CD Review

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
CD Review, Contemporary Classical, File Under?

Ukho Ensemble Plays Grisey (LP Review)

 

Gérard Grisey – Vortex Temporum

Ukho Ensemble Kyiv, Luigi Gaggero, conductor

Self-released LP

 

Composer Gérard Grisey (1946-1998) employed methods that often involved magnifying seemingly small details into overarching concepts. This is particularly true of spectrographic measurements taken of single pitches, such as the low E on a trombone, which revealed a series of overtones that he would use to craft harmonic systems for a number of pieces. This spectral approach, also employed by Tristan Murail, Hugues Dufourt, James Tenney, and others, was an important feature of French music, and later that in other countries, from the 1970s onward. In the piece Vortex Temporum (1995), another element is put under the magnifying glass, a flute arpeggio taken from Daphnis et Chloé (1912) by Maurice Ravel (1875-1927). The result is a hyperintensive investigation of, as the title suggests, circular motion through time. Scored for a Pierrot ensemble – flute, clarinet, violin, viola, cello, and piano – the piece does not leave Grisey with as many of the nuances of color that a full orchestra would, but he nevertheless manages to explore myriad timbral deployments. 

 

A subtext that surely did not escape the notice of the piece’s intended audience is the fragmentation of the source material, in a sense the disassembling of a work firmly ensconced in the repertoire. Just as, in their day, the impressionists threw down a gauntlet and challenged the musical establishment, and Boulez and other members of the avant-garde did similarly with their elders, so Grisey and the other spectralists were interested in a radical reassessment of how music was to be ascertained. 

 

Ukho Ensemble Kyiv take a deconstructive approach of their own, providing a charged, intense, and incisive rendition of Vortex Temporum. Any reference to impressionism, besides the notes and gesture of the borrowed quote, is removed from consideration. This is faithful to the score and Grisey’s musical aesthetic. Interesting to note, too, that the Pierrot ensemble signifies a connection to modernism; from Schoenberg to the present day it has been a go-to scoring for countless post-tonal composers. 

 

While there are places in the outer movements that are quite forceful, there are also segments, such as the denouement of the first movement into the opening of the second, with a number of glissandos, where the music seems to liquefy. But a sense of conflict is never far away, as the muted clusters in the piano that support this passage suggest, and eventually the oasis of the middle movement is supplanted by intensity, led by nervous microtones and multiphonics and a crescendo of the piano’s dissonant verticals that is doubled by other members of the group. The strings also respond in kind to the clarinet’s effects, and the resultant music builds in amplitude to a hushed cadenza of descending slides, followed by a return to the first movement’s assertiveness in the final one. 

 

This third large section expands upon the way that the Ravel quote is addressed, via fragmentation, augmentation, and interpolations of the effects that sound in the second movement. The sense of reverberation is enlarged as well, and many phrases echo instead of having clean offsets. Then, a pizzicato strings passage moves to the fore. It could be seen as a bit of sly commentary on the second movement of Ravel’s string quartet, which contains a plethora of plucked notes. This is then juxtaposed with ever more frenetic arpeggiations and glissandos, overblown wind notes, and penetrating sustained pitches. All of this underscores temporal morphing, and it is made manifest that the title serves as both a reference point and a remit for the composition. Several sections of quietude are each in turn cast aside in favor of ever more intricate sonic whirlwinds. An eventual unwinding once again stretches out the material, with explosive interruptions keeping the intensity level at a peak. Hushed moments then crosscut with vicious attacks and fluctuating lines, and a long tremolando creates a dynamic hairpin. What ensues in its wake is reflective, with breathy woodwinds, sustained strings, and a tolling repeated note from inside the piano in a decrescendo to silence.

 

Vortex Temporum is a late piece in Grisey’s catalog. He died in 1998, at age 52, of a brain aneurysm. It fulfils a number of the objectives he set out to explore, both from technical and philosophical vantage points. Luigi Gaggero leads the Ukho Ensemble in a superb rendition of the piece. It is one of my favorite recordings of 2025.

 

  • Christian Carey 

 

by Christian Carey
CD Review, Composers, Contemporary Classical, File Under?, Piano, Twentieth Century Composer

Pierre Boulez Played by Ralph van Raat (CD Review)

Pierre Boulez Piano Works, Ralph van Raat (Naxos)

 

The Pierre Boulez centennial year has seen a number of important concerts, publications, and recordings devoted to his music. Boulez (1925-2016) wrote three piano sonatas, which are considered important both in his catalog and in the avant-garde repertory. Contemporary music specialists tend to gravitate towards these totemic compositions – Idil Biret has recorded them for Naxos – but there are several other works for piano by Boulez, and they too are worthy of attention. Ralph van Raat has previously recorded for Naxos two selections by him, the early pieces Prelude, Toccata, and Scherzo and Douze Notations (both composed in 1945), the latter of which underwent expansions of some of its movements into pieces for orchestra. 

