Renzo
Spiteri’s
2000 RHYTHMS
2000
Rhythms is a celebration of rhythm,
human rhythm, the life pulse, that vital, primordial, energy force - raw,
chaotic, spontaneous, noise, yet simultaneously ordered, cultured, melodic
- that courses through everything. The foundations on which great
symphonies are built, the cadence of the most ephemeral verse, the beat
that incites the tapping of feet, the cycles of our biochemistry, the seen
and the unseen. Vibrations – Vita! Rhythm is life.
For some cultures, rhythm is
daily sustenance, it is the audible soundtrack that serenades their daily
routines. This can be seen not only in 'primitive' tribes, such as the
Maasai or the Kikuyu in Africa, but also in highly 'developed' societies
such as the fiery, passionate Spanish and Latin American tradition.
In recent decades, the involvement of percussion in music and dance performances has come to the fore. Many important composers have developed and extended the use and the language of percussion. From various parts of the world, veritable virtuosi of percussion have emerged, often reaching the popularity normally afforded to other more ‘traditional' musicians.
2000 Rhythms
aims to stretch the vocabulary of percussion focusing less on traditional
and modern instruments and instead working with other mediums such as
wood, metal, glass and paper. These "raw-rnaterials" are
transmuted into nine different contexts ranging from noise (in a randorn
but organised sense) to pure orchestrated sound. Against a backdrop of
projected images created specifically for the show and a spectacular
chameleon-like stage design that changes according to the mediurn of
percussion employed, 2000 Rhythms promises 1hr 15 minutes of
pulsating percussive power.
The collaborative input of four dance theatre actors from Teatru Anon, a Vocal Choir, a harpist, guitarist, bassist and three percussion players aims to create a truly unique polythythmic dialogue that transgresses any preconceived notion of a percussion recital.
A strong emphasis has been placed on local talent. Maltese composer Ruben Zahra has been brought in to co-ordinate and provide the spring-board compositions for three original pieces that will be played for the first time in public during 2000 Rhythms. These are "Karta', ‘Monollths' and 'Corpus'. The inclusion of actors offers a wide range of possibilities of conversation between rhythm and body, as happens in traditional Japanese theatre.
2000 Rhythms
is Renzo’s dream, a vision which
spans back to a photo of a wee boy aged three,
banging a pair of builder's pencils together. Then there’s a photo of
him aged a little older and now it's the. tennis racket he's thumping. In
the same album, a few years later he's moved onto mum's battered
saucepans. In fact Renzo insists that not one day goes by without him
hitting or pounding on something. It’s a “compulsion” he
adds.
By just being aware of sounds, by observing them, by listening to records, picking up the latent rhythms therein, and then trying to imitate and reproduce them in his improvised jamming sessions, Renzo is always discovering other levels of communicating with instruments.
It is his preoccupation with energy - the affirmation of life as it courses through all animate and inanimate things - that propels him to experiment with new mediums. His main concern, he states, “is to expand t'he vocabulary of percussion”, not “just on traditional and technical instruments but using other 'raw materials' such as paper, metal and wood, and to accent these elements more and more until an entire performancc can be staged around them. Something, he realises contentedly, that will reach fruition here in Malta on the 27th of December during the end of year Millennium celebrations to be held at the Independence Arena.
The performance kicks off with an improvised piece which harks back to Renzo impatiently waiting on stage for the curtain to rise, and looking at the scaffolding pipes supporting his percussion station. Beginning to wonder at the infinite possibility of sounds he could create if he had to seriously consider the pipes as potential instruments, something along the lines of, "yes this might work against that sound”.
"Music is a gut feeling - it
could be the swishing of water in a plastic tub
- it is up to the performer to create his own soundscape". Creating
in the moment is what Renzo likes best. Years of playing the jazz congas
in improvised situations, where the artist is free of the tension and
structure accompanying classical movements,
provided Renzo with the liberty and impetus to seek further dilution.
Renzo feels that his music has gone beyond ‘Jazz’, or any other
classification, defying a definition in itself. It is "music for its
own sake", pure rhythm and improvisation. Music stripped down to its
bare essentials.
This is not to say that Renzo
does not owe 'a lot’ to his firm theoretical
grounding in classical and modern music. "You have to learn the rules
before you can break them." He studied music, drums and percussion at
the School of Music in Valletta for nine years and is currently furthering
his studies in percussion performance practice with the first percussion
player of Teatro alla Scala in Milan and at the Milano Jazz School.
Renzo’s La Scala tutor was amazed by Renzo’s decision (and courage) to
stage 2000 Rhythms.
“You’re crazy!” he expostulated, “but.l want a copy of the
video-taped performance!"
Renzo is aware that to the
uninitiated, his concert will read like a lot of noise and banging about.
This is kind of criticism most often levelled at him by those armchair
critics who deign to attend his performances. But Renzo is confident that
“the audience will identify with the sincerity of the musician” and
participate in his odyssey of sound and meaning.
The best complement Renzo ever received was forthcoming from two Nigerian women, who just before leaving one of his performances, quickly walked up to him and quietly thanked hirn "for makIng the drums talk". Which basically sums up his life’s ambition.
Scoring the compositions for 2000 Rhythms proved to be an exercise in ingenuity and originality. The notation was intially problematic – how to score for scaffolding pipes and car silencers. However Renzo solved the dilemma by retaining traditional musical notation and allocating each line of the stave to an instrument: so the note ‘A’ would refer to a plastic drum and the note ‘B’ to a car rim and so on up to ‘G’. The rest was left up to imagination by marking different sides of the drum or “raw material” with different symbols such as an ‘X’ or dot.
“You have to invent your own
language just for the sake of putting the score on paper.”
“While composing you have to think of orchestrating different
sounds and textures which might otherwise not sound good together.” The
end cohesion is just a matter of trial and error and “long jamming
sessions”, where the sounds “slowly come round together”.
Warren Bugeja
December, 1999
(abridged
version)
