Tag: Experimental Music

Best of, CD Review, Contemporary Classical, Experimental Music, File Under?

Best of 2021: New/Experimental Recordings

Best New/Experimental Recordings

Trio IX and Exercises

Christian Wolff

Trio Accanto

Nicholas Hodges, piano; Marcus Weiss, saxophone; Christian Dierstein, percussion

Wergo CD

Three String Quartets

Christian Wolff

Quatuor Bozzini

New World CD

 

On Trio IX and Exercises, Trio Accanto performs recent music by Christian Wolff, a composer with whom they have often collaborated. Trio IX (2017) is dedicated to the group, and it is filled with tunes ranging from J.S. Bach to work songs to quotes and “reminiscences”  from Wolff’s own music. This is a palimpsest of a quodlibet, and all the better for it, as the strands from Wolff’s repertory of tunes are crafted into a fast shifting colloquy between trio members. Snippets of material are passed back and forth, with frequent interruptions and sudden confluences that make for many delightful surprises. Trio Accanto also performs some of Wolff’s most recent pieces in his Exercises series, from 2011 and 2018; open instrumentation, mobile form compositions. The similarity between these freer pieces and Trio IX, and the fact that the performers worked on the music in close consultation with the composer, suggest that this is a benchmark recording for understanding Wolff’s recent performance practice. 

 

Wolff’s String Quartet: Exercises Out of Songs (1974-1976) is another covert quodlibet, one in which Wolff’s music takes on an Ivesian cast, both in terms of some of the material and the collage aspects of the form. Once again, rapid stops and starts deliberately disrupt the flow. These juxtapositions are performed spotlessly by the estimable Quatuor Bozzini. Cast in a single movement, For Two Violinists, Violist, and Cellist (2008), as the title suggests, breaks the string quartet mold, allowing each player their own space and a degree of agency. This goes hand in hand with the egalitarian sensibility that Wolff has espoused both in his writings and music, always viewing new works with an eye toward collaboration. For Two Violinists, Violist, and Cellist ups the dissonance quotient but retains a highly gestural rhythmic language. Its one attacca movement, clocking in at over a half hour, is a compelling retort to large-scale late modernism. Out of Kilter (String Quartet 5) was written in 2019, and contrasts the previous piece in terms of design. Cast in a series of short movements, the demeanor now shifts within movements and between movements, capturing a plethora of moods, tempos, and solo, duo, and ensemble deployments. Wolff is nearing ninety years of age, yet he still has more tricks up his sleeve. 

 

Pauline Anna Strom

Angel Tears in Sunlight

RVNG

 

Pauline Anna Strom passed away in December 2020. She left behind her first new album in over thirty years, Angel Tears in Sunlight, which was released on RVNG in February 2021. The recent resurgence of interest in “sisters with transistors,” female synthesizer pioneers, has enabled a number of artists to be reconsidered and reissued. It has also inspired several to make new work. Strom was part of the dawning of New Age music, an unfairly maligned genre that is having a resurgence in interest. However, Angels Tears in Sunlight demonstrates that Strom’s work was never about easy stylistic markers. It includes pieces like “Marking Time” and “I Still Hope” in which one can readily hear how minimalism and ambient electronica were touchstones. Wide ranging glissandos in “Tropical Rainforest” unhinge elements of the music from simple harmonic trajectory into synth experimentation that resides further out. One only wishes Strom had gotten to see how deservedly this new music has been warmly received. 

 

Meadow

Linda Catlin Smith

Mia Cooper, violin; Joachim Roewer, viola and William Butt, cello

Louth Contemporary Music Society CD

 

Kermès

Julia Den Boer, piano

New Focus Recordings CD

 

Meadow was released December 11, 2020, too late for most music critics to catch it in time for year-end coverage (except Steve Smith and Tim Rutherford-Johnson, of course). Since the release of this half hour long string trio composed by Linda Catlin Smith, both the composer and the label of this release, Louth Contemporary Music Society, have grown in terms of influence and recorded output (see the Frey review below). Meadow contains a lush, primarily modal, harmonic palette tempered with piquant dissonances. Smith takes her time unfolding various patternings of the primarily chordal texture, creating a deliciously unhurried amble through fascinating, distinctive musical pathways. 