 

Thème et variations pour la main gauche (“Theme and Variations for the Left Hand,” also from 1945) was written for Bernard Flavigny. Each of the variations is of a different character, and the virtuosity required to play them is substantial. Instead of the pointillism and counterpoint of Webern, who would soon become Boulez’s preferred composer among the early exponents of 12-tone music, the somewhat classicized deployment of the theme gives the piece a Schoenbergian cast. 3 Psalmodies, yet another piece from the watershed year 1945, owes a debt to Messiaen for its avian filigrees and additive rhythms. Compared to Boulez’s other early pieces, the psalmodies are expansive, adding up to nearly a half hour of music. 

 

There are also two pieces from later in Boulez’s career. Fragment d’ une ébauche (1987), lives up to its title, being an aphoristic yet dense occasional piece, written in honor of Jean-Marie Lehn’s winning of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Lehn was a colleague of Boulez at the Collége de France, where the composer gave a series of lectures from 1975-1995. 

 

The final piece on this CD, Incises (2001) is well-wrought  and substantial in its own right, but it was  taken as the starting point for a more elaborate ensemble composition, sur Incises. Indeed, the processes undertaken in the composition of Incises serve as a lynchpin for the materials deployed throughout many of Boulez’s later pieces. Rather than tone rows, intricate manipulation of pitch material based on hexachords (six-note collections) yields a variety of colorful gestures, many based on sonorous verticals, elaborate runs, and trills. 

 

This is a particularly revealing recording that has been prepared with consummate care. Biret’s renditions of Boulez’s piano sonatas do Naxos proud, but a second installment of the pieces by van Raat would be a welcome addition to their catalog.

 

  • Christian Carey 

 

by Christian Carey
CD Review, Contemporary Classical, Experimental Music

Reinier van Houdt & Andrew Liles – AMBIDEXTROUS CONSTELLATION


On August 15 of this year, Reinier van Houdt and Andrew Liles released a new album titled Ambidextrous Constellation. With narration by Ash Kilmartin, Ambidextrous Constellation is a radio play that chillingly incorporates “…lists of gun specifications and transcripts of experiences of gunshot victims.” Although this album is entirely the work of European artists working in Rotterdam, it is sure to have an immediate emotional impact on those hearing it in America.

Reinier van Houdt studied piano at the Liszt-Akademie in Budapest and the Royal Conservatory in The Hague and is a well-known presence in the contemporary music scene. He has performed premiers by Robert Ashley, Alvin Curran, Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji, and Charlemagne Palestine, among others, and has collaborated with luminaries such as John Cage, Alvin Lucier and Olivier Messiaen. Andrew Liles is a prolific solo artist, producer, re-mixer and studio engineer, who has been active in recording experimental music since the 1980s.

Ambidextrous Constellation consists of eight short pieces that run between four and seven minutes each. Each track is a mixture of electronic sounds with an overlying narration. The liner notes state that a gun is “A machine without morality or judgment.” and the electronic tones consistently support this. The overall feeling is devoid of any sense of humanity, excepting only the warm voice of narrator Ash Kilmartin.

My World opens the album with a series of electronic whooshes that could be abstract gunshots, followed by series of sinister bass chords. A menacing, matter-of-fact narration follows with no musical tones or singing: “In my world, everything is flat. Nothing moves.” The background sounds are sterile and mechanical with the only human presence being the spoken word. There is the description of a bullet flying towards a head. The electronic sounds now become a series of pulses, siren-like, mysterious and uncertain. We have entered a static world where: “nothing moves, nothing propagates.” My World ends quickly, without any resolution.

Iron Sights follows, and this second track is perhaps the most unsettling piece in the album. It begins with a strong percussive beat and electronic sounds that suggest the rapid firing of a weapon. The narrative description of an automatic rifle follows, deadpan and matter of fact: “L1A1, self-loading. barrel length, 20.4 inches. Rate of fire: 610 up to 775 rounds per minute.” Chilling in its dry, clinical description, the focus of the piece now shifts to the point of view of an automatic assault rifle. “Range 400 Meters. Muzzle velocity 940 Meters per second. Unit cost, 1,300 pounds. Aperture, Iron Sights.” Sustained electronic sounds fill the space between the words, adding to the alien and disconnected feeling.

Finally, a single tone is heard with fragments of unintelligible words that slowly fade into silence. The juxtaposition of cold, alien electronic background tones with the straightforward recitation of the assault rifle specifications make Iron Sights a powerful commentary on our fascination with such deadly weaponry.

