Mark Dresser Trio at Mass MoCA
(NORTH ADAMS, Mass., April 16, 2000)
Like Bunuel and Dali did in their chosen form, Dresser and his trio take
the raw tools of their chosen form, in this case the musical instruments and
the basic rules of composition and improvisation, and explode and invert
them to explore what’s typically hidden or overlooked in performance and
composition.
The result is, like “Un Chien Andalou,” a subterranean voyage, in this case
a sonic one, although at times the music strikes with such visceral shock
and force that to insist on thinking of it only as sound to the exclusion of
other sensations is in itself a limiting point of view.
As heard on Saturday night at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art’
s B-10 Theater – a venue that is fast becoming a haven for the most
experimental, cutting-edge art ever seen or heard in the Berkshires and,
indeed, far beyond – Dresser’s trio is about nothing if not pushing limits.
In a two-act program with intermission, the group played seven original
compositions and accompanied two films, “Un Chien Andalou” and a short
video, “Subtonium,” also with original music.
As an instrumentalist, Dresser gives new meaning to the term “contrabass.”
While on the one hand it is the name of his instrument, more often called
double-bass or just plain bass, the use of the term also slyly evokes
Dresser’s approach to the instrument, which is contrary to any and all
preconceived notions of how a bass can and should be played.
And in flutist Matthias Ziegler and pianist Denman Maroney, Dresser has
found the perfect foils, nay, mirror-images to his style and approach. While
at times Ziegler and Maroney made clear their conventional mastery of their
instruments, they also spent much of the evening exploring the
near-limitless possibilities of what their instruments could do, with only a
bare minimum of electronic effects.
For example, the concert began with the aptly-titled “FLBP,” a 1998
composition by Dresser which began with Maroney scraping the strings of his
“hyperpiano,” while Ziegler blew air through one of his arsenal of
electro-acoustically amplified flutes, which included traditional flute,
piccolo, contrabass-flute, and his own invention, the “Matusi flute,” with a
vibrating membrane of his own design.
Maroney went on to play the inside of his piano with an aluminum mixing
bowl, just one of many ordinary household utensils -- including knives,
bells, mashers, bottles, bars and pieces of rubber -- that he utilized
throughout the evening to elicit a broad palette of sounds.
The sum effect, and this was just the first half-minute of “FLBP,” was what
one might imagine the “music of the spheres” to sound like – the music of
air or space itself, with high-pitched sounds evoking arcs of light from
distant stars.
Soon Ziegler brought the piece back to earth playing, of all things, what
sounded like percussion. Indeed, anyone who thinks that percussion is
limited to drums, or that percussion is not a form of melody, should hear
the Dresser trio. At various times, each instrumentalist assumed the role of
what we conventionally understand to be percussion, and then they
manipulated that percussive element to suggest a melody.
These sorts of revelations were sprinkled throught Dresser’s two-hour
program. His “Digestivo,” an excerpt from a larger work called “Banquet,”
was a kind of inverted pop tune, with inklings of early jazz, blues, and
Thelonious Monk occasionally surfacing through the gauzy scrim of
dissonance. Maroney’s two-handed melody gave each note an odd, crippled
twin, as if they were meant to be played together but could never get in
sequence. Dresser was an aggressive soloist, leaning into his instrument,
spinning it and dancing with it, slapping it, stroking it, chording it,
pulling the strings and singing with it.
Maroney variously made his piano sound like a banjo, a steel drum and yes, a
piano, while Ziegler’s flute evoked a violin and an electric guitar – again,
not through gimmicky MIDI programming, but through simply innovative
approaches to eliciting sounds from the instrument and, with the aid of
amplication, making use of the nearly infinite acoustic possibilities
inherent in them.
The second half of the show began with “Subtonium,” which featured the trio
accompanying a video by the Kunst Brothers, a husband and wife team known in
real life as Alison Saar and Tom Leeser. The video was inspired by a piece
of the same name previously written by Dresser – in a sense, this was a
“music video” arranged to fit the music, albeit music that must be played
live, as per Dresser’s request.
Dresser’s “Subtonium” was in large part an exploration of the undiscovered
acoustic potentialities of his contrabass, and the video was aptly comprised
of subterranean, dark-hued, dreamlike imagery, sort of David Lynch meets
“The Blair Witch Project.” Beginning with a shot of the deep blue sea, the
screen faded to human faces, skeletons, a paper cutout of a house, gambling
dice, an X-ray of a hand, stars, starfish, a Madonna (the original, not the
contemporary), a printed page, a clockface, and a forest.
Seventy years after its creation, “Un Chien Andalou” still has the power to
shock and amuse an audience. Viewers still audibly gasp at the sight of an
eye being sliced by a knife, and Maroney underlined that iconic image with
some appropriately jagged, wiry sounds from his hyperpiano. Dresser’s score
tended to underline the visual content, suggesting either character’s inner
emotional states or commenting on action when something of dramatic impact
took place. Ziegler played a thematic figure with a Balkan resonance
throughout the piece, ranging in mood from jaunty to comic to utterly
terrifying.
Seth Rogovoy rogovoy@berkshire.net music news, interviews, reviews, et al.
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