2025 is in the books, a year that elicited scant enthusiasm within the arts community, particularly in the US where a demoralized cultural left has been unable to forestall the befouling of Kennedy Center and the assaults on public broadcasting, often responding at the institutional level with lackluster activist-themed art. Even outside politics loom infrastructural pressures like the rise of AI and the collapse of music criticism as a viable profession, both making it harder to incubate compelling, thought-provoking music. But such music does exist, lurking in places that have thus far evaded destruction or vulgarization. Let’s acknowledge some of it, beginning with a generation that’s already endured more than its fair share of cultural—and other—wars.

From the ashes of the Soviet Union

• Sofia Gubaidulina: Figures of Time (Naxos)
  March 2025 saw the passing, after a long illness, of perhaps the greatest Russian composer since Shostakovich. This posthumous release by Titus Engel and the Basel Sinfonietta features the first full recording of Gubaidulina’s Zeitgestalten, written in 1994 after she emigrated to Germany. It was inspired by a nightmare she had of being trapped in a Soviet apartment building where the only evidence of neighbors was the sound of pop music booming through the floorboards. It reflects her idea that musical time is not only linear, but can also be expressed vertically. And there’s plenty of tension 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 within its large orchestra
• Arvo Pärt: Credo (Alpha)
  A newly-minted nonagenarian, Pärt has officially retired from composing, making the minor choral anthem O Holy Father Nicholas his last canonical work. More substantive is his late orchestral piece Silhouette, which gets its premiere recording in this album from Paavo Järvi and the Estonian Festival Orchestra. Its tri-level rhythmic structure was inspired by the similarly tripartite architecture of the Eiffel Tower
• Valentin Silvestrov: Symphony No. 8, Violin Concerto (Naxos)
  Ukraine’s preeminent composer gets a pair of premiere recordings in this album from Christopher Lyndon-Gee and the Lithuanian National Symphony Orchestra. Both the 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 from 2013 (whose nostalgia recalls a comforting time that may never have existed), have both been viewed as foreshadowing what’s since happened to Silvestrov’s homeland

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. The libretto, penned by the composer and depicting a dystopian metropolis that’s visited by extraterrestrial time-travelers, has struck most critics as an octogenarian’s naïve attempt to connect with the vernacular of a much younger generation, perhaps channeling the dysfunction of its central character: a distraught psychiatrist named Jo Ann who’s something of a cross between Eurydice and Weena from The Time Machine. However one reacts to Tippett the dramatist, his 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 demonstrates Tippett’s importance as a link 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 exploring extraterrestrial themes, but in a less portentous way, is Sun Ra’s vast oeuvre, the beneficiary of Strut Records’ ongoing series of impressive archival releases, of which the latest documents the entirety of the master’s first European performances in August 1970 at the Maeght Foundation (pronounced maag) in southern France. Excerpts from the two concerts were previously available in lo-fi LP releases. But it’s this cherishingly restored 4-CD package that truly captures the impact that the Arkestra—in full costume, delivering Afrofuturist pamphlet poetry and freewheeling open improvisations—had on the astounded audience which quickly accepted him into pantheon of the international avant-garde. Complementing Nuits is a pair of single CDs from Modern Harmonic that compile previously-unreleased solo piano and synthesizer tracks. And Live in Philadelphia features Sun Ra’s longtime alto saxophonist and posthumous Arkestra leader Marshall Allen (who turned 101 in 2025) leading his own combos

• Laetitia Sonami: Dangerous Women: Early Works 1985–2005 (Lovely Music)
  Another interesting archival album revisits Laetitia Sonami’s groundbreaking work 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 performance
• Frederic Rzewski: The Road (Passacaille)
• Frederic Rzewski: Nanosonatas (Passacaille)
  Two major undertakings by the Belgian pianist Daan Vandewalle feature 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! are the reference point for his other piano works, then the Nanosonatas are like isolating each variation into its own two-minute piece, while The Road is like stretching the whole thing out to ten hours. Rzewski was a prolific and uneven composer, and these works will probably never garner the approbation given to The People United…, De Profundis or the North American Ballads. But any work of this magnitude by a composer of Rzewski’s stature is worth having and hearing
• Yoko Ono: Selected Recordings from Grapefruit (Karlrecords)

  

  Ono’s pre-Lennon avant-garde sensibilities are epitomized by 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 Karlrecords

• Julia Perry: Maestra (Lorelt)
  Most interesting in this anthology of premiere recordings is the Concerto for Piano and Orchestra in Two Uninterrupted Speeds from 1969. Perry, who lived from 1924 to 1979, requires no apologies for her exploratory music, only regret over the ongoing neglect of this American original by orchestras who will fall over themselves to program the much more innocuous works of Florence Price and Amy Beach
• 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 school of American academic composers, teaching for many years at the University of Michigan (where he founded its first electronic music studio), and garnering admiration largely for his string quartets and choral works that combined serialism with the influence of New England hymnody. His Fourth Symphony (1973), heard here in its premiere recording, is typical of this sound world—recalling Alban Berg while pointing ahead to the generation of Harbison, Rouse and Walker. 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 lineage
• Irène Schweizer: Irènes Hot Four (Intakt)
  Long admired in Europe, this late improvising Swiss pianist (1941–2024) remains underappreciated in North America. Hopefully this release, documenting a live 1981 performance in Zürich with Rüdiger Carl, Johnny Dyani and the uninhibited drummer Han Bennink, will help rectify that
• Peter Brötzmann, Paal Nilssen-Love: Butterfly Mushroom (Trost)
• Peter Brötzmann: The Quartet (OTOROKU)

  

  I confess to a certain ambivalence about Brötzmann. The late German free saxophonist (1941–2023) stood out for his eschewal of circular breathing, believing (like Stravinsky) that the natural rhythms of the human breath were a vital attribute of woodwind instruments. But I also recall Roscoe Mitchell’s criticism of his playing: proficient with the characteristic growls of creative music, but lacking the versatility of Chicago-school saxophonists like Braxton, Frank Wright or Joseph Jarman, who could also swing, play blues or improvise Schoenbergian melodies as the need arose. Regardless, his legacy is well represented by these two releases, one capturing a 2015 duet recording with drummer Paal Nilssen-Love, 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 playing. But his solos here reveal the more exploratory side that became resurgent in the last decade of his career, culminating in this 2016 concert from 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 reception of The Rite of Spring. Jarrett seems to have been inspired by this history, and his somber outside playing on this occasion often resembles Lennie Tristano or younger pianists like Matt Mitchell more than it does Jarrett’s usual uptempo modal style

New and monumental

• Mary Kouyoumdjian: Adoration (Bright Shiny Things)

  

  In a world filled with voices claiming to have identified the one defining moral issue of their time, it’s refreshing to encounter a stage work that acknowledges the ambiguities that confound most real-world ethical judgments. This chamber opera sets a 2008 feature film by Atom Egoyan that depicts a tangled 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 features the Silvana String Quartet plus electronics, and a variety of voice types ranging from an operatic mezzo-soprano (Miriam Khalil) who portrays the boy’s French teacher and a Broadway veteran (Marc Kudisch) who portrays his judgmental grandfather

• John Zorn: The Complete String Quartets (Tzadik)
• John Zorn: Prolegomena (Tzadik)
  The JACK Quartet returns with a survey of Zorn’s complete string quartets (from the classic Cat O’Nine Tails to the newly-premiered The Unseen), and another disc featuring 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 showcases 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 post-Saariaho generation. Fagerlund has found a balance between the dark sensibilities of Sibelius and the upbeat rhythms of minimalism, as revealed in his piece Sky II, which suggests that European composers remain better equipped than their North American counterparts at writing for traditional ensembles like orchestras in a way that sounds contemporary but not overwrought
• Timo Andres: The Blind Banister (Nonesuch)
  Most impressive in this new portrait album from one of America’s most formidable young pianist-composers is the solo piece Colorful History, an update to the chaconne form in which the repeating chord progression is lowered by a half-step on each iteration, conveying a sense of cycling over territory that’s familiar but nevertheless constantly changing
• Wet Ink Ensemble: Action, Choice, Thought (Carrier)

  

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

• Tania León: Horizons, Raíces (origins), Stride, Pasajes (LPO)
  This Cuban-born American composer’s recent residency with the London Philharmonic is documented via four orchestral works that highlight her use of instrumental color and her unpredictable start-stop rhythms that nevertheless carry the music forward. Also notable is TriOlogie String Trio’s recording of León’s polystylistic A Tres Voces for Prospero Classical

Minimalism and beyond

• Steve Reich: Jacob’s Ladder/Traveler’s Prayer (Nonesuch)
  The most monumental of all minimalists (and the most admired by his colleagues) is the recipient of two new premiere recordings. Jacob’s Ladder (2023) is written for a vocal quartet (Synergy Vocals) plus chamber orchestra (drawn here from the New York Philharmonic conducted by Jaap van Zweden), setting the passage from Genesis that describes Jacob’s dream of a ladder running from Earth to heaven, with angels going up and down. The image has inspired all sorts of modern composers from Schoenberg to Penderecki. But Reich imagines that the angels’ movements might not be continuous, but could entail pausing and changing direction after a few steps—a concept that’s reflected in the music’s meandering though beat-driven propulsion, which gradually slows from 16th to eighth and quarter notes before ending on a sustained tone. Stylistically the work hearkens back to the familiar territory of the Octet and Variations from the late 1970s.

  

  Contrasting it is Traveler’s Prayer from 2021, which also sets a traditional Hebrew text (the prayer for wayfarers), and uses a similar instrumentation, but draws 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 results are notably more subdued than usual

• Meredith Monk: Cellular Songs (ECM)
  The latest album from minimalism’s leading advocate for unaccompanied, unamplified voices. See my review
• Michael Gordon: A Western (Cantaloupe)
  Performed by Theatre of Voices, this work 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)
• Bruno Strobl: Überwärts (Austrian Grammophon)
  A new discovery for most of us on this side of the Atlantic, this Austrian composer born in 1949 applies the aesthetics of glitch and noise music to acoustic ensembles, this case the Koehne String Quartet, producing a result that’s close to how I imagine Lachenmann might have sounded if he’d been a minimalist
• Jürg Frey: Voices (Neu)
  The past year featured several new recordings of works by this prominent Swiss composer and Wandelweiser co-founder. This offering by EXAUDI Vocal Ensemble stands out both for its virtuosity (it comprises a cappella choral works exclusively) and for its intense sound world, deployed in support of Frey’s own abstract 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 comprises the piano parts run backwards. Harrison has developed a unique take on minimalism that plays with the ambiguity between literal and implied repetition. His unique, homeostatic music simulates better than almost anyone else 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 post-WW1 flurry of interest in microtonal keyboards, whence came Ives’ Three Pieces for quarter-tone piano, one of the few enduring masterpieces produced 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 sixth-tone (36 tones to the octave) harmonium whose last remaining functional copy has been rehabilitated and recorded by Miroslav Beinhauer. His new anthology on the Sub Rosa label samples Hába’s own Six Compositions for the instrument, accompanied by new works by Phill Niblock, Bernhard Lang and others that succeed where Hába failed—at freeing microtonality from the shackles of classical rhythms and forms
• Brooks Williams: Abstract Art (Harmonic Ranch)
  Amid the concerns about AI’s potential to replace conventional musicians (and to produce general mayhem by scrambling the public’s ability to distinguish reality from fiction) comes this anthology of works by Brooks Williams demonstrating AI’s capacity for good rather than evil. Williams—long the go-to mastering engineer for the Downtown New York avant-garde before decamping to Lamy, New Mexico—uses modeling and artificial intelligence to make familiar sounds move in unfamiliar directions. The track You Don’t Have To Tell Me 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 initiatives: music mixing styles, cultures and sound worlds in unexpected ways. Alex Paxton’s oeuvre emerges from the lineage of Zorn and Zappa, whose juxtapositions are of the abrupt and aggressive variety, articulated in Paxton’s case with a brightness and joy that manages to avoid stumbling into farcical camp. Delicious is the first release on an American label for this young London-based composer and trombonist
• Pancrace: Papotier (Penultimate Press)
  The French ensemble Pancrace views its mission as liberating the pipe organ from its churchly associations. In their latest album this most immobile of instruments is surrounded by Irish bagpipes, Baroque violins and the ethos of free jazz. Like Sun Ra, Pancrace’s music sounds as though it’s a distorted radio transmission from another planet or another era
• Laibach: Alamut (Mute)
  The latest recorded project from this provocative Slovenian band takes Vladimir Bartol’s WW2-era novel Alamut as its source. The book, which Bartol sarcastically dedicated to Mussolini, recasts 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 which 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 is by consensus Japan’s most important living composer. And although his full-length opera Natasha was a disappointment at its Toyko premiere this year, his newly-recorded one-act opera Futari Shizuka (The Maiden from the Sea), is a concise and compelling drama which, like Natasha, employs two female lead singers—in this case a soprano singing in English and an utai Noh singer whose text is in Japanese. The cross-culturalism is also 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 included is the first recording of 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 this two-CD compilation includes works for koto, shakuhachi, solo timpani, and even a Beckmesser harp. Most intriguing 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)
  Amelia Cuni (1958–2024) was one of the very few practitioners of South Asian dhrupad singing to combine it with techniques from the Western avant-garde. 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 her 2012 recording of a pentatonic North Indian raga with new and prickly violin and cello drones to create this intense living dialog with the 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 contemplate how Ligeti might have sounded if he’d come from East Asia rather than Eastern Europe. Particularly haunting in this collection 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 that 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 deathbed

