“Coming together to listen deeply; to move and to sound
playfully, and to attend to a performance in tribute to beloved master musician
and teacher, Stuart Dempster.”
--Promo on Facebook
Time and Place:
Saturday, July 11
4:00 PM to 8:00 PM
Good Shepherd Center, Seattle WA.
If you haven’t heard Mr. Dempster’s classic “Great Abbey of Clement VI” recordings or any of his work with Deep Listening Band, please give
them a listen. I’d heard these years ago, and then when I met him when he
played on a couple of pieces for my “StormSound Cycle”, his calm enthusiasm for
the music (not to mention his playing!) were a highlight of that concert.
Stuart attended the concert. (This was a happy surprise after
some incorrectly-placed Facebook posts indicating he might not be able to make
it.) He was not there as a performer per se, but as an audience member. Or
maybe not as an audience member; in following his ideas about “deep listening”
and performance, there was no distinction between audience and players.
The first part of the concert was a circle of Seattle musicians/listeners/audience (some well-known) following instructions to spontaneously compose music
of grunts and shouts, leading to mysterious choral music recalling Ligeti’s LuxAeterna. The last piece of this part was “DidjeriDempster”. Here, the serious
was fun and the clowning around was very serious (but still fun): all of the
forementioned people (this time including me) walked around and greet each
other in eccentric (and/or loud) manners to the accompaniment of a chunk of
plastic plumbing being played as a didgeridoo. Hilarious, fun, yet at the same
time both strangely primal and strangely sublime: a perfect way to “break the
ice” which I’m going to have to try the next time I throw a party.
After this, the long piece. We all went outside to a covered
wooden pavilion, where an aleatory installation had been set up: there were small
blocks of ice hung from the overhang by wires. When the sun melted the ice, it
dripped onto empty soup and coffee cans below, producing a continuous environment
of intermittent percussion. At first we just listened. Then Neal Kosaly-Meyer
began a recitation from Finnegans Wake, during which he commented, “This is
just to get you started,” and at some point we all started improvising music. It
began with more drips of sound: hollow thumps and percussive thuds, gradually
interspersed with more traditionally “musical” percussion (bells, gongs). Bonnie Whiting strolled around, listening intensely and adding a bell-tone from a
cast-iron lid at exactly the right moments. Stuart joined in later, doing the
same with a cowbell. Drones built up from trombones and a ‘cello. Someone
started throat-singing. From there, the collective composition advanced and
receded in waves of sound, always fading away into the continuous percussion
from the ice installation. I added some gongs and cymbals, from a collection of
instruments on a picnic table. As the sound progressed, it formed into galaxies
of reverberation, always changing, always just on the edge of the realm of pure
imagination. I didn’t check the time but I guess it lasted about fifty minutes,
though it seemed short (it could have gone on for years). I left refreshed.
I could not attend the next part of the celebration due to a previous commitment. But if it’s any indication of how the part of this concert was able to attend made me feel, I am listening to some of Stuart’s music as I write this. May he continue to make such music for a long time to come.
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