Violinist Oliva de Prato is one of the stalwarts of the New York new music community, performing premieres with a plethora of organizations and in demand as a solo artist. Her latest recording for New World, I.AM. is a celebration of “Artistry and Motherhood.” De Prato, a mother herself, commissioned composers who are navigating motherhood and their careers. The project provides a nurturing, welcome perspective.
“Automatic Writing Mumbles of the Late Hours,” is by Natacha Diels, a composer and sound artist. The piece requires de Prato to trigger various electronics. The resultant sounds create shimmering textures in the upper register, while angular melodies accrete in the middle register. “Mycorrhiza I,” by Katherine Young, employs bow pressure and altissimo glissandos in alternation and accreting in intensity. Partway through, the music stops and resumes with transparency and sparer bow pressure A swath of pizzicatos, including pizzicato glissandos, are offset by bell-like repeated notes. Electronics adds a tolling drumbeat while the upper register materials are combined to create off-kilter swaths of detailed harmony.
Hang-Yang Kim’s “May You Dream of Rainbows in Magical Lands” is written in a just-intonation system called “Centaur.” Demonstrating the interval qualities, the piece focuses on sustained notes from electronics and violin. These stack up, creating held sonorities in which notes move in and out of the verticals. It is a beguiling, gradually transforming sound world and the blend of electronics and violin is beautifully presented. Little traces of found percussion, played by de Prato’s son, nibble at the edges of the pitch scape.
Pamela Stickney is a composer and theremin player. She joins de Prato on “Noch Unbennant,” a piece developed by the duo from initial improvisations. Theremin and violin are a felicitous pairing, and alongside electronics, the duo explores a panoply of sounds in a labyrinthine formal design. “Fire in the Dark” began from vocal improvisations by its composer, Jen Baker, who then collaborated with de Prato to translate these into harmonics, bow pressure, and altissimo melodic patterns. This is succeeded by purely tuned sustained multi-stops, which gradually devolve, sliding away from the initial interval. After a pause, pianissimo skittering gestures provide an interruption before once again de Prato plays sustained glissandos. A brief coda of the same intervals articulated in short values closes the piece.
Zosha di Casti’s “The Dream Feed” opens with glassy electronics, percussive punctuations, and a duo between violin and piano. Thrumming bass notes and breathy sustained ones build alongside repeated passages from the violin, overdubbed with soprano register solos. These are offset by electronic percussion and glissandos. A high double stop, pressed even higher as it sustains, is accompanied by an aggressive bass register and percussion electronic passage. The electronics drop out and de Prato plays a mid-register modal melody, swathed in a piano ostinato. Sustained harmonics and repeated notes populate the upper register while the piano’s part becomes increasingly disjunct. A piano ostinato and blurring glissandos create a hazy atmosphere. Percussion, gruff electronics and another ostinato, this time ascending microtonally in the violin, bring the music out of its reverie and intensify the piece’s conclusion. A treble splash from the piano serves as a punctuation.
A half dozen pieces, all in an experimental vein and hypervirtuosic in terms of demands, yet each distinct and compelling in their own right. De Prato remains an extraordinary advocate and here presents an imaginatively conceived and superlatively performed recording.
On October 28, 2022, Greyfade released Filters, a debut album of solo piano music by Phillip Golub. Based in New York, Golub has been performing for decades in both classical and improvisational settings. In Filters he explores the intersection of musical repetition and improvisation. The album consists of four piano ‘loops’, each about 8 minutes long. Each loop is a series of repeating phrases that maximize expression by the performer while severely limiting harmonic and rhythmic changes. Careful listening allows discernment of the unique contributions of the performer without distraction. As Golub writes: “When we know the repetition is not mechanical, there’s a certain feeling of needing to stay very focused with the performer, to be there with them.”
How does this sound? The piano phrases are simple, consisting of a few notes and chords played at a moderately slow tempo. The phrasing seems halting, even syncopated at times, and are not constrained to a strict beat. The pitch set is limited with only a few changes as the sequences proceed. There is a generally reflective feeling in these loops, marked by an absence of technical flash or drama; a sort of unsettled rumination. The phrases are similar upon repetition, but never identical – always with the same interior feel, but never tedious. At first this seems to be a variety of classic minimalism, but the variations in the cells are more subtle. Steve Reich wrote that his minimalist phrasing was varied by adding or subtracting a note or two in the cells after a certain number of repetitions, allowing the overall pattern to dominate while introducing variations gradually.