• The Dwarfs of East Agouza: Sasquatch Landslide (Constellation)
  Arab, Western and West African influences converge in this trio comprising Alan Bishop (of Sun City Girls) on saxophone, Sam Shalabi (of Land of Kush) on oud and electric guitar, 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 (song) and 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. Both works convey 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 presents the updated template, with Zorn’s wailing alto sax soaring over dense, reverb-heavy beats (supplied as before by Mick Marris but now using digital instruments) and Bill Laswell’s electric bass
• Fred Frith, Cosa Brava: Z Sides (Klanggalerie)
  Avant-rock meets musique concrète in this album that features live recordings from 2008 and 2012 by Frith’s Cosa Brava band (with Carla Kihlstedt, Zeena Parkins, Shahzad Ismaily and Matthias Bossi), newly remixed and reedited by the band’s sound designer Norman Teale
• Fred Frith, Shelley Burgon: The Life and Behavior (Relative Pitch)
  Another Frith release belongs to the “previously unreleased recording reclaimed from the archives during COVID” genre. It features the unusual combination of guitar (Frith) and harp (Burgon, whose other collaborators have included Anthony Braxton and Trevor Dunn) recorded in 2002
• Ingrid Laubrock: Purposing the Air (Pyroclastic)
  Laubrock’s latest album features no saxophone playing and less 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 singer and instrumentalist. My favorite grouping connects the Portuguese vocalist Sara Serpa with pianist Matt Mitchell, melding the sensibilities of Billie Holliday with the harmonic invention 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. She deserves to be better known in the Anglosphere, and this witty new collaboration with Ensemble SuperMusique should help

• Sylvie Courvoisier, Mary Halvorson: Bone Bells (Pyroclastic)
  My contrarian opinion is that Halvorson’s distinctive guitar playing is represented better by her collaborations with other musicians than through her work as a bandleader. And Courvoisier’s piano is an effective 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 came from a Henri Mancini soundtrack, then check out my radio interviews with both musicians from the past year
• Ches Smith: Clone Row (Otherly Love)
  Drummer Ches Smith’s unusual quartet also features Halvorson, coupled with Liberty Ellman for an unusual double guitar effect (with Nick Dunston adding 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 Fred Frith, Henry Cow and Doctor Nerve
• For Living Lovers: Natural Name (Sunnyside)
  The guitar/bass duo of Brandon Ross and Stomu Takeishi reconvenes 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 his 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
• 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 was a participant in Zorn’s Ornette Project, and his new trio album with Gregg Belisle-Chi (guitar) and Tom Rainey (drums) includes selections from a particularly blistering 2024 concert at Seattle’s Royal Room
• 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 more squarely in the Braxton lineage with its 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)
  The Pacific Northwest’s stature within the new music community may have waned since its apogee in the late 2010s, but one area where it remains at the edge is electronic music, showcased in four releases by several leading practitioners. The trio Three Point Circle (Kerry Leimer, Marc Barreca, 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) uses multitracked cello samples as his sound source on the track Hikikomori (meaning recluse), and the hyper-prolific Steve Layton (who likes to create a new fixed-media 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 musical innovation, with economics, politics and tactical factors all at play. The Metropolitan Opera’s decision to stream Jeanine Tesori’s much-derided Grounded instead of John Adams’ latest opera Antony and Cleopatra seems to epitomize the situation. But standing out from the diminished pack 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 (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 authoritarianism upon the arrival of a mysterious 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 positive, finding the presentation unnecessarily confusing (both the pre-edited and live-staged elements are deemed to be happening in the present). But the musical elements are a success regardless. Dalbavie, born in 1961 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, was once seen as his generation’s leading torchbearer for French spectralism, but his music has strayed somewhat from that alignment during the 21st century, often employing an astringent neoclassicism closer to Corigliano than Grisey. In Résistance, though, he seems to be moving at least halfway back to his roots, with the influence of Messiaen often prominent, as in the closing scene, Requiem, which closely resembles the clangorous (but more optimistic) finale of Messiaen’s 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 by a major US opera company, given the current predilection for Disneyesque glitz or librettos that seem designed primarily to annoy Republicans, all conveyed using 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 OGs of minimalism and creative music (all in their 80s and 90s with few younger musicians of comparable stature waiting to succeed them) seem ordained to remind us of some of the more inauspicious periods in music history.

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

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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; The Melancholy of Resistance by William Minke

The acclaimed singer, minimalist and intermedia artist gets a new documentary and a new record

Meredith Monk has long attracted the attention of journalists and filmmakers intrigued by her synthesis of minimalism, vocalism and theater, and by a personality whose conversational informality masks the stoic tenacity that’s propelled one of the most iconic careers of any avant-garde performing artist. Monk in Pieces, premiered in February 2025 and currently making the rounds of indie movie houses, is the latest and most biographically-oriented entry in a line of Monk documentaries whose predecessors include Peter Greenaway’s 1983 portrait for BBC 4 (which remains a useful guide to her earliest and most experimental works) and Babeth VanLoo’s 2009 Inner Voice (which emphasizes Monk’s engagement with Buddhism, a topic that receives only glancing attention in Monk in Pieces).

What’s most notable about Monk in Pieces is that it shows its subject, 82 years old at the time of its release, preparing for the inevitable final chapter of her life, whose trajectory is traced in a broad (though not strictly chronological) arc, divided into a dozen-odd chapters each centered (as the title implies) on a single major work. Helping to underscore the theme of mortality is Monk’s pet tortoise Neutron, given to her as a gift by Ping Chong in 1978 and the inspiration for her 1983 album Turtle Dreams. We hear Monk conversing with Neutron (“Do you even know who I am…who’s fed you 42 years? It’s like, what does turtle consciousness tell me?”), and nursing her through an ultimately fatal illness that leads into the film’s final and most touching scene in which Monk is shown by herself contentedly eating a simple supper in the kitchen of the Tribeca loft she’s occupied since 1972.¹ Afterwards she cleans the table, the ritual poignantly accompanied by one of her earliest songs, Do You Be?, first recorded on her 1970 debut album Key (though the version used in the film is a later one from the eponymous 1987 album).

It’s Chong who contributes the film’s most candid and insightful commentary. Four years Monk’s junior, he was her student at NYU in 1970, and later her lover and company member. To the accompaniment of Madwoman’s Vision, he recounts how Monk suggested that they have children together. “I went, ‘Uh, I don’t think so! Artists shouldn’t have kids because the art comes first'”. The tension between family and art turns out to be a recurring theme in Monk’s life. Chong eventually left Monk after a decade to focus on his own art (“I wanted to be a director, and I kept giving her direction when she didn’t want it”). And he attributes much of Monk’s career motivation to the strained relationship she had with her mother, the swing singer Audrey Marsh. (“I think a lot of Meredith’s anger comes from not being valued by her mother. She just wasn’t there for her. And also she had to fight to be accepted in the performing arts world. In a way it’s a fight to survive. Pain is where art comes from, it has to come out of need. EM Forster stopped writing when he found his lover—he was too happy!”).

Monk seems to concur with Chong’s assessment. As Marsh sings These Things You Left Me (she enjoyed great success as a young woman singing jingles for radio commercials before becoming another expendable industry castoff), Monk relates: “She wasn’t home a lot. I was dragged around from job to job when I was a little kid, like going through a meatgrinder. I saw her pain of the conflict between being a mother and being an artist, and that both of them were not 100% satisfying. I vowed that that would never happen to me, and that I wanted to do my own work and make my own path.”

Monk is more circumspect when discussing the other major love interest of her life, the Dutch choreographer Mieke van Hoek, who like Chong was Monk’s student before becoming her partner of two decades. She’s seen only in still photos and silent vignettes, and it was her sudden death of cancer in 2002 that inspired Monk’s Impermanence. But though Monk concedes that “I learned more from [her death] than from anything [else] that ever happened to me—I wasn’t the same person after that”, she declines to tell us just what she learned or how she changed. In contrast to Chong, Monk is a person who only reveal her vulnerabilities through her art.

The remainder of the film is constructed from a montage of mementos, reflections, performance footage, excerpts from Monk’s dream journals (accompanied by cutout animations by Paul Barritt), and testimonials by colleagues and collaborators, some of them archival (including Merce Cunningham, who died in 2009), others shot specifically for the film (such as New Sounds host John Schaefer). The eccentric Icelandic pop singer Björk makes an appearance on behalf of the younger generation, recounting the impression made by Monk’s 1981 Dolmen Music album when she heard it on her boyfriend’s record player at the age of 16. As the soundtrack dissolves from Monk’s recording of the track Gotham Lullaby to Björk’s own 1999 cover, the uninhibited Icelander—apparently harboring a dim view of lower Manhattan—opines “her loft that she’s lived in for half a century is an oasis in a toxic environment, and I feel that Gotham Lullaby represents that as well”.

In another vignette Monk describes the strabismus (eye misalignment) that plagued her as a child. “I wasn’t able to see out of both eyes simultaneously”, so her mother took her to Dalcroze eurhythmics from ages 3–7 to help with the integration of body and rhythm. Monk approvingly cites Dalcroze’s assertion that “all musical ideas come from the body”. (“Ding! I think that’s where I’m coming from.”). And on other occasions she’s credited Dalcroze with “influencing everything I’ve done. It’s why dance and movement and film are so integral to my music. It’s why I see music so visually”—a key to one of the fundamental differences between her approach and the more formal and abstracted patterns of the classic minimalists.

Monk In Pieces is very much an in-house affair. It was co-produced by longtime Monk ensemble member Katie Geissinger, whose husband, Billy Shebar, directed it. And as might be expected, it occasionally drifts into hagiography, most notably in the montages of bad reviews and—in the case of Atlas (1991)—snarky communications with Monk’s collaborators at Houston Grand Opera, all serving to invoke the time-honored fable of the misunderstood genius who’s ultimately vindicated. Chong also picks up this trope (“Critics were saying that what she was doing was nonsensical, was crazy, was not serious.”), and it’s true that Monk was the target of harsh invective from the notoriously snobbish Clive Barnes during the 1970s. But other critics were more supportive, including Barnes’ New York Times colleague Anna Kisselgoff, who praised the 1969 premiere of Juice at the Guggenheim Museum. Notwithstanding her detractors, it was the modern dance community, already largely dominated by women, that took Monk seriously well before she’d established much credibility with musicians. Ironically by the mid-1980s those attitudes had largely flipped, with composers reacting favorably to the long forms and newfound sophistication of Dolmen Music (compared to the more embryonic Key and Our Lady of Late), while dancers were more inclined to dismiss her choreography as amateurish (“Her movements haven’t evolved, they’re just doing shuffle steps in unison” was one New York choreographer’s complaint).

