Author: Tyran Grillo

Contemporary Classical

Stephen Upshaw: Veneer

A veneer is a promise made by surfaces. It is the thin layer we polish so the hand does not snag on splinters, the face we present so the wound can breathe without being seen. Stephen Upshaw’s debut recording understands this double bind with unnerving clarity. Across four works, his viola does not seek to anesthetize pain but study it as a corporeal fact, as memory lodged in muscle and bone, as a story retold until it becomes survivable. The cumulative effect is that of the self in rehearsal, learning how to carry its history forward without collapsing beneath it.

What unites the program is not style but pressure. Each piece asks how much strain a body can hold before it begins to speak in new tongues. Color here is not cosmetic. It is bruised, mottled, alive. Expression arrives without apology, attentive to the smallest particulate of sound, the way sensation gathers around a nerve before announcing itself as hurt or hope.

Lavinia (2021) by Errollyn Wallen opens with insistence, a four-note figure that refuses to stay dead. It returns altered, re-embodied, as if granted another life each time it risks itself. The music behaves like memory under stress, replaying a moment to test whether it can be survived differently. The titular character, drawn from Virgil’s Aeneid, stands between allegiances, her silence thick with consequence. Wallen reframes that restraint as ignition.

When fragments of her aria from Dido’s Ghost surface near the end, they do not resolve anything. They hover, exposed. The bow scrapes against sadness and subjugation until pigment leaks through, shades that feel newly discovered yet eerily familiar. These hues were always present, buried beneath histories written by marching feet and the self-justifying bloodshed of men. Their vanity cracks just enough to let the old light show through.

The New Hymns (2019) by Aaron Holloway-Nahum turns inward with a different urgency. A low drone holds the ground while microtones grind against it, chiseling away at silence. The music feels carved rather than composed. One perceives the gradual emergence of hands, the curve of a face, the suggestion of feet braced against cold stone. What resists completion is the mouth. Speech remains difficult, costly.

When the voice finally ignites, it does so faintly, like an ember refusing extinction at the edge of hearing. The effect recalls a whale’s call translated into fragile poetry, a message meant for distance and deep water. Harmonics drift in, field recordings brush against the viola’s grain, and together they open a corridor toward terror. This is not spectacle. It is the sound of a final convulsion offered up by a mind that has wandered too far from safety. The hymn becomes new by abandoning consolation.

Soothe a Tooth (2020) by Tonia Ko is shorter, sharper, and no less harrowing. It attends to the small violences we inflict on ourselves without noticing. Clenched jaws. Fractured enamel. A tongue dried by vigilance. The piece isolates such gestures of tension and release, crawling under fingernails, behind eyelids, and into the folds of the ear. Touch asserts itself as syntax. Meaning arises from friction with material reality, then fractures under the burden of interpretation. Moments of liquidity appear, convincing in their ease, only to dissolve into abrasion. When the bow bounces, it does not celebrate. It tests the possibility of defying gravity for an instant, knowing the fall is inevitable.

Trauma lives in details. It teaches an intimacy with pain that is both precise and exhausting. Healing, too, becomes granular. Progress is measured not in leaps but in the ability to notice when the body tightens, when it loosens, when it remembers too much. Ko’s piece dwells in that awareness, where endurance masquerades as normalcy and relief proves temporary yet necessary.

Veneer (2011) by Ed Finnis closes the program by shifting the question. Harmonics form a metaphysical chain, echoing inside the skull through altered tuning and electronic reverb. The sound seems less played than inhabited. Each overtone refracts into another, opening space where the earlier works allowed little. Hope enters quietly, without rhetoric. Cells unfold one by one, patient, almost tender, suggesting that new life might arise not by erasing damage but by learning to resonate with it. A single pizzicato note appears, sudden and alive, like an eye opening in an unfamiliar century, curious about where entropy might still offer joy.

Taken together, Veneer proposes that outward appearances are not lies. They are negotiations. They can hide infection, yes, but they can also protect what has not yet healed. Upshaw’s playing understands this paradox. He does not tear the mask away. He listens to it. In doing so, he reveals how the flesh carries its narratives forward, not to forget the wound, but to imagine what might still grow around it.

The album is available via Bandcamp here.

by Tyran Grillo
Contemporary Classical, Piano, Twentieth Century Composer

Ryan McCullough/Andrew Zhou: sedgeflowers/MANTRA

The first rule of MANTRA is “You do not talk about MANTRA.” The second rule is that if you find yourself unable to stop thinking about MANTRA, you talk around it, circle it, cultivate the soil from which it grows. That is how this album begins, not with Karlheinz Stockhausen’s looming monolith, but with John Liberatore’s Sedgeflowers, a choice that feels both mischievous and deeply principled. Pianists Ryan McCullough and Andrew Zhou do not kick down the door. They plant something. And what emerges is an astonishingly inventive and coherent program that understands that radicalism is a spirited little ouroboros just waiting for a stage on which to be heard.

Liberatore’s music blossoms almost immediately, unfurling from its opening gestures with a tactile generosity. Motifs sprout, dance, and scatter seeds wherever they go, each one a record of what came before and a wager on what might still take root. As these cells overlap and undergo profound metamorphosis, the piano becomes an archaeological site. Fragments of bygone vocabularies surface, collide, and re-inter themselves, leaving behind playful gestures that sprint up and down the keyboard like delighted trespassers. They score the earth, opening furrows that resemble a crisscrossed field of morose crops waiting to be reaped. By the final movement, the music feels uncannily alive, a high-speed game of table tennis played by miniature ghosts, all kinetic energy and ricocheting echoes. It is delicate, forthright, and unabashedly joyful. Between movements, two brief interludes appear like a gardener’s secret weapon, sparkling applications of fertilizer that ensure the whole thing keeps growing.

The title Sedgeflowers refers to an invasive grass-weed that appears in a 14th-century poem encountered by Liberatore, a nuisance transfigured into something vivid and beautiful. That alchemical reversal becomes the guiding ethos of the entire project, which germinated during the claustrophobic early days of the pandemic. From this soil grew the RAGE: Vented project, rooted in one of Beethoven’s most irascible curios, the 1795 Rage Over a Lost Penny, Vented in a Caprice. A handful of composers were invited to respond, not with reverence but with friction. Because the world itself was vented, McCullough and Zhou recorded separately, stitching their performances together afterward, a method that turns isolation into an aesthetic principle rather than a limitation.

Yi-wei Angus Lee’s Rage Over Lost Time wanders into this space like a dreamer with a toolkit. Extended techniques on the piano strings summon overtones, growls, and subterranean murmurs, turning the instrument inside out. The effect feels cinematic and uncanny, as if one were strolling through a Brothers Quay film in which dilapidated objects twitch into life, stubbornly refusing to be obsolete. When fragments of Beethoven finally appear on the keys, they feel less like quotations than like memories storming the holiday dinner table, gnawing on whatever leftover turkey bones they can get their claws on.

Memory also drives Dante de Silva’s Two Sedated to Rage, a hall of mirrors in which Beethoven brushes up against the Aria from J. S. Bach’s Goldberg Variations and Erik Satie’s Gymnopédie No. 1. These echoes of echoes fold inward, each reflection already filtered through time, history, and longing. What emerges is a truth glimpsed only with closed eyes, a lullaby for noteheads that know they are already ghosts.

