IMMA, Dublin
My heart sank when two friends leapt to their feet at the end of the piece while I reflected on 20 minutes of my life that I will never get back.
It was Dublin-born Andrew Hamilton’s music for people who like art, specially commissioned for this concert at the Irish Museum of Modern Art by the Crash Ensemble, a long-time “fan of Andrew Hamilton’s deliciously subversive music”.
The piece was a relentlessly faithful response to the art and ideas of American abstract painter Ad Reinhardt (1913-1967 – his 1966 Screenprintis in Imma's permanent collection). A champion of the minimal and the monochrome, Reinhardt is best known for solid black canvases which, on closer inspection, are seen to have some near-blacks as well.
With the paintings, this closer inspection takes a few seconds. In his response in sound, Hamilton stretches it out to a barely endurable 20 minutes of minimalist near-monochrome.
The evening's second Crash commission provided a comparatively more yielding experience – the four-movement W . . ., by American Dan Trueman, co-curator of this concert and currently spending a year in TCD on a Fulbright scholarship. The piece toyed with notions of pulse via an inconsistent metronome, provided imaginative settings to an old American fiddle tune and to Robert Frost's Warning, and concluded with an old-fashioned lyricism.
The concert also offered shorter pieces by Seán Clancy, Anna Murray, and Benedict Schlepper-Connolly. Judith Ring provided an engaging spotlight to soloist Kate Ellis in Up to my f-holesfor cello and pre-recorded cello.
Amanda Feery reminisced in a contemporary idiom on her earliest clarinet lessons in Rattlefor bass clarinet, while Francis Heery colourfully combined and recombined various non-traditional rubs, scrapes and knocks in his Efffor strings and percussion.
