A master at taking the art of noise to its limits
Michael Tumelty, Music Critic
Be warned. J Simon van der Walt is out and about this week. The man who might just be among the most original composers working in Scotland has a performance of one of his pieces on Friday at the RSAMD. It's called The Society for Classical and Authentic Music, aka SCAM, and has absolutely nothing to do with anything that might be inferred from its title.
Van der Walt is a one-off. His music, which lies somewhere between Mozart and nothing on Earth, has provoked comment in music circles, but only one consistent view emerges. Nobody has the faintest idea what it's about, though many agree that there are elements in it that hook into the brain and will not let go. Some have called it music-theatre. That's too narrow.
The music eludes categorisation. So does the man. Even those who know him grin with embarrassment. "He's an eccentric; he's a maverick; he's barmy", are some of the descriptions applied, at which van der Walt smiles with a good grace.
So, in the run-up to Friday's lunchtime performance, who is this man and what is his music?
You might have caught a glimpse of it in Sauchiehall Street, when van der Walt and some brass players took to the precinct as a street band. If you were there, you can't have missed them. They were dressed in uniforms sprayed with copper paint, and huge turbans fashioned from the liners of hanging baskets. These refugees from a Sultan's palace performed van der Walt's Society for High Art Music, aka SHAM, where they played a note, rotated to a different point on the compass, played another, turned again, played another and so on.
Or you might have heard it last May when his Schaduwee (Shadowy) was played, with its striking image of four bassoonists dressed in white, commenting like a Greek chorus from the back of a performance of the composer's song cycle, while a pile of books, dumped into the innards of the accompanying piano, were hurled to the floor as part of the performance by pianist Laura Baxter.
You may even have been smacked in the face by this Friday's piece, The Society for Classical and Authentic Music, when it was played at the Reed On Festival last year, with a strange woodwind orchestration and a group of mad musicians, led by the composer, who played what you would swear was Mozart, while wearing red socks, red bandanas and jumping around those points of the compass in regimental fashion.
Any attempt to figure out van der Walt involves a jigsaw puzzle, so varied and multi-stranded is the man's musical experience. Here are just a few of the pieces.
He is of South African and English descent. He's in his forties. He's simultaneously a teacher and a student, doing a PhD at the RSAMD while also teaching in the same institution and at Stevenson College in Edinburgh. He is a self-taught trumpeter who studied composition with John McLeod, among others. He has played trumpet in swing bands, jump-jive bands, reggae bands and woodwind and brass bands. He's heavily into the Glasgow Gamelan Group and world music.
He's written music for a varied range of groups, including the Paragon Ensemble and the Orlando Consort. He has worked with devising, as opposed to text-based, theatre companies, including Sheffield's Forced Entertainment (for their production Bloody Mess1) and Halifax's IOU Theatre, where, for their production of Cure, he built the electronics, performed as a mad professor onstage, played jazz bass and had some of his own music incorporated into the production.
All of these pieces of the jigsaw are relevant because they represent key influences that have shaped van der Walt's musical composition.
He thinks in a different way about composing. "My deep interest in writing music is this: the finished piece of work is not a dead piece of paper which is then realised and interpreted by the players. The finished piece of work is the performance as it happens."
Space, and the use of space as a resource, is vital to him. "When I think about writing a piece, I very much imagine a performer standing on stage, and the first question I ask is not what they're playing, but where are they?"
When he looks at the various conventions of classical music performance, he wants to "insert a crowbar into the chinks and lever it about a bit". So when the four players in one of his pieces sit down to play, the first thing they do is push away their music stands and send the music flying. "OK, it's a theatrical gesture, but it also poses the question: what do we do now?"
Both the "composition" of Balinese gamelan music, and its rituals have a critical influence on his music. He is deeply impressed by the fact that the music is evolved, rather than composed. "There is a leader, who will give a theme, but each player evolves his own music from that." The technique is one being explored intensively by van der Walt for a forthcoming large-scale project.
And ritual, with all of its ramifications, is something that might usefully be borne in mind by anyone who goes to hear his short piece on Friday.
His instrumentation and orchestration is often bizarre. The Society for Classical and Authentic Music is written for five oboes, five bassoons and two ghetto blasters (the last being a favoured device). The use of reed instruments, in a mass, is deliberately atavistic, recalling their historic military and outdoor functions, though he is equally fascinated by the sound of a trumpet section in a jazz band, used, en bloc, as one voice. He also loves the "coarse" qualities of oboe tone, is bewitched by the subversion of the orthodox balance of classical ensembles, and is especially intrigued by the dimension of a number of characters in a drama, all of whom have the same voice as opposed to the conventional spread of accents, register, timbre and inflexions.
He is also mischievous. Read his titles and his programme notes, by all means. Just don't believe a word of them. Kidology is among his weaponry. You might think you're hearing Mozart at one point on Friday. You ain't. It's J Simon van der Walt.
Just a few clues. Hope they help.