Aida Shirazi’s triptych, RAGE: Screamed, RAGE: Stolen, RAGE: Silenced, takes a darker turn. Tape and putty mute the piano strings into a rain-like hush, a sound world built in solidarity with voices cut short by the garrote of the global political machine. Individual tones surface as cryptic hints of Beethoven, never coalescing into full phrases. Allegiance to the canon is not rejected so much as incinerated, reduced to ash alongside the bodies and stories the world prefers to bury in doom-scroll denial.

If Shirazi burns the archive, LJ White listens to its aftershocks. Rage is the Bodyguard of Sadness frames social isolationism, before and after COVID, as a series of subterranean distillations. Improvisationally inflected ruminations bubble up from below, guarding grief by standing watch, arms crossed, daring anyone to look away.

Andrew Zhou’s own Con variazioni refuses to sit still long enough to be categorized. It is a minefield of interruptions, quotations, and excitations, a piece that never settles into a single groove because it does not believe in contrite comforts. Instead, it tickles the underbellies of its inspirations until they sneeze in unpredictable succession, each eruption more delightfully infected than the last. Bombast gives way to self-deprecation, bravado undercut by a well-timed wink. Acupuncture needles find their way into unsuspecting muscles tattooed in staves and key signatures, revealing that they have always shared a circulatory system, whether they liked it or not.

Christopher Castro’s Beethausenstro-Castockhoven wears its joke proudly. The portmanteau (of the composer’s name along with that of Beethoven and Stockhausen) announces the mashup aesthetic. Still, the music goes further, gleefully knocking Stockhausen’s funny bone and sending his intergalactic pronouncements wobbling. The addition of percussion foreshadows much to come with a tongue-in-cheek vitality that feels more like affectionate sabotage than parody.

Laura Cetilia’s sense of missing leans into resonance. Pennies woven between the piano strings create gong-like sonorities that shimmer and hover. Built from rhythmic motifs drawn from Beethoven, the piece constructs its cellular language one utterance at a time, sounding almost electronic in its transformations. These metallic imprints become inner gardens, places where loss is not filled but cultivated.

Christopher Stark’s Foreword functions as both overture and prophecy. Digital augmentations and piano preparations stretch time sideways, offering a comprehensive foray into what makes 20th-century clocks tick. Voice-like tonal waves breathe alongside watery submersions and cinematic expanses, each pursued by its own shadow. Its sense of eternity is not grandiose but intimate, phenomenally beautiful in its restraint.

Eventually, of course, the first rule breaks down. We have to talk about MANTRA. Stockhausen’s colossal work occupies the album’s second disc like a gravitational field. In his liner notes, McCullough describes the composer as a maverick whose ideas sometimes refused to cohere, standing apart across the variegated chasm of their own century. As Stockhausen pivoted from post-war recalibration to anti-minimalism in the 1970s, he embraced tensions as fetishes, bringing entire musical space-time continuums into relief.

Welcoming MANTRA under their fingers and into their hearts, McCullough and Zhou activate a joyful confluence of practical ingenuity and creative commitment. The opening woodblock and piano footsteps usher the listener into a sound world that feels both familiar and alien. Everyday materials are subjected to extraordinary transformations through preparations, electronics, crotales, shortwave radio, and ring modulators. The latter, powered by McCullough’s own software patch, hum with a bespoke intensity. Unlike Stockhausen’s earlier graphic experiments, MANTRA is meticulously notated (even so, it leaves vast room for imagination). Thirteen variations unfold fractally between an introduction and a postlude, accumulating over more than seventy minutes into a self-styled galactic theater.

Sine wave generators lend a timbral sorcery, while the piece’s wave-like architecture crests and recedes in dramatic confluences of means and message. Percussion and electronics create textural contrasts so vivid they feel almost edible. One can nearly taste them, as if ears had sprouted tongues of their own. Modulated vocal expectorations add splashes of color, reminding us that sound is always a corporeal inflection. MANTRA, for all its reputation, proves remarkably hospitable. It allows listeners to feel whatever they feel without insisting on enlightenment or withholding pleasure. There is no comfort, but neither is there punishment. As modern music goes, it goes down like a spoonful of sugar, possibly laced with caffeine, definitely capable of keeping you up all night.

So yes, we talked about MANTRA. We broke the rule. But like all good rules in art, it turns out to be a koan rather than a commandment. By the end of sedgeflowers/MANTRA, silence feels louder, pennies feel heavier, weeds feel wiser, and rage feels oddly generative. If this is what happens when you vent, imagine what might grow if you finally let yourself listen.

by Tyran Grillo
Contemporary Classical, Piano

Alessandro Stella: Handsome Skies – Valentin Silvestrov

Valentin Silvestrov emerges from the late Soviet classical tradition as a figure of quiet resistance, not through overt polemic but by turning inward when history demanded proclamations. While many composers of his generation negotiated the pressures of socialist realism or the rigor of the avant-garde, Silvestrov gradually chose another path, treating music as an echo rather than a declaration. But he carried it further, dissolving form until what remained was remembrance itself. In his hands, composition became a kind of afterlife, where melody appears already worn by time, as if it remembers having been heard before.

Handsome Skies, as realized by Alessandro Stella, gathers these fragile remnants into a single atmosphere. The album does not unfold as a sequence of works so much as a slow change of light, each piece leaning toward the next like overlapping thoughts. Nostalghia sets the tone with its suspended tenderness, where the delicacy of the moment is filtered through awareness of impermanence. Notes arise like recollections that cannot quite be held, life and death entwined in a gentle blur, the self dissolving through stepwise descents until only listening remains.

From there, the 3 Bagatelles, Op. 1, feel like the genetic code of Silvestrov’s language. Each motif behaves as a living cell, compact yet expansive, unfurling across vast emotional distances with no need for explanation. The central bagatelle darkens into a low tidal pull, a rumbling that suggests urgency even as it undoes itself, breath cycling downward in slow motion toward silence. Entropy here is not destruction but revelation.

Those inward explorations deepen in the 3 Bagatelles, Op. 4, where the harmonic surface grows slightly more abrasive, though never unmoored. Dissonance appears as a passing weather, always giving way to equilibrium. The music seems to hover between states, revealing how fragility and balance depend upon one another. In that exchange, lived experience expands beyond narrative and becomes architecture, something you wander through rather than follow.

The 3 Waltzes with Postludium, Op. 3, carry a different tension. Their anxiety seeps rather than strikes, an unease that presses forward in search of time’s gradual remedy. These are not dances recalled from happier eras but movements shaped by present wounds, processing themselves through the subconscious. Hope lingers quietly, most vividly in the Postludium, where fragments settle into place with a retrospective beauty that feels earned at great sacrifice.

With the 4 Pieces, Op. 2, Silvestrov’s painterly patience comes into focus. The Lullaby offers tenderness without comfort, while the concluding Postludium glimmers with restrained light. Between them lies a porous emotional space where yearning never quite finds its object, and restraint becomes its own form of expression.

The Postludium, Op. 5, stands apart in its gravity. It feels bound to mortality, like a coffin descending, the sound weighted by farewell. Each gesture seems aware of its finality, yet refuses drama, allowing grief to exist without explanation.

The Waltz and two Serenades, Op. 193, lean into sentimentality, though without artifice. Their sincerity has a photographic clarity, capturing moments exactly as they are, unembellished and therefore more affecting. Melody closes the program with its forested resonance, a dream that never consents to waking, suspended in perpetual dusk.

