2025 is in the books, a year that elicited scant enthusiasm in the arts community, particularly in the US where a demoralized cultural left has been unable to forestall the befouling of Kennedy Center or the assaults on public broadcasting, often responding at the institutional level by prioritizing activist mediocrity. Even beyond the political sphere loom global pressures like the rapid advance of AI technology and the collapse of music criticism as a viable profession. Such blows to the infrastructure have make it harder to create and nurture high-quality music. But it’s still there to be found in the cracks that have evaded the right’s destructiveness and the left’s vulgarization. Let’s identify some, starting with a generation that’s already endured more than its fair share of cultural—and military—wars.

From the ashes of the Soviet Union

• Sofia Gubaidulina: Figures of Time (Naxos)
  The music world mourned the passing this year of perhaps the greatest Soviet/Russian composer since Shostakovich. Included in this posthumous release by Titus Engel and the Basel Sinfonietta is the first full recording of Zeitgestalten from 1994. Composed shortly after emigrating to Germany, it was inspired by a nightmare Gubaidulina had of being trapped in a Soviet apartment building where the only sign of having neighbors was the sound of pop music booming through the floorboards. It reflects her idea that musical time is not only linear, but also vertical. And there’s plenty of tension herein between passages with a steady beat (resembling ticking clocks), and passages in free rhythm where masses of sound seem to be reaching toward heaven. It’s also notable for including harpsichord, a Russian bayan and two electric basses in its large orchestra
• Arvo Pärt: Credo (Alpha)
  The new nonagenarian has retired from composing, making the minor choral anthem O Holy Father Nicholas his last official composition. More substantive is his late orchestral piece Silhouette, given its premiere recording in this album from Paavo Järvi and the Estonian Festival Orchestra that was released for his 90th birthday. Its tri-level rhythmic structure was inspired by the similarly tripartite architecture of the Eiffel Tower
• Valentin Silvestrov: Symphony No. 8, Violin Concerto (Naxos)
  Two premiere recordings from Ukraine’s preeminent composer. His disconsolate Violin Concerto from 2016, “a Mass for everything that’s desirable, unattainable, or only to be arrived at in one’s imagination”, and the Eighth Symphony of 2013, whose nostalgia seems to hearken to a comforting time that may never have existed, have both been viewed as foreshadowing what’s since happened to Silvestrov’s homeland. With Janusz Wawrowski, Christopher Lyndon-Gee and the Lithuanian National Symphony Orchestra

From other old masters

• Michael Tippett: New Year (NMC)

  

  The last and most controversial of Tippett’s five operas finally gets its first commercial recording almost four decades after its 1989 premiere. Its libretto, penned by the composer and depicting a dystopian metropolis that’s visited by extraterrestrial time-travelers, has been generally regarded as a naïve attempt by an octogenarian to connect with the vernacular of a much younger generation, perhaps succumbing to the dysfunction of its central character: a distraught psychiatrist named Jo Ann who’s kind of a cross between Eurydice and Weena from H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine. Nevertheless its eclectic score—which ranges from conventional opera singing to rap and ska–is exploratory, unpredictable, and unabashed in its exploitation of instrumental color, conveyed through an orchestra that includes saxophones, electric guitar, steel drums and synthesized sounds. It shows what an important link Tippett was between Britten and contemporary British opera composers like Adès and Turnage

• Sun Ra: Nuits de la Fondation Maeght (Strut)
• Sun Ra: Uncharted Passages and Stray Voltage (Modern Harmonic)
• Marshall Allen’s Ghost Horizons: Live in Philadelphia (Ars Nova Workshop)

  

