CD Reviews

PACCIONE: Rhapsody; Stations–To Morton Feldman; Inscape: Three Choral Settings from Gerard Manley Hopkins; A Page for Will; Three Motets: Arabesques; Five Songs from Christina Rossetti; “Postlude,” from Planxty Cage. Molly Paccione, cl; Jenny Perron, p; Michael Campbell, p; Western Illinois University Singers/James Stegall; Nurit Tilles, p; Terry Chasteen, tenor; Moisés Molina, vcl; Andrea Molina, p. New World 80706-2. 57 minues.

[DISCLAIMER: I’ve known Paul Paccione and his music for many, many years. The following may be read with this in mind.]

Paul Paccione’s music has always been concerned with the manipulation of musical space/time. That is, Paccione reconceives musical geometry (x=time, y-space) as a canvas[1] on which musical objects are placed, like figures or brushstrokes in an abstract painting or drawing. These objects—chords and/or melodic gestures—retain their identity through repetition rather than development. Structure is projected through placement of objects at different coordinates on the musical canvas.

The result is a musical abstract expressionism that has developed over the years in surprising and gratifying ways. I first learned of Paccione and his music in the late ‘70s, when he was coming into his own as a disciple of Morton Feldman. His music at that time was quiet and sparse, with subtle melodic threads. His sense of color was (and is) so keen that a performance of his music gave a feeling of voluptuous austerity. In early pieces like Stations–To Morton Feldman (1987) the music is extremely spare—splashes of color on a blank temporal field, with a great deal of expressive silence.

In more recent years Paccione has embraced tonality, but his music still sounds like him. The Rhapsody for clarinet and piano (2005) is a good example. A lean piano part limns out a slow, non-dramatic chord progression in triplet eighth-note arpeggios while the clarinet plays lyrical melodic lines mostly above it. It’s as if the gentle triplets in the piano have replaced the blank canvas as a surface to be painted on.

The vocal or choral music Paccione composed early in his career was either wordless or was a setting of a short text that moved so slowly it may as well have been textless. In the pieces offered here, Inscape: Three Choral Settings from Gerard Manley Hopkins (2007) and Five Songs from Christina Rossetti (2003), the non-dramatic but lyrical presentation of the texts serves as a vehicle for the composer’s characteristic tone explorations.

My favorite piece on this recording is the Three Motets: Arabesques (1999), for four prerecorded clarinets. These motets are simple—contrapuntal in the extreme, they are made of short, tonally-enigmatic melodic gestures that are imitated by subsequent instrumental entrances. The result is a haunting, subtly and constantly changing soundscape.

The performances and recording here are of the highest quality. Paccione teaches at Western Illinois University, and most of the performers are his colleagues there. Several pieces were written for clarinetist Molly Paccione, the composer’s wife, and her readings show deep understanding of the music.

Highly recommended.

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[1] Not unlike Elliott Carter’s “time screen” in concept, but very different in practice.

Long Piano (Peace March 11)

Christian Wolff

Thomas Schultz, piano

New World Records

When faced with a work promoting a specific political or ideological slant it can be hard to find the line between art and propaganda.  Christian Wolff’s Long Piano (Peace March 11) definitely falls into the category of a politically-inspired work but the music itself remains austere and carefully detached from its surroundings.  Composed in 2004-2005, this hour long solo piano work is built largely of sparse gestures and thin textures.  The piece is constantly beginning anew and never fully coalesces in any one place for long.  Each fragment has its own internal life and motivations.  Thomas Schultz certainly had his work cut out for him in creating a coherent and linear performance of a work that is almost anything but.  Schultz is displaying a type of virtuosity that goes beyond pounding volumes and rapid arpeggios.

Never still enough to be ambient yet not directed enough to contain a typical emotional through line, Long Piano seems set on an eternal simmer.  It still manages to make you pay attention to it and simply hear its sound.

September Canons

music of Ingram Marshall

performed by Todd Reynolds, Members of the Yale Philharmonia, The Berkley Gamelan, and Ingram Marshall

New World Records

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September Canons for violin and electronic processing
Peaceable Kingdom for ensemble and tape
Woodstone for gamelan
The Fragility Cycles (“Gambuh”) for gambuh, synthesizer, and live electronic processing

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The four works on this disc span the career of composer Ingram Marshall and provide keen insights into the organic, intuitive, and expressive sides to Marshall’s output.  September Canons, from 2002, draws its inspiration from September 11 and features floating and mournful lyricism from violinist Todd Reynolds.  The composition and performance have a timelessness about them.  Everything unfolds at a slow yet deliberate pace with a certain amount of serene detachment.

