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Syd Clayton composed a significant body of experimental music in Melbourne from the mid 1960s until his death in 1994. Clayton explored chance operations as a compositional tool, using his signature toy roulette wheel to select musical elements to be used within structures that he would adapt from such diverse sources as cricket score cards and childrens games. The result was a unique blend of music, theatre and ritual.
His work has been described as magical, achieving a Zen-like veneer of simplicity that masks a deep complexity of ideas both musical and philosophical.
Since his heyday at Carlton's La Mama theatre in the late 1960s/early 1970s, Clayton's music has only been performed sporadically, and virtually forgotten by contemporary performers since his death. In Lucky Number, director Barnaby Oliver dusts off Clayton's sometimes-oblique scores and issues the challenge to a new cast of performers from Melbourne's experimental music community (featuring a smattering of former Clayton collaborators) of interpreting Clayton's music in a fashion that is both true to the original spirit and injects new energy.
ABC Iwaki Auditorium
Friday July 17 2009, 7pm
Performers:
- Adam Simmons (saxophone)
- Mark Cauvin (double bass)
- The Crystal Set (vocals and percussion)
- Barnaby Oliver (piano)
- Clinton Green (pitched percussion)
- Hugh McSpedden (lighting and projections)
Programme to include:
- Yehudi (wind and double bass)
- Archaeopteryx (wind, drone, percussion)
- Birds of Passage (wind, voice, percussion)
- Lucky Number (pitched percussion)
- The Man On The Left He's Joe Bigger From Topeca (voices, instruments)
- He Colours The Wild Orchid Slipper Wagon (World Premiere) (piano)
Performance of Lucky Number will commence at 7pm and continue throughout the evening. The main program will start at 8pm.
The performance will start at 7pm when Clinton Green begins Clayton's 4 hour percussion solo 'Lucky Number', to the accompaniment of Hugh McSpedden's immersive visual projections. The main program will start at 8pm.
Lucky Number is a rare, one-night-only exploration of one of Melbourne's most neglected composers that is not to be missed.
For more information please email luckynumbersyd@gmail.com
Lucky Number is a Satellite Event of this year's Liquid Architecture Festival. Adam Simmons and Mark Cauvin will also be performing Yehudi as part of the main Liquid Architecture program at North Melbourne Town Hall on July 11th
Syd Clayton – biography
Perhaps ritual was the basis of his music. Maybe it was humour. Or silence. Whatever the basis the effect was magic – Kris Hemensley
Syd Clayton was born in Mooroopna in country Victoria in 1939. Developing an interest in jazz as a teenager, he taught himself drums without the benefit of musical training and began playing with Melbourne jazz bands. He later took up saxophone before settling on double bass, having private lessons where he also learnt to read music and improvise. Clayton upset the more conservative elements of Melbourne jazz as early as 1960, when he was ‘shouted down’ for playing Coleman-style ecstatic saxophone at a jazz gig. As well as free jazz, Clayton became active in the poetry and visual arts scenes, including an exhibition of his ‘assemblages’ of found objects.
Clayton was invited to join a group with fellow jazz musicians Barry McKimm and Robert Rooney around 1963.The McKimm Rooney Clayton trio began as a group exploring the fringes of jazz, but by 1965 had moved towards something approaching a New Music performance group. The trio worked with graphic scores (one of the first in Australia to do so), tone rows and structured improvisations. McKimm and Rooney composed the groups repertoire, although Clayton’s contribution as an improviser with an original bass technique (comparable in style to Charles Mingus) was significant. The trio joined the Melbourne International Society of Contemporary Music (ISCM) in 1965 to a mixed response from the Society’s audiences. One comment from an ISCM member to the trio’s music was that “you may as well go outside and listen to the sounds in Bourke Street”, to which Clayton retorted, “maybe you should, it might open your ears”
Clayton’s first composition, Snakes and Ladders (1966), was based on the board game of the same name. The adaptation of games as musical structures was a common interest of Clayton in this early period: Dreams That Money Can’t Buy (1966) took the form of deck of cards with instructions written on them, shuffled, then distributed to performers, and the compositional structure of Yehudi (1969) is based on a cricket scorecard. These unique structures fostered indeterminate outcomes when these works were performed, but Clayton further courted chance through the use of a toy roulette wheel used to make compositional decisions when writing his music. He painted the maxim Deus ex machina on the side of the wheel; literally ‘God from the machine’. Although chance was important to Clayton, the outcomes of his roulette wheel fitted into musical structures and concepts defined by the composer.