Other tracks follow with a similar structure and pattern. The descriptions of the weapons get ever more intimidating. Body, Gas Operated, track 3, opens with mysterious bell tones and low rumbling sounds followed by faint, rapid gunfire in the distance accompanied by a rapid snare drumming. The narration begins “… 45 mm NATO cartridge. Barrel length 11 to 20 inches. Gas operated, short stroke piston, rotating bolt. 850 rounds per minute. Effective firing range: 300 meters.” 1984 To Present, track 5, begins with the sharp noise of static below a strong and rapid tom-tom beat. “Barrel length, 20 inches. Rate of fire: 700 to 950 rounds per minute. Muzzle velocity 945 Meters per second. Effective firing range 550 Meters…” Blackout Detachable, track 6, features the sound of a distant siren as the narration states: “AAC Blackout 300. Barrel length 35.7 inches. Unit cost $2233. Muzzle velocity 940 Meters per second. Rate of fire 800 to 900 rounds per minute. Effective firing range 503 Meters.” The listener feels as if buried under these vast and deadly descriptions of firepower.

Two of the pieces do, however, contain a human perspective. Trapped In A Constellation, the title track, starts with loud and harsh scratchy sounds, followed by lovely bell tones and electronic harmonies. The narration switches to a human point of view: “The habit that binds me to my limbs is suddenly gone – space extends.“ A background of beeps and bloops is heard, combined with ‘spacey’ electronic sounds. “I’ve become infinitely small and fall in all directions… Impossible to escape… I’m trapped in a constellation.” The listener is left with the distinct impression that this is a portrayal of instant death by gunshot.

Someone Else, the final track, is even more graphic. Electronic, alien sounds open this track, providing a remote and distant feel. The narration begins: “Silence. I don’t hear anything… [the bullet] entered my body almost quietly… Must have been very sharp and smooth. After an initial sting, I could feel my muscles contracting. I feel I should not move and stay very still. How do you breathe? I thought the bullet would quietly exit my body… “ Now the solemn electronic tones of a pipe organ are heard – distinctly spiritual. More narration: “Of course I moved eventually and then the real pain started. A dazzling pain that strikes your depths, my cells spitting out its electric suffering.” The music turns darker, with cold, spacey beeps creeping into the warmer pipe organ texture. The organ tones gradually diminish, replaced by distant electronic sounds at the quiet finish. A very moving final track to this very powerful album.

Ambidextrous Constellation is a compelling portrait of the unforgiving existence of the modern assault rifle. The emotional power of this album is all the greater because of the straightforward simplicity of its musical materials and a direct narrative approach. Ambidextrous Constellation is precisely the sort of artistry we need in a society besotted by a fascination with violence, guns and death.

Ambidextrous Constellation is available for digital download at Bandcamp.

by Paul Muller
CD Review, Contemporary Classical, Experimental Music, Microtonalism, Orchestral

Peter Thoegersen – Symphony IV: melodiae perpetuae



Peter Thoegersen has posted a digital realization of his Symphony IV: melodiae perpetuae on Bandcamp. This is an ambitious piece for full orchestra with a running time of just over 52 minutes. Symphony IV is a work in progress; it is intended to be poly microtonal and poly tempic in its ultimate form. The recording posted at this writing is realized in 12TET tuning with various sections of the orchestra heard in different tempi simultaneously. Thoegersen writes: “Each choir of the orchestra is moving separately in Fuxian contrapuntal motions, such as contrary, parallel, similar, and oblique, with respect to tempi changes in the choirs.” Fragments of Gregorian chant from the Liber Usualis form the foundation for the various sections as they ebb and flow throughout this single movement piece. Updates to Symphony IV will be posted on Bandcamp as software improvements and other refinements are implemented.

Peter Thoegersen has devoted much of his career to the exploration of multiple simultaneous tempi that intersect with scales and harmony constructed from micro tonal pitches. He has produced a number of works realized digitally as well as several performed pieces. These have been mostly for smaller and mid-sized ensembles, so the application of Thoegersen’s methodology to full symphonic forces represents a significant escalation of his artistic intentions. Symphony IV, even in its present unfinished form, gives an insight into this process.

In a conventional 19th century symphony, there is typically a sonata structure so that the various sections of the orchestra pass around a common theme and introduce variations. Symphony IV is nothing like this. From the very beginning we are immersed in a great wash of sounds and all the parts of the orchestra seem to be playing at once. This might seem to be a recipe for sonic chaos, but it proves to be more engaging than distracting. Different sections of the orchestra are often heard crossing through each other, and this creates an intriguing kaleidoscope of textures that are continuously unfolding as the piece progresses. At times the great wash of sound might remind of a piece like Becoming Ocean, by John Luther Adams. As the sections intersect and collide, snatches of what could be passages from David Diamond’s Symphony I or Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra might be heard.