  Also exploiting extraterrestrial themes, but in a much less pretentious way, was Sun Ra’s formidable oeuvre. Strut Records is back with another in its line of impressive Sun Ra archival releases, this time documenting the entirety of the master’s first European engagement at the Maeght Foundation (pronounced “maag”) in southern France. Excerpts from the two August 1970 performances were previously available in lo-fi LP releases. But it’s Strut’s cherishingly restored 4-CD offering that fully captures the impact that this outlandish ensemble—in full costume, delivering Afrofuturist pamphlet poetry and freewheeling improvised music—must have had on the astounded audience, which quickly accepted Sun Ra into the top ranks of the international avant-garde.Complementing Nuits is a pair of single disc releases from Modern Harmonic compiling previously-unreleased solo piano and synthesizer tracks respectively, and Live in Philadelphia which features Sun Ra’s longtime alto saxophonist and posthumous Arkestra leader Marshall Allen (who recently turned 101) leading his own combos

• Frederic Rzewski: The Road (Passacaille)
• Frederic Rzewski: Nanosonatas (Passacaille)
  Two major offerings by the Belgian pianist Daan Vandewalle offer the premiere recording of Frederic Rzewski’s Nanosonatas (2006–10) and the first complete recording of his eight-part “novel for piano” The Road (1995–2003). If Rzewski’s 36 variations on The People United Will Never Be Defeated! represent his most iconic piano music, then the Nanosonatas are like isolating each variation into its own two- or three-minute piece, while The Road is like stretching the whole thing out to ten hours of duration. Rzewski was a prolific and uneven composer, and these works rarely approach the caliber of The People United, De Profundis or the North American Ballades, but anything of this magnitude by a composer of Rzewski’s stature is worth savoring
• Yoko Ono: Selected Recordings from Grapefruit (Karlrecords)

  

  Ono’s pre-Lennon avant-garde years are captured in her 1964 artist’s book Grapefruit, whose conceptual compositions (many of them consisting of a single instruction like sweep or make music only with overtones) are often talked about but rarely performed, a condition rectified by the Stockholm-based Great Learning Orchestra in this new release from the Berlin-based Karlrecords label

• Laetitia Sonami: Dangerous Women: Early Works 1985–2005 (Lovely Music)
  One of the year’s most interesting archival releases revisits several groundbreaking works by Sonami created with custom controllers, most famously the lady’s glove, a variation on the old Mattel Power Glove that she used to control musical and visual elements in live performances
• Julia Perry: Maestra (Lorelt)
  Most interesting in this collection of premiere recordings is the Concerto for Piano and Orchestra in Two Uninterrupted Speeds from 1969. Perry, who lived from 1924 to 1979, need make no apologies for her avant-garde propensities. Indeed as American orchestras continue to fall over themselves to program newly-rediscovered but musically inoffensive works by Florence Price and Amy Beach, their ongoing neglect of genuine originals like Perry (1924–1979) is especially galling
• Ross Lee Finney: Landscapes Remembered (BMOP/sound)
  One American orchestra that can’t be criticized for neglecting exploratory composers is Boston Modern Orchestra Project. Their subject here, Ross Lee Finney (1906–1997), was once a standout of the Roger Sessions faction of American academic composers. He taught for many years at the University of Michigan (where he founded its first electronic music studio), and at the height of his fame was particularly admired for his string quartets and choral works that combined serialism with the influence of New England hymnody. His Fourth Symphony, heard in its premiere recording, is typical of this sound world—reminiscent of Berg and pointing forward to the next generation of like-minded composers (Harbison, Rouse, Walker, etc.). But it’s the title piece, Landscapes Remembered (1971) that’s the standout, avoiding the bombast and foursquare rhythms that disfigure so much of the music in this tradition
• Irène Schweizer: Irènes Hot Four (Intakt)
  Though long admired in Europe, this late Swiss improvising pianist (1941–2024) remains woefully underappreciated in North America. This archival release, captured live in 1981 in Zürich, should help, featuring an uncompromising free quartet with Rüdiger Carl, Johnny Dyani and the formidable drummer Han Bennink
• Peter Brötzmann, Paal Nilssen-Love: Butterfly Mushroom (Trost)
• Peter Brötzmann: The Quartet (OTOROKU)

  

