Allegro Largo Scherzo Finale

1. Daniel De La Cuesta: Fachwerk
2. Christoph Herndler: Vom Festen, das Weiche
3. Pia Palme: Improvisations

Pia Palme is a musician and composer from Vienna, one of a group dedicated to creating and playing music for the “sub-bass” recorder. This instrument, developed by Kueng in 2007, has a beautiful rich tone, particularly in its lower registers and is capable of a range of extended techniques. However, due to the instrument’s soft dynamic, Palme plays almost exclusively with amplification, which has led to the practice of combining the instrument with live electronics – something that also helps to combat the instrument’s other weakness: players can only sustain a note for a few seconds due to the vast amount of air that passes through the instrument.

A number of composers have written music for the instrument since its inception, using a variety of forms of notation. Palme is a skilled improviser, either from scratch or from graphic scores. A example of her own music that was passed around at the NZSM Composers’ Workshop, written for herself and a group of other improvisers, combined graphic and duration-based elements. When playing solo, however, Palme tends toward (apparently) free improvisation.

Her concert at the Adam Art Gallery was divided into two half hour sections. In the first, Palme played two notated works by Viennese composers: Fachwerk and Vom Festen, das Weiche, inserting the two pieces into an drone-heavy soundscape. Fachwerk is divided clearly into sections that emphasise particular techniques and sounds of the instrument. Of particular importance are elastic popping and sucking sounds and multiphonics. Unsurprisingly, the scores of such pieces tend to consist largely of fingerings. The piece ends with a rapid-fire recapitulation of the material from the previous sections.

Although it used many of the same sounds as Fachwerk, Vom Festen, das Weiche used a very different structure, relying on organic development rather than a sectional structure. At the Composers’ Workshop, Palme expressed some disappointment that composers tended to write for the eclectic percussive sounds of the instrument rather than for its lyrical properties (admittedly constrained by the breathing requirements). This piece did make greater use of sustained sounds and the lower register, particularly initially. The composer uses an expanding pitch range and accelerating change in technique to propel the music toward a climax around the middle of the piece that relies heavily on indistinct overtones before removing most of the ‘melodic’ material and finishing with a quiet duet between empty breath sounds and exaggerated key clicking.

In the second section of the performance Palme demonstrated more fully her abilities as an improviser and electroacoustic musician, removing the embouchure to leave herself with an open tube. For her live electronic work, Palme relies largely upon loop pedals and wire modulation. Palme used a variety of techniques to generate sonic objects for manipulation, at times using obvious techniques such as breathing, clicking and slapping, but at other times through some unperceived means. This raised interesting questions of acousmatics: while some sounds could be related directly to Palme’s playing, at other times it was impossible to discern how the sound produced was related to her actions, and some actions that seemed to have some significance might in fact have very little to do with the sound produced.

Of course, none of this really explains what it sounded like. Try this. She has a CD! Well, a double-CD. In fact she has another one, but I can’t find it. Listen to the audio samples! Perhaps buy the CD! I’m considering it!