Coil
TP 193
Claire Edwardes, percussion

This is one of the best CDs I have listened to this year. In its high quality of performance, and interesting choice of pieces, it demonstrates that Tall Poppies remains one of Australia’s premiére labels.

There are several aspects to this disc that mark it as unusually important. Firstly, it records some of Claire Edwardes’s best playing. The performances are assured, fluid, coherent (where necessary), and pleasantly, refreshingly, straightforward.

The latter attributes are particularly necessary for Coil, Gerard Brophy’s composition that gives the disc its title, and is the first track. Where the title suggested twists and turns, the composition is surprisingly linear. It begins with a repeated motif which returns in varied form. Rather than exploring various possible manifestations of the idea, Coil meanders through its material with little regard to the potential implications of its variations. My hearing of this is different from that of the composer, for whom it forms an ‘intricate web of sound’.

The tension between the straightforward and the complex that Coil establishes, is one which inhabits most of the compositions here. Ross Edwards’s More Marimba Dances are usefully considered with this tension in mind. The earlier dances are some of his most famous music, and Edwards’s fondness for composing them for various instruments, combined with their renown, makes one wonder what extra one gets with more of them. However, this set are surprisingly dark, in a sunnySydney kind of way. They make less of an attempt to present an integration of ‘Edwards’ and his conscious influences. It’s not that he has opted for selfparody, nor of selfcriticism, but they do seem overtly honest about the uneasiness of appropriation, be it of the genre established by the earlier dances or of something else.

Following Edwards is Andrew Schultz’s Winter Ground, for solo vibraphone. The juxtaposition of these pieces is both jarring, and completely right. Listening to this in my warm study, by a window looking out at wintry York on one of its very few brilliantly sunny days, seems entirely appropriate. At first the simple modality of Winter Ground’s opening, follows the marimba dances too well, for they employ this simplicity in radically different ways. On the other hand, their neighbouring makes such differences strikingly apparent. The vaguely mechanistic music with which this piece starts intimates, if not the claustrophobia, then the closeness of being in an interior space. The vague and the mechanical return in a different form later in the piece when the vibraphone’s motor is switched on: the rhythms of the music are disconnected from the rhythms of the motor to create a disconcerting counterpoint. As the motor incessantly articulates the music’s decaying resonances it creates both a sense of momentum and of torpor. This is matched by the constantly varied repetitions of the music. These complications point towards further contrapuntal aspects of the piece such as the careful voicing which generates its own melodic contours. There is a subtle understatement here that is captivating.

This is an attribute shared by Ricketson’s HolSpannenLuiden. It is lovely to hear some quiet music for loud instruments. Similarly, Spannen, for ‘skins’, manages to sound brittle, with hesitant motifs scarcely cohering, like the limits of their incoherence are being tested. It sounds almost like Xenakis’s Peaux played on a collection of antique instruments. This is really a very fine composition, with a modesty both charming and thoroughly engaging. It is audiencefriendly music in the best sense of that term, in that it is also slightly terrifying.

© Michael Hooper