The overall feeling in this music changes quickly and can vary from mysterious, to ominous, haunting, grand or tense. The Gregorian chant fragments embedded in this piece provide a solid foundational gravitas throughout. Often a single section, usually the brass or percussion, will rise to the top of the texture and dominate briefly. The strings provide a restrained background against which the other sections can emerge and contrast. A piano line of single notes will occasionally rise up over the woodwinds to trigger the memory of a piano concerto. The dynamics rise and fall, often depending on which section is dominating. The timpani often heralds a tutti crescendo that ends with a bold trumpet call. It is perhaps the employment of full orchestral forces that allow the listener to pick out favorite or familiar-sounding phrases. But these come in the absence of a conventional structure and so are enjoyed without any framing context. This uncertainty increases the engagement of the listener.

How far into the unorthodox will Symphony IV ultimately travel? Only time will tell, but the journey will doubtless be full of surprises and worth following.

by Paul Muller
CD Review, Contemporary Classical, Experimental Music, Microtonalism

Dave Seidel – Intercosmic

Dave Seidel has released Intercosmic, a new album of electronic music featuring tracks recorded in studio and in a live performance at The Wire Factory in Lowell, MA on June 7 of this year. Over the years, Seidel’s works have exhibited a long evolution from classical drones to the present mix of industrial and synthesized electroacoustic music. Seidel has an extensive background in experimental music, beginning as a guitarist in the 1980s downtown New York minimalist scene and later performing in various festivals throughout the US.. Since 1984 he has concentrated on the composition of drone and microtonal electronic music. Seidel is based in Peterborough, New Hampshire and Intercosmic is his latest offering.

Sundering Void is the first track on the album and this begins with a deep buzzing A/C hum, as might be expected from La Monte Young. Other harmonics enter, both lower and higher with the lowest being almost a rattle. These sounds build in volume and as the piece proceeds, new sounds enter and exit, gradually changing the texture. Most of the sounds are in the lower registers and the overall effect is like that of intimidating industrial machinery. When this piece was performed live at The Wire Factory, it must have been quite a visceral experience.

Sundering Void, as part of an album with the title Intercosmic, it would seem to imply a great empty place, filled with a few spacey beeps and boops, Almost the exact opposite is true. This piece does evoke a vast cosmos, with sounds that are commensurately impressive, but their character is drawn from familiar 20th century mechanical processes. About 4 minutes in, for example, some continuous high pitches enter, like the sound of a failing wheel bearing. By 6 minutes, there is a sound like the shrieking wind. Everything sounds vaguely out of control and about to self-destruct. These are all powerful elements, but are part of a familiar sonic vocabulary that make for a more intense depiction.

Halfway through the piece, a low rumble dominates the texture and faint sounds of sirens are heard, wailing in the distance. The middle registers become great swooshes of sound and the overall feeling is unsettling. There is a sense of movement in all this, as if a great energy is being expended to travel through the inter-cosmos. This is enhanced at about 12:30 when a few spacey sounds are heard above the roar, providing a glimmer of cosmic feeling. There is little sense of direction or purpose at this point – all is consumed by a loud thunder of sounds in acknowledgment of the dynamic power needed to reach interstellar space.

By 19:00, higher pitched sounds now dominate as if we are in free fall. Perhaps the end of the journey is at hand. There is only a rough rumbling in the lowest registers. The deep sounds continue to fade away leaving just a few descending notes at the finish. Sundering Void is great ride, the more so because it speaks to us in familiar sonic language.

A Furious Calm is the second track on this album and is more harmonically centered. Seidel writes in the liner notes that this piece is: “ My version of a chaconne, an application of a bit of Henry Cowell’s ideas for rhythm… Written using a seven-note subset of a microtonal Meta-Slendro scale. Some effects are digital, but all sound sources are analog, as are some of the effects.” A Furious Calm is organized in four layers, each with its own combination of synthesizers, drones, modulators and synthetic percussion. The piece opens with a lovely drone in the middle registers as additional sustained tones enter in harmony. The overall result is warmly atmospheric and surreal. Deeper bass notes are soon heard, providing a solid lower foundation. Some percussion enters, sputtering against the main harmonic texture and adding a sense of randomness to the mix. As the piece proceeds, the sounds become fully organized, expressing a sense of purpose that borders on menace. As the dynamics build, there is a feeling of grandeur as might be experienced in the presence of a large pipe organ.