Throughout Handsome Skies, Stella’s playing is so embodied that the distinction between interpreter and creator begins to blur. His pianism sounds as if it is thinking aloud, composing itself in real time, guided less by intention than by listening. What remains at the end is not an answer but a space, one where memory, sound, and silence coexist without hierarchy. Silvestrov’s music, as Stella reveals it, does not ask to be understood. It asks only to be entered, and once inside, the listener is free to decide whether these echoes belong to the past, the present, or something still arriving.

by Tyran Grillo
CD Review, Contemporary Classical

Music for Violas, Bass Clarinets & Flutes

Released on Thanos Chrysakis’s Aural Terrains label, Music for Violas, Bass Clarinets & Flutes unfolds as a considered gathering of voices. The instrumentation itself suggests a downward gravity, an attraction to breath, wood, and string as sites of glorious friction. Across the program, Jason Alder, Tim Hodgkinson, Chris Cundy, Yoni Silver, and Lori Freedman inhabit the lower reeds with an intimacy that borders on corporeal. Vincent Royer and Jill Valentine draw violas into their extremes in either direction, while Carla Rees and Karin de Fleyt allow flutes to hover, flicker, and occasionally wound the air.

The album opens with Gérard Grisey’s Nout (1983) for solo contrabass clarinet, a work that seems to arrive already half submerged. Its quiet beauty is multiphonically arrayed, each tone carrying the weight of an interior life too dense to be articulated outright. There is a self-examining melancholy at work, like a nautilus shell cracked open to expose its chambers, once inhabited but now resonant only with memory. The sound moves forward hesitantly, aware of its own fragility, until it is pierced by something harsher and more elemental. A foghorn-like call slices through the darkness, a fleshly blade that refuses narrative consolation. In its wake, biography itself seems to dissolve. Footprints are erased by high tide, and what remains is the fact of sound as survival in a hostile expanse.

From this eroded shoreline, Niels Christian Rasmussen’s Gestalten (2018) for bass clarinet and tape introduces a different kind of tension, one between the human trace and an environment that feels uncannily clean. Bell-like sonorities bloom within the electronic layer, accompanied by exhalations and points of light that seem to puncture shadow rather than dispel it. Against this backdrop, the bass clarinet enters as an imperfect presence, its tone roughened by time, carrying residue wherever it goes. There is a sense that the instrument stains the surrounding purity simply by existing within it. The music dwells in this unease, allowing purity and profanity to entangle until neither can be isolated. What emerges is not conflict but recognition, an acknowledgment that human sound is always marked, always implicated, and therefore alive.

Thanos Chrysakis’s Octet (2018) expands the field outward, bringing together two violas, three bass clarinets, baritone saxophone, and two alto flutes in a work that feels ritualistic without ever becoming ceremonial. The relationships therein are tactile and deliberate, offered up as if to time itself rather than to any listening subject. Overtones converge and separate, brushing against the perceptual edge, creating the sensation of watching a film while remaining acutely aware of what lies beyond the frame. With the composer positioned behind the camera, we are left to infer motive and movement, to speculate about cause and consequence. Yet the music offers space rather than instruction. In the gaps between gestures, the listener is free to wander, gather fragments, and rearrange them into provisional meanings. The result is quietly linguistic, a vocabulary shaped by force and friction rather than syntax.

Salvatore Sciarrino’s Hermes (1984) for solo flute returns the focus inward, tracing a line between tenderness and restless wakefulness. The music moves with the unsteady logic of insomnia, never entirely abandoning itself to calm. Extended techniques shimmer at the edge of audibility, suggesting something otherworldly, an aura that hovers just out of reach. It is less an effect than a presence, something felt before it is understood. Karin de Fleyt’s performance captures this fragility with remarkable poise, allowing the flute to become both messenger and message, its divinity inseparable from the physical act of producing sound.

That sense of exposure deepens with Aura, a bass clarinet improvisation by Yoni Silver based on Iancu Dumitrescu’s work of the same name. Here, the terrain grows rougher, more unstable, as if structure itself were beginning to fail. Notes split apart under pressure, their internal components laid bare. The reed salivates, the sound fractures, and what might once have been wonder turns inward, confronting its own limits. There is a foreboding quality to this performance, an intuition of collapse, yet it is rendered with such honesty that it becomes strangely affirming. The beauty here is not decorative but visceral, emerging from a willingness to remain exposed.

Lori Freedman’s To the Bridge (2014) stands as the emotional and conceptual center of the album. Featuring the composer on bass clarinet, clarinet, and voice, the work introduces the human presence as a culmination. Her vocalizations recall the fearless inventiveness of Cathy Berberian, even while being wholly her own. The bass clarinet playing is extraordinary, coaxing from the instrument a saxophonic sheen that bristles with a charged, almost dangerous pleasure. Across these miniatures, Freedman traverses extremes of temperament, from boisterous assertion to quiet self-examination, never losing sight of the work’s fundamental drive. At its core, this is music about endurance, about finding ways to persist when language alone is insufficient.

Tim Hodgkinson’s Parautika (2019) follows with a kind of gentle recalibration. Scored for two violas and three bass clarinets, it might suggest density or weight, yet the prevailing impression is one of translucence. The gestures are brief, direct, and unencumbered by excess, allowing the music to communicate with immediacy. Even as the piece closes on a more declarative note, it feels earned rather than imposed.

The program concludes with Chrysakis’s Selva Oscura (2017/18) for viola and bass clarinet, a work that distills the entire preceding journey. Its language is pared down to essentials, each sound placed with intention, each silence given weight. It is a sustained meditation, etched onto the surface of an unfamiliar world. In its economy, it invites reflection rather than resolution. We are not transported somewhere else so much as returned, altered, to the selves we were at the outset.

Taken as a whole, this collection is marked by a rare integrity. Despite its reliance on extended techniques and abstract forms, it never relinquishes its commitment to storytelling, even when the contours of that story remain elusive. The music does not explain itself, nor does it demand comprehension. Instead, it lets listening serve as a form of dwelling. Thus, we are free to encounter ourselves without judgment, to leave changed in ways that may only become clear when time grants us the distance to recognize what has taken root.

by Tyran Grillo
CD Review, Classical Music, Composers, Twentieth Century Composer

LuLo: The Restless – Rued Langgaard reimagined

Painful footsteps are behind me
Here you stand so clear and far
Through the willows all I see
is a lonely burning star
–Thor Lange, “Sun at Rest”

Cellist Kirstine Elise Pedersen and bassist Mathæus Bech, a.k.a. LuLo, came together through a shared fascination with the singular, often-misunderstood Danish composer Rued Langgaard (1893–1952). Their approach to his music is both reverent and daring. Rather than treating the scores as sacred artifacts, they dismantled them lovingly, listening closely to recordings, transcribing passages by ear, and distilling sprawling works—from piano pieces to string quartets and symphonies—down to a page or less of melody and harmony. From there, they rebuilt them intuitively, as if they were fragments of folk music handed down orally rather than concert works locked behind museum glass.

The resulting album is inseparable from its physical form: a book-object accompanied by archival photographs and artistic images by Bech, along with notes that gesture toward the times, places, and emotional climates that shaped Langgaard’s life.

Said life haunts the music at every turn. A prodigy who performed his first concert at 11 and saw his first symphony performed by the Berlin Philharmonic to great acclaim, Langgaard soon found himself at odds with the musical establishment. His eccentricity and refusal to remain stylistically obedient—shifting from late Romanticism into something more abrasive, prophetic, even anarchic—left him increasingly isolated. Colleagues mocked him; institutions ignored him. Out of seeming desperation, he wrote oblique instructions like “repeat for all eternity” or “repeat with a crescendo until either the piano or your fingers break.” Of the roughly 400 works he composed, only a tenth were performed during his lifetime, often at his own expense. Eventually, weary of his complaints, the cultural elite arranged for him to be quietly exiled to a post as a church organist at the far end of the country. Langgaard accepted, despite knowing full well the intention behind the offer. He died largely forgotten, his music surfacing again only in the present century, like a message in a bottle.