Golub takes this one step further in that the variations are introduced by the performer in the playing and not by the composer in the scoring. There are small changes to the timing of the rhythms, a change of emphasis on the individual notes and very slight differences in tempo. All of this results in subtle alterations of the musical surface and micro-acoustic detail – in other words, the variations are all driven in the moment by the pianists ‘touch’. The loops presented in Filters are just eight minutes long, but they are meant to be played as long as desired. Each 8 minute loop in the album is an edited subset of a 45 minute recording and some of Golub’s live performances have extended for several hours.
More specifically, Golub writes: “Each loop on Filters contains two ‘streams’ of music. The outer stream consists of a single high note and a single low note on the piano, always struck together. The inner stream is a succession of simple major or minor triads — with an occasional suspended fourth or added seventh — that continually re-contextualize the color of the pitches of the outer stream. Something mysterious and magical happens here that is unique to the resonance, decay, and overtones on pianos. I think that this blending of the louder outer stream with the quieter and denser inner music is at the core of the effect.”
Each of the loops, while similar in construction, have their own distinctive emotional character. Loop 1 is typical with a quietly moderate tempo and repeating phrases. These are very similar, but are heard to be slightly different in each sounding. The small variations in the phrases are not obvious, but invite close attention so that the repeating sequences engage the listener and are never boring. There is a warmly introspective feeling that is also welcoming to the ear. Loop 3 is similar, having the same reflective feeling with perhaps a bit of optimism. Loop 4 has a more ambiguous feel; its character is full of uncertainty and questioning. The most contrasting track, Loop 5, is pitched in a somewhat higher register and includes enough dissonance to produce a sense of disquiet in the listener. A bit elliptical and mildly frustrating at times, Loop 5 a departure by being more anxious than introspective.
Filters is a cutting edge album that illustrates how the performer can exert the critical creative input from within the confines of a strictly minimalist framework. The subtle variations in the repeated cells of these loops arise in the moment from the inventive touch of the pianist and are not the result of formal structures. With Filters, Phillip Golub has restored creative primacy to the individual musician, even within the heart of a highly process-oriented music.
Ironically, the first concert of flutist Claire Chase’s reign as Richard and Barbara Debs Creative Chair at Carnegie Hall in the 2022-23 season focuses on a dead composer. In honor of the groundbreaking composer and accordionist Pauline Oliveros (1932-2016), on January 21, 2023 Chase and friends perform an all-Oliveros concert. In addition to Chase (credited as performing “air objects”), instrumentalists include percussionists Tyshawn Sorey and Susie Ibarra and Manari Ushigua, leader of the Sapara Nation in the Ecuadorian Amazon, who has the intriguing credit of “Forest Wisdom Defender”.
Oliveros was hugely influential on the contemporary music scene. She was especially noted for “deep listening,” a term that Oliveros herself coined, referring to an aesthetic based upon principles of improvisation, electronic music, ritual, teaching and meditation.
The performance will be in Zankel Hall, reconfigured to a theater-in-the-round setup with the performers in the center of the hall. Several other contemporary music program in January will take place in the “Zankel Hall Center Stage” milieu, including performances by yMusic (January 19), Third Coast Percussion (January 20), Rhiannon Giddens (January 24) and Kronos Quartet (January 27).
“I’m honored to be the 2022-2023 Richard and Barbara Debs Creative Chair at Carnegie Hall this season,” wrote Chase on Facebook. “Each of the projects on this series has collaboration at its core, and I’m gobsmacked to get to share the stage with some of the most inspiring musicians in my orbit—people who have changed the way I play, changed the way I listen, and who continue to blow the roof off of the imaginations of everyone in earshot.”
Chase is fortunate to have Carnegie’s backing for this season’s chapter of her 24 year-long commissioning and performance project, Density 2036. Beginning in 2013, Chase has commissioned a new body of solo flute repertoire every year; she’ll continue the process through 2036, the 100th anniversary of Edgard Varèse’s groundbreaking flute solo, Density 21.5. The decades-long project has given a unique framework for Claire Chase’s performance career.
