Review: Ascendent Messages at Callaway Auditorium

Ascendent Messages at Callaway Auditorium
Tuesday, February 4, 2025 

Ascendent Messages sits in the serious, high-art end of the Fringe World program, the place reserved for internationally acclaimed artists premiering work that both explores the outer limits of their genre and reflects on major issues confronting the modern world. The primary artists are Jonathan Fitzgerald (classical guitar) and Paul Tanner (percussion). Together they are presenting the world premiere of four commissioned works by contemporary Australian composers and the Australian premiere of one extant piece. The concert will be held this Saturday night at UWA’s Callaway Auditorium. At a preview on Tuesday, a select audience was privileged to witness the works in their pre-premiere form.

There is a very important twist to this show: all five composers are women. The commissioned works were created by Maria Grenfell, Alice Humphries, Kate Milligan, and Kathy Potter, while the extant piece is by the Japanese composer Mayako Kubo.

As Fitzgerald said in a recent X-Press interview:

“… it’s pretty well known that female composers are underrepresented in the western art music canon, but the guitar and percussion genre was one in which gender-diverse composers were particularly poorly represented. We’ve still got a long way to go, but a project like this seemed a great way to start shifting that balance.”

For those unfamiliar with contemporary classical music, it’s important to know that percussion is not limited to drums, cymbals, bells, woodblocks, chimes, gongs, and triangles but extends to include the ‘keyboard’ instruments of marimba, vibraphone, and glockenspiel (AKA carillon). Although Paul Tanner does not play a glock in this show, he does mallet and bow his way through some very complex marimba and vibraphone parts. In all bar one of the pieces, the marimba or vibraphone provides the complex harmonic patterns that counterpoint, harmonise, disrupt, and interweave with Fitzgerald’s dazzling fret work.

The marimba is a beautiful instrument with a warm, rich sound. Its five octaves stretch over two and a half metres, while its wooden keys are amplified through metal resonator pipes. The vibraphone is slightly smaller and has metal keys. Both are played with an array of felted mallets, different sizes for different textures, though the vibraphone has an added advantage in that it can also be played with a violin bow. Running along the edge of the keys, the bow creates an ethereal hum that can send shivers down your spine.

The show opens with Grenfell’s Promenade. Straightaway the audience is thrown into the complexity of virtuoso playing. Watching Tanner’s mallets weave and overlap up and down the keyboard while Fitzgerald’s fingers spider over the frets is mesmerising.

As the composer states, this piece “explores the idea of instruments moving along together at different speeds.” The three movements, Perambulation, Interlude, and Perpetual Motion, increasingly build in tempo. By turns haunting and playful, light and dark, the guitar and marimba run counter to each other, come together, then split apart again. The occasional cymbal and bell punctuate this counterpointing, usually to signal a shift in tempo.

Kathy Potter’s Space Junk is next. Inspired by the debris orbiting the planet, it musically depicts all those defunct satellites and spent rocket boosters that are forming an increasingly chaotic and congested girdle around the earth. The concept for this piece is two disparate pieces of circling junk that form an orbiting union and then drift off into space.

The music begins meditatively but with a dark edge. From remote and gentle, it becomes increasingly fractious and discordant as the bits of junk bond together. Fitzgerald de- and re-tunes his guitar as Tanner bows his vibraphone. The parts fall into orbit when Fitzgerald, engaging his effects rack, loops a powerful bass pattern and layers it with tremolo trills. This builds into a complex and warm rhythm, overlain with bowed vibes, a kind of cosmic dance. The piece grows in intensity and then slowly fades out. Once the loops stop, the random trills and golden hum gently settle.

In introducing Kubo’s Kakurendo, Fitzgerald admitted that he was not sure if this was merely an Australian premiere. Although the piece was commissioned, he could find no record of it ever being performed publicly. As such, this may well be another world premiere.

‘Kakurendo’ is Japanese for ‘hide and seek.’ In this case the audience are the seekers while the musicians ‘hide’ their instruments by playing them in unorthodox ways. The game doesn’t quite work as the audience can see what Fitzgerald and Tanner are doing, but close your eyes and you are completely lost. The guitar sometimes becomes a drum played by knocking and tapping the top and sides, the strings rubbed and flicked as much as picked, while the snare is scratched and swiped, only occasionally fingertip-tapped. The odd notes seem random but aren’t. Maybe it wasn’t meant to be seen, only heard?

Both Fitzgerald and Tanner teach at the UWA Conservatorium of Music, where the Callaway Auditorium is located. Tanner runs a course in Afro-Latin percussion. Fitzgerald is the chair of strings and guitar.

Tanner, a Perth person, has long been prominent in new music circles here. He has an MA in music from San Diego and a doctorate in percussion from the WA Academy of Performing Arts. He came onto the Perth scene in the 1980s, performing with ensembles such as Alea and Nova. He is now the principal percussionist of the Perth Symphony Orchestra and regularly performs with the WA Symphony. With a strong reputation as a virtuoso percussionist, he specialises in the marimba and vibraphone.

Fitzgerald is an American-born Australian. He has bachelor’s and master’s degrees in music from the Cleveland Institute of Music and a doctorate from the Eastman School of Music in New York. His interests range from traditional classical guitar through to the genre’s experimental edge. A virtuoso player, he has performed solo and in ensembles around Australia and the world. He is a member of the Perth Guitar Quartet, with whom he has released several CDs, including West Australian Landscapes (2023), reviewed for X-Press here.

The fourth work in the program was Kate Milligan’s Red Earth Mine. Milligan is another Perth person, but she currently teaches in the Netherlands. She last performed in Perth in 2024, in a multimedia collaboration entitled Tactus presented by Tura New Music at the WA Museum.

Milligan describes Red Earth Mine as “a soundscape for the iron ore mining industry in deep time.” It explores the obsessive dependency that underpins much of the modern world, questioning how it will end and what it will leave behind. Both Milligan’s father and grandfather worked in the mines, though on retirement her father has become a committed environmentalist.

In two movements, Deform and Reform, the piece metaphorically and musically pulls the elements apart and speculates—via improvisation—on their future reconfiguration. A deeply discordant and difficult piece, it captures the sound of an exhausted landscape.

Using a capo and slide, Fitzgerald repeats the same patterns each round a semitone up, while Tanner plays a manic marimba ostinato, broken by taps on a wooden block. A deconstructed landscape, as the intensity builds, an electronic industrial loop is added. The repetitions continue until the capo reaches the tenth fret and can go no further. Brushes on the gong bring the piece to a desolate end.

The concert closed with the title piece, Alice Humphries Ascendent Messages, a work that “explores the ways trees communicate—both through underground mycorrhizal networks and by releasing chemical signals into the air—and considers how humans might receive messages from the earth.”

With bowed vibes and reflective guitar lines that morph into wayward chords, it is both gentle and challenging. Rising dis-chords and modulating ostinatos tell a complex story of the human exploitation of nature. It ends on a sustained humming vibe to a series of haunting guitar runs, a powerful, reflective, and not altogether comfortable place to close this magnificent show.

Ascendent Messages takes you to the outer reaches of classical guitar and percussion. It is not somewhere everyone will want to go; for many, it is too challenging, beyond the realms of enjoyment, but those who make the effort will be richly rewarded. This exciting and adventurous music pushes the boundaries of guitar and percussion to create a new and haunting sonic landscape and reflect on our complex world.

IAN LILBURNE

Photos by Alan Holbrook