Rhythm Sticks closed this year with its first commission since it was inaugurated in 1995, by Genesis-guitarist-turned-composer Steve Hackett. The City in the Sea is named after a poem by Edgar Allan Poe, and the piece was designed to exploit some of the unfathomable resources of percussionist Evelyn Glennie.
In a pre-show discussion, the duo batted around ideas about how it was written and what it was supposed to be. As Hackett explained, the first challenge was Find The Percussionist, since Glennie's schedule makes Bob Dylan's Never-Ending Tour look like a quiet weekend pottering in the garden. Then he had to select a musical idiom with which they both felt comfortable. He sent Glennie some tape-loops, which she found "interesting but not that interesting", driving the composer back to the drawing board. The finished piece isn't rock, classical or jazz, and you can never tell how long it might last.
After all this I was experiencing spasms of apprehension about what the thing might sound like, but in the event it was a pleasant surprise. It began with Hackett (dressed in black and wearing dark glasses, he was a dead ringer for heavy-metal DJ Tommy Vance) holding a sustained note over Roger King's synthesiser tones, before Glennie materialised, wearing loose-fitting white. She wandered around the stage like a sleepwalker, sampling various bizarre noise-making devices, many of them home-made. For instance, she had a tray on legs with long metal strips at each end, and a wooden disc with rods of different lengths protruding from it, which she played with a violin bow. She also produced ethereal, woozy noises by waving hoops in front of what might have been a theremin.
Hackett's approach seemed pretty simple: contrast heavily rhythmic sections against floaty, atmospheric ones, and give Glennie room to make as many different sounds as possible. There was a dramatic gear-change when Glennie cranked an air-raid siren to shrieking pitch, prompting the ensemble to change gears with urgent synth pulses and low-register rumbles from Philip Smith's piano. It climaxed with Glennie thrashing her way round a massive drum kit (there seems to be a reservoir of rage somewhere inside the elfin percussionist). Hackett kept his own contributions low-key, but a passage where he extracted organ-like tones from his guitar was striking, just before the piece faded out amid eerie chatterings and the tinkling of a wind-up music box. I couldn't think of a category for it either, but it was much better than "interesting".