The two “Density” programs are highlights of the entire Carnegie season, and they’re worth waiting for. On May 18, Chase performs Varèse’s Density 21.5 alongside works for flute and electronics that she commissioned over the past ten years, by Felipe Lara, Marcos Balter, Mario Diaz de Leon, George E. Lewis and Du Yun. The sound artist and percussionist Levy Lorenzo handles the live electronics. On May 25, Chase, along with cellists Katinka Kleijn and Seth Parker Woods, pianist Cory Smythe, and electronics artist Levy Lorenzo performs the world premiere of a Carnegie Hall commission by Anna Thorvaldsdottir.
The Paris-based Ensemble Intercontemporain, in its first Carnegie Hall performance in two decades, appears on March 25. The ground-breaking group, founded in 1976 by Pierre Boulez, brings a program that includes the New York premiere of Sonic Eclipse, by EIC’s music director Mattias Pintscher, alongside Dérive 2 by Boulez; and the ensemble reaches back a century to include Schoenberg’s Five Pieces for Orchestra.
I’ll never forget the first American Composers Orchestra concert at Carnegie that I attended, over 20 years ago. I marveled at the fact that every composer was in attendance (except Charles Ives, and he had a good excuse). Since then, I’ve eagerly looked forward to ACO’s offerings at Carnegie. On October 20 the orchestra, led by Mei-Ann Chen, gives the world premiere of a new work by Yvette Janine Jackson (co-commissioned by Carnegie Hall), and brings a host of guest performers to the Perelman stage: Sandbox Percussion (performing Viet Cuong’s Re(new)al -you’ll be seeing his name more and more, mark my words), the Attacca Quartet (performing an as-yet untitled new work by inti figgis-vizueta), and cellist Jeffrey Zeigler (featured in the New York premiere of Last Year by Mark Adamo). On March 16, Daniela Candellari conducts premieres by George Lewis, Ellen Reid, and Jihyun Noel Kim, and Modern Yesterdays by Kaki King, with the composer on guitar. As far as I can predict, none of these composers will have an excuse as good as Ives if they don’t show up.
The long-lived quintet-of-color, Imani Winds performs new and recent music at Zankel Hall on April 25. Vijay Iyer continues to prove his mettle as a versatile composer with Bruits; also on the program are The Light is the Same by Reena Esmail, and Frederic Rzewski’s Sometimes.
There are many other concerts that showcase living composers at Carnegie this season, including a good number of regional and world premieres commissioned by the institution itself. Composers from Thomas Adès to Caroline Shaw to Michi Wiancko are featured; details are at this link. A complete calendar with program details and ticket information is at this link.
Composer Bryn Harrison writes about temporal organization and experience in music. Coauthored with Richard Glover and Jennie Gottschalk in a collaborative spirit, Being Time (Bloomsbury, 2018) examines the experiences of the three authors listening to music built in different time spans, from the longest works of Morton Feldman to micro music. Harrison explores these concerns in his own music, particularly subtle variations over significant durations. Three Descriptions of Place and Movement, his first string quartet, written for Quatuor Bozzini and recorded for Huddersfield, is both intricately organized and imposing in structure. At over an hour long, it is an opportunity to see Harrison’s vision writ large.
Feldman is an obvious touchstone for pervasively slow music over a long duration, and Harrison’s work certainly has echoes of Feldman, but Three Descriptions of Place and Movement also departs from Feldman’s aesthetic in both its surface and structuring. The music is populated by changes in bowing techniques, mini-crescendos and just as quick returns to piano, and a plethora of articulations. It challenges the listener’s attention to detail by constantly shifting between these various techniques. What starts as a principal texture may shift to accompaniment, counterpoint, or a mixture of roles. Harrison says that he uses shapes like a wrapped double helix in “Opening,” to organize material so that one constantly hears it from different vantage points.