  I confess to being ambivalent about Brötzmann’s playing. The late German free saxophonist (1941–2023) was notable for avoiding the use of circular breathing (like Stravinsky, Brötzmann felt that the natural rhythms of the human breath were an essential attribute of woodwind instruments). I’m also sympathetic to Roscoe Mitchell’s criticism of his range, limited to the characteristic growls of free jazz, but without the versatility of the leading Chicago-school players like Braxton, Frank Wright or Mitchell himself, who could also swing, play blues or Schoenbergian melodies as the need arose. Either way his legacy is aptly represented by these two releases, one capturing some duets with drummer Paal Nilssen-Love recorded in 2015, the other documenting his last performances at London’s Cafe OTO in February 2023

• Keith Jarrett: New Vienna (ECM)
  Jarrett is best known for his popular and decidedly non-experimental gospel-inflected piano playing. But his playing here reveals the more exploratory side that became resurgent in his playing in the 21st century, culminating in this 2016 concert on what turned out to be his final European solo tour (Jarrett retired from performing following a pair of strokes in 2018). The venue is the Musikverein in Vienna where a century earlier Schoenberg and his students hosted the scandal concert that anticipated by two months the more violent debut of The Rite of Spring. Jarrett seems to have been inspired by this history, and his outside playing on this occasion often resembles Lennie Tristano or younger players like Matt Mitchell more than it does his usual modal, uptempo style.

New and monumental

• Mary Kouyoumdjian: Adoration (Bright Shiny Things)

  

  In an age replete with voices claiming to have identified the defining moral issue of their time, it’s refreshing to encounter a stage work that acknowledges the ambiguities that make real-world decisions more complicated that we might like them to be. This chamber opera sets a 2008 feature film by Atom Egoyan dealing with a tangle thread of deceit and prejudice involving a Canadian family, two Palestinian immigrants, intermarriage, a fatal car crash and an orphaned son who’s now a teenager. The scoring uses a string quartet and electronics, and the vocal touch is appropriately mitigated by employing a range of voice types including an operatic mezzo-soprano (Miriam Khalil) portraying the boy’s French teacher and a Broadway veteran (Marc Kudisch) playing his judgmental grandfather

• John Zorn: The Complete String Quartets (Tzadik)
• John Zorn: Prolegomena (Tzadik)
  The JACK Quartet returns with a survey of Zorn’s string quartets (from the classic Cat O’Nine Tails to the newly-premiered The Unseen), and works for larger string ensembles, including the quintet Sigil Magick and the sextet Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics That Will Be Able to Present Itself as a Science. The music features the abrupt juxtapositions in style and tempo that we’ve long associated with Zorn
• Sebastian Fagerlund: Autumn Equinox (BIS)
  The Lapland Chamber Orchestra performs works by one of the most prominent Finnish composers of the generation following Kaija Saariaho. Fagerlund has found a balance between the dark sensibilities of Sibelius and the more optimistic rhythmic propulsion of minimalism, as demonstrated in his piece Sky II, which suggests that European composers remain better equipped than their North American counterparts at writing for ensembles like traditional orchestras in a way that sounds contemporary but not overwrought
• Timo Andres: The Blind Banister (Nonesuch)
  The latest portrait album from this formidable American pianist and composer, whose best represented by his solo piece Colorful History, an update to the chaconne form in the tradition of Samuel Barber in which the repeating chord progression is lowered by a half-step on each iteration, creating a sense of cycling over familiar territory that’s nevertheless constantly changing
• Wet Ink Ensemble: Action, Choice, Thought (Carrier)

  

  One of our favorite composer-led ensembles on Flotation Device is back with works by members Eric Wubbels, Alex Mincek, Sam Pluta and Mariel Roberts Musa with vocal contributions by vocalist Kate Soper and violinist Josh Modney

• Tania León: Horizons, Raíces (origins), Stride, Pasajes (LPO)
  The result of this Cuban-born American composer’s recent residency with the London Philharmonic is a collection of four recent orchestral works notable for their instrumental color and unpredictable start-stop rhythms that nevertheless carry the music forward. Also worthwhile is León’s polystylistic string trio A Tres Voces, recorded this year by TriOlogie String Trio

