MUSIC REVIEW : A Taste of Picturesque Sounds

The tiny audience that heard Susan Rawcliffe perform with percussionist Alex Cline at the Newport Harbor Art Museum on Saturday night got a taste of one of the picturesque outposts of contemporary music, where a fascination with ethnological research into primitive sound-making intersects with an interest in offbeat sonic inventions.

Rawcliffe designs and builds her own clay flutes and pipes, which range from minuscule ocarinas (flutes with mouthpieces and globular chambers that look rather like giant seedpods ready to burst) to a massive, tunnel-like Australian aboriginal didjeridu that rests on the floor or is hefted skyward in great, back-bending arcs.

Accompanied by Cline on drums and noisemakers of Javanese, African, Irish and Brazilian extraction--in addition to a battery of pie pans and bowls--Rawcliffe played works of varying rhythmic and harmonic complexity.

In a solo aptly called “Duo for Me,” she played vocal sounds against the resonant, fixed tone of the didjeridu , focusing her sounds in and around the long tube and breathing at different intervals to produce sounds that bleated, fluttered, trumpeted, hummed like machinery or pulsed like radar. The instrument acquired a charged, electric quality, as if it were inhabited by some unseen genie.

In “Zoning,” Cline produced a muted, continuous alarm-bell timbre on one, two, three and finally four of his small, covered saucepan-sized Javanese kulintong, while Rawcliffe, on a tiny ocarina, offered teakettle-like whistles, slow wheezes and an emotional whimpering sound that became increasingly frenzied before subsiding into a quiet hum.

Other brief selections featured a water-filled pipe of Rawcliffe’s own design, the rapid rubber-band twangs of a tiny jaw’s harp and the pleasing harmonies-plus-drone of a triple cylindrical fipple flute.

Throughout, the composer’s lithe barefoot stamps and quick forearm gestures focused attention on the elemental pulse of the music, which buoyed up even the most eccentric and unearthly sounds.