By 9:00 the texture starts to thin a bit, with higher, swirling tones heard above. The dynamics slowly decrease, implying distance. At the finish, the swirling tones dominate and then fade away. A Furious Calm is an impressive combination of raw power and delicate microtonal harmonies that combine into a wide variety of textures, organized into a series of effectively layered sounds.

Intercosmic continues to confirms Dave Seidel’s mastery of alternate tuning and electronic synthesis.

Intercosmic is available for digital download from Bandcamp.

by Paul Muller
CD Review, Chamber Music, Contemporary Classical, File Under?, Recording review, Recordings, Twentieth Century Composer

Tobias Picker, NOVA (Recording review)

Tobias Picker

NOVA

Various Artists

Bright Shiny Things

 

Composer Tobias Picker won a Grammy for his 2020 operatic version of The Fantastic Mister Fox, and many pianists have first encountered him through the diatonic piece The Old and Lost Rivers. Picker has another side to his musical persona that is in no small measure reflective of his time as a student of Milton Babbitt, Elliott Carter, and Charles Wuorinen. The Bright Shiny Things recording NOVA includes chamber music that celebrates these high modernist roots, as well as forays into postmodernism. 

 

The title work is the latter, a riff on both the appropriate accompaniment, at least in Manhattan, for a bagel and cream cheese, as well as a send-up of one of Franz Schubert’s most enduring chamber pieces, the Trout Quintet. The result is lively, with tongue in cheek humor giving way to expert writing for the instruments, the composer distinguishing himself as a performer, undertaking the piano part. 

 

The recording sessions for NOVA were completed at various times, and some of the performers are no longer living. The late Lynne Harrell’s performance in Suite for Cello and Piano is memorable. He plays with yearning legato in“Serenade,” its first movement, and puckish pizzicato in “Daylight,” its second. Ann-Marie McDermott, who is still with us, also distinguishes herself, with expressive and assured playing throughout. The third movement, “Lament,” is more dramatic than doleful, and Harrell performs with incendiary phrasing. The suite’s final movement, titled “Alone,” is still a duo, but it is lonesome and solitary in its demeanor. Another departed musician, Peter Serkin, plays Three Pieces for Piano with sensitivity and virtuosity in equal measure, elucidating the complex phrasing of “Svelto,” its first movement, emphasising the dynamic and rhythmic nuances in the second, “Liberamente,” and, performing the assertive gestures of the “Feroce” third movement con brio. 

 

Happily most of the performers are still around to enjoy the fruits of their labors. Pianist Ursula Oppens makes multiple appearances, with Charles Neidich in “Nocturne,” a brief, gentle duet, and solo in the more extensive “Pianorama.” Violinist Young Uck Kim and Emmanuel Ax collaborate well on Invisible Lilacs, a three movement piece with an opener marked “Fast,” which it certainly is here, a pensive “Elegy,”, and a concluding “Moto Perpetuo” movement that is impressively played. 

 

The disc’s final piece, Blue Hula. features Speculum Musicae, a chamber ensemble that boasted some of the best performers of modern classical music. It is a formidable piece that suits them well, with a finely etched gestural profile of corruscating lines. As the piece progresses, its rhythmic drive increases, culminating in the breakneck pace of the third movement, marked “very fast.” 

 

NOVA presents another side of Picker’s music, one that embraces complexity but sacrifices none of the directness of expression that characterizes his more recent music. 

 

-Christian Carey

 

by Christian Carey
CD Review, Contemporary Classical, Just Intonation, Los Angeles

Brightwork Ensemble – My Dancing Sweetheart

Microfest Records has released My Dancing Sweetheart, a new album that features music by composers Ben Johnston, Bill Alves and Helmut Oehring. The performers are all first-rate Los Angeles musicians and include Stacey Fraser, vocals, Aron Kallay, keyboards, Shalini Vijavan, violin and Nick Terry, percussion. Subtitled “Just Songs”, My Dancing Sweetheart is an accessible and engaging introduction to the world of Just Intonation and contemporary tonal palettes.

Just Intonation is a tuning system that is based on optimizing the frequency ratios between the notes in the scale. Our conventional 12 Tone Equal Temperament tuning, by contrast, assigns specific frequencies to each note, allowing fixed pitch instruments to play in any key and transpose music easily. This simplifies harmony and chord progressions and has been the standard tuning system for western music since the mid-19th century. By fixing the frequency of notes, however, the Equal Temperament system compromises somewhat the intervals between the notes in the scale. Just Intonation tuning addresses this but requires the re-tuning of the instruments to a specific fundamental frequency. The advantage lies in that the resulting scale tones are more closely related harmonically and bring out the purity and consonance of the intervals.