Each successive movement is longer, which plays with perception as well. The movement titles – “Opening,” “Clearing,” and “Burrow” are each meant in two senses: the place and movement of the title. Thus, a musical opening may introduce material that brings one into the piece’s orbit; an opening also can be of a door, or a mind. Harrison suggests similar dualities for “Clearing” and “Burrow.” When each movement’s central process has been worked out, it ends with surprising suddenness.
The Bozzini Quartet are a perfect ensemble for the challenges of Harrison’s score, its demanding specificity of expression, dynamics, and rhythm. Cascading entrances and myriad bowing techniques and articulations are delivered crisply, with abundant clarity. The work’s sinuous chromaticism is rendered with admirably spot-on tuning.
Three Descriptions of Place and Movement is Harrison’s most successful and distinctive work to date. Once again, Huddersfield Contemporary Records presents a risk taking artist in the best possible sound and performance conditions. Recommended.
Music for Dance 2017-2020, by Alex Wand, is a new album of selected electronic instrumental music created as accompaniment for choreographed dance. Wand’s experience with the local dance community is extensive and includes residencies with the LA Dance Project, Los Angeles Performance Practice, REDCAT, and Metro Art LA. According to the liner notes, Wand has worked with choreographer Jay Carlon “ …as a collaborator on his site-specific dance theater productions and dance films…” This collection consists of eight tracks of electronic music, primarily realized using modular synths. Although Wand’s supple voice is absent from this album, the inventive sounds he creates provide an open and inviting framework for interpretive dance.
Composers working with dance companies have a distinguished history in new music. Lou Harrison often collaborated with dance choreographers during his career. John Cage famously devised the prepared piano to give his accompaniment more percussive punch, assisting the dancers to better follow the beat. The closest piece to the traditional forms of dance music in Alex Wand’s new album is Crest, track 5, which provides a repeating phrase at a brisk tempo that is mostly percussive in texture. This piece feels like dance in that it encourages movement. The rounded tones are subdued but active, and interesting harmonies develop as the repeating phrases evolve.
Out of Bounds, track 3, further explores the percussive texture but with a different expressive intent. This begins with a strong beat and rapid electronic pulse. The drum beats occasionally vary in pitch and volume so that the feeling is like being inside of a helicopter. A sine tone is heard and the rhythms change up, becoming more broadly mechanical. The pulses here are less a guide for body movement and more a framework that allows the dancer to react. Other tracks in the album encourage a similar response. Flocking, track 1, is typical with deep, sustained tones setting a warm foundation while a repeating, syncopated chirp in the higher registers convincingly evokes other worlds. There is a feeling of open grandeur to this that engages the listener while allowing the dancer full scope for interpretation.
Four Triangles features four synthetic tones with differing pitches and duration. The pitches are based on the resonant frequencies of pieces of sheet metal and the processed sounds are somewhere between a pure sine wave and a bell chime. These attractive tones blend well together and form engaging harmonies. Signal, track 7, consists of complex electronic sounds that seem to be emulating a message of some sort. Low, sustained tones compliment the beeps and boops in the upper registers. This ends dramatically as the signals fall away leaving just the lower tones. The other pieces in this album are similarly intended to give the dancers a wide canvas for expression.
Although often abstract and otherworldly, Music for Dance makes for an excellent contrast with the obvious human element that the dancer provides. Alex Wand writes: “The tracks feature fluctuating synth pulses, swirls of noise textures, and pitch-shifted recordings of planetary magnetospheres… I composed these pieces with the intent to leave room for the dance to speak and hope that this sense of spaciousness is translated to the listener as well.”
In addition to the electronic realization of his accompaniments, Wand has also experimented with physical inputs such as wireless accelerometers and contact microphones to provide a path for interaction between the movement of the dancer and the music. Music for Dance 2017-2020 adds a 21st Century sensibility to the long-standing collaboration between new music and interpretive dance.
Music for Dance 2017-2020 can be heard at Bandcamp.
Some of the artists at the 2022 Long Play festival
Two years ago, I was editing a 2020 interview with the composer David Lang about the new multi-day festival that Bang on a Can planned for that spring, Long Play, when I realized the significance of the festival title. The year 2020 would be Bang on a Can’s 33rd anniversary. Long Play = LP = 33 rpm. Very clever! Although the festival was delayed for two years, it retains its name.