LuLo’s interpretations capture this sense of restless compression with the utmost attention to detail. The album opens in a state of delicate agitation with pieces like “Cowbells in the Pine Forest,” where fluttering textures suggest jangling metal or distant movement before a melody emerges with the pale light of rural dawn. This deeply illustrative quality recurs throughout the record, pastoral on the surface but threaded with unease.

Tensions between gratitude and suspicion run through original compositions like Bech’s “Thankful” and “Waltz for Rued,” the latter inspired by Langgaard’s Andante Religioso for violin and organ (BVN407). These pieces glisten briefly, like dew left as an offering, yet they never lose contact with an underlying darkness. Joy here is fragile, provisional, always shadowed by the knowledge of what followed.

The folk impulse comes into sharper focus on tracks such as “Swedish,” where droning textures give way to a melody both exuberant and tense. Gorgeous dissonances and a sense of forlorn joy suggest music shaped by communal memory rather than personal triumph. That same feeling carries into “Sun at Rest” (BVN 136). Originally for string quartet and soprano, this iteration features Kira Martini’s voice moving with gentle inevitability through a melancholy landscape without ever becoming merely bucolic.

Elsewhere, motion takes over. “God’s Will” is reduced from its originally massive scoring to a pulsing, cinematic drive that advances with locomotive persistence, while “Passing Train,” Pedersen’s response to the second movement of String Quartet No. 2 (BVN145), leans fully into programmatic imagery. Rhythm becomes destiny, propulsion its own kind of meaning. Even the cosmic unrest of “Music of the Spheres” (BVN 128), with its theological visions of Antichrist and salvation, feels grounded here, less apocalyptic spectacle than ceaseless spiritual pressure pushing through space and time.

Some of the album’s most revelatory moments arise through extreme condensation. LuLo’s reimagining of material from String Quartet No. 3 (BVN183) strips the work down to its nervous system, revealing a surprising jazz-inflected modernity. Elastic phrasing and rhythmic instability expose Langgaard not as an anachronism, but as a composer perpetually out of joint with his own era. Pieces like “Ixion” (from Symphony No. 11, BVN303) dance cautiously, never fully leaving the ground, their instability suggesting sandcastles built with full knowledge of the tide.

As the album darkens, disquiet gives way to exhaustion. “Eventually Mad” (BVN371) and “The Restless Wind” (BVN149) feel vast and elegiac, drifting like unanswered prayers. This sense of terminal weariness reaches its quiet apex in “Tired,” again featuring Martini, whose voice moves rhythmically through a landscape of ashen flowers. It is a song not just of rest from labor, but from life itself.

By the time The Restless draws to a close, the title feels less like a description of nervous energy or creative compulsion and more like a metaphysical condition. Langgaard’s life suggests what happens when faith, imagination, and sensitivity collide with institutional indifference, when vision outpaces comprehension. LuLo does not attempt to resolve this tension or redeem it with posthumous triumph. Instead, the musicians sit with it, listening carefully.

In doing so, the album poses a quiet but unsettling question: What does it mean to be heard, and when does listening finally arrive too late? We are given no answers, only the sense that music, even when ignored or misunderstood, continues to move forward, carried by those willing to approach it as something living. In that persistence lies both consolation and sorrow, as a lonely burning star glimpsed through the willows, still shining long after the footsteps have faded.

by Tyran Grillo
Contemporary Classical, Minimalism, Video

Blushing at the Hem of Redemption: Uva Lunera’s “Trozos De Mí”

“Not even Arvo Pärt’s Gregorian chants could save her.”

When life tears your heart out, music has a way of suturing it back into place before you lose consciousness for good. This is what it feels like to immerse oneself in Trozos De Mí (Pieces Of Me), the latest project from Bogotá, Colombia-based pianist and composer Valentina Castillo (under the stage name Uva Lunera). Having previously explored her idiosyncratic blend of minimalism, groove, and songcraft across a travelogue of studio and live settings, she has produced what is, so far, her most intimate and transformational multimedia experience.

Combining sound, text, and video, Trozos De Mí is a journey, not in the sense of moving nomadically from one place to the next but of exploring the same place over and over until it becomes something totally different by the scuff marks of footprints and the stains of blood (and other effluvia) left behind. It is the latter we follow into this, her second full-length album, which by virtue of its unraveling gives us plenty of fiber to twine around ourselves in empathic understanding of the ache it so honestly captures.

Through the machinery of eight major organs surrounded by the skin of an “Opening” and “End,” the figure we glimpse beckons with one hand and holds us off with the other. We sustain this push and pull like the tearing of a muscle. What at first announces itself as an excruciation morphs with each touch of the keyboard into a lull of healing. That cusp between debilitation and revivification is where Castillo is most in her element as a performer, so that her recollections of fierce romance rage like an oil fire on a stove sucked of its oxygen by the range hood of memory.

From the fragments of “Deleite” (Delight) to the reparations of “Podéis Ir En Paz” (You Can Go In Peace), she rounds the edges of every shard just enough to be holdable without cutting through the fingers. And what a blessing that is when those fingers are the primary salvation bringers in a world of broken instruments. In the manner of bodies close and electric yet playing out the dances and separations that define every infatuation, she gives herself to the moment, knowing that whatever pieces she loses are opportunities for the clay of retelling to take their place. In “Deja Vú,” especially, she molds those traumas of repetition into something grander, less hesitant. As hurt turns into laughter and back into hurt, she leaves the piano to dance—the only coping strategy that makes sense as she delves deeper into the missing time of her autobiography.

And so, from the throes of adulthood to the quietude of childhood, she wraps herself in “Una Mantita” (A Little Blanket), a lullaby that reaches like starlight through slatted blinds without ever touching her sleeping face. Instead, that maternal glow is interrupted by “Padre,” whose stoic malevolence carves a shadow of resistance. Couched in this forlorn image is the tale of a Catholic priest (“Yes! I’m not the only one who calls him ‘Father,’” she quips) who prompts songs of forgiveness in the daughter he abandoned. However, that forgiveness must be gifted to herself, so tender that it can only be felt, never seen. This paternal hurt reaches its breaking point in “Un Duelo, Una Pausa” (A Duel, A Pause), in which drummer Rafa Lozina evokes a body scarred by too many paper cuts, each page a blade of awakening.

In closing, we are swept into a theme song for moving on. With terms settled and corporeality mended, she looks back while keeping one toe dipped into a future yet to be sung. Thus, her state of mind is always present with the listener. She sits before you, face to face, holding your hands in hers, the only completion of a circuit needed for us to know its electricity.

Trozos De Mí is available to experience in full on YouTube here. Let yourself go, and it will catch you.

by Tyran Grillo
Contemporary Classical

Joe Hisaishi: A Symphonic Celebration

Many people’s first exposure to the world of Studio Ghibli and its star director, Hayao Miyazaki, was My Neighbor Totoro. For me, it was Laputa: Castle in the Sky. I will never forget my reaction to the opening sequence, during which Sheeta, the sole living heiress of the eponymous all-but-forgotten realm, falls from an airship. As she hurtles toward the earth below, eyes closed as if resigned to this tragic fate, her crystal necklace begins to glow, imbuing enough power in its slender cord to bring her to the softest of landings into the arms of protagonist Pazu.