I would have preferred to hear less from the celebrity talking heads (including an original Talking Head, David Berne) and more insight into Monk’s early years, especially her time in Los Angeles in the late 1960s when she belonged to Frank Zappa’s extended circle (she appears as the ”Red Face Girl” in Zappa’s film Uncle Meat, and her housemate and music director was Mothers of Invention keyboardist Don Preston, who is still alive and lucid in his 90s). I’d also be interested to know why, despite having been in fairly close proximity to the Bay Area origins of classic minimalism, Monk has seldom embraced La Monte Young, Marian Zazeela, Stimmung, or the triumvirate of Riley, Reich and Glass as formative influences. But whatever might appear on one’s list of omissions, it’s still gratifying to revisit many of the now-obscure source materials that did make it into Monk in Pieces, including Phill Niblock’s original film documentation of Juice.

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Coming on the heels of Monk in Pieces is Cellular Songs, Monk’s latest release for the ECM label, extending a storied discography that commenced with Dolmen Music, and which now encompasses 13 albums, of which the first twelve were repackaged and given an new and expanded accompanying booklet in the 2022 compilation Meredith Monk: The Recordings, cherishingly assembled by ECM for her 80th birthday (it was one of my picks for that year). Cellular Songs features Monk’s all-female vocal ensemble in a medley of mostly unaccompanied songs (with piano, simple percussion instruments or hambone-style body percussion making the occasional appearance). Only one of the songs (Happy Woman) has a text. In the aforementioned Peter Greenaway documentary Monk proclaims “I don’t really have contempt for the word. I have contempt when the word is used as the glue of something, which has happened in theater and a lot of film”). Indeed, it’s Monk’s avoidance of texts that has helped keep her often joyful music from running aground on the shoals of sentimentality.

The titular reference of Cellular Songs is to biological cells (“the fundamental unit of life”), not to mobile phones. And the music is subdued but affirmational. In Monk in Pieces, the composer says “In the 80s I was doing apocalyptic pieces [e.g., Quarry and Book of Days], and then I started thinking about how maybe offering an alternative was more useful”. With Monk’s still-capable but undeniably aging voice in the forefront, and with the sparse texture conjuring the sound world of her early recordings more than her recent excursions with larger forces (e.g., Songs of Ascension), it reads like a bookend to Dolmen Music—a gentle lullaby for the faithful from the twilight of her career.

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When assessing the oeuvre and legacy of Meredith Monk, there’s a sum-of-the-parts factor that Philip Glass alludes to in Monk in Pieces: “The thing about Meredith is, she was a self-contained theater company. She among all of us was the uniquely gifted one [as a performer]”. Monk’s talent as a singer, including a three-octave range and command of ululations and other extended techniques, is undeniable. And by emphasizing the voice she stands apart from the classic minimalists, including Glass, who tended to treat singers as part of a larger instrumental group. In other respects, though, she’s often been accused of dilettantism—a jill of all trades, but not a master composer, choreographer or dramatist. In some ways her reception has been similar to Alwin Nikolais’, who began as a musician, learned the theatrical crafts of lighting and costuming, and ultimately became known primarily as a choreographer and teacher, but was seldom cited as an exemplar by specialists in any of those fields. It was rather the totality of his futuristic visual and auditory spectacles that drove his influence and reputation.

Interestingly, one of Monk’s key teachers at Sarah Lawrence College was a Nikolais alum (Beverly Schmidt Blossom). And like Nikolais, her greatest impression may ultimately be felt in the domain of new music theater, an area where she’s remained a bona fide avant-gardist, eschewing text-centric storytelling and the trappings of traditional opera that Glass retreated to after Einstein on the Beach in favor of wordless, non-linear forms, often in service to female-centered narratives.

Speaking about Education of the Girlchild (1973), whose plot—such as it is—proceeds in reverse chronological order, Monk said: “I don’t really feel that by nature I’m a political artist. The piece has six women characters. Usually you’ll see men-bonded groups like The Seven Samurai or the Knights of the Round Table. You don’t usually see six strong women who are not angry women but are just fulfilled women as the main heroes of an artwork”.² Whatever one thinks of Monk’s simple, ambient-adjacent music, it’s hard not to be impressed by her corpus of aesthetically radical multimedia works that manage to avoid the clichés of both strident militantism and New Age sentimentality.

Toward the end of Monk in Pieces, Monk embraces a sentiment expressed earlier by Ping Chong: “Doing the work is still meaningful. The other stuff just falls away. Maybe this whole thing is a way that I created something to affirm that I exist.” There may or may not be anything genuinely new in the film or in Cellular Songs, but both do justice to a career that’s remarkable for its meaning, resilience, and impact.

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[1] a six-story L-shaped building on West Broadway that also once housed Roulette Intermedium
[2] recounted in Sidsel Mundal’s 1994 film Meredith Monk

To progressive musicians, Robert Wilson will always be most closely associated with Einstein on the Beach (1976), which in addition to being Philip Glass‘s most masterful and iconic work, is the one that most optimistically proclaimed the future of new music theater, liberated from narrative forms and the affected European accoutrements of opera singing and traditional orchestras. That disappointingly few works in its lineage have subsequently managed to approach its impact suggests that it may have been more of an outlier than a paradigm shift—a pinnacle of American minimalism at its most monumental, succeeded by a drift toward postminimalism and neoclassiciam with Glass himself abandoning his avant-gardism to fulfill commissions for more conventional linear operas.

Wilson leaves behind a music theater project begun with Žibuoklė Martinaitytė, who has committed to completing it for an anticipated 2026 debut. We will look forward to UPSIDEDOWN: a journey as a late testament.

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As it turns out, I had a personal connection of sorts with Wilson. He and my mother (then named Anne McCall) and her best friend (who later wrote books under the pen name Katya McCall Walter) were a close-knit group of three at Waco High School in the 1950s. She recalls helping him with his classwork there and during his brief enrollment at Baylor University (where her father was Chancellor) before decamping for Austin then New York. I discovered this by accident in 1984 after complaining to Mom—who taught psychology at Occidental College and didn’t particularly follow the art world—about Los Angeles’ failure to support Wilson’s ambitious Summer Olympics project. I casually mentioned that like her, he was from Waco:

“Robert Wilson? Robert M. Wilson.”
“Yeah.”
“I went to high school with a Robert M. Wilson. I helped him with his trigonometry. He said ‘McCall, I’m gonna flunk this class’, but he managed to get through it. He was into theater, I remember him putting rabbits onstage.”
“Really? Did you know he’s, like, the most famous experimental theater director in the world today?”
“No, I didn’t! Good for him. He was close friends with me and Carolyn. We were kind of a threesome. You know…[pause]…I think Robert was gay…”
“You got that right Mom!”
“…and his father was a pretty stern Methodist minister that I don’t think he had a good relationship with. He felt more comfortable hanging out with us because, you know, we didn’t care. He went to Baylor for a semester, then went to New York and that was the last I saw of him.”

 

Seattle Symphony unveiled its 2025–26 season today, the first under incoming Music Director Xian Zhang, who—not coincidentally—is in town this week to conduct The Planets: An HD Odyssey. Having yet to officially assume her new role, her influence over the Symphony’s calendar won’t be fully seen for another year. But she will be on hand for ten mainstage concert series, conducting mostly standard repertory by the likes of Mozart, Beethoven, Mahler and Rachmaninov (my prediction of more Bruckner at the Symphony may have to wait—the only Bruckner symphony on the agenda is the Fourth, conducted by guest David Danzmayr).

Zhang brings a direct, plainspoken but enthusiastic style to her interactions with audiences and musicians. Her habit of conducting mostly on the beat puts her in the minority of today’s top-flight conductors (a factor that might require some adjustment from the Symphony musicians, accustomed as they’ve been since Thomas Dausgaard’s sudden resignation in January 2022 to a succession of guest conductors that generally conduct well ahead of the beat).

The contemporary music offerings, while still lackluster compared to the bountiful Ludovic Morlot/Simon Woods/Elena Dubinets era of the 2010s, at least show signs of positive movement, with the naming of Steven Mackey as one of the season’s two “Artists in Focus”. A guitarist by trade, he’s one of the most interesting composers working in the crossover space shared with musicians like Gabriel Prokofiev and the late Steve Martland. He’ll perform his own RIOT concerto in a season-closing event alongside Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, and will also debut a new saxophone concerto written for Timothy McAllister. Also on the docket is the young Seattle transplant Gabriella Smith,  a mentee of John Adams who’ll bring more of a postminimalist sensibility to some slated collaborations with cellist Gabriel Cabezas, the other Artist in Focus.

There’ll also be a newly-commissioned violin and percussion concerto from Christopher Theofanidis, representing the neoclassical lineage of John Harbison and Joan Tower (the latter also reaching the Symphony’s mainstage for the first time ever with a new Suite fashioned from her 1991 Concerto for Orchestra), plus the inevitable portion of grandiloquent mediocrity that’s prevalent in American orchestral programming nowadays. Alas, Northwest audiences will have to look elsewhere to hear music by such late standouts as Kaija Saariaho, George Crumb and Sofia Gubaidulina, or to celebrate the centenaries of Berio, Feldman and Kurtág, the 90th birthdays of Riley and Pärt, or the 80th of Anthony Braxton (arguably the most influential living American composer who’s not a minimalist). Wayne Horvitz, Seattle’s most prominent exploratory musician, is missing on his 70th birthday, as is Bright Sheng (instead of the latter’s Lacerations or Zodiac Tales we will hear Zhang conduct Franco-Chinese composer Qigang Chen’s ambitious but saccharine Iris dévoilée for Chinese singers, instruments and orchestra).

The most striking omission, though, is Conductor Emeritus Ludovic Morlot, who after serving as something of a custodial grandparent for the Symphony following Dausgaard’s departure (including leading the past two season openers), will be taking a breather from Benaroya Hall next season to “leave space for Xian Zhang in the first season of her tenure”, as his manager told me. He’s still slated to conduct in June of this season, and will lead Carmen in May 2026 at Seattle Opera (whose orchestra is drawn largely from the Symphony’s roster). Associate Conductor Sunny Xia is returning next season, though, to help provide some day-to-day operational continuity.

Thus begins the Zhang era. After the tumult of Krishna Thiagarajan‘s just-ended seven-year reign as President and CEO—during which he guided the organization through the COVID pandemic and a period of declining arts support in the Northwest, but also chased away an internationally-recognized Music Director and a Vice President who went on to assume the Artistic Directorships of the London Philharmonic and Concertgebouw orchestras—the arrival of a steady if unglamorous leader who can cultivate the patronage of Seattle’s Asian community (demographically the most reliable supporter of classical music organizations in the US) might be the most propitious way forward for the region’s most prestigious arts institution.

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Addendum: Timing the season announcement to coincide with a three-concert series featuring Zhang conducting The Planets (accompanied by projected images of the cited celestial objects, and paired with Billy Childs’ Diaspora concerto for saxophone and orchestra) proved to a spectacular success, with full houses and enthusiastic crowds greeting her arrival. The inter-movement applause heard during Holst’s sprawling masterpiece on Saturday night revealed the presence of new and infrequent audience members in the house. I spoke to several guests who professed genuine curiosity about the new Music Director, and seemed engaged by the broad but unexaggerated gestures emanating from her diminutive frame clad in baggy black concert attire. One hopes we will soon see the kind of signature strokes that characterized Morlot’s early years (such as the fondly-remembered [untitled] concerts in Benaroya Hall’s Grand Lobby that featured Symphony musicians in small ensembles performing mostly avant-garde music). But whatever ensues, it seems that Zhang can look forward to a sincere honeymoon period with her new constituents.

