Sideshow, for amplified octet and electronics by American composer Steven Takasugi, was given its US premiere by Talea Ensemble in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on 1 December 2015. A 2010 Guggenheim Foundation grant launched Takasugi's work on this hour-long piece, and the Bludenzer Tage zeitgemäßer Musik programmed the first performance in their November 2015 festival. The piece was eagerly anticipated, not least because an excerpt of it featured in Manchester-based Distractfold Ensemble's programme at Darmstadt in 2014, a performance that earned them the Kranichsteiner performance prize that year.
Born in Los Angeles in 1960, Takasugi is known internationally perhaps as much for his intense, metaphor-rich teaching style as for his music. His compositions are largely electronic, consisting of thousands of samples of stringed and household instruments sequenced into long, dense cascades of microtonal and hyper-frenetic attacks that are interspersed with occasional meditations on isolated sounds and their environments. Sideshow, based on real and imaginary stories from the freak shows and midways of early-1900s Coney Island, makes manic actors of the Talea performers, who mime playing their instruments as much as they actually play them, stare into the audience with big, toothy, ‘carny’ grins, and occasionally dissolve into fits of laughter or other horrifying spasms.
Sideshow differs from much of Takasugi's music in its programmatic movement and section titles, largely carnivalesque propositions of a glimpse at ‘The Man Who Couldn't Stop Laughing’, ‘The Human Fish’, or someone ‘Electrocuting an Elephant’. There are 62 such titles printed in the programme, which range from the fantastic to the financial. While the titles are diverse and evocative, they sometimes rush by, and the music is made up largely of Takasugi's homogenous but dazzling densities, punctuated sparsely by overt theatrical gestures: a stomping march, the introduction of props, or a silent, painstakingly slow surveying glance around the room done by the ensemble with unnerving and impressive coordination. With the spectacle promised by the titles, this can feel disappointing at first, as though the bulk of the music is but a set of virtuosic interludes between watching the musicians do silly things they do not usually do (although Talea were convincing and utterly committed to these roles). This is not to downplay the significance of the theatrical in Sideshow. Most of the musicians' actual playing is difficult to distinguish from their miming. There is a disjointedness to every action: sometimes actions are radically slowed down, sometimes radically sped up; sometimes a player mimes music being performed elsewhere in the ensemble; sometimes a player mimes electronic music they could never, quite, have played. The most memorable moments are when the full ensemble quite literally moves together, either in rapid-fire or with an extreme, ominous protraction.
The live concert experience invites a reflection on how Takasugi's music worked before the introduction of the radically theatrical into his practice. Die Klavierübung (2007–09), for example, brutally refracts crackling, tinkly piano samples over 40 minutes of music not unlike that of Sideshow. One feels not as though inside the piano itself, but as though inside a cathedral built of the splintered, discarded wood, metal and ivory scavenged from the destroyed remains of a thousand pianos. Diary of a Lung (2006/07) behaves similarly, this time using samples of the composer having a particularly phlegmy coughing fit that are accompanied by a more heterogeneous (than Die Klavierübung) catalogue of various bathroom implement sounds. Through shifts in material and acoustic, the listener travels into and out of Takasugi's physiological and medicinal ritual with great speed. One of Sideshow's great feats, then, is that the listener can easily map the obvious grotesquery of the theatrical gestures onto Takasugi's dense sound world, which might otherwise be more difficult to penetrate. The music is uncanny, not in half-recognition, but in over-saturation.
Texts from the satirist Karl Kraus inspired periodic interludes in the piece, but the texts are not spoken and these interludes can be difficult to distinguish from the rest of the music. Still, Kraus's texts in the programme look like a script for a master of ceremonies, and the cumulative effect is of being in a space made this time of the splintered, discarded tropes of 100 years of morbid fascination with the sideshow. The penultimate section, ‘Von Dunkel Zu Dunkel’, is the closest Takasugi comes to a misstep: its expansive, breathy, reflective space treads dangerously close to feeling moralistic, but perhaps a certain nihilism is essential if the piece is to be truly felt. Thankfully, the lawlessness is reincarnated for the delirious, harrowing ending. After the concert, a performer revealed to me that the ensemble is coordinated by Takasugi's own, strangely affected voice in their earpieces, adding another uncanny dimension to the production.
Sideshow's subject matter would tempt most composers to thoroughly exploit representation. However, Takasugi's trademark relentless granulation of electronic sounds induces a macabre feeling via the light claustrophobia of the music, and the confusion about who is producing what. Despite its length, I found myself eager to experience the piece again, to learn about it simply by being with it, as if my presence could somehow comfort the contorted musicians. As delivered by the unwavering hands of Talea, Sideshow is freakish without being gimmicky, making for an uncommonly rewarding concert experience.
