Tribute to drag queen

By WILLIAM DART

Since he became interested in transcription 20 years ago, Jack Body has arranged Chinese folk music for the Kronos Quartet, grafted Beethoven, Berlioz and Stravinsky together for the Auckland Philharmonia and, earlier this year, dished up some sentimental ballads such as Silver Threads Among the Gold in droll new settings for Amsterdam's New Zealand New Music Festival.

Body's latest work, Carmen Dances, offered the composer the challenge of "transcribing pop music and trying to find out how it works".

Carmen Dances is Body's third attempt at fashioning a musical tribute to New Zealand's most celebrated drag queen. First, it was to be a dance work, commissioned by the Royal New Zealand Ballet, but the commission was withdrawn. It was reconsidered as an orchestral song-cycle with a dancer. This project was commissioned by the NZSO and, again, withdrawn. The final orchestral work, as played by the orchestra in Auckland on Friday, is subtitled "The Cabaret Dances as Danced (Hypothetically) by Carmen Rupe".

"It's been a long journey," Body confesses, with a sigh, "but, as a work, I feel the concept has become much stronger through these changes."

Ballet, song-cycle or orchestral score, the inspiration remains the same, and the composer has been fascinated by the phenomenon of Carmen for over a decade.

"The whole work originated in picking up Carmen's autobiography, Having a Ball. I found it such a racy, funny and oddly moving read because it showed a person blazing a trail, the first really iconic out-and-out drag queen we've had. I liked the kind of courage it took for Carmen to be herself. It was moving, inspiring and a lesson to us all. Not that we all want to be drag queens, but people need to be their unique selves, because there's so much pressure from society to conform.

"I visited Carmen and looked at her record collection, and thought there's got to be some inspiration in this music. There were albums like Martin Denny's Exotica and Bert Kaempfert's Swinging Safari, not to mention a lot of Hawaiian music which, although it's dreadful in many ways, has its own language, colour and flavour."

Bizet's heroine is evoked in name only this time round although Body promises deconstructed arias from Carmen if he gets the chance to write the song-cycle. However, he does manage to combine Salome's Dance of the Seven Veils from the Richard Strauss opera ("the speedy version" - three minutes instead of 13) with two Turkish belly dances. "I laid the various pieces of music on top of one another, juggled some things here and there, and a marriage of opposites proved possible after all. It was one of those serendipitous things where things just fitted together so elegantly."

Watch out for some startling orchestral sounds with "the strings being treated like a giant guitar with lots of plucking and strumming" and there are more radical touches in the final Matahari Disco, where Body includes drum kit and bass guitar.

"I've never written for these instruments before and I'm trusting the players. It's a bit dangerous but that's part of the excitement."

The soloist is the Khazakstan guitarist Slava Grigoryan, "a magician of a guitarist" whom Body caught up with at the 1998 Wellington Festival. Grigoryan is asked to play everything from a flamenco strum to swooping Waikiki stylings.

"He told me he could do anything," Body laughs, "so I took him at his word."

And in the last few seconds of the work, Body makes a Haydnesque joke with a certain intrusive sound we've all got tired of hearing in concert auditoriums. I'm sworn to secrecy - the only answer for the curious is to get to the concert.

* New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, Auckland Town Hall, Friday at 6.30pm.