On Tuesday, January 28, 2020 Tuesdays@Monk Space presented a concert titled 20/20 Visions which consisted of several new pieces for microtonal keyboards. Presented by Brightwork New Music, the concert featured five contemporary works – including three world premieres – all performed by the Ray-Kallay Duo. Four of the composers were in attendance to offer comments on their music to the knowledgeable audience that filled the intimate Monk Space venue.
The first piece in the program was Atlantys (1984) for two DX7 keyboards, by Tristan Murail. The Yamaha DX7, manufactured from 1983 to 1989, was the first successful digital synthesizer offered to the mass market. Two vintage DX7s were on hand, giving this performance the sound of period authenticity. A soft rush of surf along with some low ambient sounds opened the piece, immediately delivering a restful and calming feeling. A deep rumble soon emerged from the lower registers that added a contrasting sense of the slightly ominous. Ringing sounds soon dominated the performance space, but never overpowered the interplay between Ray and Kallay that remained well-balanced, even as the variety of electronic sounds rapidly multiplied. One distinctive element was the sound of large iron bars being struck, ringing out with strong percussive tones. Towards the finish, a loud explosive sound filled the room and reverberated throughout the venue. More electronic sounds entered, alien and eclectic, reminding everyone of the great versatility of the DX7. Atlantys artfully exploits the capabilities of the venerable DX7 synthesizer, and was admirably complimented by the performance of the Ray-Kallay Duo.
The world premiere of “Really, I’m fine” (2019) by Jason Barabba followed. This was a microtonal composition for the four-handed keyboard of the Ray-Kallay Duo. This opened with a series of intricate, interleaving passages that managed to avoid needless complexity, even with twenty fingers on the keys. The strong sense of motion was pleasant and continuous. The active sections were, by turns, intimate, mischievous, playful and sweet. Engaging rhythms and an agreeable mix of exotic chords intrigued the audience throughout. The often-elaborate counterpoint was precisely played by Ray and Kallay, who navigated each passage with clarity and style. “Really, I’m fine” is an appealing combination of inviting rhythms and complimentary microtonal harmonies in a well-crafted balance.
Hush (2019) by Nina Shekhar was next, another world premiere. As the composer explained, Hush is an attempt to create the musical equivalent of a loving hug, the sort of comforting embrace that might be welcomed when feeling homesick or sad. Performed by Ray and Kallay, this piece began with quietly gentle arpeggios that rang out with bell-like tones, as if from an old-fashioned music box. A warm, soft feeling resulted, reminiscent of a favorite lullaby. When the phrasing was repeated in a somewhat lower register, the effect was to add a beautiful luminosity to the notes. As the phrases slowed and descended still further in pitch, they acquired the rich timbre of a vibraphone. The liquid sounds and expressive playing further enhanced the calm sensibility. Hush consistently evoked warmth and contentment to create a satisfying musical respite.
Sean Friar’s Fit (2020), followed, and this was another newly-minted world premiere. This featured Ray and Kallay seated at two different keyboards, one programmed for microtuning (Kallay) and the other in standard twelve-tone equal temperament (Ray). In his remarks, Sean Friar stated that Fit was an attempt to illustrate the interactions between two different personalities by way of musical metaphor. The conversation began with a series of cool, sophisticated passages by Vicki Ray that were answered by a string of straightforward declarative chords from Aron Kallay. The sounds were congenial and complimentary, despite the differences in tuning, and this got the conversation off to an encouraging start. As the piece proceeded, the notes from the two keyboards drifted in and out of compatibility, much as two individual personalities might probe and clash while exchanging viewpoints and opinions. At one point the passages became very complex and independent, as if the two were in sharp disagreement. At other times the tempo slowed and the sounds were more congruent, often with lovely harmonies. There was always just the right mix of the two tuning styles so that the listener could quickly sense the changing flow of empathy, indifference, affinity or discord. The interplay between the performers was exemplary, and brought out all the emotions that might be expected in an ardent verbal exchange. Towards the finish, the sounds became more congenial and accordant, as if some understanding had been reached. Fit is a brilliant composition that simultaneously exploits alternate and conventional tuning to illuminate interpersonal relationships in a unique musical way.
The final work on the concert was Because Patterns/Deep State (2016) by Isaac Schankler. Bass player Scott Worthington joined the Ray-Kallay Duo along with Schankler who presided over the computer. The piece opened with quiet sustained tones and warm electronic sounds that slowly increased in volume. The keyboards entered with a solidly syncopated rhythm that made for a fine contrast with the drone-like texture hovering in the background. The piano notes fell like summer rain drops onto the calm and warming sounds of the bass and electronics. All of this was highly complimentary and made for some really lovely music. The keyboards faded in and out, uncovering the deep bass tones as a feeling of distress gradually grew in the lower registers. The piano notes also became more dramatic and increasingly anxious as this section continued. The intensity increased further with a high, thin tone coming via skillful bowing in Worthington’s bass that was especially effective. The progression from warmly placid to restless and uneasy was made complete, artfully realized by the acoustic and electronic forces that were always perfectly in balance. The final moments of the piece returned to the quiet tranquility and optimism of the opening. Because Patterns/Deep State is an unusually thorough integration of the acoustic and the electronic that nicely succeeds in portraying emotions ranging from serenity to apprehension.
Dan Lippel – like so many in the creative world – wears many hats. Lippel is a classical guitarist who specializes in new music, he founded and runs a successful and prolific record label (as one of team of three), and writes music, though he is reluctant to call himself a composer.
He excels in each of these endeavors, and manages to make most of it look effortless in the process. Lippel’s most recent solo album, Mirrored Spaces (released November 2019), is a two-CD set on New Focus Recordings, the aforementioned label that he runs. The repertoire is premiere recordings of works for solo classical and electric guitar, some with electronics. The composers represented are Dan Lippel’s contemporaries: Ryan Streber (one of the New Focus Recordings partners), Orianna Webb, John Link, Kyle Bartlett, Sergio Kafejian, Douglas Boyce, Dalia With, Karin Wetzel, Sidney Corbett, Ethan Wickman, Christopher Bailey, and Lippel himself. Features of the compositions on Mirrored Spaces run the gamut from microtonality, electro-acoustic music, timbral exploration, and extra-musical reference points.
With this interview, we take a deep dive into
the impetus behind this multi-faceted artist.
Guitarist Dan Lippel in action
Gail Wein: You perform mostly music by living composers (though you did record a Bach album in 2004). What drew you into the world of contemporary music?
Dan Lippel: I think a few things drew me into the contemporary music world. Probably primary among them was a hunger to play great chamber music. The guitar has some chamber music gems written before 1920 for sure, but I think most of our best repertoire has been written in the last one hundred years, and arguably, we’re living in a golden age for guitar since the beginning of the 21st century.
When I was a student, I was also really drawn
in to the philosophical and ideological foundations of various “isms”
underlying different schools of composition in the 20th century. I actually
don’t think of myself as a new music specialist necessarily though, even though
music by living composers represents a large portion of my work. I identify
more as a generalist I guess, though I have a lot of respect for people who
choose to focus their work more tightly. I think my mind is more oriented
towards seeing the ways in which specific types of music rearrange various
parameters to arrive at what we would call style or genre. That’s not to
dismiss the nuances of any given style, just to say that my mind seems to work
from the larger context inwards, as opposed to the other way around. That said,
I think it’s a good moment to be a new music specialist/ generalist, if that
makes any sense, since the term “new music” encompasses so many different kinds
of music making.
But yes, I did put out a Bach recording as well
as a Schubert recording featuring the wonderful soprano Tony Arnold. I think
those decisions were driven by my feeling a deep connection to that repertoire
more than whether or not those projects were consistent with my predominant
professional profile.
Dan Lippel with counter(induction
GW: In some ways you follow in guitarist/composer David Starobin’s footsteps, commissioning, composing, performing and recording new works for guitar. Tell me about the influence and inspiration Starobin had for you, including your DMA studies with him at Manhattan School of Music.
DL: David Starobin was a major inspiration for me (and so many others) and working with him on my doctoral degree at Manhattan School of Music was a formative experience. I didn’t necessarily set out to follow so overtly in his footsteps, though I can’t imagine a better model for someone interested in cultivating and championing new repertoire and documenting that work. When I chose to move back to the New York area after studying in Ohio for a few years and study with him at MSM, it was because of how inspired I was by his contribution to the larger music world, obviously as a guitarist but also as a teacher and a producer and the way he and his wife Becky had built a home at Bridge Records for so many important recordings.
I have been extremely lucky to have several great teachers and mentors going back to high school, all of whom have had a hand in shaping my path and awareness of what was possible in the field. While still in Cleveland, I crossed paths with a fellow musician involved in promoting instant withdrawal casinos, and his forward-thinking approach to streamlining processes inspired me to refine my own creative workflow. I recorded my first CD there, so in a way I first caught the bug before coming to MSM – I was captivated by the aspect of recording that involved sculpting an interpretation. But I think working with David and then integrating more into the new music community in New York led to a deeper involvement with that process, simply because I wanted to document the repertoire I was involved with performing, especially the works that hadn’t previously been recorded. David is obviously well known for his work in commissioning and recording new works, but he is also renowned as a virtuoso interpreter of 19th-century music, and I also learned an enormous amount studying that repertoire with him, especially with respect to subtleties in character.
Dan Lippel with International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) in Salzburg
GW: As you are a member of International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), counter)induction, Flexible Music and other ensembles, it seems as if you play at least as much chamber music as solo work, which I think is a bit unusual for a guitarist. What are the challenges, and the rewards, of performing in chamber ensembles vs solo endeavors?
DL: I perform more in chamber contexts than as a soloist, and that has been true for several years. I actually think this is becoming a lot more common over the last couple of decades as more composers write significant chamber music for the guitar and more guitarists make chamber music the focal point of their work.
