A Tissue of Quotations

Published in Music Forum Magazine, Feburary 2010

There is a famous sketch in which German comedian Loriot, plays an elderly man standing in his living room conducting a classical record before a full-length mirror. Behind the lounge room set, which is fitted out with much-loved furniture from the 1950s, sit the entire Berlin Philharmonic in almost-complete darkness, playing the ‘recording’ live. At some point, a scratch sends Loriot back a few bars, although he doesn’t realise it, and continues to conduct the same climactic passage four or five times. The precision of the orchestra in mimicking the looping created by a scratched record emphasised the divide between mechanical and live performance.

I was reminded of Loriot’s performance as I watched Sasha Stella performing his suite A Tissue of Quotations for the Darebin Music Feast on Friday 18 September, in which he combines digitally remixed pre-composed material with traditional performance on piano. As a DJ and composer, Stella has combined some of the fundamental tools of his trade to create a work that reshapes the experience of listening to a classical composition.

The suite was composed for Melbourne pianist Benjamin Martin in 2002, but abandoned by Stella until last year, when he revived the work and set about preparations for its premiere. His writing is inventive and fresh, placing Baroque, Romantic and Impressionist music solidly within the context of the 21 st century.

Each piece of the suite uses quotations from compositions by J.S. Bach, Handel, Beethoven, Chopin, Debussy and Ravel, sometimes combining more than one composer per piece, though never allowing an excerpt to suffuse the work with its own aesthetic. It rather chops, changes and uses looped musical fragments, adjusted with chords taken from here mixed with a melody from there, the quotations so dense that it is not easy to pick the original composer. Stella’s reinventions are aptly titled: the name for the suite comes from a quote by Roland Barthes in Death of the Author; ‘the text is a tissue of quotations, drawn from the innumerable centres of culture’.

The use of musical loops harks back to John Adam’s Shaker Loops and Reich’s Come Out and It’s Gonna Rain. Adams’ looped musical fragments and ideas elaborated the inherent power of doing a lot with a little. Loops used repetition of melodic passages, which, as he wrote, ‘are small melodic fragments whose ‘tails’ are tied to their heads.’ In the same way, Stella’s music reinforces the beauty of the works that he quotes.

At one point during his performance, there was a passage that centred around the repetition and revolution of a fragment of a work by Chopin. It left the audience with baited breath, and then a moment of recognition and a ripple of quiet chuckles. Without missing a beat, Stella returned to the beginning of the phrase and repeated it, allowing the audience to absorb the phrase.

The use of an acoustic instrument to perform a work that was originally created from a digital remix constitutes a reversal of roles, in which the effect created by sampling and looping, originally the realm of the recording, has become the subject of artistic interpretation. While Stella’s compositional technique has roots in minimalism, his originality is in the use of a remix of samples from an era not accustomed to being sampled. It plays with the notion of the holy canon of classical piano repertoire, which so many have spent years trying to perfect, and gives a fresh new perspective on what these pieces mean in the twenty-first century. A Tissue of Quotations is a reminder that we stand on the shoulders of giants and that nothing comes from a vacuum. The creative legacy of the past continues to inform that of the future.