Nothing prepared me, however, for the music of Joe Hisaishi. Such emotional circuits are part and parcel of his scoring at its most glorious: building a free fall of anticipation before settling into the inner lives of Miyazaki’s timeless characters. And surely, this conspectus from Deutsche Grammophon provides a long-overdue account of Hisaishi’s melodic gifts. A Symphonic Celebration reminds us of one key reason why Miyazaki’s oeuvre owns so much valuable real estate in the hearts of children and adults alike. Each image has a song.

While Michael Beek’s liner notes rightly place Miyazaki/Hisaishi among the ranks of Spielberg/Williams, Zemeckis/Silvestri, Burton/Elfman, and Fellini/Rota, I might also add Lynch/Badalamenti, especially since the latter dream team closely mirrors the creative process of Hisaishi, who has often composed music for a Miyazaki picture based only on sketches and ideas before a single frame is drawn. Beek goes on to characterize the album’s program as “Joe Hisaishi’s musical vision freed from the bounds of film, but this time given even more space and, if it’s at all possible, even more heart and soul.” This is at once to the album’s credit and detriment.

But first, the music, which begins where it must: with Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984), their inaugural collaboration. As the first of ten reimagined suites, it packs a punch of tympani and orchestral splendor that resolves into the clarion strains of what may be Hisaishi’s most timeless theme. The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra artfully brushes in the details under the composer’s baton. The addition of choir adds a surreal sense of humanity to music for a film that still feels quite distant from who we are now, yet so familiar, while the children’s singing is a haunting remnant of carefree abundance. This sets a tone that can be difficult to read because the suites often shift so quickly from one motif to the other that one’s memories of certain scenes and characters get interrupted. Still, there are some stunning passages to savor, especially in the finale, that recapture some of the magic.

Just as Nausicaä finds its groove toward the end, Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989) is refined from note one, as the wide-eyed wonder of the titular witch setting off for the adventure of independent living blossoms across the foreground. The percussive touches and fervent string playing give way to a creamy center, while the solo violin of Stephen Morris carries a rich emotional cargo. An especially successful arrangement.

Princess Mononoke (1997) tills martial ground, cultivating the soprano of Grace Davidson, who does a splendid job with the Japanese intonation, as also in Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea(2008), while The Wind Rises (2013) introduces the mandolin of Avi Avital for a more cobblestoned sound. The latter points to Miyazaki’s fascination with flight and air travel, as played out further in Castle in the Sky (1986), which is smart for opening with Pazu’s bugled morning call but less so for taking up the theme with choir when the piano was so crucial to the original soundtrack. Moreover, the concluding melodrama feels rather out of character with the film’s tender heart. Thankfully, we get plenty of Hisaishi at the keyboard in Porco Rosso (1992), which evokes its quirky mélange with tasteful subtlety, taken up by clarinet and strings.

The biggest disappointment is Howl’s Moving Castle (2004), which has so much grace and poise in the original, yet here, despite being the longest of the program, seems rushed. That said, it does contain some of Hisaishi’s most masterful work, especially “Merry-Go-Round of Life,” which gloriously consummates a flirtatious appearance early on.

Spirited Away (2001) gives us more of Hisaishi’s distinctive pianism (again, this connects him to Badalamenti, whose keyboard playing was always so grounded in the soul), paired with the breathy vocals of Hisaishi’s daughter, Mai Fujisawa (who also sang the original Nausicäa theme). Her voice is auto-tuned, which is rather odd in a classical album, even as it plays creatively with the fringes of a genre that has grown with the times. If anything, this pop sensibility gives it an interesting appeal.

And so, we return to My Neighbor Totoro (1988), a story seared into my memory after seeing the film literally hundreds of times when it was the only one my three-going-on-four-year-old would watch at the time. Miyazaki himself once characterized Totoro as the embodiment of Japan in its transition into modernism, as evidenced by his parallels with Alice in Wonderland and Mary Poppins, and I have grown to appreciate its depths far more as an adult. Originally shown as the B picture of a double feature after Grave of the Fireflies (directed by studio mate Isao Takahata), it contrasted the reality of a war-torn Japan with the fantasy of a rural imaginary in anticipation of a hopeful future. Hisaishi adds to such inversions, beginning his suite under cover of night, whereas the film opens in the brightness of day.

Perhaps the ultimate question regarding A Symphonic Celebration is whether this music would survive without its cinematic associations. While my bias as someone in whose fibers frames of Miyazaki’s films are deeply embedded leads me toward a “no,” time will tell how it reads to new listeners as a standalone experience. Given that the arrangements are so far from home, I yearn for the moving images and their original sound palettes—missing, for example, the electronics that make Nausicaä and Totoro such delightfully nostalgic productions of their time. And while one could make a strong case for including the Totoro theme song in English since it was such an international success (even if the tessellated choral arrangement lacks the charm of Sonya Isaacs in the Disney dub), I wonder what meaning the English version of Ponyo’s theme song offers to someone ignorant of the film, or to Japanese fans, for that matter. Of course, we cannot necessarily expect the colors and textures to be the same. Still, I would recommend that anyone new to Joe Hisaishi watch, rewatch, and absorb Miyazaki’s films long before putting this album in cue.

by Tyran Grillo
Contemporary Classical, Piano, Songs

Lucy Fitz Gibbon/Ryan MacEvoy McCullough: the labor of forgetting

The program so sincerely produced on the labor of forgetting, the debut release from False Azure Records, reminds me of Pauline Oliveros, who once said, “Listening is selecting and interpreting and acting and making decisions.” Indeed, the music of Katherine Balch (b. 1991) and Dante De Silva (b. 1978), in the handling of soprano Lucy Fitz Gibbon and pianist Ryan MacEvoy McCullough, underscores the agency of listening as a process in physical flux, even when its subjects are fixed in time and space. The aural objects herein, as grandly interpreted as they are intimately assembled (if not the reverse), bend details into hooks on which we are invited to hang the keys of our distractions while not forgetting the darkness nipping at our heels.

De Silva’s Shibui (2009) opens in mourning, paying respects to Deborah Clasquin, a mentor for both De Silva as composer and McCullough as performer. The piece’s title, lifted from the Japanese tongue, refers to the tartness the latter might taste, but also to a quiet sense of understatement or even a sullen look. As an invisible integration of Bartók’s Élegy op. 8b no. 1, it barely bends under the weight of its allusions. Gentle chords are hammocks for the heaviest emotions, all of which are given rest until they can stand on two feet.

Four Years of Fog (2016) for just-tuned piano follows with a gaze into early adulthood. The whimsical tuning, contrived yet unabashedly beautiful, illuminates as much as it obscures. Subtitles like “Blissfully Ignorant” and “Sickness and Exile” read familiarly to anyone who has lived (or is living) those inevitable stages. And yet, as the octave ails behind closed eyes, we open our ears to a healing sound, unbidden to dance because the notes dance for us. Thus, are we born again, slapped in the rear like the piano at the end into self-awareness.

“Only once did she feel loved by a man / on what we might call / the wash of the cellular level.” So begins Balch’s estrangement (2020), which sets the poetry of Katie Ford (b. 1975) in an astonishing song cycle. Intended as the dark side of Schumann’s Dichterliebe, it turns the paradigm of north-bearing love into a spinning compass. Fitz Gibbon renders a body through her voice and McCullough the molecules it inhales and exhales. As in the textual play of György Kurtág, though with more attention to punctuation, Balch holds every syllable accountable for its unfolding, allowing the mind to fantasize and count it for reality. Fitz Gibbon clothes the words mindfully, flipping the operatic switch on and off at will, morphing from lullaby to whisper to microtonal shiver to aphasic slur without hesitation. This lends the bearer of language power over the flesh being described or unwritten. The fifth movement is especially impactful in its restraint, as is its successor, “the film,” in which the mise-en-scène of a relationship is repeated to the point of fallacy. The tenth movement, “only the song,” is the most visceral for its stops and starts, as if challenging sustained beauty as an illusory complex.

