MUSIC REVIEW : Hemingway Work Premieres at the Newport Museum

The Aivilik Eskimos, according to Edmund Snow Carpenter, “define space more by sound than sight”--a nice setup for composer/percussionist Gerry Hemingway.

Hemingway’s “Aivilik Rays,” for solo percussionist, tape and live electronic processing, received its world premiere Thursday night at the Newport Harbor Art Museum. The loosely structured performance, a little more than an hour long, aptly painted an aural landscape filled with shivering images of an arctic tundra.

At first glance, Hemingway’s large amplified percussion battery, situated between four loudspeakers, appeared to be designed to produce sounds at a volume level akin to a rock concert, perhaps even beyond.

Yet as “Aivilik Rays” progressed, the eardrums of the faithful, 20-member audience weren’t blasted but rather were tickled.

The music centers around the exploration of barely audible sounds produced when percussion instruments or found objects are wiped, massaged, scraped, bowed or played in some other unusual way.

Although a pulse is sometimes established (and even more rarely, a melodic fragment or two is heard), the texture remains largely a collage of delicate sound effects that many times imitate but never quite copy such natural sounds as wind, birds, waterfalls or breaking ice.

Among the myriad of mostly non-pitched instruments were drums, cymbals, cowbells, a steel drum, a mbira instrument, wind chimes suspended in water and stiff strands of long, spaghetti-like plastic which when whipped or whirled produce a soft, wind-like effect.

Toward the end, rice was scattered ceremoniously on the instruments, softly sounding the cymbals and producing a sound on the drums similar to filling a bowl full of cereal--one of many such effects created by unusual uses of objects and instruments.

The tape part for “Aivilik Rays,” realized on a Serge modular synthesizer, consists of white noise filtered and altered in various ways.

Although program notes describe four discernible movements, both tape and percussion parts meander and explore non-stop without cadenzas, noticeable changes in character or moments of pause.

An added touch occurs during the work’s only stretch of silence as Hemingway stands and surveys the room with binoculars--perhaps a touch of irony for those of us outside the arctic region who see with our eyes.