CD Reviews

Tom Johnson

Rational Melodies

New World CD 80705-2

When he was a critic at the Village Voice in the 1970s, Tom Johnson (b. 1939) was one of the first writers to apply the term ‘minimalism’ to music. As time has moved on, many composers originally associated with minimalism have branched out stylistically; while certain gestural signatures may remain, the processes by which they created their earliest works seem to have loosened up considerably.

Johnson has moved on too. After leaving the Voice, he relocated to Paris. While active as a composer throughout his tenure as a journalist, since the 1980s he’s focused on music instead of words as his primary means of expression. Johnson has continued to write pieces in the minimalist tradition, retaining the genre’s early reliance on generative processes. One of his best known works, Rational Melodies, is a case in point. Composed in 1982, the melodies are single line compositions that have been constructed with painstaking care using various patterning models. Contour, rhythmic shape, meter, proportion, intervallic profile, and tessitura are all parameters variously mapped in these 21 pieces — hence the ‘rational’ portion of their title.

There have been two previous recordings of Rational Melodies, both for solo instruments. But the French Ensemble Dedalus has rehearsed them as ensemble pieces for an extended period of time. It’s interesting that, despite the attention paid to details of compositional design, Johnson has been willing to allow Dedalus to revise these works extensively. Some involve matters of a heterophonic sort of orchestration — deciding which instruments will play each given note was apparently an intrinsic part of the rehearsal process — while others actually create significant changes of register. There are even instances when an organum-like planing is added to the proceedings, creating momentary ‘music in fifths.’

Dedalus seems to know this music backwards and forwards. One can well understand why they’ve chosen to make Rational Melodies their debut recording. That said, it still seems a courageous decision on Johnson’s part to abnegate enough control to allow his music to change, grow, and in this case, prosper.

Time Curve

Music by Philip Glass and William Duckworth

Bruce Brubaker, piano

Arabesque Recordings

Six Etudes for Piano – Philip Glass (original 1994 version)

The Time Curve Preludes, Book I – William Duckworth

Bruce Brubaker has assembled strong performances of attractive solo piano music on this recording.  The Glass etudes are a kind of “Glass concentrate” to my ears: all the harmony and rhythm but few (if any) timbral changes and developments.  Mr. Brubaker plays these works with a fair amount of rubato and feeling, something that others might shun in the face of such minimalist compositions.  These recordings are much more reverberant and meditative than the recordings on Orange Mountain Music. 

Mr. Brubaker’s work on the Duckworth preludes is similar in interpretation to the Glass.  There is more of an emphasis on ringing sound and a distance from the piano than, say, the Bruce Neely recording.  The overall affect of Mr. Brubaker’s recording is more of a watercolor smear instead of crisp Mondriaan lines.  I don’t mean that as a negative statement.  Brubaker’s sound is warm and comforting, letting me revel in the harmonic arpeggiations of each piece.  Listening to this disc, I get a better sense of what Mr. Brubaker sounds like in concert as opposed to in a studio.  I see this as a positive thing.

I like that Bruce Brubaker is able to draw a different sound out of these same pieces.  Instead of hearing a machine play the music, you hear a person interpret the score.  Mr. Brubaker has found his own path through these pieces and I find his path quite listenable.

Doctor Atomic Symphony

John Adams

Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra

conducted by David Robertson

Nonesuch Records

I’ve been excited about this music for several years, ever since I heard about the opera project on NPR back in maybe 2005.  When reviews starting coming in, well, everyone reading this probably already knows what the reviews said.  Any failings in the libretto were usually balanced by praise for the music.  My experience with the opera itself lasted all of 30 minutes.  I was watching it on PBS, bored out of my skull, and fell asleep before the end of the first act.  My wife stuck it out for half of the second act at which point she gave up, too.