The inaugural Long Play festival takes place on April 29, April 30 and May 1, 2022 at a half-dozen venues in Brooklyn, including BAM, Roulette, Littlefield, the Center for Fiction, Mark Morris Dance Center, Public Records and the outdoor plaza at 300 Ashland. Over 60 performances are scheduled. Some are free, but most are accessed via a day pass ($95) or a three-day festival pass ($195). Over a hundred performers range from the Sun Ra Arkestra to jazz pianist Vijay Iyer to bagpiper Matthew Welsh (complete list is here).
Lang, along with the composers Julia Wolfe and Michael Gordon launched Bang on a Can in New York City in 1987 with a 12-hour concert in a downtown art gallery. The organization became known for its annual marathon concerts in New York, and later expanded to include a performance group (the Bang on a Can All-Stars), a commissioning program, education programs and festivals at MASS MoCA in the Berkshires, a record label (Cantaloupe), and an on-going extensive online series created when live concerts were cancelled during the pandemic.
Looking back on our conversation on February 25, 2020, most of what Lang and I discussed is still relevant to the rescheduled Long Play Festival. Here is the interview, edited for length and clarity.
Gail Wein Successful marathons have been your signature event for Bang on a Can for 33 years. So what prompted the creation of this differently-formatted festival, Long Play?
David Lang
David Lang Over the last couple of marathons we have tried to expand our reach to different kinds of music and to other kinds of communities. After a while of doing that, we felt like we were inviting people on to the marathon for slots of 15 or 20 minutes that we wished were an hour or two hours. And so we got interested in a lot of other kinds of music and it just seemed like we weren’t spending enough time with them.
I remember thinking – this is at the last marathon – people would come in and they would go, “That was incredible. Why am I only wanting that for fifteen minutes?” What we’re hoping to do with this is to say, we’ve uncovered all these incredible connections between all these different kinds of music. And now we really want to let people go deeper into what those connections do and where they go.
Gail Wein Of course, it’s a much bigger scope. Three days, and a bunch of venues. And instead of the marathon’s free admission, this one is ticketed.
David Lang There’s still going to be a bunch of free things, including some outdoor events, because we really like the idea that we have a wide doorway, that lots of different kinds of people can come through with no barriers. But it’s also true that when you start working with so many hundreds of musicians and so many different kinds of venues, that it’s just not possible for us to fundraise to make the entire thing free anymore. So we came up with this plan that, for essentially the price of one ticket, you get a pass which allows you to see everything and then you’ll just be able to go in and out of performances and check out music from all these different communities.
Gail Wein How does the aesthetic of the performers and the programs and the repertoire differ from that of the marathons?
David Lang I don’t think it differs at all.
We’re still looking for people whose definition of what they do is: they wake up in the morning and tell themselves that they’re innovators. They wake up and they say, there’s a kind of traditional music that’s involved in my world and I’m not doing that. That’s always been the way we’ve judged people to come on to the marathon. We wanted to find people who were pushing their fields. The difference here is that we’re able to go deeper into other kinds of communities like jazz and rock music and indie pop and ambient and electronica and be able to invite more people who are pushing their boundaries.
Gail Wein I was thinking about the longevity of Bang on a Can as an institution. Institutions come and go, organizations come and go, various folks have mounted series, marathons, festivals. But not that many have lasted a third of a century. To what do you attribute Bang on a Can’s longevity?
David Lang, Michael Gordon and Julia Wolfe, the founders of Bang on A Can (photo by Peter Serling)
David Lang I’m sure some of it is just dumb luck. But also we have a kind of hippie mentality about what it is we do, where we want everyone involved in the organization to be as excited and passionate about it as possible. If something comes up that we are not passionate about, we don’t do it. Some organizations, they just begin to think, well, we have a payroll to meet. We’ve got to do this, and this is what we did last year.
One of the things that we’re really proudest of about this festival and also about our sister festival that we started in summer, which is the Loud Weekend Festival at Mass Moca, is that we’re able to change and get excited about other kinds of things and then turn the organization so that it can take advantage of what we’re all really excited about. Everyone who works at Bang on a Can is a musician; we only hire people who are musicians. And so when we talk about these things in the office, we really are sharing ideas of the things that we are all getting excited about. And so when you do something like this, when you say this is a new direction that we’re going in, or this is the kind of music we want to include, or this is a new initiative for something we’d like to do, it’s something that energizes everybody. That’s one of the reasons why we can stay fresh, because everybody understands how committed we all are to the mission of the organization.