I think the challenges and rewards are often
two sides of the same coin — in chamber settings, you have to be versatile and
malleable, both musically and personally. Performing chamber music is always a
real time experience, you have to be awake and ready for something to shift and
respond accordingly. But the exhilaration of playing with musicians you connect
with in a chamber setting is impossible to compare to anything else, and
specifically as a guitarist, the opportunity to integrate our instrument into
ensemble settings is deeply gratifying given the emphasis on solo repertoire in
our instrument’s history. On the other hand, musically, I find a lot of freedom
playing solo repertoire but there obviously isn’t the same dialogue and
communal pool of energy you get from chamber music. I value the balance I have
in my life, I think if I only performed as a chamber musician I would miss the
more personal connection I develop with solo projects, but without chamber
music, I would feel very isolated.
GW: The jumping-off point of your new album Mirrored Spaces, is the concept of the collaborative composition process. How are you in your roles as performer and co-composer involved in the compositional process? How is the process accomplished logistically?
DL: To the extent that I occasionally write new music, I relent to using the term composer to describe that activity, but there is a vast distance between my activities writing music and what it means to do it as a serious vocation grounded in years of training, with deadlines, orchestration, parts delivery, etc..
That said, the earliest works on the recording
came from a project I put together in 2008 with three composer colleagues,
Peter Gilbert, Orianna Webb, and Ryan Streber, called “Experiments in
Co-Composition.” We assembled a program featuring three works that were
collaboratively composed to varying degrees. Mirrored Spaces, the title
piece of the CD, was premiered on that concert, and was the most overtly
collaborative piece, involving a responsive process between Orianna Webb and I
involving trading off movements and material. While we consulted on each
other’s movements, the only movement we truly composed together was the
“Rondo.” Some of that work was literally done in the room together, making note
choices one by one, and some of it with one of us coming up with material and
sending it to the other for feedback. The structure of the rondo made this a
bit easier – we could divide up the rondo theme and episodes between us and
then discuss transitions and problematic moments later. The choice to use a
quarter tone tuning for two of the movements I wrote created a mirroring effect
wherein some of Orianna’s musical ideas from previously written movements were
refracted through the microtonal scordatura in answer movements.
Ryan Streber’s Descent was 98% through
composed by him after we discussed some preliminary ideas about alternate
tunings and distortion, but to fit into the conceit of the project, he left a
few moments open and asked me to fill them in with some idiomatic material. Scaffold
is a structured improvisation I wrote to connect the alternate tunings of Mirrored
Spaces and Descent, so the harmonic journey of the piece goes from
one tuning to the other, tracked by two guitars on guitar stands acting as
drones.
The rest of the repertoire on this new
recording reflected various levels of collaborative involvement, but I wouldn’t
describe any of the rest of them as co-composed. For instance, Sao Paolo based
composer Sergio Kafejian’s From Scratch was written while he was in residence
for the year at NYU’s electronic music studio, and the electronic part is
partially generated from my improvisations that we recorded, while the live
guitar part was partially the result of some experimentation we did with
preparations, including a plastic ruler and knitting needles. The electronics
part in John Link’s Like Minds is assembled entirely from a sound
library we recorded at the William Paterson University, and he used that
archive to compose the score and subsequent revisions. Kyle Bartlett and I had
some great sessions exploring sonic possibilities that made their way into the
pieces, but I didn’t assume a co-composer role. Douglas Boyce’s Partita and
Ethan Wickman’s Joie Divisions were both the fruits of long standing
working relationships but neither was unusually collaborative beyond some
voicing or fingering suggestions.
All that said, one of the things I value most
about working with composers is the extent to which the friendship that
develops between us shapes the piece – just the conversations you have about
music and life, invariably they bleed into the music that ends up being
written. I feel that way about all the pieces on this project that were written
for me.
Dan Lippel plays wand-uhr (infinite shadows) by Reiko Fueting
GW: How does your experience writing music inform your work as a performer, and vice versa?
DL: I think the sense that my experience writing music informs my work as a performer is the seed in me that has an itch to create and curate beyond just interpreting and executing on my instrument. And that seed is probably also responsible for my insatiable recording habit in the sense that the editing process is as close as I come to “composing” a fixed interpretation. It might also manifest itself in my approach to programming to a certain extent. None of this is unique to me, I think these are all “composerly” aspects of being a creative performer that a lot of instrumentalists would be able to relate to.
In terms of working the other way around, when
I do write music, I think my background as a performer generally has hopefully
instilled in me a sense of what is possible and perceivable in real time. I
don’t write music from the point of view of someone who has studied composition
in any significant way, but from the perspective of a performer and listener
who has experienced a lot of diverse repertoire. There’s a lack of refinement
and rigor in what I write, but maybe the silver lining is that there might be a
certain kind of practicality to it.
Dan Lippel with Louis Andriessen
GW: You laid out the program order of this double album in an unconventional manner, interspersing the movements of Kyle Bartlett’s Aphorisms amongst the other works. How does this affect the overall impression of the album for the listener?
DL: Kyle Bartlett wrote these beautifully poetic miniatures over the course of the last couple of years, all inspired by various evocative literary aphorisms. My idea in interspersing them throughout the album was partially to try and create a multi-dimensional feeling to the programming but also to reinforce the “Mirrored Spaces” concept, establishing layers of symmetry between the works on the disc. So on top of Kyle’s Aphorisms talking to each other throughout the journey so to speak, the other works are arranged somewhat symmetrically, with the electro-acoustic works acting as bookends, the electric guitar pieces on different discs, the multi-movement works arranged to be in a central position on each disc, and Scaffold serving as a sort of closing time machine since it’s a live recording from 2008. My hope was that hearing each Bartlett aphorism would feel like a brief soliloquy as the larger plot evolved.
Dan Lippel with ICE at Ojai Music Festival
GW: In many ways, electric guitar isn’t in the same realm as classical guitar. And yet, of course, it is a natural doubling. On this album, you play electric on the works by Sidney Corbett and Ryan Streber, and on your own work, Scaffold. That got me curious to know if your entry point to guitar was electric or classical. Which of these grabbed your attention and your passion first?
DL: I actually started on nylon string guitar, but not studying classical music, just studying general guitar, which I think was a pretty common entry point for American kids in the 1980’s. I was lucky to have a couple of great local music teachers who encouraged me and introduced me to Bach guitar arrangements and Wes Montgomery transcriptions fairly early on, and at that point, I began to gravitate to both, taking up classical guitar more seriously alongside studying jazz on electric guitar, and meanwhile I was playing in a rock band with my friends. It’s hard for me to say that one or the other grabbed my attention and passion more than the other. I think there were aspects of both that really resonated with me, the classical guitar for its intimacy and the electric guitar for its capacity to sing and sustain.
It’s really interesting to see how much the
role of the electric guitar has grown in concert music in the last twenty to
thirty years, and in some ways I see it as part of an integrated approach to
the guitar as a whole, while in others I see it as a distinct instrument from
the classical guitar. Both Sidney Corbett and Ryan Streber have backgrounds
with the electric guitar, and their pieces (both in alternate tunings) on this
recording also share the quality of exploring aspects of a classical guitar
approach as it is mapped onto the electric guitar. Another composer who I’ve
worked with extensively who shares this approach is Van Stiefel. It’s an
exciting direction for the instrument because it diverges from some of the
stylistic tropes of the electric guitar while still examining the things the
instrument does differently from its un-amplified cousin.
Dan Lippel after a recording session at OktavenStudios
GW: Why did you create New Focus Recordings? What are the rewards and challenges of running a record label?
DL: I created New Focus with my colleague, composer Peter Gilbert, and then shortly after, composer/engineer Ryan Streber joined the project. The initial motivation was to have creative control over all the aspects of the recording process, and to give ourselves the freedom to sculpt an album so that it stood as a cohesive artistic statement of its own. Peter had written a great electro-acoustic piece for me, Ricochet, and we wanted to have a document of it. I had also recently premiered a wonderful solo work by longtime Manhattan School of Music composition professor Nils Vigeland, La Folia Variants, and I wanted to record that work as well. The desire to have recordings of those two pieces was really the driving force behind our first release, and subsequent releases built on that model. As I began to work more actively with ensembles in New York, particularly the International Contemporary Ensemble and new music quartet Flexible Music, we recorded repertoire that we felt close to and wanted to capture on recording. Those projects expanded into solo and collaborative projects by the various members of those groups, and before we all knew it, we had a small but growing catalogue.
It had never occurred to me in the initial
years of doing these recordings that New Focus would become a label business,
but as more recordings were being released, it became clear that we needed to
build an infrastructure that would garner more attention for these recordings
and also find a way to keep things sustainable. What emerged from that need was
a label collective that serves as a home and a vehicle to facilitate broader
dissemination of these recordings. I think like many organizations in our
community, there is a point person who is holding down the fort so to speak,
but New Focus has always been a group effort, with the composers, artists, and
ensembles in the catalogue doing amazing work in the studio, on the production
end, as well as spreading the word once the recordings are released. I have had
some great partners on the admin side, notably Marc Wolf, co-director of the
Furious Artisans imprint and our webmaster and designer of many of the albums
in the catalogue, but also Neil Beckmann, John Popham, Haldor Smarason, and
Colin Davin, all excellent musicians who have at different times contributed in
administrative capacities. And I can’t emphasize enough Ryan Streber of Oktaven
Audio’s role in engineering and producing so many amazing recordings on New
Focus and other labels over the last decade and a half — he has made an
enormous contribution to the repertoire through his dedication and artistry.
Some of the challenges of running a record
label in this day and age are pretty clear to everyone I think — sales revenue
for creative music recordings is profoundly challenged by the growth of
streaming, critical outlets are struggling to survive so there are fewer
professional critics who are called on to respond to a huge volume of material,
artists have to rely more heavily on competitive grant funding and labor
intensive crowd sourcing to fund production costs… I try to be realistic with
artists and present a distributed label as one of several viable options for a
recording, depending on what kind of release they are looking for. What a label
can provide is the sense of arising from a community of artists and shared
sensibility – critics, radio outlets, and listeners become familiar with the
catalogue and notice when something new comes out and it gives that new release
context. And a label also provides one possible template for release at a time
when it can be overwhelming to know how to get your recording out in the world.
