- Venue
- Dartington College of Arts
- Location
- South West England
Stephen Cornford, Vleugel MA Show, Dartington College of Arts, TotnesFriday 26 September 2008 7.15pm, Studio 3
The instrument takes centre stage in Stephen Cornford’s performance of Vleugel.Vleugel is the Dutch noun for, amongst other things, the grand piano. As a musical instrument, the piano is a device for playing or producing music. Yet the music that gives the instrument its function and its status as an object is reliant upon its relationship with humankind. Instruments are made by humans, for humans to play, and their relationship to us is so closely interconnected that we struggle to define what an instrument is without us. What would an instrument be without music? With no one to make them, no one to admire them and no one to play them, surely instruments are hollow of sound in our absence?
But here, right here, in this quiet studio at the Dartington MA Show we hear their voice. The noise they make without us, occurring beyond our control, existing beyond our intervention.
Vleugel consists of Cornford stood at a central sound desk, surrounded by two kettle drums and a piano with its delicate interior on display. From the sound desk leads a trail of cables and circuits which are in turn linked to microphones and four large amplifiers set in each corner of the studio. There is a mechanical vibrating device attached to a selection of the bass piano strings, which Cornford seems to manipulate. A scattering of tiny shells on the kettle drums skin can be seen only on approaching the drums after the performance, and from the perspective of the human eye, this is all that is visibly making the large impressive sound.
The bass strings of the piano are amplified so loud they create entirely new resonances on the drums surface as the shells bounce and these noises are in turn picked up by the microphones and amplified back out in to the room. These three instruments create sounds that are repeating and building in momentum. Despite seeing all the elements on display; just how the musicality of the composition is created, whether by the technology, amplification or the small manipulative gestures Cornford makes on the sound desk, is still unknown.
Plugged in to the instruments interiors Cornford somehow taps into an alternative world in Vleugel, one where microphones inside grand pianos make the most engrossing and impassioned tones. Where kettle drums vibrate, as if they were responding to the strings of the piano. Vleugel is a sound-scape without humans, where objects have a life and a voice of their own and where they appear to be communicating on sound waves, vibrating and reverberating to each other. It is hard to get over the scale and power these instruments make, when amplified and ‘played’ by the artist. No hand touches any key of the piano, nor brush on the tight skin of either the two drums, but this composition is as profound, evocative and technical as any classic concerto.
Cornford plays the sound desk like a pianist. His black shirt and concentrated eye all affirming our notion of him as a musician, a composer and magician. We become accustomed to the noise he coax’s out of the striking black piano, through these new systems and devices. Yet the prominence of the instrument in this performance diminishes the significance of any person present or in operation of these objects. The concentrated efforts and clear technical experimentation that has been undertaken in order to hear these new and extraordinary sounds as they reverberate and on some level communicate, reverses our accepted dynamic of power in the relationship between object and creator. Here is seems that Cornford needs the instrument to be creative for this performance to occur, just as much as the instruments need Cornford.
Elevated high above Cornford and the instruments on a viewing balcony I can feel the vibrations under foot and as they run up my leg, I wonder is it possible I become part of the composition; my own body moving making its own noise, always present, just now amplified like these mysterious noises I hear. I feel, through every receptacle in my body: ears, eyes and skin – that these instruments are somehow singing without a musician physically forcing them into any set musical score. These subtleties in sounds and how they interact; how one vibration can cause another, is a new level of musicality produced in these familiar instruments that I was oblivious of until now. These are simple things; vibrations occur, they signal noises we cannot hear or comprehend exist, yet it takes a mile of cabling for us just to hear them in Vleugel. And even in looking and listening now, letting the eye follow the arrangement of objects, microphones and wire, I still don’t know where this sound truly is.
This performance is profoundly personal, an improvised composition, yet one Cornford has performed many times. Around 20 minutes in to the performance I feel the fun in ‘playing’ has left, I begin to urge the pressing of the ebony white key, smooth in texture and tempting to the human hand. I desire the delicate ping of a note. Reaching the limits of experimentation with the equipment and its rigging – it is possible that the scale of this composition has a tighter musical scale than that of the grand piano itself. So, is this new soundscape, this other world, somewhere I could and would wish to inhabit on a regular basis? Is it somewhere deeper and more ‘special’ than my own world of noise? Does it represent something we wish we knew, perhaps something so far unheard about our own existence? Vleugel certainly raises these questions by performing, moreover amplifying the ontology and object of sound.
Importantly in Vleugel the audience is given space to think in an all engrossing sound world. They become settled and have soon worked out what they can in regards to how noise is been produced and projected, and therefore drift off into new passages of thought. My mind turns to these questions: If this organ of sound only has so many notes, then how can we move beyond it? How can we herald it as our new world? Cornford is testing those limits in Vleugel, playing on those boundaries and in doing so brings a new world to life that I am thrilled to have experienced. Here is a performance highly thought provoking, both simple in its notions of play and experimentation and highly complex in its recognition, artistically and technologically, that there are is always new territory to explore and new worlds to discover, even within the confines of known musicality, sound and the instrument.
Joanna Loveday
Joanna Loveday is a writer based in Yorkshire, UK specialising in writing on
performance and live art. www.joannaloveday.blogspot.com. Contact: [email protected]
For more information on Steve Cornford visit: www.scrawn.co.uk