 

Catlin Smith features prominently on Kermès, a release on New Focus by pianist Julia Den Boer that features four pieces by female composers. The Underfolding once again features added-note harmonies, but these are interspersed with pure triads and, in a fleeting but fetching middle section, offset by a descending bass line. Crimson, by Rebecca Saunders, has some delightfully crunchy verticals, a constantly evolving set of clusters that move upward from the middle register to encompass widely spaced gestures in the soprano register. These two angular off-kilter ostinatos create complex rhythmic interrelationships. The lower register enters belatedly and is startling upon its appearance. Crimson’s denouement is something to behold. Déserts, by Giulia Lorusso, includes five movements responding to the flora and fauna of deserts in different locations. Lorusso often uses the sustain pedal to extend bass note jabs and dissonant intervals. These are juxtaposed against repeated open fifths and octaves, which reveal a plethora of overtones when sustained. Lorusso depicts powerful images of the desert as richly inhabited rather than the default brittle dryness that other composers have adopted. Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s Reminiscence begins with open intervals and quickly moves to widely spaced diminished sonorities, from there incorporating polychords with the tritone remaining prominent. It is the first piece by Thorvaldsdottir that I can recall using chordal arpeggiations in the bass, which presses the piece forward during its conclusion. 

 

Alex Paxton

Music for Bosch People 

Birmingham Record Company/NMC

 

Taking the bizarre work of 16th century artist Hieronymus Bosch as an inspiration, on Bosch People improvising trombonist and composer Alex Paxton writes exuberantly polystylic music that switches abruptly from genre to genre: think Zappa, Zorn, and Vinko Globakar in a mixing bowl. Backed up by ten crackerjack musicians who inhabit jazz, rock, and contemporary classical, the music is breathless for the sopranos, saxophonists, and Paxton himself; likely for the listener as well.

 

I Listened to the Wind Again

Jürg Frey

Louth Contemporary Music Society

Hélène Fauchère, Soprano; Carol Robinson, Clarinet; Nathalie Chabot, Violin;  Agnès Vesterman, Cello; Garth Knox, Viola;  Sylvain Lemêtre, Percussion

 

Louth Contemporary Music Society has released a treasure trove of recordings via their Bandcamp site this year. This new recording of Jürg Frey’s I Listened to the Wind Again, for soprano, clarinet, strings, and percussion, is a standout among chamber releases of new music this year. Frey sets fragmentary quotations from French-Swiss poets Gustave Roud and Pierre Chappuis, Tang dynasty poet Bai Juyi, and  Lebanese-U.S. poet-painter Etel Adnan. The gentle declamation of the text is exquisitely rendered by Hélène Fauchère. The rest of the ensemble undertakes similarly aphoristic lines, slowly and softly, which gradually thread together into an achingly beautiful web of layered interplay. I Listened to the Wind is a captivating listen.

 

Enno Poppe/Wolfgang Heiniger

Tonband

Yarnwire and Sam Torres

Wergo DL

 

Annea Lockwood

Becoming Air/Vanishing Point

Nate Wooley, trumpet

Yarn/Wire

Black Truffle DL

 

Michael Pisaro-Liu

Stem-flower-root

Nate Wooley

Tisser/Tissu Editions DL and Chapbook

 

Composers Enno Poppe and Wolfgang Heiniger collaborate on the work Tonband, a piece for the piano/percussion quartet Yarnwire plus live electronics. Heiniger is skilful at finding and emulating all sorts of vintage keyboard sounds and also supplies synthesis that glides through glissandos and microtones. Each composer has a solo work as well. Enno Poppe’s Field unfurls off-kilter ostinatos, building sheets of chromatic scales on mallet instruments and piano. Tonband, featuring live electronics performed by Sam Torres, is an imaginative combination of percussive timbres elicited from Yarn/Wire along with a diverse palette of bleep electronica. Heiniger’s solo turn Neumond, based on horror movie soundtracks, is an appropriately spooky electronics piece but also features a number of melodic fragments, each of which could be a theme in its own right. 