So again, I was excited to hear the music and not be distracted by a story which seemed to be about physics and the dietary intake of military officers.  In general, I like the music of the Doctor Atomic Symphony but it does suffer away from its dramatic context.  The brief opening movement, “The Laboratory” is quite an ear-catcher.  The two and a half minutes are driving, engaging, and my favorite part of the symphony.  The long center movement, “Panic,” languishes a bit too much for my tastes.  The form revolves around recurring brass solos, all very well played, but I never get the feeling that the movement is leading anywhere.  “Panic” kind of sprawls around for fourteen and a half minutes.  Divorced from what drama was in the opera, the music can’t seem to find its own internal trajectory.  At times, it ends up sounding like a soundtrack for a movie I haven’t seen.  Strangely enough, I’ll write about this very thing in my next review.  The final movement, “Trinity” pulls things together nicely.  Fast and driving, much more filled with a sense of urgency than the previous “Panic” movement, “Trinity” has a satisfying dramatic formal arc and a wider range of expressed emotional content.

Perhaps I am judging the work too harshly since I had such high expectations.  I have found Adams’ more recent work to be a bit on the unfocused and sprawling side of the spectrum which is a far cry from the tightly focused and forward moving pieces that I have enjoyed so much.  Perhaps I need to spend more time with the opera but, as a wise man once said, “A bad libretto is like bone disease.”

It should probably come as little surprise that I think Guide to Strange Places is the real sleeper hit on this CD.  From 2001 (the year, not the movie), THIS is the kind of music that I like from Adams.  The energy rolls right along with Adams’ characteristic orchestrational tricks but around 4 minutes in the air gets let out and we go into a “strange place.”  Transitions into foreign areas abound as a formal technique in this piece but I found each transition effective and engaging as well as each of the musical vignettes that they connect.  I’m especially a fan of the low brass and woodwind groan/grunt section around the 13 minute mark.  THIS piece, to my ears, is a Symphony.  The music is varied yet coherent, engaging yet new, and extremely well performed.

GLASS BOX: Music by Philip Glass. 10 CD Nonesuch. (Sony Classical; Orange Mountain Music; Virgin, Shandar)

Philip Glass piano, keyboards,: The Philip Glass Ensemble, Michael Riesman, keyboards, music director; Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra; Vienna Radio Symphony; Bruckner Orchester Linz; American Composers Orchestra, Dennis Russell Davies, conductor, various vocal soloists; New York City Opera Orchestra, Christopher Keene. conductor, various vocal soloists; English Chamber Orchestra, Michael Riesman, Harry Rabinowitz, conductors; various film studio orchestras with members of The PGE and The Western Wind Vocal Ensemble;conducted by Michael Riesman; Kronos Quartet – David Harrington; John Sherba, violins; Hank Dutt, viola; Joan Jeanrenaud, cello; Lyric Quartet.

Philip Glass is so ubiquitous and successful that’s it’s easy to take him for granted and stop listening. Sure, he repeats, uses arpeggios, broken chords, minor modes/keys, and his style is instantly identifiable and frequently copied. But he’s always been interested in re-inventing himself and he’s changed the rules of his game by putting himself into unknown situations with other artists, or forms, and sometimes both at once. The fruits of several seminal collaborations with theatre director Robert Wilson — -EINSTEIN ON THE BEACH (1975), and film director Godfrey Reggio — KOYAANISQATSI (1983) are in this with essays and appreciations 40 year retrospective set. But there’s a kicker. Glass frequently works with visual artists, or artists from theatre or film, but the CD only format can’t show how his music works with images. Yet it does show how arresting his music is as sound, and those who think he hasn’t changed, developed, or matured are in for a shock or a revelation.

The early works (1969- 70) on the eponymously titled disc one were shocking to some and a revelation to others when first performed. Glass threw the academic rule book out the window, but kept what he learned from Nadia Boulanger – the music of the classic masters was both logical and inevitable — and that sense of inevitable logic certainly drives these works here. The carefully added lines in MUSIC IN SIMILAR MOTION (1969) are like a mural you have to walk with in order to see, and its development is just as planned as the nearly hour long 1970 MUSIC WITH CHANGING PARTS – 45 minutes here – in which Glass let his musicians play and sing pitches they heard in its intricate overlapping parts which I think reflects his rarely remarked on before India encounter with the rhythmic patterning of Moroccan ritual music where drones and simple shifting counts – there are frequent contrasts between 2 and 3 and multiples thereof – become the building blocks for something very complex.

