Part 1 O Spectabiles Viri
Part 2 Mungangga Garlagula
Reviewed by Frank McKone
May 1
Because, over my four-score years and four, I have never had formal training or education in music, I respond to the sound of music in an unsophisticated immediate emotional way.
Viewed as offerings in an International Music Festival, both O Spectabiles Viri and Mungangga Garlagula are interesting as examples of unusual music presentations, but from my point of view as a theatre critic they were both less effective than they might have been.
Since there did not seem to be any particular connection between the two items in the evening’s program, I’ll discuss them separately.
In each case, though, I heard not just the music but saw a performer presenting us with a show of their own devising: Jane Sheldon in the role of the early 12th Century European composer Hildegard von Bingen; Mark Atkins in the role of a lonely travelling Aussie bushman camping out on country with a 60,000 year history.
Each had a co-creator/performer in Erkki Veltheim, with backstage support from a dramaturg, Ruth Little; a lighting designer, Niklas Pajanti; and set/costume designer, Emily Barrie – plus a team of recorded musicians from Soundbed Performers; engineers and management from the Tura Production team; technicians from The Street; and overall production management from CIMF’s Joshua Robinson, who gave an introductory speech.
I have read about Hildegard, who was clearly a forceful feisty woman in her day, 1098 – 1179, as a “German Benedictine abbess and polymath active as a writer, composer, philosopher, mystic, visionary and as a medical writer and practitioner during the High Middle Ages”, according to Wikipedia.
She obviously organised everybody in sight, and yet it still took until 2012 before Pope Benedict XVI declared her to be a saint.
I found Jane Sheldon’s performance of Hildegard’s music essentially sad, rather than uplifting, and I wondered if our modern concerns about women’s glass ceiling were influencing what seemed to be Hildegard’s frustration when more expansive moments in the singing more or less died away – often into silence. Too much in the 15 minutes was time waiting for a new development to happen, which in the end never eventuated.
I read up more about Hildegard after hearing Jane’s piece, and felt Hildegard would have insisted on more action. Or perhaps Jane was representing that thousand years’ wait for canonisation.
Mark Atkins’ un-named bushman (I think – or perhaps I missed his name in some of the muffled speaking into the microphone) was a very different story.
Though I was a naive invading Pom as a teenager, I was a regular overnight bushwalker most of my life, including in outback Queensland. But it was in Far-West New South Wales, in Broken Hill country where I actually saw the MinMin lights he speaks of as mysterious spiritual connections to the old country of his traditions.
I saw them one time following down along a station property wire fence. On another occasion, they were less like a light-bulb, more like a lighted mist, floating down a creekbed in Mootawingee. And I spoke to a woman who had been frightened by a big bright MinMin following close beside her car while driving towards Broken Hill from the South Australian border.
I’m sorry to say, in response to the spiritual idea, that the scientific story was they are examples of static electricity forming between layers of different temperature air.
Though I found Mark’s characterisation a bit of an odd mix between old whiteman bushman stories and Aboriginal tradition. I heard bushwacker stories around the campfire – sometimes between my mouthorgan accompaniment to Click Go The Shears – but I could only be amazed at Mark's dramatic performances on the didgeridoo.
The pace of his total presentation, even accounting for the old man bush character, was rather too slow for me, but his sounds of the didgeridoo brought his work to life.
And this is what a Festival is for – to bring out the unusual, where magic and realism meet in a 12th Century chant or the rhythm of an ancient didgeridoo.
Copyright: Frank McKone, Canberra
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