Tuesday 18 February 2025, 7.30pm
Plus-Minus presents three works that each do arranging in a different way. Like the many chamber versions of orchestral works made for Schoenberg’s Society for Private Musical Performances in Vienna from 1918, we include Mark Knoop’s intimate arrangement of Laurence Crane’s orchestral piece Cobbled Section After Cobbled Section.
At the heart of Traveller Song is a transcription of a recording of a Sicilian cart driver (carrettiere) that appears on the album “Folklore Musicale Italiano, Volume 2”, transformed by Cassandra Miller into a quasi-shamanistic ritual.
The show concludes with the premiere of American composer Aaron Wyanski’s arrangement of Arnold Schoenberg’s Variations for Orchestra, the latest instalment in his Schoenberg in Hi-Fi series.
Schoenberg in Hi-Fi is an ongoing series of albums that posit an alternate reality. In my speculative universe, Schoenberg lives a little longer — into the late 1950s: a time when a new commodity was reshaping the music industry, the stereo LP. As high-fidelity audio entered the homes of more and more middle-class Americans, record companies began producing and marketing albums around how unique the sounds on it were, whether that was in the exotica of Lex Baxter, the space music of Sun Ra, or the extreme eclecticism of Esquivel. Though mostly aimed at a wide popular audience, countless liner notes spun infinite variations of the same boast: you’ve never heard this before. Schoenberg had been living in Los Angeles for many years, and had he been alive when the Capitol Records building was completed in 1956, he would have been a stone’s throw away from one of the centres of mid-century pop music. What if an executive from Capitol had become taken with the idea of presenting Schoenberg’s works in the manner of the many “jazzing up the classics” albums produced in this period? — Aaron Wyanski
PROGRAMME
PLUS-MINUS ENSEMBLE
