Music for Guitars, Bass Clarinets & Contrabasses – Various Artists (Aural Terrains)

Last month, I was pleased to have my music visit Cafe Oto for the first time, with Feier, a solo piece, performed on a contrabass clarinet. The venue is well known for presentations of experimental music of many kinds. Not all of the shows there are in circulation, but Cafe Oto has some releases for sale on their website. Others have been documented for the label Aural Terrains, including a new recording of a gig from 2023, made by a most heterogeneous grouping of instrumentalists: guitarists, bass clarinetists, and contrabassists. The program includes works by New York School composers as well as living creators from the UK and EU. 

It is not often that you get to hear five bass clarinets playing together, but a quintet of them play 4 Systems (1954), by Earle Brown, conducted by David Ryan. Ryan has a piece of his own on the program, Fields & Refrains (2021), for solo acoustic guitar, played by William Crosby. Percussive sounds and harmonics predominate to such a degree in the piece that the varied palette sounds like more than a single instrument must be playing. Gradually, single notes and chords populate the soundscape, abiding in an uneasy relationship with the aforementioned techniques. Crosby also plays The Possibility of a New Work for Electric Guitar (1966), by Morton Feldman, another work that deliberately explores unidiomatic playing in imaginative fashion. Two more pieces by New York School composers, Tilbury 4 (1970), by Christian Wolff,  and One to Five (ca. 1970), by Earle Brown, are supplied with imaginative renditions. The relatively open character of these scores elicits intriguing colloquys among the musicians. 

The centerpiece of the recording is Riverwind (2023), by Thanos Chrysakis. In a heterogenous scoring, the piece calls for a trumpet, five clarinets, two electric guitars, and two basses. It contains multitudes, gentle daubs of pointillism, tangy verticals, sustained notes, thunderous tutti, oscillating seconds, and gliding glissandos. But it begins in nearly a whispering demeanor, with furtive gestures and sustained notes jockeying for position. There ensues a gradual buildup of motifs in the clarinets, with Schoenbergian expressionism seeming to be a touchstone. Multiphonics and microtones increasingly distress the linear components of the piece, with sonorous bass notes providing a counterweight to the chaos occurring in the middle and upper registers. What started as an inexorable tempo and demeanor becomes increasingly varied. Riverwind’s fluid fluctuations of speed are handled with aplomb under the direction of Leo Geyer, who sews together the significant independence of parts with a clear view of the piece’s formal design. 

Partway through, there is a significant thinning of the texture, with the bottom dropping out, leaving only a clarinet sustaining a pinched note in its altissimo register. The clarinets and guitars then build things back to a swirling maelstrom of sound. Overblown howls and scalar snippets show just how far-flung are the many reference points that have served as points of inspiration for Riverwind. Repeated pitches reveal a plaintive quality that offsets the muscularity that came earlier in the piece. Shards of motives are cast back and forth between the instruments, while the trumpet asserts itself, taking up expressionist melodies similar to those heard at the piece’s outset. The whole group contributes to a patchwork quilt of varying demeanors. The proceedings slow down and, with hairpin dynamics, there is a gradual denouement, obfuscated a bit at the very end by a bit of guitar feedback. Riverwind is a labyrinthine composition to be sure, but it is abundantly compelling throughout its winding journey.

The performance concludes with another ambitious piece, kryptoplégma (2023), by Tim Hodgkinson. The ensemble deployed in this work includes trumpet, multiple clarinets, including a contrabass instrument, two electric guitars, and two contrabasses. Sounds of air passing through reeds begin the piece, with the winds soon supplemented by angular interjections from guitars and basses. The trumpet interpolates a few snippets of modern jazz and, in general, takes the melodic lead with post-tonal lines that are then imitated by the clarinets. Several distorted verticals from the guitars spur the rest onward to a fervid foray into imitative lines ricocheting between the musicians and an inexorably thickening texture. Hodgkinson leads the performance assuredly, with several tempo modulations affording the proceedings a kaleidoscopic and well-paced formal design. 

There is a questing character to all of the music on this recording, which makes a bid for the continued relevance of improvisation, open scores, and alternative notational strategies, as well as their capability to coexist on a single program.

-Christian Carey