Continuum contemporary music

Press, 16 October 1989, Page 6

Continuum contemporary music

Continuum Contemporary Music Ensemble, in the Town Hall Auditorium, October 14, at 7 p.m. Reviewed by Paul Goodson. Continuum’s “New Music Prelude" brought together two very contemporary New Zealand compositions: David Hamilton’s “Kaleidoscope” (1987) and David Liebert’s “Hiawatha Goes Hunting” (1989). As far as assessing a new piece is concerned, the music critic is not primarily concerned with its internal scaffolding. In Hamilton’s. “Kaleidoscope,” the analyst may well identify various minimalist elements, and uncover numerical sequences which find their musical correspondents. The critic, on the

other hand, looks to the translation of these devices into music of structural integrity and coherence, inventiveness, and with the power to communicate and to satisfy.

Hamilton knows where he is going. He is an adroit craftsman who is able to muster a goodly array of interlocking melodic and rhythmic motifs from which to fashion a coherent whole. I question his orchestration — doubled oboe, clarinet, bassoon and horn — simply because these reiterated fragments do not achieve maximum point when bandied around among instruments of such timbral and tonal proximity.

Initially, the sustained legato passage which occurs mid-way, seemed to have no obvious en : trance and departure points from the perky ostinato figures. But when these prolonged notes turned into a type of c’antus firmus for the return of the spiky, rhythmic figures, the texture — and the piece as a whole — discovered coherence after all.

This quality of coherence I found noticeably absent from Liebert’s “Hiawatha Goes Hunting.” The composer’s notes to this work read as a curious mishmash of stammering morality and half-digested aesthetics. Nor, in performance, could I

discern how the “unmasking” of “stylised natural sounds” as musical material actually takes place.

The declaiming of part of Longfellow’s poem had very tenuous connections with the meandering oboe line, various percussive interjections and synthesiser, which presumably acted as textual interpreters. Any piece rooted in self-conscious artiness cannot be realised in structureless, arbitrary and inchoate musical language.

Liebert should dispense with “music with a message,” and reexamine some basic rudiments of how sonic connections are made and communicated.