Burning Water

a review by hilary robinson of
release format Burning Water by Martin Bartlett (CD Album)

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During the seventies and eighties, efforts to advance live electronics pushed composers and technicians on both sides of the Atlantic to develop music software capable of responding to the nuances of live instrumental performance as well as generating music by itself. Interactive systems promised players a partial release from the tyranny of the click-track (a pulse communicated through headphones to keep performers in time with a running tape and/or each other) and audiences a truer, "liver" edge to that awkwardly unfocused event, the electronic music concert. But what did composers themselves do with the technology?

IRCAM spearheaded the evolution of interactive electronics in Europe, and what emerged from that hallowed Parisian bunker was, predictably, something that sounded like a product of IRCAM (a noteworthy example being Pluton by Philippe Manoury, for MIDI piano and live electronics). However, over on the Pacific Coast, the aesthetic possibilities of interactive software went hand in glove with a contemporary blurring of composer-performer roles and it was here that Martin Bartlett began devising his own interactive systems through tinkering with primitive PCs and dedicated synthesisers in a quintessentially West Coast spirit of discovery. Three of the strikingly vivid improvisatory electro-acoustic works his innovations led to are showcased on this Periplum disc, to my knowledge one of only two complete Bartlett collections currently available on CD.

It kicks off with the ever-widening swirls of "Hexachords" (1984), an alluringly pied-piperish amalgam of Peter Hannan's plaintive soprano recorder improvisations with Bartlett's metallic, fluty microtonal electronics. I was entranced by "Hexachords" after a single hearing, on Periplum producer Herb Levy's excellent Mappings Internet radio show. Next, the first of two (highly distinct) versions of "États", for trombone and live electronics (1987), pitches soloist George Lewis into a dialogue with the software. Lewis responds to images on a monitor indicating what sort of musical material his electronic duo partner "likes" in an amusingly flatulent thumbing of noses, by turns humorous and sinister.

The centrepiece of the disc is the vital, fluid "Burning Water" (1979) for computer-controlled live electronics manipulated by the composer. "Burning Water" is intense, concentrated music drawn from the same textural palette as "Hexachords", burbling with incessant motion and harmonic freshness. The final track, a second, more spacious rendering of "États" (chronologically the first recording of the piece here), features cellist Frances-Marie Uitti, with whom Bartlett worked during a residency in Amsterdam. Uitti gives an extraordinarily sensitive account tinged with delicate nostalgia, fascinatingly unlike its trombone equivalent, which serves as a poignant reminder that Bartlett meant his works to be performed as living creations, not fossilised on tape. As such, his premature death in 1993, to quote Matt Rogalsky in the informative liners, leaves his oeuvre in a state of "suspended animation", awaiting rescue and reconstruction by the early music societies of the future. Rogalsky's advice, which I second, is that we enjoy and learn from what we have now. It's a treasure, and for anyone curious about the twentieth-century's more liberated and colourful electro-acoustic explorations, I'd call it required listening. Posted by hilary robinson at 00:00, 25 Sep 2000