Peaceable Kingdom (1990) blends a live ensemble with various atmospheric and musical recordings with excellent results.  The audio narrative and interaction of live and recorded sounds are constantly compelling.  Inspired by travels to Yugoslavia, one key motif is a recorded funeral procession and other sounds evocative of a funeral in a small village.  I began repeated listenings of the work without knowing any programmatic details and was simply draw into the sonic world of the piece.  The mixture of ambient/natural sounds and obviously recorded music makes for interesting interplay with the live ensemble.  Many times the ensemble mixture with the recorded events was such that I wasn’t sure if they were “live or Memorex,” if you will.

Woodstone, a play on the title and theme of Beethoven’s Waldstein sonata, is an engrossing work for gamelan.  The delicate and sparse opening morphs into more active and driving material that still keeps a slow yet steady pace towards its growth.  This work does not sound like Beethoven nor does it sound like traditional gamelan music.  It is pure Marshall.  Like all other works on the disc, this piece grows organically and with a sense of long-term transformations.

The last work on the disc is also the earliest (Woodstone was completed in 1981).  The Fragility Cycles (“Gambuh”) was finished in 1976 and sets the composer in a cloud of Balinese flute playing, Serge synthesizer sweeps, and live electronics.  The rich flute tones and the droning synthesizer paint a foggy and abstract aural picture.  There is a sensuousness to the sounds and a depth of timbral space that is plumbed throughout the work.  In keeping with the other compositions included with this one, The Fragility Cycles sounds as if it could last forever.  I certainly wouldn’t mind.

This reverse chronology highlights some of the core values present in the works of Ingram Marshall: longer compositions, often centered around a very limited sonic palette, but manipulated and paced with a keen and crafty ear.  The sounds put me in a very specific and contemplative mental space.  I enjoy this disc, this music, and what it does to me very much.  If you are unfamiliar with Ingram Marshall’s music, this is an excellent first step.  If you are familiar with Marshall’s compositions, you probably already own this.

In Memoriam
Soloists, Valley Festival Orchestra and Amherst College Concert Choir
Lewis Spratlin conducting

Streaming: Quartet for Piano and Strings
Yvonne Lam. Violin; David Kim, viola; Christian-Pierre La Marca, cello; Xiang Zou, piano

Navona Records

“Sun, Sun, you bring us light. Never can we pay for the blessings that you give to us.” Thus begins a Mayan prayer to the Sun that calls forth an appropriately rhythmical choral setting by American composer Lewis Spratlan, concluding Part IV of In Memoriam. Earlier, in the course of the Mexican Serenade portion of Spratlan’s ambitious choral work, the composer waxes lyrical in a soprano/tenor duet: “And when I close my eyes at night / I hear the threadbare music / of your streets / and I fall asleep as if adrift / in the air of Sinaloa.” Here, the unmistakable echoes of Mexican popular song add to the enchantment of the nocturnal images in the poetry by Pablo Neruda.

Unfortunately, there are precious few instances of such perfect melding of poetic inspiration and musical setting in the 50-minutes length of In Memoriam, based on translations of Spanish language poetry by Neruda and César Vallejo. Spratlan’s professed aim is to celebrate the resilient spirit of the people of Mexico and Central America in their journey from pre-Columbian times to the present, in spite of an often tragic and bloody history, just as the land itself seems to be endlessly renewed by luxuriant foliage. That’s all well and good, although just how much a Miami, Florida native like Spratlan can be expected to understand an alien culture – to which he is not, unlike Neruda and Vallejo, an inheritor – could be debated. True, the Mayans made impressive achievements in art, architecture, mathematics, and astronomy, but they also practiced very bloody human sacrifice. That’s not so easy for a modern person to relate to! And future generations will require historical footnotes for references to “Trujillo” and “Somoza” in the revolutionary theme of Neruda’s “The Hero.”

The greater problem is that Spratlan basically employs a style of heightened declamation, a sort of tortured sprechstimme in American English, for the great majority of his settings. One hears this all too often in contemporary choral and vocal settings, and the effect is tedious in the extreme when carried over a long work such as In Memoriam. Free, unrhymed verse explodes in a spectacular profusion of imagery such as “The peace, the wasp, the shoe heels, the slopes / the dead, the deciliters, the owl, / the places, the ringworm, the sarcophagi, the glass, the brunettes, / the ignorance, the kettle, / the altar boy, the drops, the oblivion / the potentate, the cousins, the archangels, / the needle, the priests, the ebony, the rebuff, / the part, the type, the stupor, the soul”¦” (Vallejo). These things, to Vallejo, are part of the stored common memories that a poet must not forget, but how do you set them to music?