It was a valiant effort, and one that might work better in the studio than onstage, but there’s a reason why the coupling of harp and piano, especially with an orchestra behind them, is a rare one: barring extraordinary measures (e.g., amplification, spatial separation or having the instruments play alternately instead of together), the piano will always overpower the harp. This was the unfortunate case in Seattle Symphony’s premiere of Hanoï Songs by Benjamin Attahir, a young composer who’s shown more invention in works like Adh Dhohr (a concerto for the Renaissance-era serpent and orchestra) and Al’ Asr (just given its premiere recording by Quatuor Arod), both of which offer a more subtly-drawn extension of the Dutilleux/Dalbavie strain of post-Messiaen French orchestral writing. His new double concerto—ostensibly a sound portrait of Vietnam that vacillates between antiquity and the colonial war era—does have attractive details, including an array of percussion colors that features nine tuned gongs (four are visible in the photo below). But beyond the balance issues, its essential neoclassicism often slides into Hollywood-esque grandiloquence, a domain where the John Williams of the world will, like the piano in Hanoï Songs, inevitably overshadow the strivers.

Regardless, the Ravel and Fauré offerings in this all-French program (composers and soloists!) sounded wonderful on Saturday night. Particularly enlightening was the juxtaposition of Charles Koechlin’s competent but straightforward orchestration of his teacher Fauré’s Pelléas et Mélisande suite with Ravel’s virtuosic deployment of instrumental color in Ma mère l’Oye. His Introduction and Allegro provided an additional vehicle for the Symphony‘s longstanding and much-admired principal harpist Valerie Muzzolini (this time without competition from Jean-Yves Thibaudet’s piano). And it’s been comforting to have Ludovic Morlot back in town leading both these concerts and Seattle Opera‘s Les Troyens following the tumult of early 2025, including Trump 2.0, the sacking of the Symphony’s executive leadership, and the Southern California fires that destroyed thousands of homes, including Morlot’s. Here’s to Western art music as a soothing social unguent.

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Attahir’s Adh Dhohr and Al’ Asr were featured in this concert preview from KBCS-FM’s Flotation Device program.

It’s been a somber year, with wars, conflicts, and intractable cultural and political divisions weighing on the lives and thoughts of many, including those with an investment in Western art music. I’ll endeavor to assess the situation not only musically, but also against the backdrop of a serious decline in the prestige and influence of the Anglosphere’s cultural left, particularly in the US, where its ambitions have come up hard against the judgment of the general population.

But let’s start with some new albums…

New and monumental

• Sofia Gubaidulina: Triple Concerto for Violin, Cello and Bayan (Orfeo)
  Gubaidulina currently holds the consensus title of “most important living female composer” and—notwithstanding her longtime residence in Germany—“most important living Russian composer” as well. Her 2017 Triple Concerto, just given its premiere recording by Andrew Manze and the NDR Radiophilharmonie, duplicates the format of Beethoven’s Triple Concerto, but with the humble Russian bayan (played by Elsbeth Moser, who suggested the concept to Gubaidulina) replacing the piano. The result is a mix of folk and modernist resonances, alternately dramatic and introspective. Gubaidulina’s health has declined since she turned 90 in 2021, and we’ve heard all we’re going to hear from her. So even if her Concerto doesn’t quite match the impact of Offertorium or the St. John Passion, its premiere recording by Moser and her fellow soloists Baiba Skride and Harriet Krijgh (who also contribute a performance of the composer’s 1981 duo Rejoice!) is something to cherish.
• Kaija Saariaho: Adriana Mater (Deutsche Grammophon)
• Kaija Saariaho: Maan Varjot, Chateau de l’Âme, True Fire, Offrande (Radio France)
  The late Franco-Finnish composer is represented by two premiere recordings, most notably that of her second opera, Adriana Mater. First produced in 2006 to a French-language libretto by Amin Maalouf (a survivor of the Lebanese civil war), it recounts the story of a young woman raped by a soldier who then leaves to fight. She decides to keep the baby, telling her skeptical sister “The child is mine, not the rapist’s”. Seventeen years later her son vows vengeance on his erstwhile father, but upon tracking him down finds him blind and decrepit. Unable to finish the deed, he runs off, unsure whether he’s being cowardly or courageous. In the final scene his mother says “That man deserved to die, but you, my son, didn’t deserve to kill him. We are not avenged, but we are saved.” Saariaho’s score presents her usual blend of sonorist and impressionist sonorities, with melodic fragments emerging from a slowly-changing orchestral haze. But it’s often quite close to Sibelius as well, as in a passage from Act I whose alternation between two string chords recalls the second theme from Luonnotar. Among the featured soloists, the dark bass voice of Christopher Purves is notable as the violent father. Also remarkable is the chorus, which has no text of its own, but acknowledges the proceedings using nonsense syllables or echoes of the principals’ lines, reminiscent of the Chorus of Shadows in Harry Partch’s stage works.
  
  

  

  Also receiving its premiere recording is Offrande, a brief duet for cello and pipe organ, arranged from Saariaho’s orchestral piece Maan varjot.
• Žibuoklė Martinaitytė: Aletheia (Ondine)
  Martinaitytė, born 20 years after Saariaho, could be considered an inheritor of the latter’s stylistic line. Her album Aletheia, featuring the Latvian Radio Choir, demonstrates that it’s still possible to write compelling music for a cappella choir, using no instruments and no texts. Both the title work and Ululations (from 2023) receive their premiere recording here, reveling in their tapestry of textures, drones and extended techniques including overtone singing.
• Louis Andriessen: Tales of song and sadness (Pentatone)
  Andriessen was probably the greatest Dutch composer to come along since the 17th century. His final composition, May, was completed in 2019 just before Alzheimer’s disease ended his career. It sets a melancholy poem by Herman Gorter (translated into English) using a nostalgic style that features a prominent recorder part in its opening bars, followed by suggestions of songs remembered from an earlier time. The music is dramatic, but closer to neoclassicism than to the provocative early works like Hoketus and Workers Union that established his reputation as Europe’s most trenchant minimalist.
• John Adams: Girls of the Golden West (Nonesuch)
  Adams, who currently enjoys the second highest public profile (after Philip Glass) of any living American composer of concert music, has also strayed from his minimalist roots in recent years. His opera Girls of the Golden West will never displace Puccini’s La fanciulla del West (or Nixon in China for that matter), and its libretto, which in this premiere recording has been greatly condensed from its 2017 debut, suffers from dull lyrics and one-dimensional characters. But Adams can still ply the neoclassical trade with far more substance and color than most of his colleagues.
  
  

  

  
  
• John Corigliano: The Lord of Cries (Pentatone)
  More compelling dramatically is The Lord of Cries, first staged in 2021 by Santa Fe Opera, and only the second opera by this accomplished American neoromantic. The libretto by Corigliano’s husband Mark Adamo recounts the story of Euripides’ Bacchae using the setting and characters of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, a clever trick that deserves more approbation than has yet fallen on this work, which still awaits a second production. Its premiere audio recording features Odyssey Opera and Boston Modern Orchestra Project, and is headlined by the formidable countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo, who just assumed the general directorship of Opera Philadelphia.

• Brett Dean: Rooms of Elsinore (BIS)
• Beethoven ‘Emperor’ concerto, Brett Dean ‘A Winter’s Journey’ (Orchid Classics)
  One recent opera that has gotten its due is Brett Dean’s Hamlet, whose recent mounting by the Met was one of my Picks of 2023. Dean returns to the work in Rooms of Elsinore, an anthology of chamber and orchestral works derived from the opera, ranging from voice and guitar songs using Gertrude’s lines as lyrics, to a viola sonata performed by the composer, and a lively accordion concerto adapted from the music to the play-within-a-play The Murder of Gonzago. A separate offering from Orchid Classics features Dean’s piano concerto Gneixendorfer Musik – Eine Winterreise, written for Jonathan Biss as a companion piece to Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto.
• Bernhard Lang: Voice and Ensemble (Kairos)
  With Andriessen’s demise, Bernhard Lang may now be Europe’s leading exponent of classic minimalism. His affinity for glitch music is showcased in this triple-CD from Kairos that features several recent works, including Das Hirn (which will appeal to fans of Friedrich Dürrenmatt) and The Travel Agency is on Fire (a bellicose setting of William S. Burroughs cut-ups). Soprano Sarah Maria Sun is outstanding as always in both German and English.
• Beat Furrer: Furrer 70 (Klangforum Wien)
  Klangforum Wien honors its founder Beat Furrer for his 70th birthday with a six-CD box set featuring numerous premiere recordings, including recent concertos for violin and clarinet. Their lively and obsessive, but unpredictable, rhythms make a pleasant contrast to the preponderance of slow music in contemporary praxis. The influence of Nancarrow and late Ligeti is often felt, as in Furrer’s 2007 Piano Concerto and his 1998 piano quintet Spur which anticipates Bryn Harrison’s heterostatic Piano Quintet from 2017. At other times the affinity is with Sciarrino and Lachenmann, as in his sparse and scratchy piano trio Retour an Dich. It’s an essential item for Furrer enthusiasts, even if some of the material is unbearably hagiographic, including a booklet cataloging his personal library (impressive, but not in the same league as Umberto Eco) and a half-hour silent video that shows the seated übermensch hard at work on his new opera Das grosse Feuer.
• Toshio Hosokawa: Orchestral Works, Vol. 4 (Naxos)
  Japan’s most important living composer gets a new portrait album from Naxos whose highlights include a tone poem entitled Uzu (“whirlpool”) and the violin concerto Genesis in which the composer imagines the soloist as a human life passing from conception to death, with the orchestra representing the universe.

Ives at 150

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  Ives Denk (Nonesuch)
  America’s music institutions paid scant attention to the sesquicentennial of their country’s first great composer (compare that to the Ravel at 150 hoopla that’s already underway for 2025). Fortunately a handful of dedicated individuals helped make up the slack with several notable releases, of which the most compelling features the young virtuoso Stefan Jackiw tackling Ives’ four Violin Sonatas with pianist Jeremy Denk. These relatively digestible works, all set in a familiar three movements, tend to attract lackluster performances (such as Hilary Hahn’s disappointing cycle for Deutsche Grammophon). But Jackiw and Denk find plenty of fresh nuances to savor. Ives’s violin writing can be awkward, but even the passages that usually sound ragged, like the Allegro risoluto con brio section in the first movement of Sonata No. 2, come off beautifully here, showcasing Jackiw’s flawless intonation, conveyed without using a habitual vibrato to smooth out the imperfections. The album’s second CD features a remastered version of Denk’s 2010 recording of Ives’ two piano sonatas, of which his Concord is one of the few interpretations to meet the bar set by Gilbert Kalish’s definitive 1976 rendering, also for Nonesuch.
• Charles Ives: First Piano Sonata (Albany, with John Noel Roberts)
  2024 brought us a few brand-new traversals of the Concord Sonata, but it’s John Noel Robert’s recording of the first Sonata that most captured my attention. This underheralded work would surely be included in everyone’s list of 20th century piano classics if it had only been composed by someone else. Roberts’ approach is confident but introverted, emphasizing the work’s connections to the 19th century, by contrast with the equally definitive but more percussive interpretations by William Masselos and Sara Laimon that emphasize its foreshadowing of Monk and Ustvolskaya, especially in the second scherzo.
• Charles Ives: Orchestral Works (Naxos)
  The venerable Ives scholar James Sinclair returns with a collection of chamber orchestra pieces, including the premiere recordings of several small fragments, alternate versions and incomplete works.
• Charles Ives: Choral works (2024 Remastered Version) (Columbia/Sony Classical)
• Charles Ives: The Anniversary Edition (Columbia/Sony Classical)
  Another set of reissues reclaims the Gregg Smith Singers’ anthology of Ives’ choral music, including several of his surviving sacred works (others of which were lost when Manhattan’s Central Presbyterian Church, where Ives had been the organist, relocated in 1915). Originally released on a Columbia Records LP in 1966, it boasted horrible sound quality. But for many years it was the only way to hear these works on record. Even today it’s almost the only professional recording of Ives’ remarkable Harvest Home Chorales, whose middle movement is possibly the most explicit expression of Ives’ fascination with polymeters. Happily the performances sound much better in this remastered digital edition.
  