Minimalism and beyond

• Steve Reich: Jacob’s Ladder/Traveler’s Prayer (Nonesuch)
  The most monumental, and most widely admired, of all minimalist returns with two premiere recordings. Jacob’s Ladder (2023) is written for a vocal quartet (Synergy Vocals) and a chamber orchestra (drawn here from the New York Philharmonic conducted by Jaap van Zweden). It sets the passage from Genesis that describes Jacob’s dream of a ladder that runs from Earth to heaven, with angels going up and down. It’s an image that’s inspired many composers from Schoenberg to Penderecki, but as Reich imagines it, the angels’ movements might not be continuous, but could entail pausing and changing direction after a few steps—an idea reflected in the music, which has a meandering, if beat-driven, quality to it, that gradually slows from 16th to eighth and quarter notes before ending on a sustained note. Stylistically it’s a throwback to the familiar territory of the Octet and Variations from the late 1970s.

  

  Contrasting that is Traveler’s Prayer from 2021, which also sets a traditional Hebrew text (the prayer for wayfarers), for similar instrumentation, but draws more on melodies found in traditional chanting, casting them in a series of drawn-out canons, where the voice lines are often inversions or retrogrades of each other. It’s the first time that Reich has used those techniques, and the music is notably more subdued.

• Meredith Monk: Cellular Songs (ECM)
  Minimalism’s leading advocate for unaccompanied, unamplified voices. See my review
• Michael Gordon: A Western (Cantaloupe)
  Performed by Theatre of Voices, Gorden offers an unusual take on the recent craze for converting feature films into operas, recreating a generic Western with generic scene titles (e.g., I wanna be a cowboy, The Showdown, etc.)
• Bruno Strobl: Überwärts (Austrian Grammophon)
  A bit of a discovery for most of us on this side of the Atlantic, this Austrian composer born in 1949 has adapted the aesthetics of glitch and noise music for acoustic instruments, this case the Koehne String Quartet, producing a result similar to how I imagine Lachenmann might sound if he was a minimalist
• Jürg Frey: Voices (Neu)
  2025 has featured several new recordings of music by this prominent Swiss composer and Wandelweiser co-founder. This offering by EXAUDI Vocal Ensemble stands out to me, both for its virtuosity (it comprises a cappella choral works exclusively) and for the compelling sound world, drawn from Frey’s own texts which tend to consist of two-syllable English words or pairs of one-syllable words.
• Bryn Harrison: Towards a slowing of the past (Another Timbre)
  A 40-minute work for two pianos and a fixed-media track that includes the piano parts run backwards. Harrison has developed a unique take on the practice of musical minimalism that plays with the ambiguity between literal and implied repetition. This is truly homeostatic music that simulates—better than almost any other music I’ve encountered—the experience of listening while falling asleep