 

Two recent instrumental pieces by Annea Lockwood are included on a recent Black Truffle release, Becoming Air/Vanishing Point. Trumpeter Nate Wooley is challenged to transcend the limitations of his quite considerable chops on Becoming Air (2018). Wooley is a masterful trumpeter, who specializes in overblowing and extended techniques, but the piece deliberately creates an environment in which some notes will inevitably waver. Starting out soft with lots of silences and abetted by electronics, it eventually crescendos into a gale force of fortissimo distortion. Yarn/Wire is featured on the second piece, Vanishing Point, a threnody for the mass extinction of insects. While there is no attempt at deliberate parody, the ensemble does an estimable job creating an insectine ambience that is movingly evocative.

 

The format for Michael Pisaro-Liu’s Stem-flower-root is an appealing one: a download with a chapbook discussing the piece’s inspirations in detail. It was premiered at Brooklyn’s For/With Festival, for which Wooley commissioned solo trumpet pieces from composers who hadn’t previously considered the medium. Allowed here to address music that celebrates rather than devolves his sound, Wooley plays sustained tones with abundant air supply. Octaves and overtones enter over a unison to create polyphony based on the harmonic series. Sine tones play a prominent role as well, allowing for a different color to complement the trumpet. I love the depiction of the score, how Pisaro-Liu, in reference to the titular subject, describes sections as “branchings.” Wooley is an extraordinarily gifted player, and in tandem with one of the most imaginative composers in the US, he creates a winning performance of an absorbing piece.

 

Louis Andriessen

The Only One

Nora Fischer, soprano

Los Angeles Philharmonic, Esa-Pekka Salonen, conductor

Nonesuch Records

 

Louis Andriessen passed away this year at age 82 . The Los Angeles Philharmonic, conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen, has released one of Andriessen’s final works, The Only One (2018), on a Nonesuch recording. It is a set of five orchestral songs, with an introduction and two interludes, for soprano soloist Nora Fischer. The texts are by Flemish poet Delphine Lecompte, who translated the ones used into English. 

 

Fischer is a classically trained vocalist who is also adept in popular and cabaret styles. Her singing is abundantly expressive, ranging from Kurt Weill style recitation through honeyed lyricism to raspy screams. This is particularly well-suited both to the texts, which encompass a range of emotions, from rage to resignation, and to the abundantly varied resources Andriessen brings to bear. In The Only One, his inspiration remains undimmed; it is a finely wrought score. Much of it explores pathways through minimalism equally inspired by Stravinsky that have become his trademark. Andriessen is also well known for resisting composing for the classical orchestra for aesthetic reasons. Here he adds electric guitar and bass guitar and calls for a reduced string cohort, making the scoring like that used for a film orchestra. Harp and piano (doubling celesta) also play important roles. Esa-Pekka Salonen presents the correct approach to this hybrid instrumentation, foregrounding edgy attacks and adopting energetic tempos that banish any recourse to sentimentality. As valedictions go, “The Only One” is an eloquent summary of a composer’s life and work. 

 

A More Attractive Way

IST

Rhodri Davies, prepared harp; Simon H. Fell, prepared double bass; Mark Wastell, prepared cello

Confront Core Series 5XCD

 

Improvising String Trio’s scintillating interplay is captured on A More Attractive Way, a generous boxed set of live performances from 1996-2000 in the UK. All three members of IST use preparations, so that at times they challenge the listener to recognize the players among a “super instrument” of effects. Harpist Rhodri Davies, bassist Simon H. Fell, and cellist Mark Wastell are chronicled at the outset of their collaboration at a gig in London, which is followed by performances in Barclay, Norwich, and Cambridge. Already compelling at the outset, it is fascinating how the group’s dynamic and their collective sense of pacing and shaping extended materials evolves to an almost extrasensory level by the conclusion of the quintuple CD set. Free improvisation at the highest level. 

 

Canoni Circolari

Aldo Clementi

Kathryn Williams, flutes; Joe Richards, percussion; Mira Benjamin, violins; Mark Knoop, piano

All That Dust D/L

 

Italian composer Aldo Clementi (1925-2011) made the venerable procedure of canonic writing seem fresh again with the unconventional instrumentation of his work Canoni Circolari (2006). Alongside three other process-driven and relatively compact pieces, the listener is treated to Clementi’s passion for patterning ranging from clocks to chess, to canons from all periods of music. On Overture, Kathryn Williams overdubs a whorl of scalar passages in proportional rhythm for a dozen flutes in different shapes and sizes.