American composer Harry Partch (1901-1974) was an early champion of Just Intonation and he built a number of experimental instruments to perform his works. Other composers followed during the 20th century, including Lou Harrison, Ben Johnston, Pauline Oliveros and James Tenney. Experimentation has been a consistent feature of the Los Angeles new music scene in our 21st Century, and the performers on this album have many years of concert experience playing in alternate tuning systems.

My Dancing Sweetheart is subtitled “Just Songs” and so it is appropriate that the first two works on the album, Calamity Jane and Ma Mie Qui Danse were composed by tuning pioneer Ben Johnston. Kyle Gann, composer and student of Johnston, has stated that: “Not all musicians realize it, but Ben Johnston, was a major figure in the Midwestern new music world in the 1970s and ‘80s, comparable to John Cage on the East Coast or Lou Harrison on the West. He looms even larger in the world of microtonal music, for his string quartets, sonatas for retuned keyboard, and other works are among the most compelling works ever written in alternate tunings.”

Composed in 1989, Calamity Jane is based on a series of fictional letters by the notorious wild west character to her daughter. These are a series of short pieces – all less than three minutes – sung by soprano Stacey Fraser, accompanied by Aron Kallay, Shalini Vijavan and Nick Terry. What does alternate tuning bring to Johnston’s music? As John Schneider explains in his eloquent liner notes: “The addition of these new notes provides the composers with an extraordinary new palette of melody and harmony, supported by a retuned piano, and in Calamity Jane, an equally facile violin.”


Johnston, however, does not overwhelm the listener with the unorthodox. Like Harry Partch before him, whose music was inspired by a lighthearted look at depression-era life on the road, Johnston begins Calamity Jane with something familiar: a 39 second soprano solo in a quiet, confessional style. “No. 1 Freely, Like Speech” is a short letter to Janey, Calamity Jane’s young daughter, that lovingly describes her family resemblance: “I like this picture of you: your eyes and forehead are like your father, lower jaw, mouth and hair like me.”. Ms. Fraser’s poignantly expressive vocals here are approachable and compelling, establishing an intimate human connection that carries through the entire work.

More letters follow describing various episodes, and these can be energetic, playful or solemn. “No.2 In Motion with a beat”, is an action filled letter to Janey explaining how Calamity met her father, Wild Bill Hickok, during a shootout near Abilene, Kansas. The stirring vocals are augmented by piano, percussion and violin, establishing an undercurrent of tension and movement. The dynamic balance of the ensemble is ideal; the sound engineering by Scott Fraser is up to his usual high standards. The vocals throughout are critical and are allowed to dominate.

“No. 4 Rather Slowly, but moving forward”, is just that, with the accompaniment in alternate tuning, There is a lovely violin line along with a programmable keyboard that nicely matches the mood for this piece. Ms. Fraser’s vocals have strength in every register and make for a solid exposition of the complicated narrative. “No. 5 Lively but not too fast” has a country music flavor, and describes a dust up in the Deadwood saloon between Calamity Jane and some judgmental local women. A nice beat and a wandering violin line by Ms. Vijavan frame the exuberant vocals.

“No. 6 Waltz-like” is a bit more matter-of-fact and describes the tricks and stunts Calamity performs as part of Bill Cody’s Wild West Show. This piece features a solid beat in the accompaniment in a lively tempo along with agile singing by Fraser.

“No. 7 Slowly” is Calamity Jane slowly singing her recipe for a cake, with most of the lyrics consisting of a simple list of ingredients. The vocal pitch rises with each item listed until Ms. Fraser is singing in a very high register, but she never loses power or control on the ascent. The movement concludes with “This cake is unexcelled and will keep good to the last crumb 20 years.” The final movement is “No. 8 Freely, like Speech” and closes out the diary of letters by Calamity Jane to her daughter. This bookends the first movement with a vocal solo lamenting Calamity’s coming blindness in old age. Sweetly and expressively sung, this is introspective and especially poignant.

Calamity Jane has all the elements of an appealing story: drama, excitement and intrigue populated by likable and colorful characters. The use of alternate tuning never seems to intrude on the narrative, and compliments what is a fine ensemble piece, artfully performed. The dominance of the vocals forge a special human connection with the listener, masterfully sung by Stacey Fraser. Calamity Jane nicely threads the needle between what a listening audience will enjoy and what they might learn about contemporary alternate tuning.

The second Ben Johnston work on the album is Ma Mie Qui Danse, written in 1991. For inspiration, Johnston travels to the opposite end of the personality spectrum, away from the irrepressible Calamity Jane, reaching out instead to adorable innocence. The text of Ma Mie Qui Danse is taken from audio recordings of Johnston’s three year-old granddaughter who, as children often do, sang her own improvised poetry. Building on this, Johnston also included some appropriate selections from the works of Emily Dickenson. This piece is performed as a duo with soprano Stacey Fraser and Aron Kallay on the keyboard.

