. Pre-recordings gave us the link through time and distance – the single line “You are slipping away”, sung as in natural folk-like repeated short melody, repeated regularly throughout by fifteen women from five different families. Described generously as “staggered polyphony, canon and homophonic unison”, the recordings of unaccompanied voice were raw and personal, occasionally with a second voice overlapping on entry, or a sweet child’s solo touching the heart. Perhaps visuals added to the performance could have strengthened the audience’s understanding of the women through time, place and relationship, to amplify the colour and understanding of the many repetitions of the vocal phrase. Rubiks Collective musicians sensitively added a centrally important repeated drone, providing unity to the soundscape’s continuously repeated bare, timeless intervals on keyboard and later vibraphone – the latter played unconventionally with a string bow on the edge, to add a haunting, heavenly reach of tone colour.
Pre-recorded spoken monologue told us the story of a treasured family jewel box being passed on, with cello then adding legato picture painting with a sustained stepwise rising pattern. On flute and glockenspiel the repeated melodic “hook” became more hypnotic with each “You are slipping away “ reprise and a French text recalled family traditions and memories of lives in foreign lands. Intensified dynamics with bass drum and overlapping voices in simple canon form heralded the closure with all voices, hymn-like, fading to pianissimo, a lone piano giving the final gentle response. Rubiks musicians gave us a beautiful ending for a work that at times was a little laboured with its repetitious text and minimalist elements of long sustained single pitches and drones. It was music stripped bare conveyed in a colourful and gentle interpretation of the composer’s reflections.
Photo supplied.
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Julie McErlain reviewed “Towards Home”, presented by Rubiks Collective: Tamara Kohler (Flutes), Gemma Kneale (Cello), Jacob Abela (Keyboards) and Kaylie Melville (Percussion), at the Melbourne Recital Centre, Primrose Potter Salon on August 25, 2023.