Percussionist Joe Richards and pianist Mark Knoop create a Westminster Abbey level of clangor on the mimicked bell-changing of l’Orologio di Arcevia. Mira Benjamin overdubs eight violins, once again in polytempo relationships to each other, on Melanconia. The whole quartet interprets the enigmatically notated titled work, a canon with interpretation left open about which parts are taken by whom and when to stop. When is the circle broken? In three minutes – one could imagine even more. How often does one say that about a round? 

 

Tulpa

Curtis K. Hughes 

New Focus Recordings

Curtis K. Hughes’s second portrait CD was released this year on New Focus;  the programmed works span from 1995 to 2017. There is craft-filled consistency from the earliest to most recent works, with the principle change being an ever more assured compositional voice and a major work in Tulpa, a 2017 piece for ensemble. Tulpa is engaging throughout, and seems to be a culmination of the other, smaller, compositions on the CD. Whether for soloists or writ large, Hughes writes compelling music that is artfully crafted and energetically appealing.

-Christian Carey

 

by Christian Carey
Best of, CDs, Experimental Music, File Under?, jazz

Happy 80th Birthday Wadada Leo Smith!

Best of 2021 – Happy 80th Birthday Wadada Leo Smith!

 

Wadada Leo Smith turns eighty today, and Sequenza 21 wishes him many more years of health, creative improvisation, and composing. Smith has been a driving force as a member of AACM for over five decades, a keen collaborator with jazz and concert musicians, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and a faculty member at CalArts and elsewhere. 

2021 has been a prolific one in terms of record releases by the trumpeter and composer. He is joined by wind player Douglas Ewart and drummer Mike Reed on the Astral Spirits CD Sun Beams of Shimmering Light. The standout opening movement is a sixteen-minute long suite “Constellations and Conjunctional Spaces” which begins with fragmentary utterances that build into long, florid lines that are succeeded by riotous free play. A short coda sees motives from the top of the piece reexamined in light of what has transpired in between.

TUM has released four recordings by Smith this calendar year, with a seven-CD collection of string quartets on deck for early 2022. The only single CD  among these is A Love  Sonnet for Billie Holiday, which features a trio with his frequent collaborators pianist Vijay Iyer and drummer Jack DeJohnette, marking the first time all three have worked together. It is a winning grouping, as are the two included duos with DeJohnette. As Smith points out in the liner notes, the approach here alludes to his work with Anthony Braxton and Leroy Jenkins on “The Bell,” a piece from his debut album in 1969. This affinity is both in terms of interaction and collaboration, but also in a harmonic language more recognizable in Smith’s earlier music. 

The Great Lakes Quartet, which includes saxophonist Leroy Jenkins (on some tracks Jonathon Haffner), DeJohnette, and bassist Henry Lindberg, is the personnel on the TUM double CD The Chicago Symphonies. There are four pieces here, Gold, Diamond, Pearl, and Sapphire, subtitled “The Presidents Symphony: Their Visions for America; Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg and Barack Obama at Selma!” How can a quartet play “symphonies,” one might wonder before listening. But upon engaging with these recordings, it is clear that the formal designs, development of thematic material, and use of all of the instruments’ capabilities to the utmost engage with music writ large.

A triple CD of solo trumpet music might seem like a long sit, but Smith’s individual performances on Trumpet are riveting. He recorded these fourteen new pieces, many of them extended, sculpted works, in a single weekend at St. Mary’s Church in the town of Pohja, on the Southern Coast of Finland, which provides a great acoustic for Smith’s luminous sound.  Finally (for now), Sacred Ceremonies, a three disc recording with bassist Bill Laswell and Milford Graves, visionary drummer of the New York “new wave” free jazz scene, who passed away in February, 2021 and to whom the recording is dedicated. The first CD features a duet between Smith and Graves, the second, Smith with Laswell, and the third is a trio. The level of rhythmic layering in the trumpet and drums duos is truly astonishing. Quotation plays a large role, with Smith imitating Graves’ gestures but choosing melodic lines from blues, standards, and even nursery rhymes to cross-pollinate the music. Laswell adds elements of funk and avant-pop to the mix; Smith responds in places by playing through a wah-wah pedal and employing minimal patterning. The trio is a summit of experimental practices, and the polyglot musical language they form together is inimitable and now, sadly, with the passing of Graves, irreplaceable. 