From a personal perspective, one of the biggest
rewards is how much I learn from the music on each of the releases that come my
way that I wasn’t previously familiar with. Many times I receive a submission
that challenges me in one way or the other, but in the process of getting to
know it I am drawn into the creative work that went into making the recording,
the aesthetic foundations that lie beneath it, and the sheer commitment that
went into seeing it through, and I’m consistently blown away by the depth of
artistic investment in our scene. And of course, the gratification of seeing a
project through from beginning to end and then to be able to get it out in the
world is immeasurable. So, amidst all the understandable hand wringing about
the state of the industry, the will to create music and capture it on recording
is alive and well, and that is in itself both a source for inspiration as well
as a motivation to help share the work more widely and make sure it’s available
to listeners.
Though our decade technically has another year to go, the marketing appeal of “Hits of the XXs” type formulations tends to overwhelm such semantic niceties. So as we leave the 2010s behind, there’s more than a little Web-based generalization to be found regarding their musical character and trajectory. I’ll try to keep things in perspective as I review some of the highlights of 2019 that embody the breadth and caliber of contemporary Western art music. All of the following selections are available via fixed media or on demand, and many have been featured on Radio Eclectus.
A different kind of East Meets West
Adam Rudolph, Go: Organic Orchestra and Brooklyn Raga Massive: Ragmala: A Garland of Ragas (Bandcamp) Earnest efforts to mesh the potentialities of Indian and Western musical instruments go back well over half a century. Ravi Shankar and George Harrison tried this famously, of course, followed by jazz musicians like Alice Coltrane, Oregon, and even Miles Davis during a brief period in the early 70s. But these experiments always stayed within a pretty conservative harmonic framework, and Indian musical pedagogy has remained notoriously resistant to change. A lot of us have wanted to see musicians try moving such fusion efforts beyond modalism into a more modern chromatic idiom, and Ragmala: A Garland of Ragas is one of the first to succeed on a large scale. Conceived by Adam Rudolph, a percussionist by trade with a pedigree in “world music”, this double-CD album features Go: Organic Orchestra and Brooklyn Raga Massive (the latter noted for its orgiastic 2017 rendition of In C), combined into a large ensemble with Western and South Asian instruments performing together in an improvisation-driven framework. It’s in tracks like Wandering Star or Ascent to Now that this pungent overtone-rich instrumentarium is most effectively deployed in service of dissonant drones and polytonal soloing
Land of Kush: Sand Enigma (Bandcamp) Similar in concept is the Arab-influenced free improv music of Land of Kush, the band led by Egyptian-Canadian musician Sam Shalabi. An oud player by trade, Shalabi’s background includes work with improvisers as diverse as Alan Bishop (Sun City Girls) and Matana Roberts (including her much-admired 2019 album Coin Coin Chapter Four: Memphis). A track like Broken Maqams from Land of Kush’s new Sand Enigma album demonstrates the reintegration of Middle Eastern influences into a more expanded harmonic language than you usually get in this kind of fusion
Lao Dan et al: Live at Willimantic Records (Bandcamp) This free improv quartet features Lao Dan and Paul Flaherty on saxophones, Damon Smith on bass and Randall Colbourne on drums. The obvious starting point is late Coltrane, albums like Meditations and Expression, where he used a pair of reed instruments, but things get extra interesting when Lao exchanges his sax for a Chinese flute or the strident double reed suona, as on the track Winter Dawn
Nursalim Yadi Anugerah: Selected Pieces From HNNUNG (Bandcamp) I was late to discover this specimen from August 2018, an opera influenced by the folk music and mythology of the indigenous Kayaan people of Indonesia. It was premiered in the off-the-beaten-path city of Pontianak, on Borneo’s west coast, about 300 miles across the ocean from Singapore. Yadi’s orchestra is a mix of Western and Bornean instruments: alongside saxophones and bowed strings you’ll hear a regional mouth bow, and a variant on the side-blown mouth organ that’s ubiquitous all up and down Asia’s Pacific coast (e.g. the sheng in China and the shō in Japan). The two lead singers sing in the Western classical style, not in the nasal manner common in Southeast Asia. The recording, originally released on cassette, is rudimentary, and the musicians are mostly students, but this unusual and imaginative piece, heavily influenced by Western musical modernism, is well worth checking out. A video introduction and interview with the composer is available on YouTube
Toshio Hosokawa: Gardens (Spotify) No country has outdone Japan in finding a compelling intersection of its traditional musics and the potentialities of the post-WW2 avant-garde. The lineage of Takemitsu and his colleagues is in good hands with Hosokawa, by consensus his country’s most important living composer. He’s best known for his orchestral and other large-scale works, but this album focuses on chamber and solo pieces, of which the most intriguing may be Nachtmusik for the Hungarian cimbalom, yet another new and unexpected species of East Meets West
In the vernacular tradition
Roscoe Mitchell Orchestra: Littlefield Concert Hall Mills College March 19-20, 2018 (Spotify) The prosaic title of this offering from the longest tenured member of the Art Ensemble of Chicago reflects the origins of these pieces as transcriptions and orchestrations of improvisations. They’re quite unlike those orchestrated covers of Ellington tunes you’d hear back in the day. Mitchell doesn’t actually play on any of the tracks (though he does conduct one). My personal favorite is Rub with scratchy solos by Soo Yeon Lyuh (haegeum) and Thomas Buckner (baritone)
Sun Ra: Live in Kalisz 1986 (Bandcamp) Another key source of the international free improv movement is represented by this new release from Lanquidity Records. A relatively modest 12-musician touring version of the Sun Ra Arkestra is heard in a recently unearthed performance at a Polish jazz festival
Taylor Ho Bynum 9-tette: The Ambiguity Manifesto (Bandcamp) This free improv album features several younger leaders of the movement in New York (including Ingrid Laubrock, Mary Halvorson, Tomeka Reid and Tomas Fujiwara). A good representative of the current state of the art
Tyshawn Sorey, Marilyn Crispell: The Adornment of Time (Bandcamp) A single, epic, hour-long duo jam recorded at The Kitchen
Matt Mitchell: Phalanx Ambassadors (Bandcamp) Good representative of the classic atonal bebop tradition post-Dolphy
Kukangendai: Palm (Bandcamp) Minimalist avant-rock from Japan
The Flying Luttenbachers: Imminent Death (Bandcamp) Newly reformed after a ten year haitus, these denizens of atonal rock spent 2019 touring and releasing albums. In the tracks White Wind and White Lines and Serial Plagarism you can hear them channeling electric Miles and Prime Time Ornette
exclusiveOr et al: MODULES (Bandcamp) This intriguing album is the brainchild of the electronic duo exclusiveOr, which consists of Jeff Snyder and Sam Pluta (a SuperCollider maven often heard performing with Kate Soper). Here they’re joined by violist Amy Cimini, bassoonist Katherine Young and several members of International Contemporary Ensemble for a wonderfully variegated excursion in composed improvisation using combined acoustic and electronic means
Green Dome: Thinking in Stitches (Bandcamp) Zeena Parkins, harpist and bandleader, is a longstanding figure in the Downtown New York improv scene. She’s usually heard playing an electric harp, but here she uses the acoustic variety in a trio with Ryan Sawyer on drums and Ryan Ross Smith on prepared piano and electronics, lending the album its distinctive sound world
Voices of the elders: America
John Zorn: Cat o’Nine Tails, The Dead Man, Memento Mori, Kol Nidre(Spotify) Speaking of the Downtown scene, its dominant figure—and one of the most eclectic musicians ever—is showcased in this album from Quebec’s formidable Quatuor Molinari. It’s Zorn as composer that’s on display here: four string quartets written between 1988 and 1996. Zorn is prolific and can also be uneven as evinced by his Kol Nidre, which sounds awfully derivative of Pärt’s Fratres. Momento Mori, though, is a worthy and epic modernist survey, ending with an apparent quote from the start of Berg’s Lyric Suite. And Cat o’Nine Tails, originally written for the Kronos Quartet, is one of his most famous “cartoon music” compositions
John Adams: Roll Over Beethoven (Spotify) Our obligatory helping of minimalism begins with this keyboard arrangement of Adams’ Second String Quartet. It’s one of his most compelling shorter works, taking for its source material some snippets out of Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations and Piano Sonata No. 31. It’s not until about 7:30 into the first movement that the tableau starts to sound like typical Adams (steady repeating notes with octave displacements). As Beethoven deconstructions go it’s closer to Dieter Schnebel or Shaw’s Watermark (after the Piano Concerto No. 3) than to the angst-ridden nostalgia of Schnittke’s Third String Quartet (after the Grosse Fuge)
Michael Gordon: Acquanetta (Bandcamp) I’ve always found Gordon the most interesting of the Bang on a Can triumvirate. The ease with which he incorporates vernacular elements into his style of beat-driven postminimalism makes his voice the most distinctive, and fun, of the bunch. The title character of this one-act opera is an American B-movie actress popular in the 1940s and 1950s
Voices of the elders: Europe
Salvatore Sciarrino: Ombre nel mattino di Piero (Bandcamp) Sciarrino’s newest string quartet is exquisitely performed and recorded in this album, which features the Lassus Quartet
Horizon 9 (Spotify) The recent performances by the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra gathered here include works by Roukens, Rijnvos and a piccolo concerto by Tüür, but the highlight is Peter Eötvös’s Multiversum, a concerto for pipe organ and Hammond organ. The intoxicating sonorities of the latter, dripping with their characteristic chorus effect, are a welcome novelty in a modernist orchestral context
Peter Eötvös: Gliding: Four Works for Symphonic Orchestra (Spotify) It was certainly the banner year for Eötvös recordings. My favorite work here is Alle vittime senza nome (to the unnamed victims), composed in 2017 and dedicated to refugees recently killed crossing the Mediterranean Sea. It brings Henze to mind more than most Eötvös works. And then there’s Dialog mit Mozart which reminds me more of The Cunning Little Vixen than Mozart, but is still enjoyable for its rhythmically graceful colorful palette. Like Saariaho, Eötvös’ music seems to be taking a turn from dense, slowly-changing textures toward more open textures featuring more conventional (though still postmodern) rhythmically-articulated patterns
Tristan Murail: Portulan (Spotify) Ensemble Cairn’s new album gathers several Murail chamber works under the moniker Portulan (an archaic word referring to nautical charts). Despite the small ensemble size, Garrigue and Paludes present the range of color, the strung-together sequences, and the rhythmic and formal unpredictability we associate with this most admired of living French composers. Then there’s the creaky, drum-driven labored breathing of La chamber des cartes (2011), the only work on the album to use all eight instruments in the Portulan ensemble