Gail Wein I’ve been thinking about this: New York City is already one big music festival every single day.
David Lang It is.
Gail Wein So why do you think New York and New Yorkers need this festival?
David Lang One of the beautiful things about this is the pass, quite honestly. In New York, there are always 500 concerts to see every single night. And you pay your money and you go see it and you stick it out, right? And then you say, I know I’m going to see this one, I don’t know that other kind of music, so I’m going to go see the one I know because I have to pay the money and I have to sit there for the concert.
At Long Play, we have all of this music within a few blocks of each other, all in walking distance, in Brooklyn, all the concerts are scheduled to go on simultaneously. What I’m really hoping will happen is that people with the pass will be encouraged to check out things that they wouldn’t necessarily check out because they have the right to go to that concert. So that’s our thought of how to replace the thing that we loved so much about the marathon, which is to put this kind of music next to each other, so that someone would come out of watching twelve hours of the music at the marathon and having a kind of cross section of a huge swath of interesting innovative things. What we’re hoping now will happen is that because I’ve already bought a pass, I’m going to check it out. And if I don’t like it, I can get up in 10 minutes and go check something else out. I’m not obligated to spend $50 for a concert of stuff I don’t know.
Gail Wein How did you choose and curate the artists and the programs and the venues as well?
David Lang We wanted to find places that were all in walking distance. And of course, that means that we started talking to everybody a year ago in order to get on their schedules. And then we just went to every single person who works in Bang on a Can and asked, what do you want to see? People just thought, what’s the widest, most varied, most exciting bunch of things from a bunch of different musical directions that we can come up with?
Gail Wein What do you hope audiences will come away with after experiencing the Long Play Festival?
David Lang What I’m really hoping will happen is that people will think that the world is full of all sorts of exciting things going on right now. And and that it’s full of creativity and wildness and inspiration and and that the world is very large. You know, I think sometimes when you go to a concert that’s neatly packaged and everything fits and everything makes sense. You go, this is a complete experience andI don’t need anything else. What I’m really hoping will happen is that people will come to this thing and they’ll go. That was unbelievable. And the world is full of all sorts of things that I have to continue to check out.
I asked David Lang which of the artists and programs were his favorite. A message he sent in an email newsletter earlier this month sums up his thoughts about the 2022 festival.
April 5, 2022
LONG PLAY really reminds me of those choose-your-own-adventure books – you get to make your own musical path through each day.
That is why I am going to plot my course through the weekend, very very carefully – I want to make sure I build my schedule around the concerts that I really have to see. Such as:
Stimmung – Karlheinz Stockhausen – It is hard to imagine that a European modernist classic from the 1960’s is in reality a meditation on everyone in the world having sex with each other, but that is what it is. Ekmeles sings at the Mark Morris Dance Center at 5pm on Friday, April 29.
Iva Casian-Lakos plays Joan La Barbara – Bang on a Can introduced these two to each other on one of our Pandemic Marathons last year, commissioning a new work from Joan for Iva’s fiery cello playing. The result was so electrifying that they have made it into a show, and I need to hear how it has grown. At the Center for Fiction at 2pm on Sunday.
Vijay Iyer, Linda May Han Oh, Tyshawn Sorey – Their album UNEASY came out last year on ECM and it has been on heavy rotation in my studio ever since. It’s tuneful and moody and thoughtful, and I really want to hear them play together, live. At Roulette on Saturday at 8pm.
Eddy Kwon – composer, singer, violinist – their music is so beautiful and flows so smoothly across so many boundaries that is hard for me to even describe it. The songs feel like the hit arias from the foundational music of a culture I have never experienced before. Magic. Sunday at 4pm at the Center for Fiction.
Ornette Coleman – The Shape of Jazz to Come – Coleman was a motivator for so much forward motion in music. This legendary album from 1959 was a big part of that, and it is still pushing musicians to move forward. I want to be there when six composers show us how with their world premieres. At BAM’s Opera House 7:30pm on Sunday, May 1.