Growth industries: microtonality, AI, polystylism

• Pieces For Sixth​-​Tone Harmonium (Sub Rosa)
  One of the more curious episodes in 20th century music was the brief flurry of interest in microtonal keyboards in the years right after WW1. Ives famously experimented with a piano tuned in quarter-tones (24 to the octaves) and produced one of the very few enduring masterpieces for that instrument. Two lesser-known composers, the Russian expat Ivan Wyschnegradsky, and the Czech Alois Hába, devoted their careers to equal-tempered microtonality, and Hába even commissioned a curious sixth-tone (36 to the octave) harmonium of which Miroslav Beinhauer has managed to rehabilitate the last functional copy. He’s recorded Hába’s own Six Compositions for the instrument and in this new releases he complements that with new works by Phill Niblock and Bernhard Lang among others that succeed where Hába failed: in freeing microtonality from the shackles of classical rhythms and forms
• Brooks Williams: Abstract Art (Harmonic Ranch)
  Amid the understandable concerns about AI’s potential to replace conventional musicians (and to produce general mayhem by scrambling the public’s ability to distinguish truth from fiction) comes this anthology of works by Brooks Williams showcasing AI’s capacity for good rather than evil. Williams—long the go-to mastering engineer for the Downtown New York avant-garde, but now decamped to Lamy, NM—uses modeling and artificial intelligence to make recognizable sound sources that do things their real-life counterparts can’t do. The track You Don’t Have To Tell Me, for example, features automated female pop singers whose voices go in and out of recognizability—kind of like Donna Summer on a bad day. It’s especially timely with the documentary Opus Cope, about the late David Cope and his algorithmic compositions, coming soon to PBS
• Alex Paxton: Delicious (New Amsterdam)
  Besides microtonality and AI, the other remaining major growth industry in new music consists of recombinatory efforts: music that mixes styles, cultures and sound world in unexpected ways. Paxton’s music emerges from the lineage of Zorn and Zappa, whose juxtapositions are of the abrupt and aggressive variety, articulated in his case with a joy and brightness that manages to avoid tumbling into farcical tackiness. Delicious is the first release on an American label for this your London-based composer and trombonist
• Pancrace: Papotier (Penultimate Press)
  The French ensemble Pancrace endeavors to liberate the pipe organ from its churchly associations. Their latest album mixes that most immobile of instruments with Irish bagpipes, Baroque violins and the ethos of free jazz, which like Sun Ra, presents as though it’s a distorted radio transmission from another planet
• Laibach: Alamut (Mute)
  The latest recorded project from the provocative Slovenian band Laibach takes Vladimir Bartol’s WW2-era novel Alamut as its source. The book, which Bartol sarcastically dedicated to Mussolini, recounts the legend of the medieval Persian assassin Hassan I Sabbah through the lens of modern fascism. Laibach collaborated with a pair of Iranian composers, plus two vocal ensembles, an accordion band, and a western orchestra to create this evening-length work that features texts set in Slovenian and Persian, and music that mixes postindustrial rock, microtonal electronica and orchestral sonorism of a kind reminiscent of composers like Thorvaldsdottir or Martinaitytė, before ending with a plaintive and ironic Persian lullaby

Cross-cultural perspectives

• Toshio Hosokawa: Orchestral Works 5: The Maiden from the Sea (Naxos)

  

  Hosokawa, by consensus Japan’s most important living composer, continues to command the attention of Naxos Records as evinced by this latest volume devoted to his orchestral music. Although his full-length opera Natasha was a disappointment at its Toyko premiere this year, his much more concise and compelling one-act opera Futari Shizuka (The Maiden from the Sea), which like Natasha calls for two female lead singers, is well served in this recording that features a soprano singing in English and an utai Noh singer whose text is in Japanese. Aside from the text setting, the cross-culturalism is present in the orchestral writing, which combines the modern harmonies of Western art music with the delicate textures and sparse rhythms of traditional Japanese music. Also receiving its premiere recording is Hosokawa’s flute concerto Ceremony, written during the COVID lockdowns as “a prayer for the end of the pandemic”

• Dai Fujikura: Luminous (Minabel/New Focus)
  The Osaka-born, London-based Fujikura has long enjoyed writing for unusual instruments and combinations thereof, and this two-CD compilation includes works for koto, shakuhachi, solo timpani, and Beckmesser harp. Most compelling of all, though, is his music for the Japanese play Metamorphosis of a Living Room, which is uncharacteristically restrained, gripping and epigrammatic
• Amelia Cuni: Melopea (Black Truffle)
  Cuni (1958–2024) was one of the very few practitioners of South Asian dhrupad singing to combine it with techniques from modern Western art music. Her 2007 recording of John Cage’s Solo for Voice 58: 18 Microtonal Ragas is legendary, and in this new release her partner Werner Durand has overlaid a 2012 recording she made of pentatonic North Indian raga with freshly-recorded prickly violin and cello drones. An intense living dialog with this remarkable late vocalist
• Putu Septa: Piwal (Other Minds)
  Modernism meets gamelan in the hands of this young Balinese composer
• Wenchen Qin: The Cloud River (Naxos)
  Born in northern China in 1966, Qin’s music makes me imagine how Ligeti might have sounded if he’d come from East Asia rather than Eastern Europe. Particularly haunting in this collection of ambitious works is Poetry of the Land for sheng, zheng and (Western) orchestra
• Noriko Baba: Bonbori (Kairos)
  

