Music of the spheres in the hermitage

Electro-acoustic music with John Palmer: a concert in Sachseln and a course in Lucerne

According to the English composer Jonathan Harvey, electronic music, due to its expansion of the possibilities of sound, is one of the keys to spirituality. The younger composer John Palmer, who has studied in Lucerne and now lives in London, proved himself a kindred spirit to his former teacher in his piece Vision, which is a musical interpretation of Brother Klaus's enlightenment. It was the central work in a concert given by Palmer together with the Lucerne flautist Jonas Lindenmann in Sachseln's Brother Klaus Museum, which they filled with sounds of galactic dimensions.

Musically, everything went extraordinarily well, with the technical apparatus being used for far more refined effects than the mere bombastic boosting in volume of the harpsichord (John Palmer) and flute (Jonas Lindenmann). Nevertheless, some of the flute solos which were unaided by electro-acoustic support, such as Varese's Density 21.5, tended to suffer in the museum's bone-dry acoustic. This drawback was less evident, however, in Jonas Lindenmann's performance of Robert Dick's two Flying lessons and his own Circles around C sharp, in which he focussed his tone on the centre of the sounds, which included some multiphonics, demonstrating that live-electronics aids are not strictly necessary for spiritual experiences.

The most exciting aspect of the programme lay in the interaction between electronic and acoustic sound-production. Rondo '94, by the Lucerne composer Hubert Podstransky, varies two basic motifs in a game of exchanges between the harpsichord and live-electronics; hovering tremolo-figures, produced electronically, found their counterpart in the echo-effects of the baroque instrument's minimal repetitions. On the whole, however, the role of the live-electronics was closer to that of more conventional instruments, thereby avoiding exhaustion of all the medium's extensive possibilities.

The most convincing work in this respect was one written especially for this concert in the museum, John Palmer's own Vision, which gradually dispersed the energetic activity of spiky harpsichord figurations into ethereally smooth fields of sound. The harpsichord and tape, at first locked into one another as separate cogs, became not only melted together, but, during the working-out of the piece's process, more and more closely bound to one another. The relation of opposite sound-sources, of man and machine, was just as spiritual as the echoes of the spheres, distinguishing themselves in their delicate tenderness from so much of the now familiar 'new-age sauce'.

Luzerner Zeitung, 28th September 1994, Urs Mattenberg (translation: Juliana Hodkinson)