  Of more specialized interest is the new digital reissue of The Anniversary Edition, originally put together for Ives’ centenary in 1974. The big highlight here is Vivian Perlis’s compilation of recorded reminiscences by Ives’ friends, relatives, business partners and fellow composers (including Elliott Carter and Bernard Herrmann) which she eventually transcribed for her book Charles Ives Remembered. And although the musical selections have all been recorded elsewhere, their assemblage here creates a pleasant sampling of the range and originality of this unique fount of American maverickism, free atonality, postmodern collage and polystylism.

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“The future of music may not lie entirely in music itself, but rather in the way it encourages and extends, rather than limits, the aspirations and ideals of the people.” (Charles Ives)

“This music is all a part of another tomorrow. Another kind of language.” (Sun Ra)

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More reissues and archival releases

• The Complete Obscure Records Collection 1975–1978 (Dialogo)
  The short-lived but high-impact label Obscure Records brought the world such classics as Gavin Bryars’ Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet, Brian Eno’s Discreet Music, and John Adams’ Christian Zeal and Activity (his first canonical work) in their premiere recordings, as well the debut album by Penguin Cafe Orchestra. Obscure’s anthology of Machine Music compositions by the English minimalist John White is also worth noting in light of his passing in early 2024, as is a recording of John Cage’s Forever and Sunsmell featuring the unaccompanied voice of Carla Bley. Though some of these albums materialized in digital form over the years, this wonderful 10-CD box set is the first complete digital release of the entire Obscure discography.
• William Masselos: The Complete RCA and Columbia Album Collection (Sony Classical)
  Masselos, whose career was cut short by Parkinson’s disease, gave the world premieres of Ives’ First Piano Sonata and Copland’s Piano Fantasy, and his recordings of those masterworks are still definitive today, especially in their newly remastered digital versions. The Copland in particular ought to be mandatory listening for anyone inclined to dismiss his career based solely on his most popular works (the Fantasy is just as sophisticated as Messiaen’s piano pieces, and far more interesting rhythmically). Brahms, Satie, Ben Weber and Paul Bowles are also represented in this attractive 7-CD box set.
• Sun Ra: Lights on a Satellite: Live at the Left Bank (Resonance)
• Sun Ra: At The Showcase: Live in Chicago 1976–1977 (Jazz Detective/Elemental Music)
• Sun Ra: Inside the Light World: Sun Ra Meets The OVC (Strut)
• Sun Ra: Strange Strings Expanded Edition (Cosmic Myth)
  Three fascinating archival releases from three different labels, plus a major reissue from a fourth label, helped keep Sun Ra’s legacy in the spotlight in 2024. The continuing activity of his Arkestra under the leadership of his indefatigable saxophonist Marshall Allen, who turned 100 in May, have also played a crucial role. Perhaps the most interesting of these albums is Lights on a Satellite, recorded at the Left Bank Jazz Society (in Baltimore, not Paris) at a live 1978 gig that’s famous for its inclusion in Robert Mugge’s documentary film Sun Ra: A Joyful Noise. This is the first time that the entire concert has been available for listening, though, thanks to the recent discovery of the complete stereo tape of the event.
  
  At The Showcase also covers the late 70s era Arkestra, and its customary “variety show” mix of swing tunes, free improvisations, and Afrofuturist songs (often delivered by two or three female vocalists/dancers performing in front of the all-male band). It comes with an attractive booklet featuring photos, articles and Marshall Allen’s personal account of meeting this most eccentric of all American mavericks for the first time in 1958.
  
  Inside the Light World is a tad less compelling if only because it dates from 1986, after Sun Ra’s heyday as an avant-gardist is usually deemed to have ended. It does have an interesting rendition of Theme of the Stargazers though, which emphasizes whole-tone scale figuration. Finally there’s the aptly-named Strange Strings, one of the most peculiar of all Sun Ra albums, a self-styled “study in ignorance” wherein his wind players are given unfamiliar string instruments to play. Cosmic Myth has given it a new expanded reissue with digital remasterings of the original mono pressings plus newly-discovered stereo versions of some of the 1965 source recordings. It makes an interesting contrast with Mauricio Kagel’s Exotica, which was recorded seven years later with European musicians.
  
  Also of interest is Outer Spaceways Incorporated: Kronos Quartet & Friends Meet Sun Ra (Red Hot Org), one of whose tracks features Marshall Allen and Laurie Anderson jamming with bassist Tony Scherr, and John Blum Quartet: Deep Space (Astral Spirits) which again features Allen on alto sax and EVI.

More from our predecessors

• 

  Lucia Dlugoszewski: Abyss and Caress (Col Legno)
  Klangforum Wien offers premiere recordings of several works by this quirky composer who’s long been better known among dancers than musicians (she was Erick Hawkins’ longtime music director, and eventually his wife). Her music often uses custom-built instruments (one is visible in the accompanying photo), and the title piece features trumpeter Peter Evans in a particularly demanding solo role.
• Julia Perry, Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson: American Counterpoints (Bright Shiny Things)
  The highlight here is the first recording of the astringent Symphony in One Movement for Violas and String Basses by Julia Perry (1924–1979), whose previously-recorded Short Piece For Orchestra is a similarly brief but compelling representative of uncompromising American post-serialism. Perry’s output is largely unrecorded, and admittedly uneven. But its neglect compared to Florence Price (1887–1953)—whose biography as a rediscovered African-American composer is similarly compelling, but whose music is far less original—seems emblematic of the state of institutional orchestra programming in the US.
• George Crumb Edition 21: Kronos-Kryptos (Bridge)
  The 21st and presumably final volume in Bridge Records’ Complete Crumb Edition features his last premiere recording: the percussion quintet Kronos-Kryptos, written in 2018, revised in 2020, and as it turns out, the only Crumb composition for percussion alone. I discuss it, and Crumb’s complicated legacy, in this article.

• 

  Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji: Toccata Terza (Brilliant Classics, with Abel Sánchez-Aguilera)
• Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji: Opus clavicembalisticum (Passacaille, with Daan Vandewalle)
  One of the most eccentric (and irascible) of all 20th century composers—comparable to Nancarrow in his isolation, if not his influence—Sorabji continues to receive premiere recordings of his long, dense and complicated piano works. The latest selection to see the light of day is the third of his four Toccatas, whose manuscript was rediscovered in 2019 in a private collection. Sorabji’s formal model was Bach (the multi-movement harpsichord toccatas, not the more famous works for pipe organ), but the harmonic language of this two-hour piece is closer to Scriabin. Also of note is Daan Vandewalle’s new recording of Opus clavicembalisticum, made famous by its persistent listing in Guinness Book of World Records as the “longest non-repetitious piano composition” ever written. In reality it’s not even Sorabji’s longest piano piece (his Sequentia Cyclica super Dies Irae lasts 8½ hours), but Opus clavicembalisticum remains his best known work, and one of the very few Sorabji compositions that’s been recorded multiple times. Give it a listen and decide for yourself whether it’s the work of a crank or a visionary.
• Pehr Henrik Nordgren: Streams (Alba)
  Although little-known outside Scandinavia, Nordgren (1944–2008) might be the most intriguing Finnish composer between Sibelius and Saariaho. This album features the premiere recording of his Chamber Symphony from 1995, which, like most of his music, combines post-serial and folk-inflected styles. Nordgren was born in the Swedish-speaking Åland Islands, and instead of attending the Sibelius Academy like most Finnish composers, he left to study composition in Japan, where he met his wife. Upon his return he eschewed the capital Helsinki in favor of the small northern town of Kaustinen. His Chamber Symphony begins with drums and woodwinds imitating the sound of a gagaku orchestra, and ends with a chorale-like passage, seemingly epitomizing the unique, multicultural biography of this intriguing composer.

Newer voices

• 

  Kate Soper: The Hunt (New Focus)
• Kate Soper: The Romance of the Rose (New Focus)
  Wet Ink Ensemble may be the most potent composer-led new music ensemble in North America, and its house vocalist, Kate Soper, might be our most important younger exponent of new music theater. Two major releases showcase her interest in ancient texts: The Hunt and The Romance of the Rose are both based on Medieval sources, with the former adapting the Lady and the Unicorn tapestries into an hour-long work for three female singers who accompany themselves on violin and ukulele while portraying virgins hired by a king to lure a unicorn into a trap. The Romance is a longer work (perhaps too long) based on the 13th century Roman de la Rose that recounts a dream vision wherein a Lover (who is female in Soper’s version) is beguiled first by the image of a rose reflected in a fountain, and subsequently by visits from Lady Reason, Shame (played by Soper), and the God of Love, accompanied respectively by a vocal harmonizer, a heavy-metal guitar and the instrumentalists of Wet Ink Ensemble. As usual, Soper deploys a range of vocal deliveries spanning unaccompanied dialog, spoken text with musical underscoring, and more conventionally declaimed or sung lyrics.
• Gabriel Prokofiev: Pastoral 21 (Signum)
  Prokofiev enjoys lurking in the border regions where Western art music intersects with dance music and other popular genres. His latest album features Pastoral Reflections, a new meditation on Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony for string sextet and synthesizer, and Breaking Screens, an exercise in disco-meets-modernism.
• Gabriela Ortiz: Revolución diamantina (Platoon)
  A breakthrough album for this Mexican composer, who’s just turned 60, featuring Gustavo Dudamel and the Los Angeles Philharmonic performing three colorful orchestral works, including the violin concerto Altar de cuerda, and a ballet score for chorus and orchestra written to commemorate Mexico’s 2019 glitter revolution.
• Gabriel Vicéns: Mural (Stradivarius)
  Vicéns’ music paints a barren but gripping soundscape that emphasizes sparse, disconnected chords. Vicéns was a competitive bicyclist for a while, and there’s a certain subdued relentlessness to his music that seems to channels that same kind of energy.

Old meets New

• 

  Timothy Cooper, Ensemble 1604: Shadows That in Darkness Dwell (The Night With…)
  Dowland’s Flow My Tears is the springboard for recirculation and improvisation on Baroque-era and modern digital instruments in this interesting album from composer Timothy Cooper and the UK-based Ensemble 1604 (named for the year in which Dowland’s music was published).
• Brian Andrew Inglis: To Byzantium and Beyond (Kairos)
  The humble recorder has seldom been embraced as a solo vehicle for experimental music, with Berio’s Gesti (1966) standing as a lone beacon in a barren contemporary landscape. The London-based composer Brian Andrew Inglis goes a long way toward rectifying this with an album of exploratory works for unaccompanied recorder that exploit such extended techniques as glissandos, multiphonics and singing while playing.
• Ekmeles: We Live the Opposite Daring (New Focus)
  James Weeks’ Primo Libro expresses the old meets new philosophy quite vividly with a succession of 16 short madrigals written in 31-division equal temperament (derived from “quarter-comma meantone, a temperament commonly used in the Renaissance and early Baroque”), performed by the New York-based vocal sextet Ekmeles in their new album that also showcases works by Zosha Di Castri and Hannah Kendall.
• Daron Hagen with Duo Yumeno: Heike Quinto (Naxos)
  New meets old meets East meets West in this setting of a medieval Japanese epic that chronicles the fall of a powerful but arrogant imperial family, performed by a pair of Japanese musicians who play koto and cello while singing the text in a manner that’s suggestive of the 13th century itinerant monks who would have been its original raconteurs. And was the case with Weeks, Hagen’s work additionally reflects the influence of the great Italian madrigalists, as suggested by its title.

Braxton meets post-Braxton

• 

  Anthony Braxton: 10 Comp (Lorraine) 2022 (New Braxton House)
• Anthony Braxton: Sax QT (Lorraine) 2022 (I Dischi di Angelica)
• Ferry Good Company: Selected Works of Anthony Braxton (Don’t Look Back)
  Saxophonist Sam Newsome recently opined that improvised music uniquely “offers a space where creative minds can come together without being defined by race, gender or political affiliations”. And notwithstanding the roots of 1960s free jazz in African-American culture and activism, its most original thinkers have often been heterodox in both their musical and their social thinking. Sun Ra is an obvious, and previously noted example, while Anthony Braxton—a South Side avant-gardist and AACM veteran who spent decades in academia, and is arguably the most influential living American composer who’s not a minimalist—has also been a sharp critic of contemporary identity politics. Whatever the factors, the fires of musical innovation in the US have always burned brightest outside its academies and institutions, with improvised music remaining its most reliable crucible of new ideas.
  