These early works grew in complexity as Glass’ musical language developed , but their complexity has nothing to do with the serial method in vogue when they were written. That was tied to the dialectical view of history as a kind of conflict resolution process, which starts as thesis, moves on to antithesis, and culminates in synthesis. These pieces function outside of history, or rather within their own idea of history and time.

Glass decided to confront that subject head on in the massive yet ingeniously varied MUSIC IN 12 PARTS (1971-74) [ disc two ] which is, in some almost dialectical way the culmination of his minimalist period. Or as Glass told me “ My idea was to write a piece that was like a catalog, a kind of grand compendium of all the ideas I had worked out… and I tried to find ways of linking an overall harmonic structure to an overall rhythmic structure to produce a kind of (laughs) unified field theory of music. “ Time and how it’s perceived is a large part of what it’s about, and Glass has many ways of expanding our sense of it here. Producers Robert Hurwitz, Kurt Munkacsi, and Michael Riesman have chosen parts VII to X so that the listener can experience them as a sequence of developing units and not just bleeding chunks. There’s a lot of variety in Glass’ sometimes circumscribed approach – a full range of contrapuntal devices and rhythms as well as surprising but perfectly logical changes of direction and texture. But you can’t hear the unwritten undertones and overtones which emerge from the overlapping lines, volume, and acoustic properties of the room where it’s played live. And a rare complete performance by the PGE at San Francisco’s Davies Hall 16 Feb 2009 will certainly bring these out. Orange Mountain Music – — has also released a PGE live at Rovereto, Italy, 2006 set of 12 PARTS, which is as thrilling and cogent as this studio one though the tempos are markedly slower in several places.

Glass’ 5 hour “ opera “ with Robert Wilson EINSTEIN ON THE BEACH (1975) – [ disc three ] – is paradoxically more elaborate and simpler than 12 PARTS, as befits a work tailored for and responsive to the exigencies of stage action. These excerpts give a good sense of its shape as well as its intimate – all 5 Knee Plays – and spectacular dimensions – Train 1 and the concluding Spaceship scene. The incisiveness and elegance of the playing and singing defines the character of the piece as I imagine it to be when encountered live – all space, light, movement, décor – aligned with Glass’ strongly varied harmonic and rhythmic densities, though I miss the seat of your pants rawness of the PGE’s Tomato LP . Still it’s wonderful to hear the Prologue from Act V ( Rome Section ) of Wilson’s originally for the 1984 LA Olympics the CIVIL wars (1983) — a beautiful, imaginative, and tremendously moving score with killer bass clarinet solos, which Dennis Russell Davies and his American Composers Orchestra play with heart and soul. But there’s not a note from the Wilson/ Glass – Rumi poems MONSTERS OF GRACE (1997) , which is on OMM.

Three of Glass’ 5 collaborations with Reggio – KOYAANISQATSI (1983) , POWAQQATSI (1987) – [ disc 6 ], and ANIMA MUNDI (1999) [disc 10] are here. KOYAANISQATSI is revered for its fits like a glove marriage of image and sound – the slow moving lines and suspended harmonies in “Organic” and the unsettling altered chords in “Resource” are perfect musical analogues as well as stand alone pieces as are al the others — while Glass’ absorption of world music instruments into his own idiom in POWAQQATSI is striking, but much less known, largely because its distributor, Cannon Films, was going bankrupt when it was released. But the last installment in Reggio’s QATSI trilogy, NAQOYQATSI (2002), with its intricate textures and demanding but perfectly apt writing for cellist Yo Yo Ma – it’s on SONY Classical – sadly didn’t make the cut. But the good news is that all 3 QATSI films have gotten a new lease on life by being performed live with the PGE.