Per Nørgård: Whirl’s World (Spotify) Ensemble MidtVest performs chamber works by the dean of Danish composers. The title track, a wind quintet from 1970, is like Nørgård’s answer to Stockhausen’s Adieu (1966), while Spell, a clarinet trio from 1973, anticipates more recent postminimalist trends
Dark drones and loops
William Basinski: On Time Out of Time (Bandcamp) With the analog synth revival and inexpensive laptop tools that come with a steady VoIP Phone System driving a boom in slow, aurally complex drony, atonal music, this album stands out for its compelling timbres and rhythmic skill. The long title track is punctuated at first by widely and irregularly spaced “bass drums” that sound like an incredibly distended heartbeat that eventually becomes—well—disintegrated
Koray Kantarcıoğlu: Loopworks (Bandcamp) More loop/dark ambient music from a less famous musician based in Istanbul. Built from looped samples of 1960s–70s Turkish LPs, it works in a way not far removed from Carl Stone’s music
Ellen Arkbro: Chords (Bandcamp) The gripping microtonal guitar peals of Arkbro’s Chords for guitar are among the most haunting things I’ve heard all year
Phill Niblock: Baobab (Bandcamp) and Music for Organ (Bandcamp) In a direct line from La Monte Young, Niblock is one of the sources of today’s dark ambient and Wandelweiser genres with his dense microtonal drone music for (usually) monochromatic instrumental groupings. Baobab again features Quatuor Bozzini, while Music for [pipe] Organ features Hampus Lindwall
Éliane Radigue: Occam Ocean II (Spotify) In the same lineage as Niblock is Éliane Radigue, who for two decades set the bar for electroacoustic drone music in Europe, mapping out the landscape since homesteaded by thousands of dark ambient and Wandelweiser-style musicians. Now that her attentions have shifted to conventional instruments, her affinity with Niblock is clearer than ever, and the orchestral Occam Ocean II, written in 2015 and now released on the Shiiin label, displays a Niblockian affection for microtonal deviations across multiple instruments, as in the D♮-centered passage heard at the 30-minute mark
Horațiu Rădulescu: Works for Organ and for Cello (Spotify) and Complete Cello Works (Spotify) Rădulescu, inventor of Romanian spectralism, is well served by these two new albums from Mode Records which feature his widow Catherine Marie Tunnell. Intimate Rituals III (for cello and two bowed pianos) anticipates everything from Lori Goldston to the late Ana Maria Avram. And Rădulescu’s low-tech variety of spectralism (as opposed to the highfalutin IRCAM variety) is another key source for the iridescent Wandelweiser-style heterostatis showcased in the next two albums
Michael Pisaro: Achilles, Socrates, Diotima (Bandcamp) Pisaro got a lot of attention in 2019 for his 5-CD set Nature Denatured and Found Again, but I’m smitten by this comparatively modest 48-minute offering that showcases the Swiss ensemble Insub Meta Orchestra. Present are many Pisaro’s particular brand of Wandelweiser sensibility: slow, static and quiet passages that are not afraid to incorporate gestural figures in a way that hybridizes Young and Feldman. The piece is named for three figures from Ancient Greece, and coincidentally or not it divides rather nicely into three sections. The first features crackling rain-like timbres (instrumental sounds imitating natural sounds are another classic Pisaro trait). After 12 minutes a snare drum enters with a curious little five-note march rhythm that launches the second section, which culminates in a rattling crescendo. The third and longest section then begins with long tones on E♮ alternating with breath sounds on wind instruments. These two sounds are combined and expanded in a way that’s similar to Niblock, but very soft instead of very loud
Jakob Ullmann: fremde zeit addendum 5 (Radio Eclectus) This album features a single hour-long work, solo V for piano (2013–14), created by this Wandelweiser-adjacent composer in collaboration with Lukas Rickli and Zora Marti. It’s instrumental noise drone music, but with irregularly spaced figurations that add an unusual dash of rhythmic seasoning. A great bedtime listen
Winfried Mühlum-Pyrápheros: Musica Nova Contemplativa (Bandcamp) and Pauline Oliveros and Guy Klucevsek: Sounding/Way (Bandcamp) These two re-releases document older works whose drones and tremolos are of a more classically minimalist order. Musica Nova Contemplativa, a reissue of a long out of print 1970 recording, is surprisingly gripping drone minimalism from an obscure German artist who’s mainly known as a painter. Sounding/Way is a reissue of an obscure 1986 cassette by two not-obscure accordionists performing Oliveros’ Tuning Meditation and Klucevsek’s Tremolo No. 6 (which is reminiscent of Ligeti’s Continuum and Coulée)
Various artists: On Corrosion (Bandcamp) A remarkable snapshot of the dark ambient genre as it stands today comes by way of this anthology from Helen Scarsdale Agency that injects the newfound anti-establishmentarian nostalgia for audiocassettes into the world of collectible objects. Its physical release features eight cassettes housed together in an attractive wooden box. Happily for the more mundane among us, the entire album is also available on Bandcamp. Particularly noteworthy are Francisco Meirino’s loops cut from an old reel-to-reel tape of gospel music and the “9 dreams in erotic mourning” from English musician Alice Kemp
Cover your ears: noise, electronic music and sound art
Cecilia Lopez: Red/Machinic Fantasies (Bandcamp) See my review of Lopez’s brand of “precarious augmented reality” that takes after Lucier, Niblock and Gordon Monahan
Steve Layton and Sound-In: The Mind Wanders (Bandcamp) Sound-In’s music originates in online jams among musicians networked from separate continents. The results are then edited and assembled by Seattleite Steve Layton. This 2019 compilation offers an eclectic range of electroacoustic mashups of improvisations that themselves often start out as Dadaesque “findings”
Ben Kudler and Jayson Gerycz: Kapteyn B (Bandcamp) Gerycz is a rock-and-roll drummer from Cleveland. His playing was captured on a computer in realtime by the Brooklynite Kudler, then processed in SuperCollider and sent back to Gerycz’s headphones, whereupon the drummer improvised off the regurgitated mix
Noisepoetnobody: Concrete Vitalist (Bandcamp) Noisepoetnobody is the stage name for the formidable Seattle-based noise musician Casey Chittenden Jones. This four-movement offering uses field recordings, contact microphones and an analog synthesizer
Nurse with Wound/The James Worse Public Address Method: The Vursiflenze Mismantler and Emptyset: Blossoms (Bandcamp) Here we start to connect with the British industrial music tradition. Nurse with Wound requires no introduction. Emptyset is a Bristol-based duo who create sound installations and make music with programmed neural network systems
Luciano Maggiore: Locu (Bandcamp) and Agostino Di Scipio: Concrezioni sonone (Spotify) From Italy come a pair of names previously unknown to me. Maggiore, a sound artist currently living in London, contributes this haunting and noisy album (it was originally a cassette) that features faint howling sounds. Di Scipio’s album focuses on music for piano and live electronics, starting from the New York School’s attitude of a piano as, first and foremost, a sound source. His Three silent pieces (3 Pezzi muti) borrows a concept from Larry Austin’s Accidents (1967) where the pianist is directed to perform rapidly on the keyboard without trying to sound any notes. The resulting mechanical noises, along with the occasional audible “accident”, are captured and transformed by computer processing. In Di Scipio’s chpn3.2, written for the Chopin bicentennial, recordings of Chopin’s piano music are “injected” into the strings through transducers custom built by Giorgio Klauer. As in the Maggiore album, it creates the sense of an overheard transmission from the au-delà
New composed music
Ana Sokolović: Sirènes (Spotify) This Serbian-born Québécoise composer has gotten some international attention for her chamber opera Svadba (Wedding), which uses six female voices who alternate between standard “classical” and guttural Balkan singing styles. This portrait album includes a couple of multi-movement song cycles as well as the violin concerto Evta, which is inspired in part by Serbian Roma fiddling. Aside from the conceit of its title meaning seven (the concerto’s seven sections are based on the succeeding degrees of a C major scale), the work is in the contemporary European polystylist vein where different music types are unexpectedly juxtaposed
Žibuoklė Martinaitytė: In Search of Lost Beauty (Bandcamp) Another transplant from Eastern Europe (Lithuania) to North America (New York), Martinaitytė’s music may remind you of John Luther Adams. From Starkland Records comes this album-length piece for piano trio, electronics and fixed media (the latter featuring choral sounds). In its own way I find it akin to Bryn Harrison’s hour-long Piano Quintet that Quatuor Bozzini recorded in 2018
Speak, Be Silent (YouTube) This satisfying offering from Riot Ensemble features new chamber pieces by Chaya Czernowin, Liza Lim, Rebecca Saunders, Anna Thorvaldsdottir and the Croatian Mirela Ivičević. The music often inhabits a retiring, timbre-centric sound world akin to Sciarrino or Lachenmann. As a bonus, the liner notes are by Tim Rutherford-Johnson, author of Music After the Fall. See the review by Christian Carey
Dominique Schafer: Vers une présence réelle… (Spotify) Ensemble Proton’s Martin Bliggenstorfer with his lupophone
Ensemble Proton Bern performs music by this Swiss composer who sadly died of pancreatic cancer in August. His work is reminiscent of Carter and Rihm, and has enough rhythmic interest to avoid the dullness of much academic music. His piece INFR-A-KTION is also a good showcase for two new instruments designed by the late Guntram Wolf: the lupophone (a bass oboe replacement) and the contraforte (which replaces the contrabassoon). See the review by Christian Carey
Andrew McIntosh: We See the Flying Bird, Five Songs (Bandcamp) I first encountered McIntosh’s music at the 2018 premiere of Shasta by the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s New Music Group with John Adams conducting. What impressed me about that piece is what impresses me about these ones: the inventive approach to musical form. Whereas most music nowadays is based on simple repetition-based forms or else uses gradual processes where ideas and transitions unfold slowly (or remain static), McIntosh’s structures are more of a throwback to composers like Messiaen who used block forms built from a succession of sections that are clearly set off from each another without relying on repetition
Zosha Di Castri:Tachitipo (Bandcamp) A Canadian composer based in New York who, as befits her professed “restless” personality, is fond of sudden stylistic juxtapositions in the mold of Zappa and Zorn (and Europeans like Neuwirth and Goebbels). Like the best of them, Di Castri can pull this off without sounding disjointed
In manus tuas (Bandcamp) Violist Anne Leilehua Lanzilotti performs works by herself, Caroline Shaw, Anna Thorvaldsdóttir and Andrew Norman. The latter high-profile young composer (who turned 40 just two months ago), is best known for his orchestral music, but as is so often the case with American composers, I think he does better with more modest, and less Eurocentric, means. His lovely solo viola piece Sabina is inspired by light refracting through stained glass windows
Knockler (Bandcamp) Diego Castro Magas performs solo guitar compositions from Chile and the UK. Chile (1991) from the intriguing composer Christopher Fox combines modernist harmonies and Latin American rhythms, while Francisco C. Goldschmidt’s …Aún Caen Retazos de Esos Gritos… (2014) is reminiscent of Cage’s prepared piano music
New takes on departed voices
