Recording review

Composers, Contemporary Classical, Experimental Music, File Under?, Recording review

Ken Ueno sings Sonic Calligraphies in the Tank (Recording review)

Ken Ueno – Sonic Calligraphies (Off-record)

Composer and vocalist Ken Ueno is a creator and performer of notated composition, sound art, and improvisation. A professor at UC Berkeley, Ueno’s singing  involves extended techniques, with an investigation of throat-singing styles from many traditions being just one facet of them. His explorations have also often included using a megaphone. 

The megaphone is not often thought of in musical contexts, but rather as an amplifier of spoken voices, often strident in demeanor and used for warning of danger, imposition of power, and inducing fear. Ueno’s employment of it in previous contexts turned these aims on their heads, serving as commentary on political subterfuge and decolonization. His latest work for voice and megaphone, Sonic Calligraphies, does this too, but in a more abstract fashion. In order to obtain certain frequencies, he modifies vowels to create expressive, but not directly linguistic, inflections. 

Another partner in this endeavor is the recording venue, The Tank, a disused, large metal cistern in Rangely, Colorado. Converted from water container to performance venue, it has a one second delay and is extremely resonant. The inception of its use for performance was the iconic 1989 LP Deep Listening, made by Pauline Oliveros, Stuart Dempster, and Panaiotis. Oliveros later repurposed the recording’s title as a manifesto for her discipline of sound studies. Like this trio, Ueno employs the resonance of the tank, exploring its high ceiling and spacious interior with detailed attention. His sonic palette is a panoply of overtones, microtones, multiphonics, and glissandos. They are deployed in everything from gentle forays to dramatic sonic maelstroms. 

 

Facilitating this endeavor with a megaphone which, above all, is about messaging and overt declamation, makes its abstraction a virtue. The recording is a poetic rejoinder to the amplified discourse so often found today, emanating from the political talking heads on cable news, doom scrolls of social media, and animated disagreements in public and around the dinner table. Sonic Calligraphies may elude precise translation. However, it is eloquent and engaging in equal measure. 

 

-Christian Carey 



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

Tobias Picker, NOVA (Recording review)

Tobias Picker

NOVA

Various Artists

Bright Shiny Things

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

-Christian Carey

 

by Christian Carey