  • Christian Carey

 

by Christian Carey
Books, Contemporary Classical, Experimental Music, File Under?

Required Reading: Experimental Music Since 1970

experimental music since 1970

Book Review:

Experimental Music Since 1970

By Jennie Gottschalk

Bloomsbury, 2016

284 pp.

From the very beginning of Experimental Music Since 1970, author Jennie Gottschalk lets us know that her perspective is that of a “maker,” a composer. This is instructive as to the book’s approach and to its inclusion and, in some cases, exclusion, of experimental composers who have made an impact over the past five decades. These decisions are based on a particular composer’s vantage point rather than an attempt to construct an all-encompassing canon of “important” figures, which in the fragmented and various perspectives of the postmodern era no book could truly do without devolving into mere name-checking and cataloging. Happily, Gottschalk’s book is anything but a catalog — her portraits of various wings of experimental music are vivid and often detailed. It is the viewpoint of a fascinating “maker,” someone who embraces an array of imaginative approaches to musical experimentation.

Gottschalk suggests that one of the purposes of her volume is to serve as a continuation of Michael Nyman’s seminal Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond. Perhaps in response to the centrality of Cage in the earlier volume, she begins Experimental Music Since 1970 with a deconstruction of the composer’s 4’33”, pointing out the various pathways into experiment that the piece still affords today. Gottschalk identifies these central concerns as follows: indeterminacy, change, non-subjectivity, research, and experience. While it is quickly pointed out that not all experimental music engages all of these issues, they prove to be pivotal in the way that Gottschalk defines and describes experimentation.

With these initial precepts laid out, the book proceeds to further parse experimentation into particular spheres of activity, with each chapter tackling one or more of these. Thus we are spared a chronological overview and when concerns overlap in composers’ works, they may reappear throughout the volume. This does lead one to question certain choices of space allocation. For instances, even given all of his fertile creativity, why is Peter Ablinger so often referenced while microtonal composers Ezra Sims and Joe Maneri and hypercomplex composers Brian Ferneyhough and Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf are not mentioned even once? Apparently, the second modern school falls outside of Gottschalk’s purview. While one can fall back on her statement that she is a composer rather than a historian, it is somewhat disappointing that these significant types of experimentation seem “beyond the pale” (interestingly, there is similar neglect of American late modernism in Tim Rutherford-Johnson’s recent After the Fall: Music Since 1989). The presence of experimental jazz is also spotty, with a few references to artists such as Anthony Braxton and George Lewis but nothing about, for instance, Ornette Coleman, Alice Coltrane, and Sun Ra. Another challenge is some haphazard copy-editing, particularly in the book’s latter half.

These caveats aside, what is covered here is a splendor of imaginative music-making that will supply much food for thought. Gottschalk is particularly in her element when discussing the Wandelweiser collective, approaches to instrument-building, ad hoc electronics, improvisation, sound art, ecomusic in general and site-specific works in particular. The book’s inclusivity in terms of race, gender, and sexuality may, along with Rutherford-Johnson’s similarly sensitive treatment of these issues in Music Since 1989, help to slay a few stereotypes about composers. Gottschalk’s website, Sound Expanse, continues to build upon the achievements and aims of Experimental Music Since 1970, providing a valuable companion to the book and a “must bookmark” resource all by itself.

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by Christian Carey
Canada, CDs, Chamber Music, Composers, Contemporary Classical, Experimental Music, File Under?

