Album Review: James Rushford & Judith Hamann - Midmeste
Reviewed by Kassel Jaegerbomb
A decade ago, I studied composition with the benevolently controversial figure Antoine Beuger. For Antoine, the number of performers involved in a performance is of fundamental importance. In Beuger’s conception, solos should have something to say about solitude, and duos about “being two”. I passed through various phases of considering this: first with the reverence of a student towards their teacher’s ideas and experience, then seeing it as a distinct quirk of Antoine’s personal, brilliant yet problematisable approach. Today, I’ve arrived at a respect for the concept, seeing its truth reflected in many successful things.
Midmeste, by James Rushford & Judith Hamann, is one of those things. Its two-ness is one of enduring friendship and intertwined experimental development, but also in a distinct, accomplished weave of melody and texture it achieves.
A first listen to Midmeste is to hear the sheer range of sound worlds achieved with cello & organ. Whilst the music is self-evidently compelling, executed with exactitude and recorded expertly, some unusual choices are made: the sudden inclusion of field recordings; the vibrato cello that inevitably recalls a romantic-classical vocabulary; or of the loud, creaking pump mechanisms of some of the organs. Is there something that connects these various, seemingly disparate ideas, or are they just byproducts or gimmicks?
Many an instrumental work has been produced “exploring the possibilities” of a certain instrument or instrumental combination (see the memes on local composer Pedro Alvarez’s Instagram stories for the occasional, rightful mocking of this approach). To simply display a tapestry of possible outputs of two instruments is the vibeless, dry, exploring-for-it’s-own-sake approach of the academy: Music for Non- Traditional Research Output Credits. No doubt most of the organ-cello repertoire fits either in this field. If not, it rests in a gamut of rarely-heard (including by me) classical compositions, some of which might be beautiful, but which would nonetheless be made tedious by association with Australia’s endlessly disappointing culture of classical music performance. I digress only to make clear that Rushford & Hamann’s approach is nothing of this sort: ineffable specificity is at its heart, achieved through a profound embrace of their idiosyncratic “two-ness”.
Rushford & Hamann based the work off of a 15th century chanson O Rosa Bella by John Dunstable, which survives today as sheet music outlining various melodies in counterpoint (a compositional technique involving writing multiple melodies that, when played together, harmonise well). The music starts with both instruments playing in unison (meaning: the organ & cello are playing the same notes). What sounds as one uncanny singular sound eventually reveals incongruousness through a faltering hoot from the organ, or from the contrast of the cello’s slow onset with the organ’s PS2 button-press start. I hear this as a brief exposition: not a statement of melodic themes in the classical sense, but rather a moment that establishes the twinning of the sonic texture of sound (timbre) with how it moves (melody).
This continues in the following sections. When the music first becomes polyphonic, one can listen to it melodically and hear something recalling the Renaissance polyphony of the reference chanson. But one can also hear it texturally. Then, it becomes a sequence of varyingly resonant sonorities: from fused, justly intoned combinations to the strident, coarsely beating sounds of strange tunings and de-tunings.* This type of listening is invited in the reverse way in the following, third section. Here, both instruments play static drones, but by amplifying the activity of the overtones & “excesses” of the drones—a range of sparkling cello harmonics, and hot-air organ wheezes and honks—melodic counterpoint once again appears, borne out of timbral qualities.
(*One of the main organs Rushford plays on the album is his custom- made portative organ, a mobile medieval instrument. These are usually tuned to one of two antiquated tunings: Pythagorean tuning, which is exceptionally bright and potent, like a pointy triangle, or Meantone tuning, which tends to be quite warm. Both tunings have access to a range of intervals not playable on your standard piano or Casio keyboard [unless it has been left out in a hot backyard shed for too long]. Play something like a D-sharp and G-sharp together, and you will hear a pulsing something like when you have two car windows open on the freeway and that horrible rhythmic whooshing happens. Combine this with the infinite spectrum of pitches achievable by someone as immersed in microtonal cello as Hamann, and a range of weird, less- often-sounded harmonies are made possible.)
To me, this array of cello-organ combinations presented in the album’s first eight minutes continues logically from the album’s opening statement. It continues to expand the field of what the music can contain, whilst remaining focussed on this hybrid melodo-timbral listening mode. Through this gradual expansion, the music remains cogent even when those aforementioned creaks and cracks of 15th- century pipe organ wood dominate the mix. Or when “field-recording- adjacent” sounds enter in the periphery of room recordings of one of the larger organs—one of the record’s strangest and most memorable moments. By slowly introducing a way of listening to melody that is interdimensional – embracing how sound is at a given time and where it is going, Rushford and Hamann musically unveil these sounds. When the music arrives at its most conventional point, towards the end of side B, it feels like one is being invited to hear even the most pure melodies with the perspective granted by the more phenomenological world- building of the previous half-hour. After Midmeste concludes your next assignment is to listen to Kylie Minogue as musique concréte.
It's how natural this inter-dimensionality feels that is so impressive in this perpetually impressive duo’s music. The “3D chess” metaphor comes to mind (although all chess, existing in our universe, is at least 3D, as Armando Iannucci & Stewart Lee have rightly pointed out). Where Alvin Lucier or Alan Lamb revealed the delights of listening to phenomena as- they-are, where Morton Feldman repurposed pattern and melody as a way of traversing vast durations, where Pauline Oliveros or Ros Bandt invited the joys of listening profoundly to space, contemporary musicians now find themselves the joy of living with the consequences of these myriad sonic revelations. We’re challenged to compose and play in ways which traverse the expanses opened by them, in a multi- dimensional, 4D-chess sort of way.
To do so at all is difficult: there’s a lot to consider, and it’s much easier to fall back on making music that can easily be described using existing micro-genre tags, most of which I do not understand, so please stop listing them to me in the smoker’s area of The Bird. Doing so in a sustained way is even more difficult, and Midmeste’s sense of adventure briefly seems to soften a few minutes into its second side (though I’m not even sure if this is a criticism—safety or pattern feels like a necessary counterbalance to the album’s most far-out points, in a way that further serves to make the album’s strangest episodes feel elegant without detracting from their raw oddness).
Overall though, the album is an extraordinary achievement, and that I’ve only spoken of one of its many successful “twinnings” is testament to this. With each listen one hears more of Rushford and Hamann’s shared stories, personalities, the folding of memory, space, history and time, in a multidimensional weave. Music like this makes me tremendously excited about music’s future.