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- Custom Article Title: Blood on the Floor
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- Article Title: Blood on the Floor
- Article Subtitle: Mark-Anthony Turnage’s orchestral suite
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The writer and academic Malcolm Bradbury once argued that we can find traces of the chaos, contingency, and plurality that typify the modern urban environment embedded in the structure of the modern novel or in the design and form of modernist painting. But in music? I think it is fair to say that classical composers have struggled to find similes as obvious, potent, or effective for the experience of living in a modern city as artists working in other media, or indeed as musicians working in other genres. It’s not for nothing that we commonly speak of urban rap, but not, say of urban symphonic music.
- Production Company: Melbourne Symphony Orchestra
Originating in a commission from leading German new-music group Ensemble Modern (which has since helped champion the work), Blood on the Floor was inspired by the composer’s encounter with Francis Bacon’s eponymous 1986 oil painting that depicts an empty room with a splatter of blood on wooden floorboards – or is it a diving board? Certainly, it is no straightforward image. Rather, through subtle distortions of perspective, colour, and form, Bacon conveys the kinds of sensory disorientation and feelings of unease that Bradbury suggests are now literally built into our modern lives.
Bacon’s painting is also reductive; the image he produces consists of just a few bold motifs, lines, and colours. Turnage’s compositional response, however, is capacious. It is scored – virtuosically so – for a large instrumental ensemble that includes a solo saxophone, lead guitar, bass guitar, and drumkit. The titles he gives to the individual movements serve to reinforce the broad link between Bacon’s painting and his score. The second and sixth movements (‘Junior Addict’ and ‘An Elegy For Andy’) are additionally dedicated to the memory of the composer’s younger brother, who died from a drug overdose while the work was nearing completion.
The musical rhetoric Turnage deploys is unmistakably indebted, at least in part, to earlier twentieth-century composers such as Igor Stravinsky, Leonard Bernstein, and Béla Bartók, who also explored ideas of metrical and melodic juxtaposition, dislocation, and play in their scores. Furthermore, like Bernstein and Stravinsky in particular, Turnage also draws on jazz-inspired rhythms and harmonies that enhance the sonic allusions to the rhythm and pace of modern city life, if not to the dominance of American cultural forms within it.
Turnage goes further in extending his field of influences to include progressive rock. Here, the music of Frank Zappa comes to mind as another likely influence. Zappa famously made extreme demands on the musicians in his band. So too does Turnage, starting with the conductor, who is required to direct extended sections of highly complex rhythmic changes alongside music of considerable suppleness. In both respects, Fabian Russell excelled. His assurance from the front no doubt helped to elicit what was a succession of brilliant instrumental solos (both fully scored and improvised) from across the rest of the ensemble.
Particular standouts included the solo rock/jazz quartet of Carl Mackey (saxophone), James Sherlock (solo guitar), Sam Anning (bass guitar), and Dave Beck (drumkit), performing alongside Wendy Clarke (alto flute), John Craven (bass clarinet), and Jessica Buzbee (trombone). The whole ensemble was led with confidence and precision by principal violinist Dale Barltrop.
Given that we live in the most urban nation in the world, the particular relevance of Blood on the Floor to an Australian audience should require no special pleading. The final movement (‘Dispelling the Fears’) also refers to a painting by the Australian abstract expressionist painter Heather Betts and is dedicated to her and her husband, composer Brett Dean. It is an arrangement by Turnage of a same-titled larger work for two solo trumpets and orchestra that he composed in 1994. Here the two solo parts were performed with consummate skill and sensitivity by MSO principals Owen Morris and Shane Hooton, their ethereal interplay helping to draw the whole work to a close with an unexpected hint of optimism.
This was an indisputably successful performance of a work that can stake a claim to be a significant landmark of twentieth-century music. It deserved to attract greater interest, but the fact that Hamer Hall was far from full attested to the continuing impact of Covid restrictions on music producers. Planning and populating a large venue under shifting social-distancing rules remains a major challenge for all arts producers. For those of us who were there, Blood on the Floor emerged as a stimulating, challenging, and ultimately surprisingly moving meditation for, and on, our times.
Metropolis: Blood of the Floor was performed on 9 April 2021 at Hamer Hall by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra.