VoxCarnyx

Tramway, Glasgow

If there’s any Scottish orchestra fit for purpose when it comes to film music, it’s the RSNO, whose capturing of a sizeable slice of that lucrative market sector is now significant thanks to the state-of-the-art studio facility it has developed in its Glasgow HQ. That story is well-documented in Keith Bruce’s recent VoxCarnyx feature, well worth a read.

So what has that to do with the orchestra’s presence on Saturday at the Glasgow Sonica Festival in Glasgow’s Tramway, where it presided over the Scottish premiere of American composer John Luther Adams’ Pulitzer Prize and GRAMMY Award-winning Become Ocean, a sonic meditation addressing the former environmentalist’s fear that “as the polar ice melts and sea level rises, we humans find ourselves facing the prospect that once again we may quite literally become ocean”?

The answer relates to the function of this music, originally presented at its 2013 premiere in Seattle with multicoloured spotlighting to throw shifting focus on successive sections of the large orchestra as a necessary visual amplification. Adams’ 45-minute score is fundamentally mood music, a throbbing, rumbling undercurrent that evolves at a glacial pace, shaped as a languorous palindrome that barely rises above its slumbering narcosis.

On its own it might be passably acceptable as several notches up from white noise, and in that respect conductor Clark Rundell played safely by the book. But for its filmic properties to be appreciated beyond that, some form of visual stimulation is clearly an essential. 

Which is what visual artist and creative coder Alba G Corral brought to this Sonica presentation. Seated at a computer desk adjacent to Rundell, her real-time digital interpretation – extending over three large rear-mounted screens and ranging from drone-like sea images to abstract lineal playfulness (some of it exquisite enough in its own right) – genuinely acknowledged the geometry of the music, its mirror images and serpentine mutations, achieving some impact in its response to all-too-few moments of musical catharsis. Yet it fell short on persuasiveness, plagued by a surface detachment and shallow repetitiveness, begging the question, what was the point?

Ultimately it felt like one of those trendy psychedelic installations many of a certain age will recall from futurist consumer exhibitions half a century ago. In terms of chiming with today’s zeitgeist Become Ocean undoubtedly had a point to make, but even with the visual aid failed to hit the nerve that might drive it home.

Ken Walton