The sad truism that second-rate poets – the Wilhelm Müllers rather than the Pablo Nerudas – are more likely to inspire great music than the truly great ones would seem to apply here. Also, the live recording of In Memoriam, made in April 1993 in Buckley Recital Hall at Amherst College, is less than optimal in the clarity with which it registers the large forces employed here, 5 solo vocalists plus a chorus of 110 singers and 70 instrumentalists. There’s too much bleed-through in the moments of heightened intensity. The recording sounds as if it were intended for archival purposes, rather than commercial release.

“Streaming” for Piano and Strings (2004) benefits from a better recording, which is essential since so much of the effectiveness of the music is in its details. Spratlan claims to have aspired to something analogous to a stream of consciousness in literature, in which “ideas and images appear, merge, retreat, reappear changed, [and] jostle for place” (Spratlan), much as in the state in we emerge from sleep but are not yet fully conscious. With repeated auditions, the 16-minute piece appears less aleatoric (i.e., by random chance) than we might have at first imagined. A principle of form begins to emerge from the “buzz of consciousness” (Spratlan) that employs vivid contrasts between a beautiful, languid theme in the strings, like a slowly drifting cloud tinted by the colors of sunset, and bumptious, scrambling frenetic figures that threaten to overwhelm it.

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.

James Mulcro Drew

Animating Degree Zero

New World Records

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Animating Degree Zero; Bonaroo Breaks (Street Funeral Music); 12 Centers Breathing; The Lute in the Attic; Solemn Acts in Rain; In Memoriam J.C. Higginbottom
Performed by The Barton Workshop

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For me, this was the right music at the right time. I didn’t know I needed to hear this music and, lo and behold! it arrived.   James Mulcro Drew’s music has an honesty and sensitivity that make it seem like a natural spirit instead of the construct of an individual.   Each work exudes purity of essence and unwavering commitment to the musical/emotional goals quickly set at the start of the piece.   Animating Degree Zero, for a large mixed chamber group, colorfully drifts along the ether while a single, un-transposed motive arrives periodically to ground us to reality.   The piece could go on forever with its tranquil and slow breathing pace.

Bonaroo Breaks (Street Funeral Music), on the other hand, has more of a sense of drive and direction.   The two trombones play through a modular improvisational framework that perfectly captures the sense of a New Orleans street processional.   The percussion is thin, simple, and extremely effective.   As in Animating Degree Zero, there is a purity of the compositional idea that oozes through the piece.   Not a note or gesture is out of place in the performance.

Twelve Centers Breathing for viola and percussion sounds like a template for the serene and expansive gestural language of Animating Degree Zero. Long, slow, sustained sounds with expansive pauses play out over the duration of the piece, never seeming to disturb the surrounding silences.   The flow of time is set at a hypnotically slow pace and it is hard for me to listen to the music and do anything else.

The biggest surprise on the disc is The Lute in the Attic from 1963.   Approximately 40 years the senior of any other work on the disc, this more expressionistic composition hints at the serene style that dominates the disc.   There are some shockingly aggressive vocal moments at times that made me think of Eight Songs for a Mad King. Drew’s piece, though, was written 6 years earlier.   Baritone Charles van Tassel does a great job balancing the smooth lyrical motion with the more harsh shouting eruptions.

The last two works, Solemn Acts in Rain and In Memoriam J. C. Higginbottom, return to the tender and blissful music found earlier on the recording.   Solemn Acts in Rain drifts along without much trajectory but it drifts along nonetheless.   The music floats around as if it were part of the ether.   The pitch language is somber, as you might expect from the title, with a mixture of contemplation and disquiet throughout.   In Memoriam J. C. Higginbottom follows up with the more mournful soundworld of a solo trombone in caverns of delay.   The long tones become a smearing, shifting, oozing chorale that, like so many other works on this disc, simply sit timelessly until the sound stops.   I think that even had I heard In Memoriam in a concert hall, I would still feel as alone as the trombonist.