Most of Clayton’s work from this period was performed at Carlton’s newly-established La Mama Theatre; appropriate as Clayton’s music increasingly incorporated theatrical elements. For example, both Yehudi and How To Write A Chinese Poem (1969) both call on the musicians to “become actors”. The scores require performers to mime, make “magical gestures”, clap and vocalise, as well as play their instruments. These scores appear simple and disarming at first look, but musicians who attempt to perform them soon discover how challenging they can be. As well as seeking an original form of music theatre, Clayton sought to challenge performers by placing them outside their comfort zones and forcing them to interpret his scores in the moment. Elements of collage are also present in Clayton’s work, particularly The Man on the Left, He’s Joe Bigger of Topeka (1968), where performers are required to interpret a collage of comic book cuttings accompanied by instructions dictating pitch, tempo and dynamic.
Some of Clayton’s work spills out into public spaces as well. La Streega Joe (1970) transplants the performance from the advertised theatre to a billiards hall where patrons and management are completely unaware of what is happening (Barry McKimm recalls Clayton playing the jukebox in Carlton’s Café La Streega during this performance). A 28 day street festival was also composed by chance operations but remains unperformed.
The 1970s saw Clayton withdraw from La Mama and chance operations to explore more traditional musical forms, such as songs, cantatas and dances. His interest in theatre continued to develop, and he wrote many plays throughout his life as well. His music from this time tests the limits of simple sets of musical elements. Archaeopteryx (1979) sees Clayton explore a minimalist approach to a solo by Charlie Parker, invoking the theme of birds which Clayton returned to in many of his works. Lucky Number (1986) saw Clayton return to chance operations to compose this long work for solo pitched percussion.
Clayton maintained an interest in sport and games throughout his life, particularly in the roles played in these activities by chance and ritual. He played in a local baseball team, fascinated by the sport’s complex system of signals and rituals, and also developed a series of complex strategies for Australian Rules Football based on baseball strategies and elements of chance, making contact with coaches including Ron Barassi and Kevin Sheedy during the 1980s. His interest in chance was not confined to music, permeating these other areas of Clayton’s life as well. Robert Rooney speculates that Clayton’s most significant influence as a composer may have been his casual job as a postman. He recalls Clayton as an acute observer of day-to-day events that others would take for granted, and his postal rounds gave ample opportunity for Clayton to observe everyday coincidences in mundane life. He would also collect discarded shopping lists, broken toys and other detritus he found on his postal rounds, recalling the Merz art of Kurt Schwitters, who’s influence Clayton acknowledged not only in his visual art but also his music.
Clayton left behind a large body of music and theatre that occupies a unique place in Australia’s cultural heritage, although it has been sadly neglected since his death in 1994. Only recently have a new generation of performers begun to rediscover his distinctive body of work, and accept the challenge of performing the music of Syd Clayton.
- Clinton Green (2009)
Further reading:
John Jenkins, 22 contemporary Australian composers. Melbourne : NMA Publications, 1988. http://www.rainerlinz.net/NMA/22CAC/clayton.html
John Whiteoak, Playing ad lib: improvisatory music in Australia 1836-1970. Sydney : Currency Press, 1998.
Further listening:
“Yehudi”, in Artefacts of Australian experimental music: 1930-1973. Shame File Music 2007 (sham050)
“Lucky Number”, in NMATAPES 5. NMA Publications 1988/ Shame File Music 2006 (sham043) http://www.shamefilemusic.com
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