“No 1. Sprightly” is the first movement, and introduces the granddaughter. A bouncy piano accompaniment provides the launching pad for a number of short, jumpy phrases in the vocals. The singing is agile and angular, full of the starts and stops of toddler enthusiasm, as can be seen from this fragment of the text:

“cause we go a seek and we go very boy
oh, did you remember him’
he was tamer me
and he had and he greet me
for six hundred money
and dream
Mister dream
how he gave me Santa”

Other movements based on the Emily Dickenson texts are more reserved, as with movement “IV. Slow and Tranquil”, The singing here is both forthright and mature, and in a more conventional style.

“A bird is of all beings
The likes to the dawn.
An easy breeze does put afloat
The general heavens upon.”

As the movements proceed, the contrast between the broadly expressive Dickenson and the enthusiastic outbursts of youth constantly refresh the ear, enhancing the feelings expressed by each. The accompaniment and the alternate tuning compliment the emotional force of the singing. The last movement, powerfully sung with a spare accompaniment, sums up the perspective of Ma Mie Qui Danse:

“The child’s faith is new
Whole – like his principle
Wide
Like the sunrise
On fresh eyes
Never had a doubt
Laughs at scruple,
Believes all sham but Paradise!”

Ma Mie Qui Danse is a delightful musical pairing of youthful exuberance and mature reflection.

Bill Alves has contributed two works to the album, Time Resonances (2012) and A Sonatina (2016). These are both single-movement pieces of about 7 minutes each. Alves is a composer and educator, as well as the co-author of a scholarly biography of Lou Harrison. He is co-director of Microfest, the annual festival in Los Angeles dedicated to microtonal music.

As Alves explains in the liner notes, Time Resonances is “…a technological elaboration of a medieval musical genre known as a ‘mensuration canon,’ a piece in which the melody is combined with itself but at a different speed.” Stacey Fraser performs all the parts separately, and these are then combined electronically at different lengths but with no change in pitch. Time Resonances opens with gentle bell tones in various registers. Sustained vocals enter, creating lovely chords that mix well with the bell tones. There are no lyrics in this, just abstract ahhhs and ohhhs. The tempo is moderate with independent vocal lines soaring and gliding in and around each other. The feeling is gently mystical with a sense of standing outside of time. The dynamics rise and fall but only moderately, producing graceful tides of sound. Interesting harmonies develop and subside, slightly dissonant at times. The singing is disciplined and the electronic processing precise. Time Resonances masterfully combines the abstract with the human voice to evoke in the listener a glimpse of the infinite.

The second Alves piece, A Sonatina, draws its inspiration from the poetry of Gertrude Stein. Alves writes in the liner notes about Ms. Stein: “At times, she went even further, making language into a fascinating abstraction, which has long appealed to me as a composer, as has her musical perspective of language, her use of repetition, and the seeming simplicity of her supposed ‘difficult’ works.” All these elements can be found in A Sonatina, performed by Stacey Fraser, Aron Kallay and vocalist Donna Walker.

The piece begins with a string of high piano notes in a fast repeating phrase, simple at first but slowly gaining more structure and complexity. The vocals enter, first spoken by Donna Walker and then sung by Fraser as a sustained melody. The active piano accompaniment by Aron Kallay is controlled and decisive, contrasting nicely with the expressive singing. About midway through the piece, solitary deep notes from the piano add a welcome foundational counterpoint to the continuing melody. A Sonatina is beautifully reflective, and artfully marries the text of Getrude Stein to some really lovely music.

The final work of the album is Die Stille Stürtzt (2015) by German composer Helumt Oehring. This work is sung solo by Ms. Fraser. Die Stille Stürtzt translates in English as The Silence Falls, and is inspired by the poetry of Hungarian exile writer Ágota Kristof. The liner notes explain that the text is “…the search for identity in an unfeeling world.”

The singing is slow and expressive, residing mostly in the lower soprano registers. The sound is lush and lovely, with the soloist easily carrying the entire piece. Sung in German, the language perfectly compliments the sensitivity of the text. The feeling is intimate and slightly wistful:

“The silence tumbles down in the trees, the pale forest
Crooked to the earth and your white face
tired, somewhere you are thinking of me, the one,
who loved your eyes closing from the inside.”

Die Stille Stürtzt manages to bond German and Hungarian sensibilities into a solemn musical formulation that is immediately understood in any language.

The ‘Just Songs’ of My Dancing Sweetheart offer an accessible connection to the experimental past, and brings a new appreciation for Just Intonation and other alternate tuning systems that stand at the cutting edge of contemporary music.