Glass’ orchestra only and orchestra with voices writing , which appears throughout his 8 symphonies. has grown by leaps and bounds. The strings only – violin 1 and 2, violas, cellos, double basses – Symphony # 3 (1995) [ disc nine ] is full of timbral contrasts despite its white on white sound which Stravinsky and Herrmann also exploited in APOLLO (1927) and PSYCHO (1960), and the third movement’s quick assymetrical metres — 7 /8 , 9/8 … are virtuosic and thrilling. The complex rhythmic and harmonic writing for every choir approach of Symphony # 8 (2005), which Dennis Russell Davies and his Bruckner Orchester Linz premiered at BAM on their first US tour in 2005, and play here, is extremely original and subtle. The 8 themes which begin the first movement are closely related yet legible, the second movement passacaglia ventures into strange harmonic waters ala Boulanger’s teacher, Faure, and the third and final one, with its sense of deep and inevitable sorrow, never fails to bring me to tears, whether at BAM, or at home.

Chamber music speaks from the mind and heart , and Glass’ string quartets are clearly letters from home. # 4 (Buczak) (1987) [ disc seven ] , which was commissioned by Geoffrey Hendricks as a memorial to his young artist lover Brian Buczak, who died of AIDS, has an alternately ecstatic, and otherworldly character – the suspended in time middle slow movement – while the first movement’s sostenuto  chords seem to frame a kind of narrative of Buczak, Hendricks and Glass together – they were friends – in a continuously evolving present, which extends to the third and final movement, too. Lots of the writing in # 5 (1991) , with its frequent metric shifts , mercurial changes of texture, and the headlong dive of its chromatic scales in 17/8, at a very fast tempo, is openly virtuosic, and Glass told me he asked David Harrington and Kronos to play it as one thought, which they do, with accuracy and point, in all 3 quartets here. Four of the 10 Etudes for Piano (1994), which Glass wrote for Davies to play, and which Glass does here, are very personal, idiosyncratic and non-didactic additions to this form which Chopin and Debussy enlarged so beautifully before him.

Glass’ use of the orchestra in his Gandhi opera SATYAGRAHA (1979 [ disc five ] is not unlike that of Debussy in PELLEAS Et MELISANDE (1893-1902) , where the orchestra disappears into the music, and being invisible in this way becomes more deeply felt. His wind and string – with one synthesizer – writing evokes a completely unique sound in which the voices seem to flower from the orchestra and vice versa. Tenor Douglas Perry’s Gandhi – he virtually owned the role till Richard Croft sang it at The Met this spring – gives a mellifluous and touching performance, though the miking of alto Rhonda Liss’ Mrs. Alexander, while dramatic alright, is too far forward harsh. But Christopher Keene, sadly dead from AIDS, leads a cogent performance with the New York City Opera Chorus, and his singers in Act III’s extremely exposed sextet make it seem easy as pie.

The text and performance style of Glass’ opera about the heretic king AKHNATEN (1983) [ disc eight ] aim, like the in Sanskrit SATYAGRAHA, at divorcing and /or mirroring action(s) from words. The voice – countertenor Paul Esswood sings the pharaoh – is set within an umbrous ( no violins as in KOYAANISQATSI ) yet continuously shifting orchestral frame, and musical time and scale once again take center stage, in Davies and the Stuttgart State Opera and Chorus’ vigorous and deeply atmospheric account of this monumental yet very personal score.
You get a touch but only a touch of Glass’ wide-ranging efforts in moving pictures – other than his for Reggio — in disc ten, Filmworks, though Nonesuch’s PHLILIP ON FILM gives a better introduction and in depth survey of his work in this form. Still disc four has excerpts from his odd yet enchanting score, ETOLIE POLAIRE , for Francois de Menil and Barbara Rose’s 1977 doc MARK DI SUVERO, SCULPTOR. My favorite has always been “ Are Years What? ( for Marianne Moore ) “ for flute and soprano and tenor saxophone – Dickie Landry , with its startling and refreshing “break “ – rest — midstream. Disc ten is strangely unsastisfying – we don’t get bleeding chunks, but chunks nevertheless of scores both famous and obscure. But who could ever think, much less see Glass’ 1994 opera based on Jean Cocteau’s 1946 film LA BELLE ET LA BETE, as anything but new music wedded to the work of this way too gifted – who could ever pigeonhole Cocteau? –and deeply influential artist? Glass apparently identifies with him – both were outsiders even when they appeared to be movers and shakers within their own time – and Glass’ time is decidedly ours. But anyone curious about his recent film, concert, and theatre work should check out Orange Mountain Music’s catalog – as well as Nonesuch’s , which give a close-up view of this straightforward, extremely important, yet deeply elusive artist.