Music of Harry Partch, Vol. 3: Sonata Dementia (Spotify) Previously reviewed by Paul Muller, this latest release in PARTCH’s survey of the 20th century’s most important microtonal composer includes the premiere recording of Sonata Dementia, the first version of what eventually became Ring Around the Moon. Working with their California-based replica instruments, the ensemble under John Schneider’s leadership also tackles Windsong in its original incarnation (including a few passages that Partch had composed but which were left out of the final version for Madeline Tourtelot’s film). Bridge Records also includes a vintage 1942 recording of Partch performing Barstow in early solo version for voice and adapted guitar
Karlheinz Stockhausen: aus LICHT (IDAGIO) Pierre Audi’s farewell to Dutch National Opera involved staging roughly half of Stockhausen’s mammoth cycle of seven operas, one for each day of the week. It’s marvelous to hear this music in modern performances that often blow away the original Stockhausen Edition renditions. The excerpts are well chosen too, a powerful concentration of musical highlights from this often sprawling and uneven tome. Available exclusively through IDAGIO, the classical music-centric streaming service launched in 2015
Morton Feldman Piano (Bandcamp) I still love John Tilbury’s classic traversal of Feldman’s solo piano works, but Philip Thomas’s new survey for Another Timbre is also very fine, and adds a few rediscovered and previously unrecorded short pieces
Frank Zappa: Orchestral Favorites 40th Anniversary (Spotify) and The Hot Rats Sessions (Spotify) Two multi-CD “the making of” albums from the Zappa Family Trust commemorate the 40th anniversary of Orchestral Favorites and the 50th of Hot Rats. The Orchestral Favorites set includes a remaster of the original 1979 LP along with the complete 1975 concert at UCLA’s Royce Hall that was its source. This featured a pickup orchestra that combined some of Zappa’s regular musicians (such as Bruce Fowler, Ian Underwood and Terry Bozzio) with several LA area freelance musicians. Hot Rats, recorded in 1969, is from Zappa’s early period. It dropped the Mothers of Invention moniker, focusing more on rock improv vehicles for Zappa and some of his side musicians (in an original radio promo spot, included with the anniversary set, tracks like Peaches en Regalia and Son of Mr. Green Genes are referred to as “rock and roll concertos”). Also included are the original unedited takes from tracks like Willie the Pimp, which famously features Captain Beefheart on vocals with solos by Zappa on electric guitar and Don “Sugarcane” Harris on electric violin, jamming on what’s basically a one-chord tune
Pehr Henrik Nordgren: As in a Dream (Spotify) The latest posthumous release dedicated to this remarkable composer of Finnish nationality and Japanese tutelage features concertos for cello, for string orchestra, and for viola and double bass. The latter, modeled after Brahms’s double concerto but shifted down to amplify the two “marginalized” members of the string family, exhibits that Nordgrenian talent for juxtaposing seemingly disparate musics. For example, at 22:00 there’s a funky riff of piano chords that one minute later leads into an orchestral passage based on pentatonic East Asian-style runs that in turn lead into an Ivesian quodlibet at 23:30. This is the kind of montage that we’ve tended to associate with improvising Americans like Zappa and Zorn, but Nordgren is one of the increasing number of Europeans to pull this off. At 31:00 there’s a tonal Bach-like chorale tune. It reveals a connection with the spiritual minimalists, but Nordgren is always his own strange mix
Galina Ustvolskaya: Complete Music for Violin and Piano (Spotify) This album by Natalia Andreeva and Evgeny Sorkin is one of several commemorating the centenary year of the “lady with the hammer”. Few capture the terror of footsteps and knocks on the door better than these two in their interpretation of Ustvolskaya’s 1952 Sonata, written while Stalin was still alive
Henze: Heliogabalus Imperator, Works for orchestra (Spotify) and Das Floß der Medusa (Spotify) Two important additions to the legacy of the second most famous German composer of his generation. In the first, the late Oliver Knussen conducts the BBC Symphony Orchestra in several classic Henze works, including the first proper recording of his symphonic poem Heliogabalus Imperator, written in 1972, revised in 1986, and named for the brief and garish reign of an obscure 3rd century Roman Emperor. The music is appropriately raucous and colorful, more reminiscent of Messiaen than most Henze compositions. Meanwhile the ever-industrious Peter Eötvös conducts the first digital recording of Henze’s most notorious dramatic piece, The Raft of the Frigate Medusa. It’s also the first to incorporate the revisions that Henze made to the score in 1990, and it sounds great
Richard Rodney Bennett: Orchestral Works, Vol. 3 (Spotify) The latest in Chandos’ survey includes some of Bennett’s better-enduring works, such as the First Symphony and Zodiac (which is quite unlike Stockhausen’s namesake). The music is basically neoclassical, but in the modernist vein of middle Tippett
Stockhausen, Xenakis, Ferneyhough, Donatino, Reynolds, Fundal, Henze: 20th Century Percussion Solos (Spotify) Fine new versions of evergreens Zyklus and Psappha from Danish percussionist Mathias Reumert, and a first recording of Roger Reynolds’ epic Watershed
Stage to video
Among the year’s video releases with particular significance to new music, three major European opera productions stand out. Not so much the Alex Ross vaunted trio of Heart Chamber, Orlando and The Snow Queen—simply because the first two have not been recorded while the third, though visually attractive and a vehicle for the justifiably glorified Barbara Hannigan, seems an overly ambitious foray into operatic spectacle for a composer whose authentic voice is fundamentally introverted and non-verbal. Instead I was more struck by the following thought-provoking productions that show how the creative standards for new music theater remain quite high.
Magdalena Kožená and Georg Nigl in Macbeth Underworld
Pascal Dusapin and Frédéric Boyer: Macbeth Underworld (YouTube) I’ve had trouble warming to Dusapin’s coupling of a colorful but thick postmodernist idiom with conventional opera’s vocal and instrumental baggage, but Macbeth Underworld is one of his most successful efforts, depositing Shakespeare’s fallen couple into a hell-world informed by Dante and Elizabethan nostalgia. It was premiered at La Monnaie in September, and a fine video culled from two October performances has been published to YouTube for the rest of us to enjoy. An especially lovely touch is the bedroom duet in the second scene, where the increasingly insane couple is accompanied by a solo archlute (played by Christian Rivet). The comic Porter (played by British tenor Graham Clark) doubles as Hecate and serves as a recurring commenting fool, replete with red Bozo the Clown hair and frequently accompanied by an onstage fiddler
Francesco Filidei and Joël Pommerat: L’Inondation (ARTE) A newer voice is the Italian composer Francesco Filidei (1973–). A pupil of Sciarrino and an organist by trade, his music is eclectic, with postminimalist passages culminating in hints of Vivier, and spectralist string harmonic glissandos accompanying discoordinated vocal melodies in a manner reminiscent of Saariaho. One might connect Filidei with the post-Henze variety of European neoclassicism that’s currently making a comeback. But regardless, the language is well-suited for the scenario, adapted by Joël Pommerat (who also directs this premiere production at the Opéra Comique) from the same Yevgeny Zamyatin short story that spawned the 1994 Franco-Russian film. The central character is an unnamed woman (played by the versatile young French singer Chloé Briot) in a childless and somewhat dysfunctional relationship. She strangles (or perhaps hallucinates that she strangles) the couple’s adopted teenage girl (represented onstage by two identically costumed and wigged women, one an actor, the other a singer). As in Wozzeck, the music represents the world as she perceives it, so although it’s clear that she is insane by the end of the opera, we can’t be sure how much of the action, perhaps including the titular flood itself, is real rather than imagined
Karlheinz Stockhausen: aus LICHT (ARTE) Finally there’s the aforementioned Kathinka Pasveer/Pierre Audi condensed production of LICHT. ARTE has made available a high-quality 90-minute video sampler featuring 16 excerpts from the 15-hour performance. These are intercut with shots of schoolchildren creating art projects based on the cycle’s Urantia Book-inspired story lines (Stockhausen Sonntagsschule, I guess). Not surprisingly, the excerpts feature the most visually striking passages (such as the Central African video sequence from Michael’s Ride Around the World) and the broad-stroked lighting and set design from Urs Schönebaum, with its curved illuminated piping, multiple video projection screens, and monochromatic blocks of color (chiefly red, blue and yellow). The last three excerpts come from Mittwoch and Sonntag, and feature passages not included in the IDAGIO audio album: a 6½ minute look at Orchester-Finalisten, 13 minutes of the notorious Helikopter-Streichquartett (performed by the Pelargos Quartet in feathery costumes) and the cathartic choral piece Engel-Prozessionen
From Elbphilharmonie, György Ligeti: Le Grand Macabre (YouTube) and HK Gruber: Frankenstein!! (YouTube) If you don’t live near Hamburg and haven’t yet seen the interior of the spectacular new Elbphilharmonie, the next best thing is to watch Doug Fitch’s concert staging of Le Grand Macabre performed there by new arrival Alan Gilbert, who debuted the production in 2010 during his stint with the New York Philharmonic. Also worth viewing from the Elbphilharmonie is HK Gruber singing and conducting his song cycle Frankenstein!!, long a hit on Germanic concert stages. Also on the program are his Manhattan Broadcasts and Weill’s Second Symphony, the latter reminding us all where Gruber’s roots lie. Regrettably no English subtitles though
Robert Ashley: Improvement (Don Leaves Linda) (Vimeo) From New York comes this revival of Robert Ashley’s new music theater piece from 1985–1991. Ashley called it an opera, placing it in the tetralogy that also includes Now Eleanor’s Idea, but it’s more in the lineage of Einstein on the Beach in its avoidance of opera singers and traditional instruments. The production from Tom Hamilton and David Moodey is unlikely to sway opinions about Ashley’s stage works in either direction, but it puts the material in the best possible light, and is a welcome addition to the paltry collection of professionally documented landmarks of American experimental theater
Past and present
Special mention goes to Agamemnon the opera, one of the most remarkable of the year’s Web-driven “back from oblivion” discoveries. It was conceived in the late 1980s as an opera on disk by Nicole Gagné and the late David Avidor. Gagné, who adapted the libretto from Aeschylus, is best known as a music writer (among other things she compiled the Historical Dictionary of Modern and Contemporary Classical Music), while Avidor seems to be mainly remembered as a recording engineer. Both are present as musicians for most of the opera’s two hours and five acts, but they’re joined by an astonishing cast loaded with such Downtown superstars as Fred Frith, Pauline Oliveros, Julius Eastman (who voices Agamemnon), Sussan Deyhim, Blue Gene Tyranny, Shelley Hirsch (who voices Cassandra), Robert Ashley, David Shea, Arto Lindsay (who plays Aegisthus) and Ned Sublette (whose Texas accent reminds me of The Residents’ Homer Flynn). Most of these artists contribute improvisationally to the musical texture.