  Braxton’s two latest releases document his newfangled Lorraine composition method that combines written melodies (which resemble conventional jazz tunes) with graphic symbols and other directions to guide the associated improvisations. One of the most prominent novelties here (for Braxton anyway) is the use of computer-generated sounds that respond to the human musicians. It’s like having an automated Greek Choir in the ensemble. Both albums were recorded live in Europe with a variety of trios and quartets that feature saxophones, trumpet, accordion and voice—but no drums or bass. To the uninitiated, the music might seem long and meandering, which could make the Lithuanian ensemble Ferry Good Company’s new offering a better introductory album. Among other things it sports a rendition of Braxton’s famous “parade music” Composition No. 58 that debuted on his Creative Orchestra Music 1976 album.
• Josh Modney: Ascending Primes (Pyroclastic)
  Spectralism meets the experimental big-band traditions of Sun Ra and Michael Mantler (with an emphasis on Braxtonian rhythmic disjunction) in this ambitious project by the violinist and Executive Director of Wet Ink Ensemble. As suggested by its title, Ascending Primes is a suite of improvisational works whose ensemble sizes, movement numbers and tuning systems are all based on prime numbers in the sequence 1-3-5-7-11. Trumpeter Nate Wooley, pianist Cory Smythe and drummer Kate Gentile are among the musicians from the greater Braxton orbit that are featured in the proceedings.

• 

  Philip Zoubek Trio Extended: MIRAGE (Boomslang)
  In a similar rhythmic space as Gentile and Modney is Philip Zoubek and his Cologne-based ensemble that has helped that city become a hotbed of post-Braxton/Zorn/Zappa-style structured improvisation, building on the avant-garde credentials it inherited from the likes of Stockhausen, Musikfabrik and the WDR Studio for Electronic Music. Many of the musicians featured in MIRAGE also appear on Scott Field’s Sand album, which was one of my picks for 2023.
• Nicole Mitchell, Alexander Hawkins: At Earth School (Astral Spirits)
• Anna Webber, Matt Mitchell: Capacious Aeration (Tzadik)
  Two imaginative releases that successfully wrench the flute/piano duet combination away from the hackneyed realm of Prokofiev and Poulenc.
• Sylvie Courvoisier: To Be Other-Wise (Intakt)
• Matthew Shipp: The Data (RogueArt)
  A pair of New York-based pianists chime in with new solo offerings. The Swiss-born Courvoisier has been a prolific recording artist for nearly 20 years, but To Be Other-Wise is only her second solo outing, featuring both prepared and conventional piano improvisations that evince the influence of Messiaen, Cage, Nancarrow and Cecil Taylor. Shipp, by contrast, stays straight on the keys for most of his new double-CD. Taylor figures as an influence here too, along with McCoy Tyner and his penchant for mixed-fourth chords. But there’s also a good dose of Charles Ives in Shipp’s playing, especially in Track #11 which combines the rhythms of popular music with the dissonant harmonies of modernism.

More improv from Downtown and elsewhere

• 

  Wadada Leo Smith, Amina Claudine Myers: Central Park’s Mosaic of Reservoir, Lake, Paths and Gardens (Red Hook)
  Braxton’s fellow AACM members Smith and Myers celebrate their recent 80th birthdays with a duet album from which the track Conservatory Gardens is a worthy sampling.
• Adam Rudolph, Tyshawn Sorey: Archaisms (Meta/Yeros7/Defkaz)
  Rudolph specializes in hand drums while Sorey uses a conventional jazz set. The counterpoint makes for a compelling CD #1, while a second disc features a quartet, with percussionists Sae Hashimoto, Russell Greenberg and Levy Lorenzo joining Rudolph while Sorey conducts using his autoschediasms technique adapted from Butch Morris’s conduction and Braxton’s Language Music methods.
• Wayne Horvitz, Bill Frisell: Live Forever, Vol. 3: Frankfurt, Knitting Factory 1989–1990 (Other Room)
  One of the most intriguing non-Sun Ra archival releases of the year features two veterans of the Downtown New York improv scene. Both played in John Zorn’s Naked City band during the time these tracks were recorded (Horvitz on keyboards, Frisell on guitar), and both would soon settle in the Northwest (where Horvitz remains). There’s plenty of good and exploratory music captured here, including a poignant rendering of a tune from Nino Rota’s soundtrack to Juliet of the Spirits.

• 

  Bill Frisell, Kit Downes, Andrew Cyrille: Breaking the Shell (Red Hook)
  It’s nice to see Frisell return to his exploratory roots after building his career with more conventional jazz material. This recording features a unique grouping with Frisell joining Cecil Taylor’s longtime drummer Andrew Cyrille while the eclectic British keyboardist Kit Downes plays on the pipe organ of Manhattan’s St. Luke in the Fields.
• Fred Frith: A Miscellany of Mishaps (Bandcamp)
  This unusual compilation of out of print, esoteric and previously unreleased items from the world’s leading avant-guitarist includes a characteristic solo track called Yui’s Workout (previously available only on a rare benefit album for a particular rural North Carolina middle school) and Snakes and Ladders, a decidedly un-characteristical postminimalist composition written for the Bang on a Can All-Stars in 2009.
• Brandon Seabrook: Object of Unknown Function (Pyroclastic)
  The young Brandon Seabrook does for the banjo what Frith has done for the guitar in this new album that features a variety of rhythmically lively multilayered solo tracks.
• Ben Goldberg, Todd Sickafoose, Scott Amendola: Here to There (Secret Hatch)
  Thelonious Monk tributes are a common thing, but this trio of clarinet, bass and drums takes an unusual approach, focusing on the bridge sections of famous Monk tunes and using the material for motivic, not chord-based, improvisation. The opening track, an adaptation of In Walked Bud, is a good example, using the rising fifth from Monk’s original as the basis for an extended downtempo fantasy.
• Horse Lords: As It Happened: Horse Lords Live (RVNG)
• Spinifex: Undrilling the Hole (TryTone)
  Two new albums from two veteran bands with a similar approach to glitchy avant-rock, off-kilter rhythms, and instrumentations that feature saxophones added to a standard power trio. Spinifex is based in Amsterdam, while the members of Horse Lords originally coalesced in Baltimore (but are dispersed across the Atlantic).
• WASNT: Wasnt (Bandcamp)
  The debut album of this Seattle-based downtempo band features Julie Baldridge’s mournful violin solos, reminiscent of violist Mat Maneri. Speaking of which…
• Lucian Ban, Mat Maneri: Transylvanian Dance (ECM)
  One of the most unusual albums of the year features pianist ban and violist Maneri (with his drawn-out solos that emphasize double stops and a slow, wide vibrato) recorded live in the Transylvania region of Eastern Europe where Ban was born and where Bartók made his groundbreaking recordings of folk music in the 1920s—recordings that these two New York-based musicians use as the starting point for their nostalgic and often mournful improvisations. One of  Bartók’s Edison cylinders, transcribed below, became the first of his famous Romanian Folk Dances. Its soaring melody can just barely be discerned in the second track of this album.

 

Drones and darkness

• 

  Phill Niblock: Looking for Daniel (Unsounds)
• Phill Niblock: V&LSG (XI)
  The late and beloved Phill Niblock (1933–2024), the godfather of drone minimalism and a lynchpin of New York’s musical avant-garde who produced hundreds of concerts at his SoHo loft space, is represented by his late composition Biliana, which features what might be his most beautiful drone of all, conveyed by the multitracked voice and violin of its dedicatee Biliana Voutchkova. Also notable is V&LSG, featuring the unusual combination of Loré Lixenberg on multitracked voice and Guy De Bièvre on lap steel guitar.
• Éliane Radigue: OCCAM IX, Laetitia Sonami: A Song for Two Mothers (Black Truffle)
  Radigue is often viewed as a European counterpart to Niblock, but favoring thick drones of indefinite pitch to Niblock’s intense microtones. Following a succession of epic works created on an Arp 2500, Radigue turned to acoustic instruments at the turn of the 21st century, so this new work conceived for Sonami’s custom-designed Spring Spyre (featuring a large metal ring on which are mounted three long springs and three audio pickups) is something of a throwback for her. It’s paired with Sonami’s own solo piece for her new instrument.
• Jürg Frey with Quatuor Bozzini: String Quartet No. 4 (Collection QB)
  Yet another flavor of minimalism is represented by this Swiss composer and co-founder of the Wandelweiser collective, whose work combines the influence of drone music with the sparse landscapes of Feldman. His new multi-movement quartet is traversed by Canada’s leading string quartet specializing in experimental music.

Opera on the screen

• Bronius Kutavičius: Lokys (The Bear) (Klaipėda State Music Theatre, OperaVision)
  With North America’s largest opera companies turning in a lackluster year on their mainstages, and with the Met inexplicably choosing to stream Jeanine Tesori’s justly-panned Grounded instead of either Golijov’s Ainadamar or John Adams’ new Anthony and Cleopatra, it was left to European companies to make up the slack. One of the most revelatory recent productions was this opera by Bronius Kutavičius (1932–2021) which recounts a tale of 19th century Lithuanian forest life and bestiality, set in a modernist idiom built from dissonant orchestral riffs overlaid by parlando voice lines. It’s like a darker, atonal Janáček that offers an alternative to the spiritual minimalist lineage pursued by other late Soviet composers whose spiritualty was of a more conventional Christian variety. Kutavičius’s interest in paganism aligns him with a young Stravinsky (who famously quoted a Lithuanian folk melody in The Rite of Spring). Some of the highlights of Lokys include several allusions to folk music (as at 36:00) and a passage where the orchestra’s wind players toot on ocarinas. The opera was composed in 2000, and an audio recording was released two years later by Ondine. But this is the first production professionally recorded on screen, captured live in October 2022 in Klaipėda on the Lithuanian coast.

• Alexander Raskatov: Animal Farm (Wiener Staatsoper, Ö1)
  Now that Gubaidulina’s composing days have sadly ended, Alexander Raskatov seems to have granted the consensus title of “most important active Russian composer”. His latest opera—an unnervingly prescient adaptation of Animal Farm—is sung in English (slightly updated from Orwell’s 1940s prose), a decision that had profound effects on the music’s construction. “Working on Animal Farm I found a method of using mostly short scalpel-like phrases, [with] hocketing between the ensembles.” Raskatov also employs onomatopoeia (e.g., vocal imitations of horse whinnying), but the dominant influence is Stravinsky at his most modernist, particularly the rustic Les Noces and the orientalist Nightengale, as evinced in Animal Farm by the distortion-mirror folk elements that characterize the first solo passage for the coloratura equine Mollie (whose role is more prominent here than in the novella). At other times the pastiche of Schnittke asserts its influence, as in Squealer’s Second Act appearance as a downscale crooner. A co-commission between Dutch National Opera (which premiered the work in 2023) and Vienna State Opera (which streamed it the next year), Animal Farm‘s references to Soviet and Putinist Russia are quite clear. An interesting directorial choice was to have the performers who portray animals wear masks, but remove them when their characters become more “human”.

• Peter Eötvös: Valuska (Hungarian State Opera)
  One last Eastern European entry is worth noting: the 13th and final opera (and the only one set in his native Hungarian) by the late Peter Eötvös. As a numbers opera with intervening spoken dialog, it can get tedious for non-Hungarian speakers. And it’s not as compelling as Eötvös’s Angels in America or his kabuki adaptation of Three Sisters. But it still delivers the composer’s idiomatic whimsy flecked with dark humor. Its eclectic music includes allusions to Tchaikovsky and the ritual orchestra of Tibetan Buddhism.