BRYARS: And so ended Kant’s travelling in this world; PÄRT: The Beatitudes; LOMON: “Transport”, from Testimony of Witnesses; DUCKWORTH: Selections from Southern Harmony; WALKER: Selections from The Southern Harmony & Musical Companion. Boston Secession/Jane Ring Frank. Brave 720. 52 minutes.
The house of minimalism has many mansions. In fact, minimalism itself moved out (probably in order to sublet) around the time of Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians, a piece whose relatively spritely harmonic rhythm (the pace at which the chords change) indicates a break with “pure” minimalism. Since then, the label of “minimalist” has been accepted and rejected by composers of a wide range of musical attitudes and attributes.
The music on Surprised by Beauty: Minimalism in Choral Music shows that the choral and instrumental group Boston Secession takes a broad view of minimalism. The common characteristic among the pieces is a certain level of simplicity on the surface and a commitment to tonality in one form or another.

Gavin Bryars’ And so ended Kant’s travelling in this world is a meditative setting of a brief prose description of the last, minor occurrence in the philosopher’s life. The text is from Thomas de Quincey’s biography, and Bryars sets it in straightforward speech rhythms, with no counterpoint and only occasional harmony. The expressive power in the piece comes from Bryars’ use of melodic dissonances, which usually consist in lowering scale degrees and lengthening the syllable. And so ended Kant’s travelling in this world is an almost perfect match of subject/text and technique.
Arvo Pärt’s Beatitudes is even more austere than the Bryars, in some ways. It is scored for chorus and organ, and the organ supplies volume, counterpoint, and drama. On the other hand, the text is given a ritualistic setting, letting the words speak for themselves free of expressive ornament. The result is a piece both lean and haunting.
Ruth Lomon’s Testimony of Witnesses is an evening-long oratorio based on poetry by victims of the Holocaust. The “Transport” section is a setting of short verses about the trains that carried people to the concentration camps. Lomon uses the considerable resources of the Boston Secession instrumental contingent (Testimony of Witnesses was written for them) to paint a harrowing sound picture of these events. The music is tonal and directly expressive. It’s powerful and deeply moving.
The program proper concludes with selections from William Duckworth’s Southern Harmony, a reworking of hymn-tunes from William Walker’s 1835 The Southern Harmony & Musical Companion. Duckworth is one of the founders of post-minimalism, which employs minimalist techniques (repetition of notes, motives, or phrases and clear, usually relatively fast pulsation) along with techniques from both more traditional and more Modernist techniques. Walker’s original hymn-tunes provide excellent grist for Duckworth’s mill. The result is an exultant updating and deepening of music that already was part of America’s artistic DNA when Duckworth got hold of it. The disc closes with “bonus tracks”, lively readings of some of Walker’s hymn-tunes that Duckworth used as source material.
The performances, led by Boston Secession Artistic Director Jane Ring Frank, are uniformly outstanding and sound very good—you can hear everything. Highly recommended for those interested in recent trends in choral writing and performing.

Terry Riley, soprano sax, time-lag accumulator

Elision Fields

A lot of us have known and loved the original LP of Riley’s Poppy Nogood and the Phantom Band, which often was performed in all-night concert sessions. This represents a much expanded performance from the LP, and took place live in concert in the wee hours of the morning during 1968. It was originally released on the Organ of Corti label, so this represents its re-release.