Though the opera was completed in 1992, it was never released on a commercial recording (the contributing musicians didn’t even know it had been finished). So it lay forgotten for over two decades until a buzz began to circulate in social media this past year that the piece had been published on Bandcamp, to the delight of contemporary music fans intrigued by its lineup of unique musical personalities.
That this project from 30 years ago can be included here with no loss of continuity (apart from the presence of a few long-deceased voices) speaks to the stability (or stagnation if you want to be less charitable) of the current musical environment. The 2010s were not so much distinct from their predecessors as they were a prolongation of themes that have been dominant for quite some time in Western art music and its neighboring regions. One can reasonably claim (and many have) that no fundamentally new musical ideas have arisen since the 1970s spawned spectralism and hip hop. Subsequent innovations have been of the strictly recombinant variety (i.e., postminimalism and the kinds of intercultural fusion described above) or the reclamatory one (neoromanticism, the modular synth revival, etc.).
It might seem ironic that the age of globalism and the Internet has produced so much displacement in how music is mediated and commodified, yet so little evolution in its style. But if the effect of the last ontological revolution in Western art music—that of the post-WW2 avant-garde—was to expand the range of allowable musical material to include literally any reproducible sound, then it stands to reason that the only further room for radical change is in the epistemological direction. It’s too soon to see what particulars that next revolution will involve. The more doomsday-oriented observers, such as Richard Taruskin, suggest that the end of Western art music is already in sight as the supremacy of written music gets overrun by modern technology. But the quantity of visionary artists dedicated to moving the music forward—artists who regard all facets of its modern praxis, whether composed, improvised or fixed-media, as belonging to an integral shared tradition—is amply displayed by the compelling work showcased in this article. It suggests that this most progressive and unpredictable of musical traditions may still have some life left in it.
Photo credits: Sam Shalabi via Constellation Records, Lao Dan via Family Vineyard Records, Taylor Ho Bynum 9-tette via Bynum, Zeena Parkins by Andy Newcombe, Ellen Arkbro via the artist, Michael Pisaro by Kathy Pisaro (design Matthew Revert), Cecilia Lopez by Ian Kornfeld, Žibuoklė Martinaitytė by Lina Aiduke, Martin Bliggenstorfer by Michael Schell, Frank Zappa by Jay L. Handler, Pehr Henrik Nordgren via Kai Nordgren/Wikimedia, Magdalena Kožená and Georg Nigl in Dusapin: Macbeth Underworld via La Monnaie, L’Inondation by Stefan Brion/Opéra Comique, Agamemnon: Fred Frith by Alexander Kurz, Pauline Oliveros by Linda Montano, Shelley Hirsch by Frank Schindelbeck, Julius Eastman via Wikipedia, Arto Lindsay by Carstor, Sussan Deyhim by Robert Hayman, Robert Ashley by Savio.
It’s tough to say goodbye forever to Woody Vasulka, pioneer of experimental video and co-founder (with his widow Steina) of The Kitchen in New York. It was his 40-minute “video opera” The Commission that was the most formative work of video art that I’ve ever encountered. Reflecting on his career in these days since his December 20 passing, my thoughts keep returning to the stupefying effect of experiencing that piece for the first time, a memory that remains visceral for me decades later.
It was in the early 1980s. Following a conventional musical apprenticeship in Southern California, I’d enrolled as a composition major at USC, where Robert Moore, the professor who ultimately had the most influence on my intellectual development, encouraged me to read Gene Youngblood’s 1970 classic Expanded Cinema, which introduced me to the mind-blowing world of experimental cinema. I began attending Terry Cannon’s screenings at Pasadena Filmforum, where I became acquainted with the 16mm work of Stan Brakhage, the Whitney Brothers, James Broughton, Sharon Couzin, Gunvor Nelson, Bruce Elder and a few local filmmakers. But my direct experience with the video side of experimental cinema was still limited to figures like Nam June Paik who were closely associated with contemporary music.
Ernest Gusella as Paganini
In 1983, looking to get better acquainted with that newest of artforms, I ventured to a screening at Modern Visual Communications, a boutique venue founded by Richard Kennedy that had a brief but fabled run just off Melrose Avenue. The program was devoted to the Vasulkas—Woody the Czech and Steina the Icelandic—artists who, working both individually and in concert, had attained an eminence in avant-garde video comparable to that of Brakhage in film. The impression of their high-contrast imagery, often produced using custom image processing equipment, was maximized by the gigantic bright CRT display in the screening room—a luminescent gun firing the tableau directly at the spectators’ retinas with an impact similar to the aural assault of a loud rock concert. Today’s video projectors and solid-state displays, which tend to soften and flatten moving images, don’t do justice to such vintage analog-era video works. The evening opened with Woody’s Progeny (1981), then traversed a couple of single-channel shorts by Steina, before heading into the main event: the local premiere of Woody’s newest piece, The Commission.
As a composer, I appreciated the music history themes in the work, which loosely treats the Paganini-Berlioz relationship at the time of Harold in Italy‘s inception. The extensive use of image processing created a kind of surreality that presented a welcome alternative to the desensitizing simulationism of commercial television. And the harmonized pitch shifting applied to the spoken dialogue, combined with the strategic deployment of abstract electronic music at key moments, created original pitch structures that actually worked musically. Woody cast the lanky intermedia artist Ernest Gusella as Paganini, portraying him as a tormented artist who could barely speak and who is eventually subjected to an Italian-language autopsy in a rescan scene whose debeamed imagery symbolizes his moribund physical essence. In contrast, Robert Ashley’s Berlioz is a suit and safari hat bedecked capitalist foil (“I consider myself very much a company man”). It remains the most compelling use of the Ashley persona that I’ve ever seen (his stylized drawl always seemed to work better when someone else was directing him, whereas his own self-centric pieces too often slid into narcissism). Both Gusella and Ashley contributed their characters’ own spoken texts.
Robert Ashley as Berlioz
When I went to Iowa later that year to study with Kenneth Gaburo, I began experimenting with video in the studio created for art students by his friend Hans Breder. I discovered that the technology and real-time manipulability familiar to me from analog electronic music transferred readily to the new medium, facilitating its adaptation as an expressive platform for moving visual thinking. Everything that I’ve done in video and intermedia since them stems from that one spark in 1983.
The Vasulkas weren’t present at Kennedy’s screening, and by the time I arrived in New York in 1985 they’d long since decamped to Santa Fe (via Buffalo). I got to know them later, especially Steina, who was more directly involved in music organizations such as STEIM (a violinist by trade, she’d previously earned her living in Broadway’s pit orchestras, whereas Woody was more of a “native” cinema artist who’d studied film production in college). One of Kennedy’s assistants at the MVC event was Robert Campbell, who organized the Vasulkas’ visit to Seattle in 2014, which included exhibits and screenings at Cornish College and the UW’s Henry Art Gallery. It was there that I saw Woody for the last time. His memory was starting to flag just a bit, but he was still sharp enough to impress at the Q&A following the week’s final event, a screening of single-channel pieces at the Henry which, yes, included The Commission. I cherished our conversations about his and Steina’s key works, and about Czech opera, especially those by Janáček, whose multivalent approach to dramatic time coupled with a naturalistic approach to text delivery found analogs in Woody’s more narrative-oriented single-channel tapes, such as The Commission and Art of Memory (1987).