In print

• 

  Philip Freeman: In the Brewing Luminous: The Life & Music of Cecil Taylor (Wolke Verlag)
  The first book-length biography of one of America’s most innovative musicians is something of a specialty read: Taylor’s life story isn’t as fascinating as Sun Ra or Miles Davis, and Freeman isn’t as gifted a raconteur as John Szwed or Quincy Troupe. But fans of Taylor’s music will find this an essential volume, tracing his career, influences, and—to an extent anyway—his personal life. Freeman downplays the oft-claimed importance of Messiaen in Taylor’s development, sympathizing with critics who consider the connection between Taylor’s atonality and European postserialism “superficial”. Freeman does concede that during Taylor’s time at New England Conservatory, Messiaen visited Boston for the premiere of Turangalîla and a performance of the Quartet for the End of Time that featured one of Taylor’s professors on cello. An interesting connection that Freeman does make is with Richard Twardzik, an obscure New England pianist whose playing combined Bud Powell, Erroll Garner and Schoenberg.
  
  Freeman confirms what’s long been known in private about Taylor’s sexuality, revealing that although Taylor was rarely open about his homosexuality, he understood his attraction to men from an early age (leading to an estrangement from his father). Taylor’s use of cocaine to help fuel his hyperactive marathon solo sessions is also acknowledged. Freeman portrays his subject as socially awkward, sacrificing almost everything for his music, and William Parker is quoted about Taylor’s seeming lack of empathy. But there’s otherwise relatively little insight into what made up the personality of such a complex, driven man. I could have also used more detail about Taylor’s aesthetic philosophy, including his Afrocentric view of musical structure in relation to the human body. But the dutiful chronicling of recording and performance dates and personnel will be useful to aficionados, and there’s no denying the importance of Freeman’s effort in furthering our understanding of this controversial and enigmatic musician.
• Joonas Sildre: Between Two Sounds: Arvo Pärt’s Journey to His Musical Language (Plough)
  First published in 2018 in Estonian, and now available in its first English-language edition, this unusual book is stunning if only for the sheer audacity of producing a “lives of the great composers”-style graphic novel about a late 20th century post-Soviet musician, a cartoon book in the style of Maus or Persepolis that traces the biography of spiritual minimalism’s most commercially successful representative. Pärt’s life story, like Taylor’s, revolves around overcoming challenges, but is not unique among Eastern European composers who languished (or worse) in the repressive environment of the Soviet bloc. But the imaginative visual milieu with stylized staffs and noteheads is a nice touch. And the reading experience is pleasant and fast-paced. An especially touching moment is Pärt’s prophetic boyhood memory of hearing Estonian radio’s music broadcasts played over a loudspeaker in a nearby market square. “Occasionally, the wind carries fragments of melody to Arvo’s backyard. It brings with it a sense of longing…”

Prospectus

I write this amid a season of gloom for the American left, as it faces a prospect that some of us have been dreading (and warning about) for several years: the coalescence of a multiethnic right-wing coalition founded on economic populism and social conservatism that attracted the votes of ½ of Latino men, ¼ of black men, and an alarming percentage of voters under 30 by acknowledging that in contemporary American society, class is as potent a cultural and political determinant as fixed identity. Progressives, hobbled by their abandonment of classical liberalism a decade ago in favor of left-identitarianism, have failed to grasp this, while simultaneously and unwittingly encouraging a resurgence of white nationalism.

It’s not just the political left that’s collapsed though. The cultural left in the US—the sector involved in the arts, sciences, humanities, media and academia—has become more reviled by, and isolated from, the broader population than at any time since the 1930s, if not longer. Reversing this estrangement will requiring repudiating—or at least tuning out—the voices and ideology that have led us over the cliff.

This needn’t require cancelling anyone, or dumbing down the cultivated arts. A few years ago, during the flap in the band and music ed communities over “Keiko Yamada” (who turned out to be the pen name of composer Larry Clark), I ventured to the publisher’s Web site to familiarize myself with “her” music. It was uniformly dull and derivative, relying on clichés like black-key scales to sound “oriental”. Yet I found no evidence that the outraged voices on social media had objected to the poor quality of the music when they thought it was being written by a Japanese woman. The unfortunate lesson of DEI is that so long as a preoccupation with fixed identity overwhelms everything else, then we’ll keep getting Keiko Yamadas, Jessica Krugs and Yi-Fen Chous, along with the earnest mediocrity whose elevation has caused our arts institutions to falter. Returning to a more generative, liberal philosophy will encourage our most innovative, challenging and affirmational voices—fancy Julia Perry at the Symphony instead of Florence Price, an Anthony Braxton commission instead of Carlos Simon, or Adriana Mater streamed in HD instead of Grounded.

But if artistic excellence and cultural standing don’t provide enough motivation to change courses, there are always the election results of November 5 to think about. And the trajectory of a nation’s cultural health often portends its social prognosis as well.

 

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Photo collage: Žibuoklė Martinaitytė by Lina Aiduke, Charles Ives in 1913, Biliana Voutchkova and Phill Niblock at Silent Green Berlin in 2023, Toshio Hosokawa by Kaz Ishikawa, Sofia Gubaidulina by Mario Wezel, Wayne Horvitz and Bill Frisell via Other Room Music, Julia Perry via the Rider University Libraries Julia A. Perry Collection, Lucia Dlugoszewski via Col Legno, Sun Ra by Robert Mugge, Kate Soper as Shame in The Romance of the Rose, Wadada Leo Smith by Tom Beetz, Duo Yumeno (Hikaru Tamaki and Yoko Reikano Kimura) by Kasia Idzkowska, Kaikhosru Sorabji by Joan Muspratt, Anthony Braxton and Brandon Seabrook via Brandon Seabrook, Adriana Mater in Paris 2006 by François Fogel, Gabriel Prokofiev by Nathan Gallagher, Sylvie Courvoisier by Véronique Hoegger, George Crumb by Rob Starobin, Between Two Sounds: Arvo Pärt’s Journey to His Musical Language by Joonas Sildre, Gabriela Ortiz by Mara Arteaga.

The career trajectory of Elena Dubinets continues to soar upwards. The current Artistic Director of London Philharmonic Orchestra is now headed to the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra next season to assume its Artistic Directorship. She will help to steady the tiller of one of the world’s most storied orchestras that has nevertheless seen some recent upheaval, lacking an Artistic Director since Ulrike Niehoff’s sudden departure last year, and a Chief Conductor since the sacking of the scandal-ridden Daniele Gatti in 2018. Her term will presumably overlap with the formal start of Klaus Mäkalä’s Chief Conductorship in 2027 (at a mere 28 years old, Mäkalä is the Concertgebouw’s chief conductor designate, and in a particularly eyebrow-raising move he recently announced that he would also assume the Music Directorship of Chicago Symphony Orchestra starting that same year).

Born in Moscow in 1969, Dubinets (pronounced “doo-bin-YETS”), grew up in the Soviet Union, earned her PhD from Moscow Conservatory, then emigrated to the US in 1996 when her husband accepted a software engineering position at Microsoft. She quickly rose in the Northwest music community, joining Seattle Chamber Players as a programmer in 2001, then joining Seattle Symphony in 2003 where she became Vice President for Artistic Planning during the final years of Gerard Schwarz’s long tenure as Music Director. She retained the position through the legendary Ludovic Morlot/Simon Woods era from 2011 to 2018 during which the Symphony reached a zenith in its international standing, driven largely by its new music initiatives, including the [untitled] series of concerts in the Grand Lobby of Benaroya Hall that often featured Symphony musicians performing contemporary chamber and electroacoustic works, plus numerous high-profile commissions and premieres of full orchestra works by Elliott Carter, Valentin Silvestrov and John Luther Adams among others.

After the departure of Morlot and Woods, Dubinets found herself unwanted by the Symphony’s new and more parsimonious leadership team, whereupon she decamped to the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, thence to the London Philharmonic Orchestra, where she serves as the co-equal of the orchestra’s Chief Executive David Burke. Since the LPO retains a Principal Conductor (currently Edward Gardner) instead of a Music Director, Dubinets enjoys complete autonomy over the orchestra’s programming, a role that she has clearly relished after many years spent managing the intricate politics of US orchestras. Her projects in London have included a much-acclaimed production of Heiner Goebbels’ A House of Call and a high-profile US tour with violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja.

Dubinets is also the author of Russian Composers Abroad: How they left, stayed, returned, published by Indiana University Press in 2021. Those of us with fond memories of her time in the Pacific Northwest wish her well with this exciting appointment.

Untuxed, a series of informal, intermission-less Friday-night concerts, returned to Seattle Symphony last night in the hands of its inaugurator, Ludovic Morlot, the Symphony’s former Music Director and current Conductor Emeritus. The program consisted solely of Shostakovich’s wartime Eighth Symphony (1943), a massive piece that can betray a deficient ensemble, with its multitude of lengthy and exposed solos for woodwinds, cello and violin (whose associations with death and funeral music in European are readily embraced by its composer), and by the perennial balance challenges posed by Shostakovich, whose legacy is littered with the corpses of performances that conveyed only two dynamic levels: with brass and without brass.

The Eighth is also a piece that has languished in the shadow of its neighbors, including the epic Fourth Symphony (banished before its premiere in 1936, and still unheard at the time the Eighth was composed, suggesting that Shostakovich might have intended the latter as a substitute for the former), the popular Fifth (whose first movement is echoed by its counterpart in the Eighth with its broad tempo and dotted rhythms that are interrupted midway through by a rough march), the Sixth (whose long, slow first movement is followed by two faster, shorter ones), and the martial Seventh and autobiographical Tenth. No. 8, in fact, had only been mounted once before by Seattle Symphony: in 1985 conducted by the composer’s son Maxim.

For all these reasons, Morlot’s selection of the Eighth to anchor the season’s first subscription week (whose full-length Thursday and Saturday concerts additionally featured Boulez and Ravel) was an audacious one, especially coming right after the ensemble’s summer layoff, and requiring part-time players to to cover the additional flute, bassoon and percussion parts plus a fortified complement of low strings).Happily, the musicians were more than ready for the task. The sparse audience attending the huge onstage forces experienced the full expressive and dynamic range set out by the composer, starting with the somber main theme of the opening Adagio, presented by the first violins with minimal vibrato in contrast to the lusher tone used for the more extroverted second theme. The piercing climax that came ten minutes later was the loudest unamplified sonority I can recall hearing at Benaroya Hall since Bluebeard’s Castle in 2012, and its subsidence into the prolonged English horn solo that concludes the movement was handled exquisitely by the Symphony’s longtime specialist Stefan Farkas (who received the first soloist’s bow afterwards).The mechanistic viola melody that launches the second of the work’s two scherzos is the one excerpt from the Eighth that regularly gets quoted in popular media—usually in connection with wartime Russia. Its rendition Friday night was aptly militant but not muddled. The clattering climax that concludes this movement was another high point, with the drums’ brutal at the forefront, but not enough to drown out the dotted figures in the remaining instruments, whose subsidence from fff to pp as the fourth movement’s passacaglia theme emerges was another transition whose dynamic subtlety is often lost in less careful hands.The success continued in the closing Allegretto, which requires virtuosity from many instruments (including the bass clarinet), plus enough interpretive restraint to convey the slightest touch of optimism at the work’s C major conclusion (Mariss Jansons calls it “a small light at the end of a very long tunnel” that’s possibly just an illusion).

Shostakovich has always been one of the 20th century’s most controversial and contradictory composers. Haunted by censorship and the threat of imprisonment (or worse), his music was championed by Britten and Bernstein, and praised by Rudolf Barshai for “leaving its blood on the stage”, but also dismissed as “bad Mahler” and “battleship grey” by Boulez and Robin Holloway. Whatever one’s feelings about it, though, it’s impossible to survey the landscape of late- and post-Soviet music—Schnittke, Silvestrov, Ustvolskaya, Pärt, Gubaidulina, etc.—without recognizing its inexorable connection to Shostakovich. Unlike Prokofiev, who was arguably a greater composer, but a historical dead-end who left no stylistic heirs, Shostakovich articulated a world view that managed to embody the experience and expression of multiple generations of Eastern European composers.

