Ensemble Three|Dysmetropsia
17 September, 2025 Hanson Dyer Hall, Southbank, Melbourne, VIC
“Dysmetropsia” was the title of a concert presented by Ensemble Three, a stunning group of musicians who are Joel Brennan, trumpet/flugelhorn; Don Immel, trombone; and Ken Murray, electric guitar. This innovative program featured world premieres of new works by composers Elliott Gyger and Anne Hsuyin, alongside diverse pieces by Melody Eötvös, Leilehua Lanzilotti, and Alan Holley.
It is a great paradox that some of the most captivating and gratifying music is often based on pathos and tragedy, and an underlying connection for most of the works in this concert was a sense of pathos. Although the term Dysmetropsia describes a neurological disorder that distorts perception, and many of the works did indeed explore sonically altered perceptions of sound and space, the connecting thread throughout this event was a musical representation of grief and loss.
Gamma by Melody Eötvös, a work described by the composer as a dramatic re-writing of a much earlier solo guitar work, opened the concert. Gamma featured a very active electric guitar part, around which the trumpet and flugel horn and trombone hovered with meandering melodic segments. Opening with Ken Murray’s driving guitar beats, the horns explored a diversity of timbral textures with a variety of mutes. While this striking work underwent several changes of character and mood, its overall journey projected an unnerving and unsettling atmosphere, as well as conveying altered perceptions of sound and space through its many fluctuations in texture, tempo and dynamics.
Elliott Gyger’s What Rough Beast (first performance) followed a talk by Gyger. He recited W. B. Yeats’s 1919 poem The Second Coming, also explaining how it influenced his composition. The poem, which contains the words What Rough Beast, was written in the wake of the Great War and at the outset of the Spanish Flu, and describes “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;” setting the mood for the music. Its three movements were themselves segmented, and included a variety of sound worlds including different effects pedals for the guitar, sections using muted horns, swirling melodic fanfares, and a wide range of dynamic settings. The piece travelled through multiple musical dispositions from eerie, disjunct, and dissonant sections, through to more melodic and peaceful parts, guitar solos and numerous other atmospheres during its many stages.
‘Composers in the room’: Alan Holley, Melody Eötvös, Elliott Gyger
In keeping with the thread of loss, Leilehua Lanzilotti’s The Strong Pulse Beneath the Charred Earth was a work that evoked a ghostly and desolated world, based as it was on the devastating fires that overwhelmed Hawaii some years ago. This hauntingly beautiful piece was a visual as well as sonic experience, with the players using their instruments in innovative ways. Ken Murray used a violin bow on the electric guitar to create static, meditative sounds while both Joel Brennan and Don Immel used only the mouthpieces of their respective horns as end-blown vessels, at times amplified, to generate a sound world that combined sonic beauty with unsettling sensations.
Anne Hsuyin’s Alice Syndrome (first performance) was, for me, the only work of the concert that did not totally engage me. Although well written and seemingly enjoyed by the audience, the work lacked the gravitas and experimental nature of the other pieces. While the piece started with an interesting and unworldly guitar texture, it soon became static through the prolonged use of pentatonic melodies, and used many gestures that sounded much like excerpts from film music.
J.S. Bach and Jimi Hendrix are undoubtedly two of the most gifted and influential figures in musical history. Composing a single work that includes influences from these musical giants can result in either a muddled pastiche, or a cohesive and masterful mix. Alan Holley’s All Demons Run achieved the latter. In his pre-performance talk, Holley spoke of how events from his teen years, including his love of Bach’s music and Hendrix’s musical response to the conflict in Vietnam, helped shape the thinking for this work. This piece took listeners on an expedition through a sonic world full of auditory references to both Bach and Hendrix, with Ken Murray’s guitar intermittently providing a pulse around which the trumpet and trombone circulated in counterpoint. With guitar tones echoing Hendrix’s Woodstock performance, and forlorn brass passages evoking Bach’s chorale writing, this work underwent well-crafted changes in character and mood, resulting in in a captivating and dynamic soundscape full of integrity and attractiveness. This piece, like all the works, benefited immensely from the accomplished and virtuosic artistry of the performers.
In summary, this concert proved to be a most pleasurable and illuminating musical journey.