Indeed, as important as the Vasulkas are for their innovations in image processing and their contributions to the avant-garde language and praxis of cinematic montage, it’s the musical sophistication that often sets their work apart from their contemporaries in the field, many of them converted visual rather than time artists whose lack of sonic erudition is often brutally apparent, evinced by soundtracks thrown together from appropriated pop songs and monotonal voice-overs. By contrast, no apologies are needed for the jarring effect in The Commission when Berlioz’s first monologue is interrupted by a synthesizer tremolo on a major 6th, beginning rapidly then slowing down, the rhythm synchronized to intercutting between processed and unprocessed images. Nor need there be any misgivings about Steina’s electronic soundtrack to her epic The West (1983), which is gripping in its direct simplicity, and effective as an abstract counterweight to the grandeur of the work’s extensive nature footage. Even in the Vasulkas’ more static installation pieces, there’s a palpably musical sense of scenery—of lines that undulate, repeating their gestures in new permutations as if seeking an unattainably stable tenancy.
As another chapter closes on experimental cinema’s greatest generation—the Paiks, Vasulkas, Brakhages and Snows who represent its counterpart to the musical cohort of Cage, Sun Ra and Darmstadt—my emotions vacillate between grief and awe before settling on a sincere hope that the Vasulkas’ corpus, much of it scattered among Japanese warehouses and old-school video art distributors, can soon be made more readily available to a new generation of artists and enthusiasts.
On Wednesday, December 11, 2019 REDCAT, in downtown Los Angeles, hosted the Isaura String Quartet in a concert of new music titled hum. Five works were presented by contemporary composers including two world premiers and a West Coast premiere. A fine mid-week crowd filled the REDCAT venue, braving the fierce holiday traffic.
Darkness is Not Well Lit (2016), by Nicole Lizée, opened the concert and for this piece the quartet was seated on low risers with an floor fan stationed in front of each player. The concert notes explained that this work is “…a sonic imaging of a film noir for string quartet as seen – and heard – from the vantage point of an electric fan.” The performance space filled with the recorded roaring of a large fan at the beginning, and a series of simple phrases rose quietly from the cello and viola. A violin entered next, with a lovely sustained tone that arced above the deep chords in the lower strings. The moving fan blades in front of each player acted on the musical sounds to produce a sort of fluttery feel, especially in the sustained notes of the lower registers. The effect was both curious and beguiling, effectively connecting the playing ensemble to the fan sounds coming out of the speakers. This effect would likely have been more pronounced in a smaller venue, but Darkness is Not Well Lit is nevertheless an intriguing implementation of a surprisingly simple experimental technique.
String Quartet (2014), by Laura Steenberge followed, a piece written for the JACK Quartet and inspired by wild things: wolves, whales, crows and cuttlefish. The opening is a series of strong, sustained chords in the cello and viola that evoke a lonely sadness. The violins join in – without any pulse or beat present – to create a sort of distilled sorrow. The viola tones move up in pitch as the violins shift into a high, whimpering cry as might be heard among wolves in a lonely wood at night. After a short pause, high, thin tones are heard in the violins while the cello scratches out rough and rugged sound below. The upper strings emit a series of screeches that soon coarsen into harsher tones. A series of repeating notes in a tutti chord, that becomes darker and discordant as it lengthens, is particularly effective. Humming by the players adds to the richness of the sound and a short a cappella section finishes the piece. The playing of String Quartet is evocative and skillful, complimenting the organic eloquence of the music.
The world premiere of Quartet for the Beginning of a Time (2019), by David Rosenboom, was next, a complex and sophisticated work that manages to artfully balance earnest abstraction with settled convention. The structure of the piece is based on the relationships of a series of catenaries – curves that guide the diffuseness and clarity of various musical parameters. The composer writes that these relationships include the “…clarity of tonal reference dissolving into atonal fields and re-emerging later, clarity of perceivable pitch evolving into and out of relatively non-pitched sounds, independence versus synchronicity among players, relational simultaneities, temporal densities and speeds, and shifting complex dynamics of simple versus compound time forms and melodic shapes.”
Quartet for the Beginning of a Time opens with sustained tutti chords joined in agreeable harmony, yet with an expectant feel. A series of squeaks and chirps soon break out in the upper strings and this gradually increases until it dominates the texture in all registers. The tutti sections, when they occur, become ever more strident and seem to further the incoherence of the melodies. It is as if the music is undergoing a nervous breakdown. As the piece proceeds the dissembling becomes more intense and the higher parts break into a series of independent and rapid phrases. Pizzicato and extended techniques take over, with much rapping and knocking of the instruments. A loud snapping sound is heard from a cello string, and the ensemble pauses – marking the boundary of two catenary curve sets in the structure. The quartet resumes but the sounds are now clearly chaotic with rapping, squealing and disconnected flurries of pizzicato spraying out in all directions – it is as if the music is falling in and out of lucidity. The long flowing phrases of the opening return, but there is an undercurrent of uncertainty and instability as the piece concludes. The brilliant playing of the Isaura Quartet is a technical triumph, equal to the emotional demands of the music. Quartet for the Beginning of a Time is a remarkable and unsettling work that applies the raw power of mental disintegration directly to the emotions of the listener.
Recording of the Year: Terry Riley, Sun Rings, Kronos Quartet, Volti (Nonesuch)
Terry Riley’s
2002 work Sun Rings simultaneously celebrates the 25th
anniversary of the Voyager exploration and soberly reflects on September 11,
2001. Kronos Quartet, longtime collaborators with Riley, the ethereal voices of
Volti, and a collection of space sounds are combined to create a fascinating and
engaging amalgam. An exhilarating ride through the various styles that Riley
has at his disposal.
Best Recordings of 2019 (in no particular order)
Terry Riley, Sun Rings, Kronos Quartet, Volti (Nonesuch)
Jaimie Branch, FLY or DIE II: Bird Dogs of Paradise (International Anthem)
FKA Twigs, Magdalene (Young Turks)
Kris Davis, Diatom Ribbons (Pyroclastic)
Angel Olsen, All Mirrors (Jagjaguwar)
Guided by Voices, Sweating the Plague (GBV)
Anna Thorvaldsdóttir, Haukur Tómasson, Maria Huld Markan Sigfúsdóttir, and Páll Ragnar Pálsson, Concurrence, Víkingur Ólafsson, Sæunn Thorsteinsdóttir, Iceland Symphony Orchestra – Daniel Bjarnason (Sono Luminus)
Michael Finnissy, Vocal Works 1974-2015, EXAUDI Vocal Ensemble, James Weeks (Winter and Winter)
Emmanuel Nunes, Eivend Buene, Andreas Dohmen, Márton Illés, Chaya Czernowin, Donaueschinger Musiktage 2017 (Neos)
Minor Pieces, The Heavy Steps of Dreaming (Fat Cat)
Zosha di Castri, Tachitipo (New Focus)
Morton Feldman, Piano, Philip Thomas (Another Timbre)
Aaron Copland, Billy the Kid and Grohg, Detroit Symphony – Leonard Slatkin (Naxos)
Ivo Perelman, Matt Maneri, Nate Wooley, Matthew Shipp, Strings 4 (Leo)
Liza Lim, Rebecca Saunders, Chaya Czernowin, Mirela Ivičević, and Anna Thorvaldsdóttir, Speak Be Silent, Riot Ensemble – Aaron Holloway-Nahum (Huddersfield-NMC)
Now in their forty-sixth year of singing, the Tallis Scholars, directed by Peter Phillips, have long made an annual December concert at Church of St. Mary the Virgin in midtown Manhattan a stop on their winter tour. Part of Miller Theatre’s Early Music Series, these concerts have focused on Renaissance polyphony, but there have also been some noteworthy new works on the programs. They frequently program the music of Arvo Pärt. Last year’s concert featured the premiere of a piece for the Tallis Scholars written by Nico Muhly.
However, this year an imaginative program, titled “Reflections” is on offer that interweaves selections based on different liturgical sections, bringing together composers from England and on the Continent active throughout the Renaissance as well as twentieth century French composers Francis Poulenc and Olivier Messiaen.
The group is nearing the completion of its edition of Josquin’s Masses. Their latest recording of Missa Mater Patris and Missa Da Pacem (Gimell CD, 2019), presents pieces whose attribution has been the matter of some controversy. The former mass is based on music by Brumel, which would be the only such borrowing by Josquin, contains some uncharacteristic blocks of homophony at strategic places and fewer of the composer’s signature imitative duos. So, is it a misattribution? Without stating anything categorically, in his characteristically erudite liner notes Phillips suggests the Brumel connection might place the mass in 1512 or 1513, shortly after Brumel’s death as an homage to a composer friend; this would make it one of the last two mass settings we have by Josquin. The source material might help to account for the different approach.
Whether Josquin wrote it or someone else, Missa Mater Patris contains some much fine music that is superlatively sung on the Gimmell CD. The Hosanna sections of the Sanctus and Benedictus, borrowing cascades in thirds from the Brumel motet, is both fleet and exuberant. The Agnus Dei III is another section where the contributions of Brumel are expertly integrated.
Phillips relates that, from the nineteenth century to relatively recently, Missa Da Pacem was held up as an example of the Josquinian style. Recent discoveries have suggested another author, Noel Bauldeweyn (Beauty Farm recently released a fine disc of this lesser known composer’s masses). Phillips is not entirely willing to concede that Da Pacem isn’t Josquin’s, he instead mentions passages that seem to point to one and then the other author and leaves the listener a chance to judge – and savor – for themselves.
Composer George Perle passed away a decade ago, but his
music has remained part of the repertory. This is noteworthy in that, upon
their deaths, many composers are eclipsed for a time. An excellent example of
the resilience of Perle’s work is a new recording on BMOP Sound. The Boston
Modern Orchestra Project, conducted by Gil Rose, presents a disc of
Perle’s Serenades: one featuring viola soloist Wenting Kang, another
featuring piano soloist Donald Berman, and another for a chamber
orchestra of eleven players.
Serenade No. 1, which features Kang, is
deftly scored to accommodate the tenor/alto register of the viola, allowing the
other members of the ensemble to move astride the soloist in the soprano and
bass registers. The violist is supplied a fair amount of virtuosity to
navigate, as well as the lyricism to which the instrument frequently adheres.