Linda Catlin Smith on Another Timbre

Linda Catlin Smith

Drifter

Apartment House and Bozzini Quartet

Another Timbre at105X2

 

Born in the US and residing in Canada for more than a quarter century, Linda Catlin Smith has become a fixture on that country’s cultural radar. She has been welcomed and feted as one of Canada’s own. For instance, she is only the second woman to win the Jules Léger Prize for Chamber Music and has had a long association with the ensemble ArrayMusic, whom she served as Artistic Director. Several recordings have been released of her music, but last year’s Dirt Road won her critical acclaim and belated notice in the United States, ending up on many critics’ “best of year” lists (mine included). Released by Another Timbre, Dirt Road was merely a foretaste of that label’s commitment to Canadian music. Another Timbre has recently released a set of five recordings in its Canadian Composers series (another batch of five is due later this year).  Catlin Smith features prominently, with the double disc Drifter serving as Volume 1 in the series. Other composers include Martin Arnold, Isiah Ceccarelli, Chlyoko Szlavnics, and Marc Sabat.

 

Drifter’s program is performed by two chamber groups: Apartment House and Bozzini Quartet. The “drifting” in question is not itinerant hitchhiking, but rather the placid tempo pathways frequently chosen by Catlin Smith. The piano trio Far from Shore, played here by Philip Thomas, Anton Lukiszevieze, and Mira Benjamin,  is a case in point. Slow, soft music for the trio, often reminiscent of Morton Feldman’s approach (one that Catlin Smith acknowledges as a signature influence on her work) abides alongside passages of colorful piano chords. The spectrum moves from inexorably repeated constrained sets of pitches, to chromatic counterpoint, to whole washes of sound. The intuitive sensibility that Catlin Smith claims as her approach in preference to any dogmatic systemization clearly allows her to move through constantly changing musical terrain, all the while maintaining an organic sense of each piece. How does she manage this? An interview in the booklet accompanying the Canadian Composers set quotes her as saying,”Listening. Lots of listening.” One could do worse as a composer in any style to listen as carefully as Catlin Smith does.

 

Cantelina (2013) for viola and vibraphone, played by Emma Richards and Simon Limbrick, presents another of the composer’s interests, one in heterogenous instrumental pairings. Both here and in the Piano Quintet ( 2014), another of Catlin Smith’s predilections, exploring tightly knit counterpoint in close registral positions, is featured. The overlapping in Cantilena is quite fetching (it is a combination that should be explored by more composers and one I’ll keep in my own hip pocket) and it is equally affecting when writ large in the quintet. The title work is also for a seemingly challenging combination, piano and classical guitar, played by Philip Thomas and Diego Castro Magas, but Catlin Smith’s gentle daubs of coloristic harmony and unequal ostinatos work beautifully in this duo context as well. Mon Qui Tremblais (1999), played by Thomas, Benjamin, and Limbrick, has a pulse-driven piano part that is joined by sustained violin and bowed pitched percussion. An interesting notational device is used: rather than writing out all the notes and rhythms, the composer specifies that the musicians silently read a Rimbaud poem and use its speech rhythms to shape the musical work (for instance, the percussionist gets his attack points from the accented French syllables).

 

Bozzini Quartet appears in two string quartets by Catlin Smith. Folkestone (1999) pits a persistently high violin line against blocks of slow articulated, syncopated chords played by the other three members (these have an almost accordion-like quality in their spacing). Gradually, other lines emerge from the texture, with the cello playing a poignant solo dissonant with the rest of the harmony. The chordal passages begin registrally to disperse, bringing the locus of activity closer to the violin’s sustained flautando melody. Mid-register lines now break free and the chords move in double time for a brief stretch before ceding the terrain to widely spaced and again slowly articulated harmonies. This alternation of patterns includes still more elements to be introduced: pizzicatos, duets, flashes of quartal harmonic brilliance, and a bass-register cello melody made truly weighty by the registers it has balanced against before. Clocking in at more than 32 minutes, Folkestone is a substantial and thoroughly captivating composition. Gondola involves members of the quartet coming in and out of unison and a gentle boat-rocking pacing that Catlin Smith describes thus:”The title loosely refers to its slight undulation or floating qualities – a subtle motion or disturbance of the surface, like trailing the hand in water.”

 

Evocative imagery for truly evocative music-making. Drifter is an album (a double-album at that) worth savoring.

