June 9, 2018
UKARIA Cultural Centre, South Australia

Couches and coffee table – complete with indoor plant and coffee table books – took centre stage for the opening concert of the UKARIA Cultural Centre’s third UKARIA 24 Festival. Casually dressed musicians – percussionists from the Australian Youth Orchestra’s Momentum Ensemble – came and went, reclining and chatting as the audience assembled.

John Cage scored his 1940 piece Living Room Music for percussion ensemble playing “any household objects or architectural elements”. From his reclined position in UKARIA’s brand new living room, Momentum’s Jeremy Sreejayan casually slapped the side of the couch, launching – along with Fraser Matthew, Thomas Robertson and James Knight – into a rhythmic, entertaining performance that fully embraced the theatre of Cage’s music. Knuckles rapped on the coffee table while a plastic jug and tiny teapot (the lid whipped off with a flourish) added their unique timbres to the polyrhythmic mix in the first movement, To Begin, while Story – which draws its musical elements from the text of Gertrude Stein’s children’s poem The World is Round – saw the quartet declaiming from the coffee table books. For the third movement, the musicians moved to a table of children’s toys, bright...