Tune-in to percussionist and UC San Diego Music graduate student Michael Jones’ D.M.A. recital “A Life of Metal” on Friday, March 12 at 5:00 p.m. PST on the UC San Diego Music Youtube channel!
“A Life of Metal” takes its name from political philosopher Jane Bennett’s work Vibrant Matter. In this book, Bennett asks how we can theorize the objects and materials that constitute our experiences, economies, thoughts, and perceptions as vibrant, energetic, or perhaps even “alive.” The works on this program, Mani. Gonxha by Pierluigi Billone and dust by Rebecca Saunders, resonate with this faith in materials, and in these specific cases metals, as “actants” rather than objects. In these pieces the activity of the metal spreads itself through a network of air, wood, felt, plastic, yarn, skin, flesh, and bone, until confidence in the distinctness of these co-actors weakens. At the core of this program is a fascination with resonance as a connecting, co-activating force, and how the material of metal embodies this.
PROGRAM:
Pierluigi Billone (b. 1960) - Mani. Gonxha (2011)
Rebecca Saunders (b. 1967) - dust (2017/2018)
Mani. Gonxha
A prayer. Mani.Gonxha is an intensely intimate ritualistic experience for the performer that becomes naked and exposed when placed in front of an audience. It is as if one were to visit a church and find someone deep in personal prayer; this moment of great significance for the individual creates a somewhat unsettling but captivating situation for the observer. Through the use of two Tibetan singing bowls – traditionally sacred instruments used as a signal to begin and end periods of silent meditation – Billone extracts a rich soundscape featuring a variety of impacts, timbres, resonances and harmonics one would not imagine could be produced by a single source. The bowls are an extension of the hands (Mani). They become part of the performer, just as the performer himself becomes part of the resonating body. The slightest contact between various materials – metal, skin, bones, torso, and voice – multiplies and propagates sound through the performing body and into the open. Gonxha is a reference to Mother Teresa’s Albanian birth name, Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu. Furthermore, Gonxhe in Albanian translates to “bud”, or the “knoblike growth on a plant that develops into a flower,” much like the elaborate sonic universe that is developed from the simple source of two singing bowls.
dust
dust / d?st / n.: a fine, dry powder of tiny particles of waste matter or earth. A film of dust is a like a membrane, covering or layering the body or thing, on the ground, on surfaces or carried in the air.
The dust of the earth is a place of burial.
Dust within a room is composed mostly of dead skin, a powder of mortal remains.
"...not a sound only the old breath and the leaves turning and then suddenly this dust whole place suddenly full of dust when you opened your eyes from floor to ceiling nothing only dust and not a sound only what was it it said....come and gone in no time gone in no time." That Time, Samuel Beckett
"...all these words, all these strangers, this dust of words, with no ground for their settling, no sky for their dispersing, coming together to say, fleeing one another to say, that I am they, all of them, those things that merge, those that part, those that never meet, and nothing else, yes, something else,....a wordless thing in an empty space..." The Unnameable, Samuel Beckett
Inside, withheld, unbreathed,
Nether, undisclosed.
Souffle, vapour, ghost,
hauch and dust.
Absent, silent, void
Naught beside. Either, neither, sole,
Unified.
RS
dust is a solo for two, each their own. An homage to Christian Dierstein and Dirk Rotbrust for the (many) wonderful sound sessions over the years. Each performer creates their own version, defined by their own instruments and the chosen juxtaposition of up to eight separately composed modules.
The fallible physical body behind the sound, feeling the weight of sound, exploring the essence of a timbre, seeking the grit and noise within. Surface, weight and touch are the essence of musical performance: the weight of a heavy beater resounding on the drum skin; the bow drawing the sound out of silence; the differentiation of touch pressing the brushes into the drum skin; the expansion of the muscles between the shoulder blades; the player´s in-breath preceding the played tone...
RS, Berlin 1st April 2018
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