Confronting the Modern Gods: John Psathas and Fabian Ziegler
The album Modern Gods: a contemporary collaboration brilliantly performed and engineered
A growling roar opens the first movement of John Psathas's work RealBadNow. Not a loud, in-your-face roar, but one seeming to arrive from outer space, a disembodied electronic voice from the universe, full of foreboding. When live percussion enters, layers of atmospheric sound develop beneath lovely marimba flourishes in the hands of the remarkable Fabian Ziegler, gestures that drop into a sense of immense distance in the music’s texture.
The movement, called “Individualise the Social", is the first track on a new album from Psathas and Ziegler called Modern Gods. The sleeve note suggests “the relationship between people and Gods in ancient times has transformed into today’s relationship between people and technology.” There’s always a lot of thinking underpinning Psathas’s music, and he has talked and written about the influence of modern writings on his compositions. He is, it seems, in a dark place with respect to the world today, expressing pessimism and sometimes anger about 21st century society.
There are five movements in RealBadNow. Their titles – the others are “Normalise Catastrophic Imagination”, “Prepare for Defiant Acts of Radical Imagination”, “Teach Appreciation of the Aesthetics of Violence” and “RealBadNow” – come from a book Psathas has described as “life-changing”: Disposable Futures: The Seduction of Violence in the Age of Spectacle by Henry Giroux and Brad Evans. RealBadNow is, he says, a launch pad for his future compositions, in which he will use confronting text in real time. For Psathas, the place we are in is indeed “real bad now” and he plans to acknowledge this through his creative work.
Musically the composition is full of depth and variety. The second movement brings distant drumming into the texture, seeming to explore cosmic spaces with repetitive figures building tension and direction. The music is suddenly more joyous in the third movement, letting light into the layers and transporting us to the dance floor with a disco beat. Psathas made a deliberate decision that this more cheerful movement should not end the work; his intentions are darker. In the very rapid 4th movement there’s a sense of impending chaos as a dark wind blows, percussion fierce and vocals ultra-deep, a hint of movie soundtrack with the voice of the beast. The work’s final movement has elements of lament, beautiful marimba sounds in the foreground, a yearning mood and marvellous timbral explorations before all fades into silence.
Composer John Psathas
…in a dark and pessimistic place.
Psathas is a major New Zealand composer, one who has pushed sonic and collaborative boundaries for many years, exploring sound sources and contemporary ideas across generations and countries. He operates in a big international context with a wide community of composers and performers and has a large and growing oeuvre. On this album, alongside the new work RealBadNow, he circles back to two of his earlier instrumental works, View from Olympus and Halo, rearranging them very successfully for combined live and electronic sounds.
Psathas, however, wants it all to be more than just rewarding listening. Earlier this year, using similar processes, including collaborative work with pianist Michael Houstoun and younger generation producers Emanuel Psathas (his son) and Immanuel Dannenbring, Psathas presented two works on a Chamber Music New Zealand tour. Called Voices at the End, the programme was named after the second work on the programme, a solo piano version of his earlier exciting six-piano work, this time with added electronic tracks and screen images. The postcard-perfect visual cliché on screen – a mushroom-shaped cloud, a butterfly drying its wings, children playing in clean water, spring blossoms and many more nature images – did not enhance the artistic experience for me.
In the work that opened that programme, the world premiere of Second-Hand Time, Psathas presented his deep foreboding about society’s direction with text accompanying Houstoun’s playing and the electronic recorded sounds. The on-screen words offered a bleak rant, piling up quotes from contemporary writers deploring society's desire for unsavoury violent entertainment, fascism, totalitarianism, and the shallow desires of the global elite for wealth and power.
Musically, there was much to admire in Houstoun’s performance. Minimalist pianistic effects became a little jazzy and syncopated in the second movement and then increasingly insistent. The unrelenting torrent of negativity on-screen, however, hugely distracted from the music. As the work ended with coruscating descending piano flourishes, Huxley and Orwell were evoked and we were left with a final dark message about "the readiness of the public to amuse itself to death". The chamber music audience was left a little stunned.
I have strong doubts that adding visual and text effects to music in a conventional concert setting is successful in communicating strongly-held political or philosophical content. I respect Psathas’s views and his sincerity in attempting to share them but (to get back to the album) when enjoying Modern Gods, I found it more satisfying to focus on the sounds without visual distractions. Movement titles and sleeve notes seemed sufficient to emphasise the composer’s sombre inspiration and existential anxieties.
Percussionist Fabian Ziegler
…staggering virtuosity
View from Olympus was composed in 2002 as a double concerto for percussion, piano and orchestra. Commissioned by percussionist Dame Evelyn Glennie, this landmark work of Psathas’s has a distinguished performance history and was recorded for Rattle by the NZSO with Houstoun and percussionist Pedro Carneiro as soloists. The version on this album is, in the composer’s words, a “karaoke” backing track for percussion and piano soloists, with synths, electric guitars, sub basses and a virtual orchestra. It’s a work with a big conception and a big heart and this “modern” version has plenty of impact. Young Lithuanian pianist Akvilė Šileikaitė joins Ziegler in a staggeringly virtuosic performance, especially in the frenetic and Dionysian “Dance of the Maenads” . The two soloists end the work with “Fragments” for vibraphone and piano, a short and meditative “encore” duet.
Pianist Akvilė Šileikaitė
..revealing the beauties of piano sound
The third work on the album is also re-imagined and rearranged. Halo, originally composed in 2010 for cello and piano and arranged in 2016 for vibraphone/marimba and piano, has audio tape added in the first and third movements. Psathas has referred to his thoughts about the decline and death of his mother Anastasia when composing the piece, and the central movement, “Stacia”, may be a reference to her name. The two soloists, Ziegler and Šileikaitė, work splendidly together throughout, fine musicians discovering the beautiful sounds available from their instruments in a work with lovely reflective moments even within rapid virtuosic passages.
Modern Gods is a significant new offering from a major composer, three works from two decades of his composing oeuvre, all freshly imagined and encompassing his past and current inspiration and working methods. The album is brilliantly performed and engineered and was created in a truly contemporary collaborative process.
Modern Gods Music by John Psathas, performed by Fabian Ziegler (percussion) and Akvilė Šileikaitė (piano), available for streaming, download or purchase here.