  

  Bonbori is the term for Japanese paper lanterns, whose aesthetics are merged with Western sensibilities in this portrait album which features Ensemble Cairn from France where Baba lives. Her piece Non-Canonic Variations, uses a Bach chorale as its starting point, while In the Pavilion of Mister Porcelain quotes from the corresponding movement of Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde, which Baba’s father asked her to play for him on his deathbead

• The Dwarfs of East Agouza: Sasquatch Landslide (Constellation)
  Arab, Western and West African influences converge in this trio that features Alan Bishop (of Sun City Girls) on saxophone, Sam Shalabi (of Land of Kush) on electric guitar and oud and the Cairo-based Maurice Louca on keyboards and beats
• Raven Chacon: Voiceless Mass (New World)
  Chacon hails from Fort Defiance in the Navajo Nation, which accounts for the Diné title of his piece Biyán (which means song) or the concept behind Owl Song, named for the nocturnal hunter that’s “considered by some to have the ability of shapeshifting”, a talent simulated by having the musicians cycle through timbral changes on their instruments. Rounding out the album is the title piece that’s become known through the political reference and for having won the Pulitzer Prize in composition, but perhaps fittingly it’s musically the least interesting of the three in conveying Chacon’s vision of thematically-centered moment form

Improv from Downtown and elsewhere

• Painkiller: The Equinox and The Great God Pan (Tzadik)
  John Zorn’s iconic trio returns after a two-decade hiatus. The Wizard Way from The Equinox shows the updated template, with Zorn’s wailing alto sax soaring over dense, reverb-heavy beats (supplied by Mick Marris but now using digital instruments rather than analog drums) and Bill Laswell’s electric bass, auspiciously timed to coincide with the 50th anniversary of one of its models, Ornette Coleman’s Prime Time band, unveiled in the album Dancing in Your Head
• Fred Frith, Cosa Brava: Z Sides (Klanggalerie)
  Avant-rock meets musique concrète in this album that features live recordings by Fred Frith’s Cosa Brava band (with Carla Kihlstedt, Zeena Parkins, Shahzad Ismaily and Matthias Bossi) made during tours in 2008 and 2012, newly remixed and reedited by the band’s sound designer Norman Teale
• Fred Frith, Shelley Burgon: The Life and Behavior (Relative Pitch)
  Another entry in the “reclaimed from the archives during COVID” genre is this previously unreleased recording from 2002 that features the unusual combination of guitar (Frith) and harp (Burgon, whose other collaborators have included Anthony Braxton and Trevor Dunn)
• Ingrid Laubrock: Purposing the Air (Pyroclastic)
  The latest album from Ingrid Laubrock features no saxophone playing, and less actual improvisation than we might expect. It’s an ambitious collection of 60 miniature songs, or koans as Laubrock calls them, setting texts by the American writer Erica Hunt. All of the songs are duets, featuring four different combinations of one singer and one instrumentalist. My favorite grouping connects the Portuguese vocalist Sara Serpa with pianist Matt Mitchell, a sound I might describe as melding the sensibilities of Billie Holliday with the harmonic innovations of Schoenberg
• Joane Hétu: Elle a son mot à dire (Ambiances Magnétiques)

  

  Saxophonist and vocalist Joane Hétu has long been one of the leading figures in Montreal’s French-speaking avant-garde (e.g., the band Justine). She deserves to be better known in the Anglosphere, and this new collaboration with Ensemble SuperMusique might be just the thing to do it