The final movement concedes that sustain, darkening it with images of disunity: “Sometimes she thought of her love for him / like a donated heart / preserved in a jar.” Hearing De Silva’s Shibui (reprised in just intonation) in closing, we feel the caps spun onto the jars of our own hearts. Birds in the background remind us of where we are and, more importantly, where we were never meant to go. We are always alone in our hearts, thus sung until the lungs of our identities empty themselves and move on without us.

If any of this seems morbid and hopeless, it’s because the honeycombed hardships of its upbringing are proven for their sweetness. Fitz Gibbon and McCullough, like the artists animating their throat and fingers, understand that the upswing of retrospection is fruitless without falling into lessons of self-reckoning. And while we may tell ourselves the pandemic is behind us, any act of restoration in its rubble is a lie without the mortar of care. Let this album be one slather in the right direction.

the labor of forgetting is released to the wider world on November 4, 2022.

by Tyran Grillo
Contemporary Classical

Open Intervals: An Interview with Composer Matthew Bennett

(All photos by Brian Smale)

Composer and holistic sound artist Matthew Bennett has created some of the most intuitively experienced sonorities that you might never have thought to trace to their origins. As the former director of the Sound + Sensory Design Program at Microsoft, where he was still employed at the time of this interview, he endeavored to render the Microsoft soundscape as a community of audible signatures. His innovations transformed Windows into a tactile user experience in which vibration became substantive. Since then, he has established Acoustic Ecology to expand his aural vision to the tech industry at large. He and his music can be found at songofsilence.org, where he continues to document his transcendent path through the audible world.

As for said music, it not only leaves room for listeners to sit down, close their eyes, and feel; it also seems to take on new qualities as the circumstances of its engagement change over time. What might at first sound like a lullaby can just as easily slip into elegy without so much as a change of arpeggiation. If “songs without words” can be said to constitute a genre, then here we find “soundtracks without films,” each as vulnerable to the movements of our internal cameras as is technology is to our touch and regard. It’s only natural, then, that Bennett should shift his professional focus from user interface to interfacial use—in other words, giving voice to the internal relationships of physiological engagement with reality as we know it, while also taking care of health with products like delta 8 pen and more.

As Bennett elaborates below, mysticality is one facet of his polyhedron, as amorphous as it is precise. Thus, what might seem to be a dichotomy reveals its cohesion through geometry. In the same way that moods and even health are deeply affected by densities, volumes, and wavelengths of sound, so are his examinations designed with the intent to let intention go of its own volition.You can also try out delta-8 vape carts from OCN to get rid off stress and to maintain physical and mental well being. And so, let us orient ourselves in alignment with our inner voices and join the thought life of a composer who understands that silence, however illusory to grasp in human terms, is the Alpha and the Omega.

Tyran Grillo: What is your earliest sonic memory and how do you think it shaped (if at all) your approach to sound today?

Matthew Bennett: I have a very early memory of sitting in my family’s dining room, at an upright piano that my mother purchased before she married my father. I was three or four years old and was enjoying just pushing keys and making sounds, as children do. At some point, I was playing two white keys simultaneously, one with each hand, and discovered a sound that I loved more than anything in the world. A perfect fifth! I remember specifically that it was the notes E and B (above middle C).

Of course, I didn’t know anything about note and interval names then. I just knew that I loved that sound. I kept playing it over and over. I remember feeling that the sound was somehow green, which is an association I still have with those notes. That was the beginning of my personal relationship with that special interval.

A couple of years later, after we’d moved to a different house, I remember sitting at the same piano, playing parallel fourths and fifths. I was now big enough to operate the sustain pedal and I had fun holding it down, letting the strings vibrate and resonate across the soundboard to create a whole world of sound.

Looking back now, I can see that those perfect intervals have felt like important friends for my whole life. I still love to feel their sound and resonance, and I still love the idea of creating a whole world from them.

After my parents died about seven years ago, I realized I had lost touch with this beauty. I felt the strong need to refocus my musical work to be more consistent with those early experiences of joy and resonance, and the sheer love of sound and vibration that I had as a young child. This was a turning point for me. I had lost both of my parents within a year, and all music seemed utterly meaningless. Certainly, I felt the music I was making at that time had no reason to exist.

I had to go through a long personal process of clarifying what was meaningful and what kind of music (if any) I wanted to spend the rest of my life creating. I remembered my early experience and joy with the open intervals, and to some extent, they guided me back to Gregorian chant. I slowly began to build a language based on principles and music that did feel meaningful.

This also meant reconsidering my relationship to several non-Western classical music cultures I had studied in graduate school (as a student of ethnomusicology), especially Indian raga, Persian Radif, and Indonesian gamelan. More specifically, European chant led me to reexamine historical styles that I had studied years earlier, especially organum and early polyphony, which have become important to my ways of thinking and working.

I slowly began to build a new kind of personal musical language and practice, with an aesthetic system that has turned out to be very consistent with my earliest experiences of musical beauty. This is not a conscious process, and has taken years.

It was about six years before I even had something that I could share, and it is all still very much work in progress. During that time, I didn’t even know if I would ever have music to share again. But that didn’t matter to me. I needed to go through this process to save my own life and to understand my relationship with the world.

TG: In light of your “green” perfect fifth, I’m wondering if you have any synesthetic associations with sound in general, and whether those associations shape how you choose to create sonic environments for software applications that people will be using on a daily basis. Does this compel you to seek an “organic” sound? Is there a more accurate word for you to describe it?

MB: Since childhood, I’ve had consistent associations of color and texture (tactility) with specific musical intervals, especially my favorite ones. But I think everyone has a certain amount of synesthesia. Some people can become more consciously aware of it than others. There’s a common idea that our senses are separate, but it’s not so simple. They interact and overlap and affect each other. We actually experience our senses as an interrelated web of perception. The amazing thing about music is that it lets us tune in to the flow of these interior sensory perceptions while connecting that to the exterior world. No theory or special knowledge is required—this happens intuitively!

I understand sound as touch-from-a-distance, physical vibration that literally connects our interior experience to the outside world, and to other people and their interior experience. Sound permeates boundaries, which gives it a special immersive quality. This affects how I compose music, and also how I design sound for technology and digital experiences.

Sound helps connect the digital and physical worlds. And the soundscape created by the billions of devices around the world affects how people feel, how they interact, how they process information. I think of the global soundscape of technology as a system, an audio ecology. Because our sounds impact so many people, we have an ethical responsibility to make the system healthy and functional. You can click here to know more about it. But, this also means we need to get rid of annoying audio, sonic clutter, and noise pollution. It’s not just bad aesthetically; it’s bad for people’s mental and physical health (the World Health Organization has actually confirmed this). It’s one way that technology can be a source of cultural and sensory disruption; we feel it in our bodies. A more holistic approach to designing our audio ecology can help heal this rupture.

A healthy audio ecology needs a more dynamic range. We need quieter sounds, and more silence (e.g., time to reflect for a moment instead of being constantly rushed by the next alarm). Quiet sounds are often felt more than they are heard. They’re more effective in communicating information and essential for creating more beautiful and functional digital experiences.