When I first turned it on in my car this morning, it sounded just like the recording, but by the time I hit Philmont Avenue en route to work, it was in an altogether different place, with a lot more material and permutations than was ever on the LP.

The music consists of rhythmic fragments over a drone, that are manipulated by electronic means along with live performance. There are no notes with the album, so I’m relying on what I’ve heard anecdotally over the years. It’s a great album, even if one is already familiar with the original LP. I believe there might have been another version recorded as well, but I do not know that it is available, so this is the best thing out there right now as an archival performance of Poppy Nogood. The sound is excellent, and the length matched my commute perfectly (40 minutes).

Alter Ego Plays Philip Glass

Music in Similar Motion
Strung Out
Piece in the Shape of a Square
Gradus
Music in Contrary Motion
600 Lines
How Now

Alter Ego:
Manuel Zurria, flute; Paolo Ravaglia, clarinet; Francesco Peverini, violin; Francesco Dillon, cello; Oscar Pizzo, keyboard; Gianluca Ruggeri, marimba
Orange Mountain Music

I’ve always been particularly enamored by Glasss early music, and Two Pages was actually the first work of his that I knew, on an old LP with Glass and Michael Riesman. I still have the old Chatham Square albums of Music with Changing Parts, Music in Similar Motion and Music in Fifths, and once saw a page from an early work involving two flutes back in college (well, maybe that was actually Steve Reich’s Reed Phase, but whatever); I still remember trying to play that fragment to get some sense of what it sounded like.

I had known that the Italian new music ensemble Alter Ego had recorded two separate albums of some of Glasss early music, including How Now and 600 Lines and went crazy trying to track one of these down, as it apparently was only available through the Italian distributor Stradivari.it. Fortunately, a 2-CD set has just been released containing a wealth of Glass’s early music, some of which exists in other recordings (such as Music in Similar Motion, Gradus, Music in Contrary Motion, Strung Out and some of which I have not seen any recordings of (How Now, 600 Lines, Music in the Shape of a Square). The recordings of Music in Contrary Motion and Gradus represent the first recordings of these versions for ensemble or bass clarinet, respectively.

Lets start with a general comment: this album is excellent. The recorded sound is wonderful, the performances are first-rate, and the liner notes, written by Glass himself (including a paragraph from his book Music by Philip Glass), are insightful.

In terms of the individual pieces, being very familiar with Music in Similar Motion and Music in Contrary Motion as performed by Glass’s ensemble, it is interesting to hear a different scoring and interpretation. The latter has always, in my experience, been performed by a solo Farfisa or other electronic organ, while Alter Ego scores it for mallet instruments, keyboards, winds and (from my listening) violin. Its a very different, yet pleasant interpretation and scoring and complements other recordings well.

The same is true for Strung Out, which I originally knew through a recording by Paul Zukofsky. I like this performance very much, and the violin sounds warmer to some degree. Strung Out was one of Glass’s first minimalist works, and was performed by having the score on many pages that were supported by several music stands that the violinist navigates during the piece. The music is literally strung out among the music stands, and as I recall Glass’s own description from years ago, the music also suggests being strung out in the physical/mental sense. Unlike the later Two Pages and other works, there are no additive processes present within Strung Out, but it is repetitive nonetheless.

Gradus has also been recorded, I believe, by Jon Gibson. This version is performed on bass clarinet, while the original was for soprano sax. It is immediately recognizable as Glass, even though a relatively early work. The same could be said for Music in the Shape of a Square for two flutes, which is very rhythmically driving.

The remaining two pieces, How Now and 600 Lines are repetitive but like some works on this album, do not have formal additive processes. Both of these are relatively long (600 Lines takes around 40 minutes), and very compelling. I’d love to also have been able to hear how they would have sounded with Glass’s nacent ensemble, but that is a secondary issue; having these works at all on a great recording is more than enough.

In all, this is a great addition to my iPod,and a nice way to start 2007.