• Sylvie Courvoisier, Mary Halvorson: Bone Bells (Pyroclastic)
  My contrarian opinion is that Halvorson’s distinctive guitar playing is best represented through her collaborations with other musicians more than her own work as a bandleader. And pianist Courvoisier is an effective and longstanding foil as evinced by their third and most recent album together. Listen to Nags Head Waltz, with noisy passages alternating with a dance motif that sounds like it could have come from a Henri Mancini soundtrack, then check out my radio interviews with Sylvie and Mary from the past year
• Ches Smith: Clone Row (Otherly Love)
  Drummer Ches Smith’s unusual quartet also features Halvorson along with Liberty Ellman for an unusual double guitar setup (with Nick Dunston on electric bass). The quartet’s name plays explicit homage to Schoenberg, and the music holds its place in the lineage of atonal rock-n-roll purveyed by the likes of Frith, Henry Cow and Doctor Nerve
• For Living Lovers: Natural Name (Sunnyside)
  The guitar/bass duo of Brandon Ross and Stomu Takeishi returns for their first album in over a decade. Ross is perhaps best known for his electrified recordings with Henry Threadgill and the power trio Harriet Tubman, but here he plays acoustic instruments in a collection of Ross compositions recorded in 2019 and 2024
• Satoko Fujii: Altitude 1100 Meters (Libra)
  This offering from the prolific Kobe-based pianist and bandleader was inspired by a summer trip to the highlands west of Tokyo, and the cool texture of the air at that elevation. It features two violins and a viola joining Fujii’s jazz trio to produce a hybrid of free improvisation and classical piano quintets that features the Zorn-like shifts in mood and tempo that are characteristic of her music
• Tim Berne: Yikes Too (Out of Your Head)
  Berne is one of the most important Downtown New York alto saxophonists who’s not named Zorn, and although his teachers included Julius Hemphill and Anthony Braxton, it’s Ornette Coleman who’s at the root of his aesthetic (Berne even participated in Zorn’s Ornette Project). All these influences are in evidence in this far-ranging trio album with Gregg Belisle-Chi and Tom Rainey on guitar and drums that includes selections from a particularly blistering 2024 concert at The Royal Room, the leading Seattle venue for live improvised music cofounded by Wayne Horvitz and Robin Holcomb
• Kate Gentile: Sifters (Obliquity)

  

  Drummer Kate Gentile’s variation on the Berne trio (with Jeremy Viner on sax and Marc Ducret on guitar) is one that I’d put squarely in the Braxton lineage with her emphasis on hybrid forms (in comparison to Coleman and Berne’s more conventionally structured jazz tunes) and the kinds of complex herky-jerky rhythms found in works like Braxton’s Composition 23c or 40(o)

NW dark ambient

• Three Point Circle: Fluorescent Grey (Palace of Lights)
• Domenica Diavoleria: Orange Clearing (Eiderdown)
• Steve Layton: This Is Fine (69) (NiwoSound)
• Robert Millis: Interior Music (Discrepant)
  Although the Pacific Northwest’s profile within the global new music scene has waned since its apogee in the late 2010s, one area where it remains in the forefront is electronic music, featured in these four releases by several Washington-based veterans of the practice. The trio Three Point Circle (Kerry Leimer, Marc Barreca and Steve Peters) represents the distinctive Northwest flavor of Dark ambient, while the Olympia-based Domenica Diavoleria offers a vision of the region where the “old growth Fun Forest has taken over the city, with…whirligigs and…sunken playlands”. Robert Millis (of Climax Golden Twins and Idol Ko Si) uses multitracked cello samples as his sound source on the track Hikikomori (meaning recluse). While the hyper-prolific Steve Layton (who likes to create a new piece every day) meditates on endless glissandos in his album This Is Fine (69)

On the screen

It’s been a lean year for on-screen innovation in new music, with economics, politics and tactical factors all at play. The Metropolitan Opera’s decision to stream Jeanine Tesori’s much-derided Grounded, but not John Adams’ latest opera Antony and Cleopatra, seems to epitomize the situation. Standing out from the diminished pack, though, is Marc-André Dalbavie’s Melancholy of Resistance in its premiere production by Berlin State Opera (available on video from Medici.tv). Like Peter Eötvös’s final opera (which was one of my picks of 2024), it’s based on an allegorical novel by László Krasznahorkai in which an innocent young man (Valouchka, portrayed here by the celebrated countertenor Philippe Jaroussky) watches helplessly as his town devolves into fascism upon the arrival of a traveling circus.