And then I have to figure out how to run between all the other shows, trying to see as much as I can.
Nona Hendryx! Arvo Pärt! Sun Ra! Éliane Radigue! ZoëKeating! Galina Ustvolskaya! Pamela Z! JG Thirlwell! Soo-Yeon Lyuh! Craig Harris! The Brooklyn Youth Chorus! More! Much more!
Plus I will try to see my own show (Death Speaks) with Shara Nova on Sunday at Mark Morris, if I can figure out how to fit it in.
Whatever the schedule ends up looking like, I have a feeling you are going to see me there with circles under my eyes, as I run from show to show to show to show to show.
Given her association with Morton Feldman, both personal and professional – he was both her spouse and her instructor at Buffalo University – it is tempting to look for comparisons between their compositions. Tempting but unrewarding. Yes, Monk Feldman creates slow, quiet pieces, but so do many composers since Morton Feldman who have greatly departed from his legacy. A fundamental distinction one hears on Verses, Another Timbre’s Monk Feldman recital disc, is that the composer has a cogent sense of form; the longest piece is thirty-one minutes and there are even two five minute pieces, all of which have distinct sectionalization.
The harmonic sensibility of Duo for Piano and Percussion (1988) and piano solo The I and Thou (1988)rely upon an extended sense of triadic post-tonality, with a great fluctuation of the deployment of pitches to create asymmetrical phrases. A distinct gesture that is found in most of the pieces on the recording is a grace note leading into or out of a rest, with this punctuation creating phrase-based boundaries within the pieces. The title work, for solo vibraphone, uses microphrases, short splashes of arpeggios with the pedal down that are followed by rests. Throughout the piece these expand and contract, thicken to wide-spaced chords and reduce to intervals, creating a miniature full of information and surprises.
The recording’s centerpiece, The Northern Shore (1997) is inspired by a place where Monk Feldman, a Canadian, goes to every summer in Quebec. Like a number of the composer’s pieces, nature as a touchstone, rather than as a programme, serves as a wellspring of inspiration. There is something of a ritualistic quality to the way that each player interprets the same intervals and then passes them off to the next, in a kind of call and response. In addition to nature, Monk Feldman has long been interested in theater, particularly Noh, with her most recent opera, or “non-opera” as she prefers to designate them, finished just before the beginning of the pandemic. Color is an important consideration in The Northern Shore, with different verticals and arpeggiations having distinctly scored accumulations of pitch. Like much of her work, the use of triads that never quite resolve provides an achingly beautiful ambience. GBSR Duo – percussionist George Barton and pianist Siwan Rhys – joined by violinist Mira Benjamin, are sympathetic and compelling interpreters of the music.
For Bunita Marcus, Palais de Mari, Triadic Memories
Alfonso Gómez
Kairos 3xCD
Morton Feldman’s late piano works are totemic structures, influential on a generation of composers from the Wandelweiser collective to American experimentalists. Slow-moving, prevailingly soft, and quite long, apart from the Palais de Mari, which still clocks in at nearly a half hour in duration. This Kairos recording presents compelling renditions of Feldman in clear, focused sound that captures the pedaling and decay of notes with admirable detail. Alfonso Gómez’s recent recording of Messiaen’s Vingt Regards, also on Kairos, was an impressive outing and he is more than equal to the challenges and subtleties of Feldman’s music.
Feldman often mentioned that the usual late twentieth century pieces, which often were bounded by a somewhat arbitrary 20-minute time frame, were easier for programming. Feldman preferred to think of his predilection for longer pieces as exploring “scale” rather than “form.” Thus the somewhat diffuse direction found in For Bunita Marcus. Written for a composer whom Feldman mentored, it distinctively uses short, thread-like gestures in the middle register in distinctive fashion. These melodic cells are then expanded into dissonant arpeggiations. As is so often the case, the introduction of a new pitch seems like an important event. The pauses and, for lack of a more accurate term, cadential points, are even more so, and beguilingly asymmetrical.