In my music, and in my work with technology, I’m interested in the ways sound and silence shape time and structure feeling. In music, this happens through listening in a traditional linear way. But the soundscape of technology is a massive, fluid, interactive, non-linear composition distributed across billions of devices and people (our major technology platforms are also the biggest sound delivery platforms in history). I want to do what I can to make the global soundscape of technology more beautiful. From my perspective, this is all about small, quiet moments of sound.

TG: Can you tell me about both your earliest and most recent musical (or sonic) influences?

MB: My earliest specific musical influence was probably Warner Brothers cartoons. Not the main parts of those soundtracks composed by Carl Stalling, but specifically the short episodes where the musicians imitated music of other cultures—Chinese, Native

American, African, etc. Of course, these were horrible musical and racial stereotypes. But at the age of four or five, when I was just becoming aware of the musical cultures around me, these were my first exposure to worlds of sound that felt interesting and beautiful. I would go to the piano and try to imitate them. I eventually studied ethnomusicology.

Starting 20 years ago, but especially throughout the last decade, an important influence for me has been the musical language of Arvo Pärt, specifically the tintinnabuli system he created in the 1970s. I consider Pärt to be one of my most important teachers (through his music and ideas; unfortunately, I haven’t met him in person). His language builds on plainchant and organum, two bodies of music I consider part of my foundation. I’ve also been deeply influenced by Pärt’s concepts of musical and ritual time, which have their own important antecedents.

The main part of my practice has been to learn this musical language and to ground it in the body, to internalize it as a fluid framework for composition and improvisation. I hope that, eventually, I might be able to contribute to the tintinnabuli language in some small way. Arvo Pärt created tintinnabuli over 40 years ago, and he is still the only composer working with it. Film composers sometimes evoke his sound, but I’m surprised there aren’t more composers and improvisers who want to engage seriously with this musical system and its innovations. I am a musician who is working with the tintinnabuli language, but for me, it’s more like prayer. I don’t consider myself to be a very good composer, in the professional sense (it was liberating to realize this).

My goal is to create living form with sound, so patterns in the natural world are also an important inspiration. I am constantly amazed by organic form and by the way nature generates beautiful, rich (even complex) results from a few simple rules. I think what I’m always trying to get at is a generative grammar of natural form (to borrow a concept from linguistics and structural anthropology). For me, that means learning the grammar and deep structure of the tintinnabuli language to the point where I can compose and improvise fluently within it, similar to the way an Indian classical musician might approach a raga.

TG: Have you ever looked deeply at cymatics? Either way, does an awareness of vibration, frequency, etc. factor into your work?

MB: I haven’t looked deeply into cymatics, but I’m very interested in the sensory experiences of sound as vibration, resonance, and silence.

For me, the experience of sound is deeply connected to our sense of touch. We don’t just hear sound; we feel its vibrations through our whole body. Sound is resonating, haptic energy. In a real sense, music makes it possible for us to “feel” time. Music gives time tactility and texture. We are immersed in vibration, resonance, and the flow of time. Through the intensity of sound, we get to experience the joyful feeling of unfolding in time, and share it with others. Creating a shared, immersive, sensory time world is one of the things music is really good at.

Understanding sound as physical energy (and as psychological and emotional energy) has changed how I listen and how I make music. I approach composition more like sensory design, as a way to orchestrate the flow of sound, silence, time, touch, and gesture to create specific shapes of feeling that I want to live in and can be shared.

TG: How did you become involved with Microsoft and what has it meant for you to be part of such a ubiquitous platform?

MB: My first involvement with Microsoft was in 2008, creating sounds for Windows 7. After that, I returned to my regular music work. I didn’t give it more thought until they offered me a permanent position creating sounds for mobile devices. I almost said no, because the sound of most devices at the time was ugly, annoying, or both. But there were a few exceptions that made me realize it might be possible to create something more beautiful. Back then, this was just an intuition. But as the world of technology grew, I was fortunate to have the necessary support to develop new ways of thinking about sound design for digital experiences, and to create the Sound + Sensory Design Program at Microsoft.

The scale of Windows is both humbling and inspiring. With well over a billion devices (and counting), those sounds are heard hundreds of millions of times globally each day. Though each sound is very short (one or two seconds at most), they account for millions of hours of sound heard around the world daily. The Windows platform creates its own soundscape, which also integrates with many different cultural soundscapes around the world. Ultimately, those sounds become a part of people’s lives and their personal soundscape. (This is a big responsibility!) Because environmental sound impacts mental and physical wellbeing, there are actually public health aspects to designing sounds for Windows. Poorly designed sound creates anxiety. We have an ethical responsibility to minimize annoying audio and noise pollution.

I am trying to create a seamless and immersive acoustic ecology for technology. I want sounds that are felt more than they’re heard. I want sounds that ground us in the digital world and help heal the sensory disruptions of technology. And I want to design silence. Sometimes this means literal silence or removing sounds. But it also means creating a sonic language that contains silence and resonance within it. I imagine our environmental sounds as tiny pools of time that rise up to meet users (listeners) in the moment, supporting a rhythm of little moments of presence and reflection. In that way, our sounds are a bit like poetry. Of course, they also have to be functional! But the beauty here is no mere ornament, it’s part of the structure and function (and truth) of the sound.

TG: Do you feel that music has always been in some sense technological? Do you see the body as technological?

MB: I think one of the things that makes music so powerful is that it is a technology with a whole dimension of feeling attached.

At one level, a work song is a practical technology to organize collaborative labor. Choreographing the movement of agricultural work in time makes the work more efficient and productive. At the same time, there can be powerful social and emotional dimensions to singing together.

I think the “embodied” nature of music makes it a special kind of technology—one we can feel in our bodies (and hearts). Music can also be a spiritual technology. It’s often used as a way to encode, preserve, and transmit sacred information, but also as a framework or medium for religious and spiritual experience. Music is a powerful technology for shaping (and sharing) time and feeling. This means it’s connected to everything.

From a musical perspective, our bodies are important instruments. We are organic material that vibrates and resonates. Arvo Pärt says that the soul is the most important musical instrument. How do we tune our soul?

TG: How would you define your own spiritual connection to, and awareness of, music? Do you connect it to any particular tradition or faith or do you see it as a universal given of the human experience?

MB: I think music is an important way to tune our soul and to feel our connection to others, to history, and to elemental aspects of the universe. For me, the ideas of prayer and chant have been very important, especially the special worlds of music connected with psalms (tehillim) and the Jewish tradition of nusach chant, which is essentially a process of turning language and intention into music. The breath of this process is at the heart of my practice. I’m not necessarily talking about the literal words of the psalms, but the music of them—the ways of intoning, heightened speech that turns into song, the primal rhythms and contours of language—and especially the quality of intention (kavana), the ritual states of mind and heart.

TG: Are there any avenues of music, composition, and/or creative practice that you would like to explore more deeply and how do you hope they might enrich your life and the lives of others?

MB: I hope to continue becoming a better student of silence and to improve my ability to listen deeply. For me, that means continuing to work with the tintinnabuli language created by Arvo Pärt. I’ve spent years learning to improvise using that language. Moving forward, I hope to share more of that work and integrate it into my larger catalog.

I want to keep exploring ways that a musical language based on plainchant and early polyphony can be physical and kinetic (and contemporary). That’s one thing I’m trying to accomplish with my pulse-based pieces (the Gradual Music, and others). These extended pieces are teaching me about new ways of listening. The shape of time is different. Once I tune into these time worlds, I never want to leave!