Seattle Symphony has had a long affinity for Shostakovich, extending back to Gerard Schwarz’s lengthy tenure as Music Director. The presence of several orchestra members who grew up in the Soviet Union surely helps as well. In that sense it’s fitting for his music to accompany the resumption of the Untuxed series following a 2½ year absence brought on by post-COVID consolidation and the executive turmoil that reached a head with the acrimonious departure of Thomas Dausgaard as Music Director in January 2022, leaving a gap that will finally be filled by Xian Zhang’s arrival in Fall 2024. It’s a testament to the caliber of its musicians and the leadership of its section principals that the artistic standards of the Symphony have remained so high despite the organization’s offstage issues.

There was a time when the death of a composer as prominent and long-lived as George Crumb would engender a stream of monumental obituaries and career surveys of a kind that serious music writers once aspired to. That so little in this vein has materialized since Crumb’s February 2022 demise at the age of 92 might be a reflection of the dilapidated state of North American music criticism. But it could also mean that his professional eulogies had already been written decades earlier. Among contemporary composers, only Stockhausen seems to have traced a more dramatic arc of reputational soaring and sinking than Crumb, whose distinctive chamber and piano works defined large swathes of the musical avant-garde during the 60s and 70s, but who shortly thereafter found himself dismissed as a faded has-been. By 1997, Kyle Gann had compared him to Roy Harris for the precipitous rise and fall of his professional standing.

But as Stockhausen eventually showed, attempts to close the narrative of a still-living artist are subject to revision. And a pair of posthumous events—the premiere recording of his late percussion quintet Kronos-Kryptos (the last of his canonical works to be commercially recorded), and an intriguing retrospective program called Spotlight: George Crumb, presented in Seattle and Olympia by Emerald City Music—have provided the means and the opportunity to construct a more authoritative epilogue to his protracted resumé.

Origins and heyday

In the 2019 profile film Vox Hominis, screened as part of the Spotlight events, Crumb recalls the impact of the 1950s “Bartók explosion” on his musical development, the beginning of an influence that lurks in the tritone-based pitch structures of many Crumb compositions, occasionally bursting into the open in the “night music” passages that dominate the first of his Four Nocturnes (1964) and the ending of Music for a Summer Evening (1974). The sparseness of Webern, the chords and rhythms of Messiaen, the under-the-lid piano techniques of Henry Cowell, and the delicate nostalgia of Ives revealed in his song Serenity are other obvious influences on the trademark Crumb style.

One of his more underacknowledged sources seems to be Berio—in particular the middle movement of Circles (1960), notable for its textural transparency, its soprano part that alternately sings, intones and whispers the texts by E. E. Cummings, and the elaborate percussion writing that includes a meticulously-specified instrumental layout which requires its players to pirouette to perform the piece. Crumb duplicated the manner and instrumentation of Circles—substituting Lorca for Cummings and a piano/celesta for Berio’s harp—in Night Music I (1963), the first of his compositions that sounds thoroughly like Crumb.

Night Music I established the template for such later works as Ancient Voices of Children (1970), Vox Balaenae (1971) and Night of the Four Moons (1969), of which the latter was included in Spotlight: George Crumb as the embodiment of his “classic” period, a compendium of stylistic fingerprints that include its chamber setting (an updated Pierrot ensemble of female voice, alto flute/piccolo, banjo, electric cello and percussion), and its reliance on extended techniques (e.g., whispering into the flute, playing the banjo with a plastic rod) and percussion instruments (including kabuki blocks, Tibetan prayer stones, an mbira, and several auxiliary instruments played by the singer). Berio’s concept of theatricalized performance has now evolved into a ritual presentation in which the performers (save the “immobile” cellist) end the piece by gradually exiting the stage in the manner of Haydn’s Farewell Symphony as they play a lullaby inspired by Mahler’s Der Abschied.

The texts again come from Lorca, chosen for their pertinence to a lunar theme (the work was composed during the Apollo 11 flight). Emerald City Music’s traversal remained faithful to the composer’s meticulous performance directions. Notable was soprano Charlotte Mundy’s insistence on emphasizing the text’s sensual side during the Huye, Luna, Luna, Luna! movement (whereas Jan DeGaetani in her reference recording of the work makes it more playful), and Jordon Dodson’s sensitive banjo playing, which conveyed fragility on an instrument that’s not always noted for delicacy. All five musicians embraced Crumb’s cherishing treatment of every word and phrase as the originator of its own integral musical world, demonstrating what Eric Salzman called a “suspension of the sense of passing time in order to contemplate eternal things”.

Crumb’s style is largely defined by the soft, slow and sparse sound world—offset by brief, elegant musical gestures—of works like Night of the Four Moons. But there’s one major exception within his oeuvre: Black Angels, Thirteen Images from the Dark Land, composed in 1970 for electric string quartet. Described by its composer as “a parable on our troubled contemporary world” (whose milieu included the Vietnam War), its reputation for shrieking dissonance was bolstered by its use in the soundtrack to The Exorcist and its many performances by the Kronos Quartet that emphasized its loudest, most aggressive characteristics, the ritualized shouting and amplified distortion resonating with young audiences attuned to Jimi Hendrix and heavy metal.

In reality, though, Black Angels is only consistently loud during the first six of its roughly 18 minutes. That the remainder of the work (including the celebrated Death and the Maiden quotations and the neo-Medieval Sarabanda de la Muerte Oscura) dwells in a gentler, more typically Crumb-like ambience was emphasized in the JACK Quartet‘s comparatively subdued reading at Spotlight: George Crumb, which eschewed the Kronos’ contact mikes and guitar amps in favor of DPA microphones fed through the house sound system. This made the timbral and dynamic shifts less jarring than in most performances, the visceral effect dialed down to emphasize such subtleties as the recurring Dies Irae citations and the motific connections between the Sarabanda and the thimble tremolos in the work’s concluding Threnody. Cellist Jay Campbell explained, “it’s nice to hear the notes”, and the only lingering regret was the propensity for the auxiliary percussion (the performers play maracas, bowed goblets and a tam-tam alongside their regular instruments) to overwhelm the lightly-amplified strings.

Among composers of Crumb’s generation, only Ligeti in his Second String Quartet (1968) exerted a comparable impact on the subsequent development of the string quartet medium. Black Angels was a direct model for such works as Tan Dun’s Ghost Opera, and the godfather of much of the new music shepherded by the Kronos Quartet and likeminded groups over the past half-century. Even Stockhausen in his notorious Helicopter String Quartet (1995) hearkens back to the ritualized counting (always to seven!) in Black Angels. As postmodernism defined an extreme new range between noise music and the near silence of Feldman and Cage, Crumb in Black Angels demonstrates an ability to dwell on both ends of the continuum in a stylistic space that’s gestural but unique, and not totally dependent on a post-Webernian aesthetic.

A succession of major works followed Black Angels into the 70s, including the Makrokosmos I and II collections that established Crumb as one of the most influential composers of postwar piano music. They’ve remained in the instrument’s modern repertory, admired for their organic incorporation of extended techniques, and their evocation of Christian and mythological themes through the use of pastiche and musical quotation, conveyed in the composer’s familiar handwritten scores that hearken back to the decorative notations of the Ars Subtilior era (Crumb’s father had been a professional music copyist).

Ebb and flow

Within a few years, though, Crumb’s star had begun to fade. The 1977 premiere of his much-anticipated Star-Child, written for Pierre Boulez and the New York Philharmonic, seems to have been a turning point. It’s a colorful piece, but Crumb clearly struggles to translate the subtle gestures of his chamber works to a vast ensemble that comprises an orchestra, bell-ringers and two spatially-dispersed choirs. The result is uncomfortably derivative both of Crumb’s earlier works and of Charles Ives’ Central Park in the Dark, and it waited more than two decades for its first recording, breaking a string of annual album releases from Nonesuch and Columbia records that kept Crumb’s name in circulation among modern music enthusiasts. (Both those high-profile labels would substantially curtail their commitment to contemporary music as the CD era dawned).

Now Crumb was isolated from his earlier audience, and by the mid-80s he seemed mired in a slump. His students recounted him looking for excuses to avoid composing. And when new works did materialize they often seemed like a diluted echo of past achievements. Mundus Canis (1998), a portrait of five family dogs for guitar and percussion, and the third and final work featured at Spotlight: George Crumb, epitomizes these fallow years. Performers Jordan Dodson and Ji Hye Jung managed to bring out its humor, including a guiro imitating a dog scratching fleas. But in general, the work seems slight and halting, with the poignant eloquence of Lorca and the ritual callouts of Black Angels now replaced by shouts of Yoda! Bad dog!. It was in this context that Kyle Gann’s aforementioned judgment seemed fitting.

Unexpectedly, though, the new millennium saw a rejuvenation in Crumb’s output. Encouraged by family and friends, he undertook a series of settings of traditional American (and later, Spanish language) songs that ultimately totaled nine distinct Songbooks. Their reception was lackluster: apart from a few gems such as a bitter, Mahler-quoting rendition of When Johnny Comes Marching Home, they tend to sound sluggish and monotonous compared with Crumb’s earlier vocal works, and they lack the disjunction between archaic tonality and modern atonality that makes the pastiche and quotations of Black Angels so captivating. But they did succeed in refocusing Crumb’s compositional energies in ways that found their best expression in his late piano works, including the Mozart and Thelonious Monk-inspired Eine Kleine Mitternachtmusik (2001), one of the few items from this period to secure a foothold in the repertory, and the two books of Metamorphoses (2017 and 2020): 20 aural portraits of paintings by Klimt, Klee, Chagall, O’Keeffe and others, concluding with van Gogh’s The Starry Night (which had inspired Music for a Summer Evening decades earlier). Conceived as a resumption of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, they’re among the most remarkable keyboard works ever composed by an octogenarian—a worthy companion to the Makrokosmos volumes, and a fitting bookend to an oeuvre that officially began in 1962 with Five Pieces for piano.

By comparison, Kronos-Kryptos, Four Tableaux for Percussion Quintet (2018–20), the centerpiece of the just-released 21st, and final, volume of Bridge Records Complete Crumb Edition, feels less compelling: a competent but anachronistic retread of Crumb’s earlier music that’s nevertheless notable as his only composition for percussion alone—an astonishing fact given his longstanding reputation as a pioneer of modern percussion writing. Its best passage comes in its quiet finale: a dirge on Poor Wayfaring Stranger composed in memory of Crumb’s daughter Ann, a vocalist who premiered many of his Songbooks before her death of cancer in 2019.

The culmination of the Crumb canon deals another blow to the great generation of postwar American avant-gardists whose surviving ranks are now headed by Anthony Braxton and the original minimalists. On the morning of his death Crumb was arguably the most important living composer of piano music, and the last giant in a distinctively American line of innovative percussion writers whose praxis has been so thoroughly assimilated into the mainstream of Western art music that it no longer seems to represent a distinct “thing”. Crumb was also instrumental in developing the postmodern practice of pastiche and theatricalized performance. Whether his best-known works remain worthy of the approbation they received half a century ago, or whether Andrew Clements’ revisionist pronouncement (“too much surface, far too little depth”) is closer to the mark, their influence seems certain to greatly outlive their creator. Crumb, as Mark Swed put it, may have been famous only within new music circles. But he mattered well beyond them.

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Founded in 2015 by Andrew Goldstein and violinist Kristin Lee, Emerald City Music has secured a niche in the Northwest music scene for its distinctive brand of “high-end” concertizing, featuring such accoutrements as snacks, an open bar, projected titles and artist profiles, perusal scores spread out in the lobby, and an eclectic mix of contemporary and historic Western art music of both the composed and improvised kind. Most of their Seattle performances take place at 415 Westlake, an event space in the heart of Amazon’s corporate digs in South Lake Union that’s well suited to the trademark ECM experience, allowing for such endeavors as performing Georg Friedrich Haas’ Third String Quartet in total darkness. The program for Spotlight: George Crumb featured three works totaling 50 minutes, plus National Sawdust’s 20-minute portrait film Vox Hominis, filmed at the composer’s home and studio on his 90th birthday. This modest lineup was probably a good thing: Crumb’s music, like Webern’s, is best savored in small portions.