Composer James Romig’s previous piece for electric guitar, The Complexity of Distance, written for Mike Scheidt, was an overwhelming paean to distorted revelry. It was a swerve from Romig’s previous compositions, which were primarily for acoustic instruments, such as the Pulitzer-nominated piano work still and a number of pieces for percussion. His latest composition for electric guitar, The Fragility of Time, is played clean, sans distortion, and serves as a sort of companion to The Complexity of Distance.
The hour-long work returns to the gradual unfolding of still. Romig began his mature career writing serial music with rhythmic vivacity. In recent years, he has retained a constructivist mindset, but slowed down the tempo of his works. One is tempted to attribute some of this to his many residencies at national parks, where the scenery and time to create seem to have metabolized in a tendency for his phrases to breathe differently.
One could scarcely hope for a better advocate than Sargent who, in addition to recording The Fragility of Time, has performed it at several venues. The level of concentration required to render the piece’s asymmetrical gestures, moving frequently between regularly fretted single notes, verticals, and harmonics, is considerable. The dynamics are subdued for much of the piece, though as it progresses the texture is peppered with single forte gestures, and it closes with forte harmonics.The pitch language itself is post-tonal in design, but doesn’t eschew the use of tertian sonorities.
The Fragility of Time has a mesmeric quality.Listeners may attend to subtle shifts occurring throughout the piece or merely bask in its attractive sound world. Either way, The Fragility of Time is a rewarding experience: take time to savor it.
Palm Sweat: Marc Ducret Plays the Music of Tim Berne
Marc Ducret, guitar/arranger
Out of Your Head CD/DL
This is no ordinary jazz guitar album. Saxophonist/composer Tim Berne and guitarist Marc Ducret are longtime collaborators. After receiving a stack of compositions from Berne, Ducret set out to arrange them for overdubbed guitars, brass choir, voices, percussion, and cello (played by his son). Ducret knows Berne’s own style well, and while celebratingnd 2 it places his own stamp on this collection of work.
“Curls/Palm Sweat/Mirth of the Cool” begins the recording. An eleven-minute long suite, in it Ducret comes on heavy, with overdubbed, distorted guitars, panning between speakers. I didn’t previously associate Berne’s music with power chords, but Ducret rocking out is in some ways analogous to Berne’s Snake Oil band at full fury. “Stutter Step” begins with a long drone, over which an extended solo of angular lines, complete with whammy bar vibrato, create a fractious demeanor. There are then a series of harmonic arpeggiations alongside brass choir. The layering of instruments is adroit and the result, once again, faithful to Berne’s musical language. “Shiteless 1 and 2” are a study in contrasts, the first exploring noise and then adding horns to the mix, and the second overlapping harp-like arpeggios and a clean guitar sound.
Not all the compositions feature amplification. “Rolled Oats 1” and “Rolled Oats 2” feature a more traditional jazz sound, without effects or extreme amplitude. They are lithe standouts among the recording’s walls of sound, and a welcome respite that features Ducret’s playing in a gentler vein.
Palm Sweat is a fascinating translation by Ducret of Berne’s works. Recommended.
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.