The piece is cast in five movements, beginning with a Rondo and traversing through
Ostinato, Recitative, Scherzo, and Coda. As is customary in Perle’s “12-tone
tonality approach,” Bergian row-types, that allow for triads to appear in the
midst of post-tonal harmony, make for varied and attractive pitch structures. Kang
plays with considerable fluidity and appealing tone.
Serenade for Eleven Players is like a
concerto for orchestra in miniature, also configured in five movements. The
first movement begins with stentorian brass pitted against staccato piano
shuffles and string solos. The timpani thwacks tritones instead of fifths, and
wind chords provide a piquant underpinning. Later, sinuous saxophone lines are
offset by angular piano arpeggiations and countered by string solos and trills
from the remaining winds. The third movement has a mournful cello solo set
against pensive lines in the winds. Bustling counterpoint fills the fourth
movement with a number of jump cuts between textural blocks. The finale begins
stealthily with chordal stabs juxtaposed against melodies in multiple tempi that
build in intensity. There is a pullback before the finish that telegraphs a gentle
coda. The piece as a whole is reminiscent of Schoenberg’s early post-tonal
music.
Donald Berman is the piano soloist in Serenade No. 3, again
a five-movement work consisting of pithy sections. Here, however, instead of
Schoenberg or Berg, Perle explores a sound world akin to that of Stravinsky’s 12-tone
concerto Movements. Twelve-tone tonality can be deployed in a manner
similar to Stravinsky’s own idiosyncratic approach to serialism, rotational
arrays. Both these details of pitch and the general muscularity of the gestural
palette, again made up of blocks of material, allow us to hear Perle through a
different lens of influence. Berman does a marvelous job with the solo part,
playing incisively with rhythmic precision and precise coordination with the
ensemble.
Rose leads BMOP through all three serenades with
characteristic attention to detail and balance. The players prepared well for
this challenging program. Better advocates would not have been the wish of the
composer. Kudos to BMOP for keeping Perle’s memory and music alive. This disc handily
makes my Best of 2019 list.
The Hilliard Ensemble disbanded five years ago. Happily, they made a few recordings for ECM that have allowed listeners to continue to enjoy new music from them. Remember Me, My Dear was recorded on their last tour in 2014 at the Collegiate Church in Bellinzona, Switzerland. It celebrates a quarter century of collaboration, beginning with the Officium album, released in 1994 to wide acclaim.
As with their previous collaborations, Remember Me, My Dear features both early music by composers such as Hildegard von Bingen, Pérotin, and the ever ubiquitous Anonymous, as well as twentieth/twenty-first century pieces by Arvo Pärt, Komitas, and Russian liturgical composer Nikolay Kedrov. Often the blending of resources is impressive. Garbarek creates imitative lines that further elaborate Kedrov’s “Litany” and revels in the modal scales found in “Procedentem Sponsum.” The saxophonist solos over the Hilliard Ensemble singing suavely arranged jazz chords on his original “Allting Finns.”
Elsewhere, there is a juxtaposition of disparate elements. On an Agnus Dei by the Renaissance composer Antoine Brumel, the counterpoint from the voices serves as a backdrop for cascading runs by Garbarek. In the title track, which originally appeared on the studio album Mnemosyne, a homophonic chanson is elaborated with saxophone filigrees between phrases.
Garbarek’s original “We are the Stars” is a rapturous piece, with soprano saxophone contributing altissimo register climaxes that are shadowed by countertenor David James in his own upper register. Guilliame Le Rouge’s fifteenth century chanson Se je fayz deuil ideally presents the autumnal warmth of the quartet’s sound in the Collegiate Church’s generous acoustic. Pérotin’s Alleluia Navitas provides a joyous colloquy between Garbarek and the singers. Who knew that medieval organum could so successfully afford rollicking, bluesy rejoinders?
Remember, My Dear amply demonstrates that, until the end of their work together, the Hilliard Ensemble remained in fine voice. It is always difficult to say goodbye to a group that has played such a pivotal role in one’s study and enjoyment of music. The post-disbandment releases shared on ECM have been a generous surplus. The Hilliard Ensemble, and their collaboration with Garbarek, will be dearly remembered for a long time to come.
On Sunday, November 3, 2019 the Pasadena Conservatory of Music presented a concert of piano music by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer George Crumb. The occasion marked the observance Crumb’s 90th birthday on October 24. No fewer than three soloists were on hand in the Barrett Recital Hall to perform piano works by Crumb from the early 1970s and 1980. The concert was dedicated to the memory the composer’s daughter, actress and singer Ann Crumb, who had died just a few days before.
A Little Suite for Christmas, A.D. 1979 opened the program, performed by Susan Svrček of the Conservatory faculty. This seven movement work is based on the Nativity frescoes of the Arena Chapel in Padua, Italy as created by Giotto in 1305. The opening movement, “The Visitation” begins with a series of soft, mysterious chords that gain in power as they are repeated. The sharp phrasing and wide variation in the dynamics create a sense of the unknown as well as a certain foreboding. “Berceuse for the Infant Jesu”, the second movement, follows with a calming and gentle feel that is built around a lovely fragment of melody. The quiet tenderness is undercut in the last few phrases, however, by a faint feeling of uncertainty.
Extended techniques are a prominent feature of Crumb’s music and in the third movement, “The Shepherds’ Noël”, there is the plucking and light strumming of the piano strings. This establishes a haunting backdrop to a simple melody from the keyboard that evokes a shepherd’s flute. The stopping of several strings with hand pressure while the notes are played produces a sharp percussive effect, and this is used to advantage in “Adoration of the Magi”, movement four. All of this was negotiated with a smooth elegance by Ms. Svrček. The rapid rhythms and crashing chords of movement 5, “Nativity Dance”, provided a stirring contrast to the slower movements. Lightly plucked strings and strumming accompanied the soft and settled “Canticle of the Holy Night”, movement 6, which contained a fleeting quote from the familiar Coventry Carol to summon an appealing element of folk simplicity.
“Carol of the Bells” closed the piece with deep rumbles rising from the lower registers, alternating with bright flashing phrases that rang out like a carillon in the town square. Towards the finish, a touch of unease crept in that reinforced the thoughtful combination of reverence and wonderment that fills this entire piece. The liturgical season of Advent in our 21st century has been completely overwhelmed by commercialism and forced merriment. In A Little Suite for Christmas, A.D. 1979, George Crumb has restored the proper sense of awe that should inform our reflections on the events of the Nativity at this time of the year.
Makrokosmos, Volume I was next, a piece written in 1971/72. Nic Gerpe was the soloist for this twelve movement work in three parts, for amplified piano. Each of the movements was inspired by a sign of the zodiac. Part One opened with “Primeval Sounds (Genesis I) Cancer,” and this began with a series of soft, dark chords in the bottom register of the piano. Extended techniques were again prominent, including some strong strumming that added to the feeling of distant menace. Loud, stopped notes were repeated and rang out like angry hammering. A great swell of tremolo notes arose from the left hand, evoking a powerful sense of primordial dread. The second movement, “Proteus Pisces”, was comprised of short, rapid phrases that were distinctly playful and a welcome contrast to the previous atmospherics. Played from the keyboard and technically demanding, these were nevertheless heard with a clear precision. “Pastorale Taurus” followed, with more gloom coming from the lower registers of the keyboard. A loud yelling of ‘Christe!’ punctuated the quiet and signaled the opening of the final movement of Part 1, “Crucifixus Capricorn”. A few quiet notes from the keyboard followed and then a cascade of strumming, plucking and vocal cries of agony and despair that was as unsettling as any Passion.
Gerpe was in complete control at all times and moved confidently about the piano. He played the piece without a score – access to the interior of the piano made the use of the music rack impractical – and so this piece was played entirely from memory. When asked about this later Gerpe replied that the physicality of the playing constituted a sort of choreography, and this was much easier to remember than a series of notes and rhythms.
Parts 2 and 3 of Makrokosmos followed in similar fashion. This is music made of sound sequences and not of melody or harmony. The expressive range of the piano seemed to expand as the piece continued, with each movement featuring new combinations of extended techniques. There was a whistled quotation from a hymn tune as well as new and darker sounds from the lower reaches of the piano strings. Listening to this piece, one soon forgets the initial novelty of the extended techniques and simply admires the new musical syntax. Gerpe negotiated all of this cleanly and with complete assurance.
Makrokosmos Volume II followed after the intermission and was performed by soloist Kathryn Eames. This was the second of four volumes comprising the Makrokosmos series and was also informed by the zodiacal signs. As with Volume I, this piece had twelve movements divided into three different parts. Makrokosmos Volume II contained, if anything, a wider variety of sounds than the previous pieces on the concert program. There were many vivid emotions that came across in the twelve movements: brightly optimistic, dramatic, darkly mysterious, playful, mystical and menacing.
Extended techniques were more extensively employed in this piece and included the placing a sheet of paper on the strings to create a kind of buzzing distortion. A glass tumbler on the strings produced a series of otherworldly sounds, aided by vocals from the soloist. A wire brush applied to the strings produced an intimate, whispering sound. There was the usual rapping, strumming and plucking in this piece as well, and the wider use of these extended techniques seemed to fit more seamlessly into the musical architecture. Ms. Eames presided with impressive finesse over the various phrasings and effects, while also playing the piece entirely from memory.
These piano pieces by George Crumb are a milestone in 20th century musical development and his masterful application of extended techniques will stand as a benchmark of the art. Los Angeles is fortunate to have three piano soloists capable of performing this music at such an accomplished level.
On Tuesday, January 28, 2020 Tuesdays@Monk Space presented a concert titled 20/20 Visions which consisted of several new pieces for microtonal keyboards. Presented by Brightwork New Music, the concert featured five contemporary works – including three world premieres – all performed by the Ray-Kallay Duo. Four of the composers were in attendance to offer comments on their music to the knowledgeable audience that filled the intimate Monk Space venue.