The production, directed by David Marton, features a large upstage projection screen that displays a combination of prerecorded material and live camera shots of the singers and actors. It was described as a “film-opera” by one reviewer who, apparently unfamiliar with the work of Michel van der Aa, enlisted it as “the birth of a new genre”. Other critics were less charitable, finding the presentation unnecessarily confusing (both the staged and prerecorded elements are deemed to be happening in the present). But the musical results are compelling regardless. Dalbavie, born in 1961 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, was once seen as his generation’s leading torchbearer for the French spectralist movement, but his music has strayed from that alignment during the 21st century, often veering into an astringent form of neoclassicism that’s more reminiscent Corigliano than Grisey. In Résistance, though, he seems to be moving at least halfway back to his roots, with the influence of Messiaen often present, as in the closing scene, Requiem, that closely resembles the clangorous finale of Messiaen’s far less cynical Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum.

Also worthy of mention for new music enthusiasts is Billy Shebar’s Meredith Monk documentary Monk in Pieces (110th Street Films), which I reviewed here.

Outlook

It’s disheartening to contemplate the unlikelihood of an opera like Resistance being produced onstage—much less streamed—by a major US opera company right now given the preoccupation with Disneyesque glitz or librettos designed to annoy Republicans, all set to generic, derivative music. Matthew Aucoin has pointed out that the most explicitly political works are “rarely the most artistically interesting, and they’re often quite aesthetically conservative too”. The right’s vindictiveness, the left’s fecklessness, and the impending loss of the last original masters of minimalism and creative music (with few young Americans of comparable stature available to succeed them) all seem destined to remind us of the more inauspicious periods in music history.

But as evinced by the preceding catalogue, music that is challenging, intriguing and genuinely contemporary can still be found. And even if its profile seems to be waning as the century progresses, its survival attests to the resilience of a musical tradition that is generative, venerable and inspiring in its pluck and adaptability.

Photo collage: Noriko Baba by Kyoko Nagashima, Steve Reich by Wonge Bergmann, Sun Ra meets the French by Philippe Gras/Claude Gaspari, Keith Jarrett by Rose Anne Colavito, Monk in Pieces, Valentin Silvestrov by Dmitri Matveyev, Jürg Frey via Le Vivier, Tania León via the artist, Sofia Gubaidulina by Mario Wezel, Alex Paxton by Jess Rose, Amelia Cuni via the artist, Robert Millis at Kyushu University, Yoko Ono at Lisson Gallery 1967, Painkiller (John Zorn, Bill Laswell, Mick Harris) via the artists, Raven Chacon by Adam Conte, Putu Septa via Other Minds, Frederic Rzewski and daughter by Françoise Walot, Sylvie Courvoisier and Mary Halvorson by Caroline Mardok, Irène Schweizer via the artist, Peter Brötzmann by RI Sutherland-Cohen

Other photos: Michael Tippett: New Year at Birmingham Opera Company 2024 by Adam Fradgley; Keith Jarrett by Henry Leutwyler; Marc Kudisch, Naomi Louisa O’Connell and Omar Najmi in Adoration by Maria Baranova; Steve Reich by Jesse Yang; Laibach via the artists; Toshio Hosokawa by Kaz Ishikawa; Joane Hétu via Productions SuperMusique; Philippe Jaroussky, Tanja Ariane Baumgartner, Matthias Klink in The Melancholy of Resistance by William Minke; Sandrine Piau in The Melancholy of Resistance by William Minke