My Dancing Sweetheart is available on Spotify. The album was produced by Aron Kallay and includes a 55 page file that includes the track listing of the album, liner notes, the complete texts for all the pieces and a wealth of background information on the composers and the performers.

by Paul Muller
CD Review, Contemporary Classical, Los Angeles, Organ

Peter Garland – Plain Songs

Cold Blue Music has announced the release of Plain Songs: “Love Comes Quietly”:(after Robert Creeley), a new CD album by composer Peter Garland. As the title explains, Plain Songs consists of seven movements of pipe organ music inspired by the poetry of Robert Creeley. The album artfully blends the simple plainsong traditions of the early church with the later development of the pipe organ. Peter Garland is quoted in the liner notes: “I wanted to write an organ piece that would be intimate and mostly quiet, emphasizing the nature of the organ as a wind instrument capable of long, sustaining tones. I wanted the musical textures to be open and transparent.” Organist Carson Cooman commissioned this work and here performs Plain Songs, including the selection of stops that create the textural and timbral context for each movement.

The historical form of plainsong is the chanted liturgy of the early Western Church and by the ninth century was the prevailing form of music sung in the Latin Mass. It is monophonic, unmetered and typically unaccompanied, yet the emotional force of plainsong chant remains undiminished over the centuries. The later development of the pipe organ adds the possibilities of harmony, color and nuance to church music. From venerable musical materials, Garland has brilliantly created a powerful work that quiets the restless soul.

“Movement 1”, the first track of the album, immediately demonstrates how Garland has artfully mixed the historical traditions of plainsong and pipe organ. The piece opens with a range of soft, flute tones, starting deep in the bass register and rising upwards into the treble. The tempo is deliberate and the notes are generally sustained, creating an engaging series of slowly changing harmonies. The feeling is introspective and reserved; there is none of the fancy keyboard technique from, say, the Baroque. “Movement 1” could be a comforting prelude to a memorial service. In much of Plain Songs the pipe organ is acting as a synthesizer with the graceful unfolding of beautiful chords that vary in timbre and color.

“Movement 2” has a sunny feel with the notes heard primarily in the higher registers. The chords are thinner and the sounds are sharper, suggesting a sense of purpose. There is more boldness in the stop selection. Again, there are no fast tempos or complex technique; this music moves within a more restrained perspective. “Movement 3 – Variations on ‘Lament on the Death of Charlemagne” has an early medieval feeling. There is more movement in the notes and the suggestion of a warm melody in the middle registers. A soaring, repeating phrase breaks out above – like an arcing ray of light blazing across the moving melody below. A suitable tribute to the first Holy Roman Emperor.

The other tracks follow a similar pattern – moderate tempo, solid chords and engaging timbral variations. “Movement 4” brings a light, refreshing feel with sharp, bright chords in the middle registers. Darker notes below make for a good contrast but overall there is a sense of confidence and hope. Towards the middle of this movement the entry of flute stop tones thins the texture while adding new forward energy. A return to the opening timbral mix completes the piece with a satisfying structural closure. “Movement 5 – The Maze of Longing” features a procession of high, bell-like tones with an independent string of lower notes in gentle counterpoint below. The result is both comforting and hopeful. “Movement 6” begins with a series of broadly rising arpeggios that evoke the image of summer flowers reaching to the sun. The arpeggios then reverse direction, falling in pitch to create a more reserved and introspective feeling. The moderate tempo and rhythms propel the piece resolutely forward, but without haste or stridency.

“Movement 7 “Stone./ like stillness” completes the album with solid chords forming a declarative melody. There is a noble feeling to this and a sense of royal presence. At times the sounds even suggest a bright fanfare. Strong notes in the lower registers add a foundation of gravitas while flute tones in the upper registers add to the regal feeling. The last half of this movement has a very big sound, filling the ear with powerful, full chords. There is a palpable sense of the majestic, even as the piece winds down to softer sustained tones at the finish.

In Plain Songs, Peter Garland has brilliantly combined the simplicity of plainsong with the harmonic and timbral possibilities inherent in the pipe organ. Often the most compelling music is the result of simple musical materials carefully crafted to evoke deep emotion. The works of Pauline Oliveros come to mind, as do many others. We tend to think of plainsong as being limited by the early medieval imagination and that subsequent historical developments have ‘improved’ the art. Plain Songs offers a compelling counter to this view. Too often the clutter created by the ever increasing complexity of performance obscures the profound message in the underlying music. In Plain Songs, Peter Garland has given us a more direct musical connection to the emotional support we are longing for in this uncertain age.

Plain Songs: “Love Comes Quietly”:(after Robert Creeley), is available directly from Cold Blue Music and Bandcamp, as well as numerous CD retailers.



by Paul Muller