Sounding out

When audience members walk into Laxson Auditorium to experience modern composer Paul Dresher’s unique vision, they should do so with the open-mindedness of children. Because what they will find towering on stage and carefully strewn throughout the room is like a glorious new jungle gym filled with infinite possibilities—except this dreamlike world is made of music.

An ambitious project that debuted in 2001, Sound Stage combines the physics of sound, larger-than-life invented instruments, a modern chamber orchestra and theater exposition in order to explore the means and meaning of music-making.

Conceived and composed by Dresher and choreographer Rinde Eckert, Sound Stage is centered around a 17-and-a-half-foot-tall metronome on a rolling A-frame with giant pendulums swinging silently on either side. Using wit and science, the performers turn every surface of the A-frame into an instrument: They strike its wooden sides with mallets and climb inside or atop to play the bells, cymbals or strings with which it is outfitted. In the process, the instrument becomes many things: a drum set for all five performers, a giant harp plucked by pendulums, a childhood home with an attic full of memories—whatever the performers’ imaginations dictate.

“My approach is rooted in building instruments,” the 51-year old Dresher says via phone from Berkeley. “I’ve always been into making new things. … Now it’s become sort of a combination of acoustic and electronic inventions.”

For most of the show, the stage consists of three zones: Stage right holds a piano and quadrachord (a large, amplified string instrument that can be bowed or plucked); at center stage, in various positions, are the A-frame pendulums; and stage left consists of a “classroom” with a desk and chalkboard. The room is strewn with long piano wires attached to resonating boards that emit slicing buzzes and varying pitches, and performers also play plastic tubes, pipes, whistles and other attached objects.

Dresher is supported onstage by the contemporary chamber ensemble Zeitgeist (featuring violinist Yuri Merzhevesky, percussionist Heather Barringer, pianist Tom Linker and Patrick O’Keefe on clarinet, bass clarinet and soprano sax), the group that commissioned the work. Director Eckert provides spoken word to provide a framework for understanding the piece. The music making is “entirely nonhierarchical and free flowing"; pieces segue from silence into motion, as Merzhevesky’s violin carries the melodic themes.

“The music is not heard coming from the stage,” Dresher notes, “but from all around you in the house.”

Dresher says his own style is a synthesis of influences, from the repetition and tradition-shattering ethos employed by such minimalists as Steve Reich (with whom he worked in the ‘70s), to African drum styles, world music (particularly Indonesia and India) and even rock-'n'-roll guitar, which he has played since college. Dresher says that Sound Stage incorporates these influences and is meant to encompass a full range of music’s capabilities, from the usual emotive qualities to abstract ideas and a fundamental curiosity of “how did that noise just happen?”

“Most people aren’t aware of the sounds that can be created from everyday objects around them,” Dresher says. “For instance, I have amazing old recordings from Africa of, say, people playing a coke bottle and a mailbox—and getting a wide range of sound.”

Dresher counts among his many influences the visionary Harry Partch, who rebuilt music from the ground up by creating his own instruments, using different tunings and intonations to suit his own vision of a completely non-traditional orchestra. Other West Coast artists and iconoclasts, from John Cage to recently deceased Lou Harrison, inspired Dresher to pursue his own ideas in innovative forms. After working on acoustic instruments for years, he branched into electronics—which will be the subject of a lecture at Chico State the day of the show (12:30 p.m. in PAC room 204A).

"[Zeitgeist] wanted to get away from the traditional chamber music concert,” Dresher explains. “They wanted something more theatrical. … But most of the time musicians don’t make good actors, so I wanted to create a structure that would allow them simply to play music but also move around and capture that sense of childlike wonder … that discovery that is music in its purest form.”

Perhaps the best thing about the 80-minute performance is that, once it’s over, audience members are invited onstage to try out the toys themselves.

“That was a huge surprise to me when we first started [in Minneapolis]," Dresher says. "I had no idea the allure the instruments would have. The audience had to cross the stage to leave that particular venue, and people started checking everything out … The stuff is not fragile, so we decided to make that a part of every performance—it’s really interesting to watch people experiment and find their own sounds."