Io

Music for flute by Beyer, Vierk, Polansky, La Barbara, and Tenney

Margaret Lancaster, flutes; Beth Griffith, soprano; Larry Polansky, electric guitar; Matthew Gold, percussion

New World CD 80665-2

 

On io, Flutist Margaret Lancaster performs a program that spans nearly three quarters of a century. Despite this, most take the 1930s Ultramodernist tradition in American music as a point of referral.

Written in 1936, Johanna Beyer’s “Have Faith” is a brief, angular piece that presents the nightingale’s song in a fetching, somewhat spiky, costume; it is sung with pure tone and detailed care by Beth Griffith. This segues directly into the title piece, by Lois V. Vierk. Lancaster is joined here by Larry Polansky (playing electric guitar) and Matthew Gold (playing marimba). The material encompasses many of the slides and inflections of Gagaku, a subject of extensive research by the composer. Lancaster thrives with Eastern flair in the subtleties and characterizations demanded by the score. Meanwhile, Polansky and Gold articulate vibrant ostinati and pulsating drones. Thus, the piece supplies an East-meets-West, traditional music plus Downtown amalgam that is simultaneously distinctive and appealing.

Premiered in 2008, the most recent work on the CD is Joan La Barbara’s Atmos. Although written for multiple instruments and “sonic atmosphere” as a theatre piece, it still shows off Lancaster’s considerable dramatic flair as an audio-only presentation. La Barbara revels in the sounds of breath, manipulating both live performer and recordings to create a wide range of “wind shadings.” Other effects include percussive attacks, key clicks, and all manner of vocal utterances. La Barbara’s piece may be more directly influenced by Cage than Cowell or Seeger, but it is welcome for its inclusion as a stunning showcase for Lancaster regardless.

Another echo of the Ultramodernist school is James Tenney’s Seegersong #2 (1999). Tenney (1934-2006) used Ruth Crawford Seeger’s Piano Study in Mixed Accents as a basis for the piece, extending Seeger’s ideas about tempo flexibility (perpetuo mobile) to encompass some of the investigations into large-scale rhythmic design that engaged him during his late career. While all of this precompositional conceptualizing may be fascinating to insiders, the aural result is widely appealing: a skillfully written, artfully shaped solo flute piece. Lancaster affords it the precision its tricky rhythmic shifts require, all the while maintaining a sumptuous tone.

The CD closes with Larry Polansky’s five-movement work for solo piccolo entitled Piker. Taken from a reference in a 1935 letter by Marion Bauer to Ruth Crawford Seeger (“You’re no piker! But please drop me a card from somewhere!”). Generally, one might think that five movements of solo piccolo is four too many, but Polansky varies the part enough to keep things quite interesting, including microtones, devilishly difficult polymetric twists and turns, distressed Shaker tunes, and percussive foot stomps. Truth be told, Lancaster is joined by Polansky and Gold on the final movement of the piece, so it’s not strictly a solo work. But for many, it takes an artist of Lancaster’s caliber to make piccolo diverting for twenty minutes; a task she accomplishes handily here.

The Stroke that Kills

Seth Josel, electric guitar

New World Records

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Until It Blazes, Eve Beglarian
Strum City I, II, III, Alvin Curran
Slapback, Michael Fiday
The Stroke That Kills, David Dramm
Stoned Guitar/TIG Welder, Gustavo Matamoros
Canon for Six Guitars, Tom Johnson

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Here is what I think: I think that every teenager who walks into a music store and wants to buy their first electric guitar should instead be given a copy of this disc. They are to listen to the disc every day for two weeks. When the time is up, if that youngster doesn’t want to play any/all of the pieces on it, they should not be allowed to buy a guitar.

Seth Josel has programmed tremendous music and played it with conviction, power, and subtlety. Until It Blazes is slow paced and hypnotic. I never knew I could be so enthralled by “sol-me-re-do” but the gentle delay and growing distortion kept me captivated. The three Strum City pieces are just that: continuous strumming over changing amounts of harmony and distortion. My only complaint is that the most energetic work comes first, making the other two less satisfying from a dramatic trajectory perspective. A minor quibble, if you even consider it valid.

Slapback, my favorite work on the disc, is raw and muscular. The improvisatory style walks you through the structure of the piece. It sounds like a King Crimson lick at first but the motive builds, grows, and evolves in extremely satisfying ways. David Dramm’s The Stroke That Kills is an electric adaptation of a guitar trio (all played by Josel) and channels the propulsive nature of Flamenco rhythms.