I think we can always learn more about silence and listening. No matter how deeply we go, we always have to start from scratch in the next moment.

TG: Who did you used to listen to but don’t anymore? Who do you listen to now? Who have you never listened to but would like to?

MB: This is a surprisingly difficult question to answer. My listening has always been all over the place. Sometimes I listen to everything, other times I can’t stand to listen to anything. The amount of time I spend listening to something isn’t necessarily an indication of how important it is to me. Sometimes I’m not listening to something because I need to be thinking about it a lot. Listening to music, in the traditional sense, has been important to me, of course. It can also be distracting. I often find myself intentionally “not listening.” Sometimes, I need silence in order to really listen.

TG: Who have been some of your greatest teachers, whether those under whom you studied directly or those who have unwittingly taught you from afar just by virtue of you knowing their work, philosophy, or creations?

MB: I’ve learned from so many wonderful artists and teachers that I don’t know where to start. I’ve also been strongly influenced by several different music cultures. I see my work more as a dialogue with various traditions than as being influenced by specific people.

I think our earliest teachers are especially important, and I’m grateful that I was able to connect with good teachers when I was very young. My best teachers haven’t always been musicians or composers. Sometimes a poet or a producer has had more impact on my work. I don’t like to list specific names because that can become a deceptive shorthand or label for an artist’s work. For each person we can name, there are many we can’t who have influenced us as much or more. My most important teachers aren’t individuals but collective traditions.

TG: On that last note, do you see yourself creating or contributing to a certain tradition?

MB: I know that the answer is yes, but being at the center, I don’t have the proper perspective to say which one(s). That is not my job. While my work sits at the confluence of several streams, it’s always been my goal that whatever I create be not simply a superficial combination of “stuff I like.” There’s a lot of that in the music world now, and it can be delightful, but collections of multiple influences rarely coalesce into a truly organic language.

That has been my goal. How does plainchant relate to raga? How can improvisation integrate with composition and more specifically with tintinnabuli and various traditions of chant? How might the tintinnabuli process grow roots that connect with similar structures in gamelan music? These are the kinds of questions at the center of my practice.

The answers I had 15 years ago were very different than the answers I have now. To paraphrase Rilke, you have to hold the questions and live your way into the answers. That’s a slow process; it takes decades.

TG: Speaking of changing over time, if you could visit your younger self, what would you say to yourself?

MB: To my younger self: Focus on being immersed in all the musical and creative traditions you love. Go as deep as you can with each one. Don’t worry about how to actively combine them. Just listen and wait. I’d also let younger me know that this process is going to take a lot longer than you think but that it’s worth it. If you think about it as building the foundation for your life’s work, you’ll make different choices.

by Tyran Grillo
Classical Music, Recordings, Review

Beth Gibbons Astonishes in a New Górecki’s Third

After a decade-long studio hiatus, Beth Gibbons steps from behind the curtains with a project that feels as organic as it does surprising. Organic because its integration is undeniable, and surprising only to those unfamiliar with her trajectory. The Portishead frontwoman has always been known for her intensity as singer and songwriter, navigating a range uncommon both within and without the scene to which she has been aligned. The darkly inflected splash of Portishead’s 1994 debut, Dummy, threw her and bandmates Geoff Barrow and Adrian Utley into a drawer marked “Trip Hop,” a label that risked gessoing over the genre-defying shades of her vocal palette even as it gave listeners a viable canvas upon which to paint their appreciation. By 1997’s self-titled follow-up, strings had become a haunted theme of their sound, reaching ecstatic heights in such singles as “All Mine,” wherein Gibbons unleashed her soul through an emotional megaphone of fractured magnitude. All of this came to a head that same year when the band fronted a full orchestra at the Roseland Ballroom in New York City. The spirit of that concert seems to have planted a seed in the singer’s heart, easing her shift from a distance into the contemporary classical space of Henryk Górecki’s Symphony No. 3.

Those who grew up with the successful Nonesuch recording of this “Symphony of Sorrowful Songs,” featuring Dawn Upshaw and the London Sinfonietta under the baton of David Zinman, will have a thick cluster of brain cells to unravel in order to make room for yet another version, for since then a number of recordings, each with its merits, has appeared. Ewa Iżykowska’s on Dux (2017) arguably fills the finest diurnal cast, while Joanna Kozłowska’s on Decca (1995) is a close second for its cantata-leaning gradations. That said, and despite its muddy production, the Nonesuch blend of tempi and intimacy struck a profound chord with its 1992 release. For the present album we find ourselves in passionate redux. Given the current sociopolitical climate, when division has become the rule beyond exception, its immediacy is sure to ripple across the minds of new and familiar listeners alike. And if any conductor is worthy of ensuring that resonance, it’s Krzysztof Penderecki, here leading the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra in a live recording from 2014. Whether or not you agree with the concept (Górecki’s family reportedly wanted nothing to do with the project, and even Björk once turned down an offer to sing the Third), it’s difficult to push against the candor therein.

Long before Gibbons breaks the ice of our expectations, however, the violins in the first movement cry out with vocal integrity, enlivened by Penderecki’s own compositional reckonings with tragedy. The pacing is compelling yet offers enough breathing room for the piano’s restorative metronome. Gibbons makes an arresting entrance, noticeably different from predecessors not only in her ability to cut heart strings by force of a mere syllable but also for being fed through a microphone, thus lending an otherworldly appeal. Yet despite the technological intervention, if not also because of it, her honesty cultivates shared vulnerability. In that respect, it’s worth reminding ourselves of the words she’s singing—all too easy to forget when the meaning of this music has faded in favor of an effect cherished by popular imagination. Knowing that this centuries-old lamentation of a mother to her son occupies the center of an orchestral palindrome like a relic encased in glass provides insight into the worldview of a composer whose love for God embraced every note.

The second movement is built around an inscription by an 18-year-old girl to her mother found on a Gestapo prison wall. Unlike the desperate cries of innocence and revenge that surround it, Górecki was moved by its prayerful bid for forgiveness, unfettered by talons of war. Gibbons approaches this text with a remarkable combination of mature and childlike impulses, navigating both sides of life in poetic truth as Penderecki wraps her in a cloak of empathy. Her effort to understand the nuances of a language not natively her own, taking on the trauma of its becoming, is obvious and translates through her bravery.

The third and final movement centers around a folk song dating back to the 15th century, in which the Virgin Mary begs to share her Son’s wounds on the cross. The sheer humanity Gibbons draws from these verses shows in the urgency of her delivery as she follows the score with fluid precision, at once floating over and entrenching herself in the orchestra’s insistent pulse. In the process, she illuminates the fear churning at the bottom of all faith and the moral resignation required to turn it into knowledge.

Górecki once said in an interview: “I do not choose my listeners.” And yet, there’s a sense in which his music seeks out listeners more than ever, binding to flesh and spirit as if to make up for his death in 2010. All the more appropriate, then, that this piece should resurface in the present decade, when its connotations of genocide and sacrifice might ring truer even to those who once treated this symphony as a pretty backdrop. We live in harsh times when excuses for ignoring history are thinner than ever, and when a piece like this deserves a reboot to examine its inspirations more deeply. For while the Symphony No. 3 has been read above all as a critique of the Holocaust, Górecki clearly wanted to keep the font of his most personal work untainted by the fingertips of politics. If anything, an overwhelming maternity, compounded by the fact that the composer lost his own mother at the age of two, prevails, lighting a humble candle—not a universal torch—that continues to burn in his absence.

This album and its accompanying film are scheduled for a March 2019 release on Domino.

by Tyran Grillo