Menage a Trois - for tuba, percussion, flute (and voice)

It is a rare marriage that occurs between pornography and contemporary classical music and yet in this piece, they seem very happily related.

This piece marks an early stage in the evolution of "Isolde, the composer" towards her demands that her performers use words, sing and act as well as playing the challenging and atonal, arrhythmic and genuinely chaotic score.

There is - as one would expect - much slurping, squelching and wailing in this piece, both scored musically and in terms of the erotic poem which acts as a seemingly impromptu libretto. It parodies the porn genre quite successfully, with liberal cries of "oo, yes, harder, faster" after which the velocity and energy in the music yields to those demands. But the main point of the poem is that it is entirely concocted of fantasy and is quite dreamlike: It seems more about watching pornography and imagining oneself in the midst of it, than about actually partaking in desires of the flesh.

There is the difficult challenge handed to the performers that of course the words are scored accurately and at times (particularly for the woodwind instruments) the ability to transform from erotic performer to perfect embouchure is problematic. But perhaps it is deliberate: a general wrestling, writhing, struggling embarassment plays centre stage and the performers are merely catalysts for this.

The threesome are often at odds with each other; at times there is much interplay between the tuba and the flute, at other times between the tuba and percussion, but never between the flute and percussion. This seems to reflect a decided sexuality; the tuba gets all the attention whilst one or the other are left to their own desires and fantasies.

It doesn't feel particularly voyeuristic. Despite the composer's will to make "difficult" music accessible to all through the common motive of sexual desire, one is entirely aware of the fact you are listening to music which has little to do with perceived notions of pleasantness and this means you are unable to lose yourself fully in the themes and ideas.

Is it erotic? Yes. Is it arousing? no.

7/10