Palai de Mari plays with a widely spaced chordal domain, with two to four sonorities frequently connected in post-tonal voice-leading. A number of the verticals sound like the added note triads found in Poulenc or Milhaud, but they are of course deployed without the sense of harmonic rhythm that propels music by Les Six. These are interspersed with melodic fragments that emphasize the usual seventh and, less usual, fifth. All told, the effect of the piece is that of Feldman exploring different sonorities within his preferred framework of “scale” rather than “form.”
Triadic Memories, clocking in here at nearly an hour and a half, is a journey of thirds set against Feldman’s characteristic use of dissonances. Shifts of pacing are pointed up by Gómez’s rendition, where the tempo ranges from very slow to andante. In general, changes in texture, tempo, and pitch selection are faster than the previous two pieces, yet in the uncoordinated and unexpected nature of these shifts Feldman manages to create music that floats rather than inexorably moving towards a goal. His late fascination with Asian rugs, with their uneven threading, is a worthy analogue to this piece in particular.
Gómez thrives in the epic environments of Messiaen and Feldman. His focus and sense of large-scale pacing are without peer. Recommended.
Catherine Lamb’s studies with James Tenney at Cal Arts, as well as substantial research of figures such as Erv Wilson, have led her to crafting compositions with subtle tuning systems based on just intonation. On a double-CD from Kairos, JACK Quartet performs an early piece, Two Blooms (2009), and a recent, gargantuan opus, divisio spiralis (2019). Where extended just-intonation composer Ben Johnston created quartets like his Fourth, based on “Amazing Grace,” where the focus is melodic cells, Lamb is interested in the confluence of different intervals, creating beats from difference and combination tones and reveling in the interplay of harmonics.
JACK plays the subtle shifts of intonation with gorgeous specificity, savoring each dyad or vertical construct as a sound image in itself, yet providing a flowing legato that connects the various strands. Their renditions take time, the phrases breathing within a subtle, mainly soft, dynamic spectrum. In this one hears Lamb’s predilections for allowing difference tones to be articulated without the high amplitude of pieces by LaMonte Young and Phil Niblock. The overtones nearly take the role of extra voices in the texture, shimmering and poignant. Two Blooms focuses on the development of the entire compass, not stinting intervals in the tenor and bass registers. It ends with an open fifth that is perfectly tuned, abundantly spacious.
Her most recent quartet, divisio spiralis, is an epic journey of thirteen movements. It too focuses on the entire compass, but the main sections often deal with piquant dissonances in the upper register, where major and minor seconds deliver achingly biting beats. As the piece progresses, wider intervals, particularly open fifths and octaves, provide a context of progression to the formerly aloft altissimo duos. Seconds become sevenths, affording a triadic component to the work’s conclusion. Despite the epic proportions of divisio spiralis, listeners will be rewarded with further details in subsequent listenings. Highly recommended.
“Glitter and Gleam,”the leadoff single for Robbie Lee and Lea Bertucci’s collaboration Wind Bells Falls immediately brings you into the altered domain of their engaging approach to sound art. An essay for warped celeste, it provides a sense of musique concrète while also exploring a playful sensibility. Bell-like timbres ricochet throughout the soundfield, supplying exactly what the title suggests.
Throughout the nine pieces on the recording, the duo deploys winds, keyboards, and tape machines. Their specialties include using acoustic instruments in unconventional ways and distressing tape to make it sound synthetic. “Image Mirror” features wild flute overdubs, once again kaleidoscopically transformed. They sound like the wailing riff from an Arkestra member’s free jazz solo chasing itself around the room.
It is striking how willing the artists are to restrict their palette to a limited and distinctive set of sounds for each track. On “Bags, Boxes, and Bubbles,” chiming chords are set against glissandos in a reiterative dialogue. Via an excellent segue, this morphs into duets of slides and trills on “Division Music.”
The duo stretch out on “Azimuth,” retaining small collections of sounds for discrete sections but gradually morphing between them through a process of addition and subtraction of new timbres and motifs. Baying shards gradually build into a registrally delineated rhythmic canon, a venerable composition device redeployed in this experimental context. The album closes with a delicate miniature, “Somebody Dream,” in which chimes and delicate cooing afford a lullaby sendoff to this unusual and diverting recording.
