My first trip to the new Shed 6 was a few weeks ago to see con­tem­po­rary music out­fit Stro­ma. They were play­ing a sam­pler of mod­ern art music, stretch­ing from Rav­el and Schoen­berg, through Boulez and Berio, to more recent work by Gillian White­head and David Lang. Music writer Alex Ross was our tour guide, describ­ing and giv­ing con­text to a full range of mod­ern, avant-garde and exper­i­men­tal music that could have been twice as baf­fling with­out.

The con­ven­tion­al lay­out for that show had con­cert seat­ing fac­ing down the long room to a flat­ly lit stage and obtru­sive ban­ner stands. Tak­ing over the same venue and for a sim­i­lar musi­cal project, the NZSO and con­duc­tor Hamish McK­e­ich (also con­duc­tor and co-direc­tor of Stro­ma) trans­formed the space into a vast dra­mat­i­cal­ly lit theatre/gallery/cabaret hybrid, with an unstaged orches­tra placed side­ways, some of the audi­ence sit­ting at tables, bench­es or on the floor, and some stand­ing.

I had lit­tle idea what we were in for, aside from the draw­card of Jon­ny Greenwood’s name. (Con­trary to ear­li­er Welling­ton­ista reports, Green­wood was not in atten­dance.) McK­e­ich’s laid-back intro­duc­tions to each piece replaced any need for a print­ed pro­gramme.

The first few high vio­lin notes of Arvö Pärt’s “Fratres” revealed a sur­pris­ing­ly dead room acoustic. But as the crys­talline struc­ture of the piece rotates and descends the scale, the dou­ble bass­es enter­ing was like some­one just remem­bered to turn on the sub­woofer.

Alex Ross, in his intro­duc­tion to the Stro­ma con­cert, made a point about jazz pick­ing up the avant-garde baton in the late 50s and co-evolv­ing with the explo­sion of new and increas­ing­ly icon­o­clas­tic styles in con­tem­po­rary music. Welling­ton com­pos­er (and Stroma’s oth­er co-direc­tor) Michael Norris’s “Heart Across Night” is an intri­cate and slight­ly wag­gish piece, played in a suit­ably infor­mal space at the end of the room, and while pre­sent­ing in a jazz mode – it’s scored for trom­bone, drum kit and dou­ble bass – the cut-up, stop-start rhythms point­ed to a dif­fer­ent tra­di­tion.

Back with the NZSO, John Zorn’s “Kol nidre”, a word­less rework­ing of frag­ments of the Jew­ish rite, car­ried echoes of “Fratres”; both pieces devo­tion­al and con­tem­pla­tive, and sur­pris­ing­ly con­so­nant, using the yearn­ing “Jew­ish” scale also com­mon to Mid­dle East­ern, Balkan and fla­men­co music. It turned out this was a teas­er for a larg­er focus on Zorn in the next Shed Series show.

Haydn’s Sym­pho­ny no. 60, “Il dis­trat­to”, was derived from his inci­den­tal music for a French stage com­e­dy. This piece is almost post-mod­ern, with Haydn play­ing mul­ti­ple musi­cal jokes, includ­ing imi­ta­tions of a street band, an ama­teur wed­ding orches­tra who need to stop play­ing to tune their instru­ments, and the hero’s absent-mind­ed­ness as he for­gets his own wed­ding. Its play­ful­ness was a great con­trast to the more sober pieces in the rest of the show.

As McK­e­ich point­ed out, late Roman­ti­cism has become the dom­i­nant form adopt­ed by fea­ture film com­posers, except that the utter­ly con­trast­ing thick micro­tonal­i­ty and glis­san­di famil­iar in orches­tral works by Pen­derec­ki and Ligeti is now a com­mon short­hand for indi­cat­ing chaos and ter­ror on screen. Alex Ross, in his Stro­ma intro­duc­tion, saw cause to cel­e­brate this as a main­stream accep­tance of new forms of music emerg­ing in the 50s and 60s, but I’m not so sure. Jon­ny Greenwood’s film scores, which tend not to hew as close­ly to the emo­tion­al or action beats as most nar­ra­tive scores do, are an excep­tion. They are also eas­i­ly export­ed as stand­alone orches­tral suites, heard here in a selec­tion of six cues from “There Will Be Blood”, one of which even had as its ori­gin an item from his “Pop­corn Super­het Receiv­er” con­cert piece. It moves through Pen­dereck­ian swarm­ing micro­tonal­i­ty, per­cus­sive effects rem­i­nis­cent of Radiohead’s “Burn the Witch”, Bernard Her­rmann-esque fren­zy, and calm lyri­cism. A ter­rif­ic end to the night.

The concert’s sub­ti­tle “Jux­ta­po­si­tion” reflects the plur­al his­to­ries of each piece. “Fratres” exists in many arrange­ments. “There Will Be Blood” is for a film but also re-uses exist­ing con­cert mate­r­i­al. The Zorn is sourced and refract­ed from a medieval rite, and the Haydn moved from the the­atre stage to the con­cert hall.

This is a well-designed and thought­ful series, a great new way of expe­ri­enc­ing mod­ern music and far bet­ter than the for­mal sit-down Stro­ma pre­sen­ta­tion. I can’t wait for the next and final show, called “Pro­jec­tion” and fea­tur­ing Zorn and Mozart, at Shed 6 on 19th Octo­ber. If you want a seat, get there ear­ly.

Side­notes:
– Shed 6 is also con­fus­ing­ly called the TSB Bank Audi­to­ri­um. There is also the TSB Bank Are­na and TSB Bank Arcade. Sort it out, Venues Welling­ton!
– My iPhone reminder tone is in the same key as “Kol nidre”, which was just as well.
– Crack­ing cans of Garage Project in between move­ments is the new cough­ing.