Gustavo Matamoros wins the prize for the weirdest piece. Stoned Guitar/TIG Welder lives up to the “stoned” moniker (the work requires the guitarist to “With a stone, trace the strings of the guitar slowly from bridge to nut”). Spacey and ambient, the work doesn’t sound much like an electric guitar (which is the point). If Segovia says that the guitar is like an entire orchestra, then Matamoros and Josel show that the electric guitar contains the entire electronic sonic experience. You could hear Genesis P-Orridge singing “Hamburger Lady” over this piece.

Tom Johnson’s Canon is quirky, chunky, and highly segmented. The form of the piece feels the same way as Fiday’s work: the careful working out of material. Johnson’s music, here and elsewhere, is incredibly conscious of craft and fortspinnung. This work is rigorous and stimulating without being pedantic or professorial.

This disc does make me want to instill that “Josel Bill” waiting period on electric guitar purchases. We need more music like this and more performers like Seth Josel.

GOLDSTEIN: Configurations in Darkness; Ishi/timechangingspaces; Ishi/”man waxati” Soundings. Malcolm Goldstein, solo violin; Radu Malfatti, trombone; Philippe Micol, bass clarinet; Philippe Racine, flute; Beat Schneider, violoncello. New World 80676. 69 minutes.

Malcolm Goldstein’s experience as an extraordinary violinist/improviser (or is that “improvising violinist”?) informs every moment of his a sounding of sources disc on New World Records. His playing and composing is vital, visionary, and eminently listenable.

The first piece on the disc is Configurations in Darkness. The first two tracks comprise two performance of this score, part of which is included in the accompanying booklet. The score provides pitch materials and time frames for activities, and the resulting controlled improvisation is a teeming soundworld full of folk references, modernist dissonance, and free-floating expression. Goldstein’s collaborators (Radu Malfatti, trombone, Philippe Micol, bass clarinet, Philippe Racine, flute, and Beat Schneider, cello) are fine musicians, attuned to improvisation and to Goldstein’s musical world.

Ishi/timechangingspaces is an electronic sound collage produced for West German Radio and realized in their Cologne studio. Like many of the classical electronic pieces made in that studio, Goldstein’s piece uses found sounds (here including singing from the last member of the Yahi tribe) to create an expressive soundscape that compels us to listen.

The final work on this disc, Ishi/”man waxati” Soundings, is a reworking of Ishi/timechangingspaces into a controlled improvisation, played by Goldstein himself, with vocal interjections as well as violin sounds. It is a fascinating and expressive rethinking of the electronic work.

Highly recommended.

Johanna Beyer: Sticky Melodies

Suite for Clarinet No. 1
String Quartet No. 1
Three Songs for Clarinet and Soprano
Bees
The Federal Music Project
Movement for Two Pianos
Suite for Clarinet No. 2
String Quartet No. 2
Ballad of the Star-Eater
Movement for Double Bass and Piano
Three pieces for choir
Sonatina in C

Astra Chamber Music Society, John McCaughey, director
New World Records

Johanna Beyer is a composer who has been woefully neglected. As the composer of what many consider to have been the first electronic piece (Music of the Spheres, 1938), it’s amazed me how little one hears of her. I first became enamored with the 1938 work on a landmark LP with new music by women composers, and am delighted that New World Records is making a lot of Beyer’s music available in a recent 2-CD set. The recordings provide a really nice overview of Beyer’s music since 1930 (her pre-1930 music remains unknown). Beyer was a contemporary of Charles and Ruth Crawford Seeger, Henry Cowell and other American “experimentalists” of that era, and her music was very much ahead of its time. She ultimately developed ALS and, along with a worsening relationship with Cowell after his release from prison, made her last years tragic and unfortunate.

Fortunately for us, however, we have these 2 CDs with a good deal of Beyer’s music in extremely sympathetic and skillful performances. Of all the music on the album, the two string quartets particularly stand out. While the fourth movement of String Quartet No. 1 have been described in terms that make it seem proto-minimalist, I’m struck more by its use of repetitive glissandi than its stasis. The string writing reminds me of the one performance I heard years ago of John Becker’s string quartet, another amazing piece that I wish were heard more often (note to performers: I’ll die a lot happier if I could hear the Becker again, it’s that good).

The two works for clarinet solo are gems, as is the piece for contrabass and piano. In fact, all the pieces on these discs are incredible finds, and belong in any new music aficionado’s playlist. I’ve wanted to hear more of Beyer’s music since hearing that early electronic piece of hers, and now want to hear the remainder of her oeuvre.