Daylight Music 346
Another delightful Daylight Music. This music series continues to offer interesting curations that surprise and often challenge my musical sensibilities. Today’s event featured minimalist classical that mixed in percussion. An improvisational recorder player mixing in sounds of bees and Palestinian poetry and a drumming duo.
Daylight has featured the recorder numerous times. Helping showcase how versatile the instrument is when played by talented musicians. Today Fatima Lahham was the talented musician. One of her pieces used the pitched sound of a queen bee as she calls to her hive. A sound with its own strange musicality. Fatima then interleaved her own dance around the queen bee’s repeating ‘music’, almost as if she was one of the worker bees answering the queen’s call.
The challenging part of this week’s programme was the second act, Rattle. Two drummers, Katharine Eira Brown and Theresa Wrigley who complement each other to make music that goes beyond the simple percussive nature of the drums. I am not a fan drumming as the primary driver in music. I prefer there to be a melody the drums act subserviently to. At times in St John’s on Bethnal Green, the sound was thunderous, with vibrations coming up through the floor. Katharine added a layer of ambient vocals for extra dynamics. At times it worked. Other times it was two drummers. Though interesting, by the end of their set, I wasn’t converted.
Closing the afternoon was Minihi. Minihi are percussionists and composers Zands Duggan and Louise Anna Duggan. They write minimalistic classical using a range of percussive instruments, such as drums, piano and even a dulcimer. Review websites who know a lot more than me, say they play neoclassical. No idea what that is. But at times it was delicately powerful. They were accompanied by a cellist and at times there was a delicacy of the cello, piano and vocals, then stronger percussion would take the music in a different direction than die back down again to let the music take a different direction. It was all rather wonderful and yet another new discovery brought to me by Daylight Music that I otherwise would never have found.
