Fine tunes from fine-tuning

By WILLIAM DART

Composer Lissa Meridan is as happy to talk about the life of a turntabler as she is about listening to Ligeti, and we did both when I caught up with her before the premiere of her new orchestral piece tuning the head of a pin.

This is Meridan's first orchestral commission since she won the Auckland Philharmonia's Fanfare competition in 1999 with her zany, ear-popping firecracker.

The new work is more subtle, more searching. It's about "finding focus on all levels", but one of them is quite literal: "The long, sustained A in the oboe is the note the orchestra tunes to," Meridan explains.

"That was my first inspiration, because my favourite part of any concert is when the orchestra tunes up. I love the way the sound bounces around all over the place but the instruments all come together on the same note."

For a musician who is active in the field of video and intermedia - earlier this year she created Elastic Horizons, an interactive audiovisual installation with Venezuelan artist Antonio Funiciello for Wellington's Adam Art Gallery - she writes music that has a physical presence.

She admits that tuning is "fully minimalist in some parts" and was influenced by her work as a DJ. "The past couple of years since I've been DJ-ing I've been influenced by idm [intelligent dance music].

"I'm really keen on the sort of stuff that comes out on Warp Records, groups like Autechra and Boards of Canada, who can take one idea and stretch it out to eight or nine minutes, making an epic landscape.

"While it's really simple, there are these multiple layers of rhythmic interest that build up."

Meridan's turntabling has included a gig at the Wellington Fringe Festival, providing the music for a Janet Dunn fashion show. "Janet had some quite strong themes, so I did a live mix using ballet music, bagpipes, some quite heavy drum and bass and strange electro as well. In the winter section, for all the raincoats, I had a bit of a thunderstorm with ballet music coming in underneath."

Meridan works at Victoria University's School of Music, teaching composition alongside Jack Body, Ross Harris and John Psathas, and is also kept busy as vice-president of the Australasian Computer Music Association. In July, she presented a paper on mapping collaborations between art music and dance music at its annual conference.

With a schedule like this, her regular meditation sessions are invaluable - and, it turns out, related to her music. "I'm really interested in how our frequencies change during the day. You might wake up in the morning and feel really out of tune with yourself - the weather in Wellington certainly does that for me - but meditation will tune you up, quieten and calm you. My new piece is a little like that, reducing everything to three or four simple ideas.

"I spent my earlier years trying to write complex and intellectual music but somewhere along the line I felt I'd lost the sense of beauty. When I was writing fierce angel in 2000, I was looking for that sense of beauty. When I took up this new piece, I was determined it would be beautiful as well as something that would draw audiences in."

Next in line is a commission for the Auckland Philharmonia's 2003 series, a three-minute piece titled Blast. "I'm going to use a visual stimulus. I've got a video clip of an explosion and I'll make a spectral analysis of that and shape the music around it."

But, in the meantime, there's some other fine tuning to be done.

* tuning the head of a pin, with the Auckland Chamber Orchestra conducted by Peter Scholes, Auckland Town Hall Concert Chamber, Sunday at 8pm.