kagablog

“In composing I work like a filmmaker”
Michael Blake

It was Sunday November 18 at 11am when the Michael Blake Ensemble made its Gauteng debut at UNISA’s ZK Matthews Hall in Pretoria, playing the music of Michael Blake. Michael Blake is himself second pianist in the Ensemble that also includes Jill Richards (first piano) , Magda De Vries (marimba) and Frank Mallows (vibraphone). The composer also personally introduced the eight compositions of his that were performed, including four short pieces for solo piano.

These short pieces the composer himself describes as his “workshop, an opportunity to try out techniques that can be developed in subsequent larger-scale compositions”. As such I think Blake would have done better to leave these flimsy sketches behind and contribute another larger-scale composition to the ensemble. Although Jill Richards is South Africa’s finest interpreter of the contemporary piano book the real strength of the Michael Blake Ensemble lies in its ensemble character. These solo piano pieces didn’t stretch Jill out enough to warrant the solo space she was given to perform them.

And there you have my only niggle about an otherwise entrancing concert. The Sonata For Two Pianos pays homage to Schumann to whom Blake attributes the “invention” of the piano quintet. Hang on, what does a piano quintet have to do with a work for two pianos? Well apparently Blake reversed Brahms’ model and transcribed his earlier Piano Quintet for two pianos. Whether one is versed enough in the classical tradition to follow all of Blake’s musicological witticisms and erudite sleight-of-hands is irrelevant - the writing is superb and prompted the doyenne of South African music writing Muff Andersson, who was sitting next to me, to whisper “I’m sure Blake is left-handed”. When, after the concert was over, I asked her what she meant, she explained that composers usually write the difficult bits for the pianist’s right hand but that Blake had dished out equally difficult material for both hands. Perhaps he is ambidextrous? In fact I’m sure that both pianists get to play so much because the composer was keeping as many of the notes that he composed for piano and string quartet in the two piano transcription as he possibly could. His comment about this “I had quite a job giving all the string quartet music to the pianists, mostly to Jill but also some to myself while keeping the original piano part.”

Ways of the Dance, written in 2003, is scored for piano and marimba and vibraphone, both played by Magdalena De Vries. Here the special texture of the Michael Blake Ensemble begins to be heard. The interplay between piano percussion and percussion percussion is extraordinary. Blake cunningly subverts our sense of the piano’s melodic function by writing for the marimba in a highly pianistic way. The piece is apparently inspired by bushman hunting dances. “when you track an animal you must become the animal. tracking is like dancing; because your body is happy you can feel it in the dance and then you know that the hunting will be good.” The quote sheds interesting light on how piano and marimba seem to intertwine and occasionally take each other’s roles over, then slip back, or slip forward i should say, into their own musical territory. One is constantly confronted with the question, which is the hunter? Which the hunted? The piece works admirably on this level, and could almost be described as programmatic, so clearly does it illustrate in musical terms a philosophical paradox. However it does make its point well within the alloted 15minutes and one feels that some judicious editing on behalf of the composer would have allowed a more concise and hence Darwinian composition to emerge.

38a Hill Street Blues was the concert’s opener and a very fine introduction to the Ensemble it is. Magda and Frank get to work out on a mash up between honky tonk stride piano and uhadi bow music of the xhosa in the eastern cape. No i didn’t make that description up, it’s from the programme notes. If i hadn’t read them i would have described the piece as “two early downtown new york minimalists on crack”. And yes, that means i liked it very much.

The musical high point of the morning’s concert was cleverly programmed as the climax, and it really was a perfect case of leaving the best for last. Shoowa Panel, written this year, exhibits Michal Blake’s enthusiasm for traditional african weaving. Unlike Ways Of The Dance, the 12 minutes of Shoowa Panel really didn’t feel like they were enough, it is the sort of mesmerising exercise in repetitions that could go on and on and on. The marimba and vibraphone interlock tensely and then effortlessly, seducing and then jarring, creating an aural shimmer that absolutely does bring to mind the optical effect shown in the photograph of the shoowa panel above. Blake quotes John Gillow’s book about african textiles and i have replaced “embroideress” with “composer” in order to give an insight into how Blake himself sees his approach to composition. “All the patterns come from the imagination of the composer and can change as the work progresses… although there may be one dominant motif, which defines that part of the composition, it is likely that the motif will change as it spreads across the composition in time.”

Michael Blake is an extremely prolific composer but I think that Shoowa Panel is one of his most important works. Important in that it is a model of the kind of composing he does when he “works like a filmmaker”.

As a filmmaker myself I was forced to ponder the exact meaning of that statement, not just in terms of Blake’s composing process, but of my own. I am a filmmaker because I make films. But do I “work like a filmmaker”? Or indeed, do my films “work like films?” And therefore, how do films “work”? How do filmmakers “work”?

I will leave out my own self-searching on this question for another essay, I believe in the answer to this question lies the solution to the “problem” that audiences often have with my films. But getting back to Blake, I believe there is at least one rigorously defendable way in which his compositions work in a way that could be correctly described as “cinematic”. If one thinks of the optical effect of looking out at a visual plane through a long lens. The four-sided frame of the image remains constant as one pulls the focus of the lens, but the pulling of the focus causes the plane of focus to change within the frame. IN other words, although the frame of our vision remains static our attention is constantly being drawn to different aspects within the field of vision. Focus leads out attention, we follow the focusing device with our eyes and hence the image constantly changes while it always stays the same. Michael Blake in his Shoowa Panel composes sound in a manner analagous to how the long lens works. The repetitive nature of the melodic devices is never quite heard in the same way because of the way it is framed and focused in time. Blake lenses his sounds, and in this way his statement “In composing i work like a filmmaker” is true.

“In composing I work like a filmmaker, using montage technique to construct the music.”
Michael Blake

There is another way that Michael Blake composes like a filmmaker and the sentence above clearly explicates his self-reflexivity. I have written this essay in an attempt to allow the form of the essay to illustrate both Michael Blake’s statement, as well as the notion of how a filmmaker works. In other words, I have consciously edited it. The first quote did not represent the full “picture” as it were, of Michael Blake’s statement. It was a teaser, meant to build suspense. The essay milked as much material out of the teaser as possible. The full sentence then appeared as a denouement, it completed the essay that until then had not seemed to need any completion. It fulfilled an emptiness carefully prepared but of which the audience was unaware, an invisible emptiness. Michael Blake creates the inaudible emptiness in order to fill it with sounds whose gravity deserve to rupture the silence. The final bowed vibraphone notes of the Shoowa Panel don’t come out of nowhere. They come out of a carefully prepared engagement with the shimmering of heatwaves above desert sands transformed via the composer’s lens from the optical to the aural. We are fully focused and as the decay of these celestial notes dies away completely, silence is, perhaps for the first time ever, truly golden.