 

 

 

by Christian Carey
Recordings

Best New Music 2014

Cross-posted from my home site, The Big City, here are my lists for top new music recordings of the year, in a few different categories:

Best 2014 Albums of New Classical Music:

  • Dan Becker, Fade. Not just a set of excellent compositions, but a rarity in classical music, a set that is thought-out and made to work as an album. Becker’s music shares some of the hints of pop sensibility with that of Michael Torke, but has a tougher, more abstract edge. Terrific chamber pieces, played b y the Common Sense and New Millenium Ensembles, are interspersed with Diskclavier realizations of Becker’s “Reinventions,” harmonic structures from Bach on which he’s placed his own, improvisatory lines. Listening to the album is an affirmation of the past, of the incredible accumulation of music and ideas, and the possibilities of the future. Deeply enjoyable.
  • Martin Bresnick: Prayers Remain Forever. Bresnick has been indispensable as a teacher to the current generation of new composers, and his own music is sublime, with exquisite craft, an ear and heart for the beautiful, and a transparent, graceful and unselfconscious connection to the common musical materials all around us. This is a superb collection of recent chamber works, beautifully played.
  • Ralph van Raat: Fred Rzewski: Four Pieces. Rzewski’s political themes, as strong as they are, have overshadowed his achievements as a pure composer. The People United Will Never Be Defeated is a statement, and also one of the great works of variations in the classical literature. If that is his Goldberg, then Four Pieces is his “Hammerklavier,” a tremendous piano sonata in classical form.
  • Ludovic Morlot, Seattle Symphony, John Luther Adams: Become Ocean. A welcome Pulitzer Prize winning composition that actually deserves the award, a concentrated culmination of JLA’s strengths as a composer. The recording is also superior to the live performance at Carnegie Hall in May, where the piano part was buried under the orchestral textures.
  • Arditti Quartet, Bernhard Lang: The Anatomy of Disaster. Another installment in composer Bernhard Lang’s Monodologies series, and one of several excellent Arditti Quartet albums released this year. This made the list due to my personal affinity for Lang as a composer and a man. Based on Haydn’s The Seven Last Words of Christ, Lang’s writing is bitingly expressive, destabilizing, and a real ethical and moral antidote to the problem of endless, quantized, manufactured loops and repetitions.
  • Camerata Pacifica, John Harbison: String Trio, Four Songs of Solitude, Songs America Loves to Sing. I have mostly grudgingly admired Harbison’s composing, appreciating how his music was made without enjoying it, so this set of chamber music and songs was a surprise. The musical language has both greater expression than I’ve heard from him before, and also greater, coherent rigor. He’s pared down his materials and now says more. The Camerata Pacifica plays with natural ease and assurance.
  • Jeroen van Veen, Van Veen: Piano Music. Give the pianist some. Van Veen has produced two great, comprehensive sets of minimalist piano music, as well as the ultimate collection of Simeon ten Holt’s Canto Ostinato, so why not gives us this multi-disc box of his own compositions? Not all of the 50 tracks are great, but so much of this music is, especially his Minimal Etudes
  • yMusic, Balance Problems. Terrific chamber pieces from composers in and around the orbit of New Amsterdam records; clear, tough-minded post-minimal music, just skip the series of chords at the end, from Sufjan Stevens, that masquerade as a composition.
  • George Crumb: Voices from the Heartland, Sun and Shadow. Not fade away. Critical interest seems, oddly, to have turned away from Crumb, as if he is neither productive or relevant. This album proves otherwise, especially in the premiere recording of Voices from the Heartland, which concludes his American Songbook cycle. Crumb is misapprehended as belonging to a particular, dated, intellectual fashion for mysticism, when it is his critics who are lost in the vagaries of the zeitgeist. The beauty and craft of Crumb’s music are timeless.
  • Steve Reich: Radio Rewrite. Indispensable as every other new set of pieces from Reich, this is sure to please his pop followers with Jonny Greenwood’s solid playing of Electric Counterpoint and the premiere of his Radio Rewrite, a subtly strong piece that is part of an on-going transitional period. But most impressive is Vicky Chow’s fantastic solo performance of Piano Counterpoint.
Post-WWII composing

  • Tyshawn Sorey Trio, Alloy. My personal favorite and overall best record of the year. One reason for that is the musical ideas inside it are so deep and powerful that they’re a little bit frightening, it’s a large universe in which to lose oneself. Alloy is on a lot of jazz lists, but I can’t put it on mine: Sorey is most closely and accurately defined as a jazz musician, but this is an album, like his others, of his compositions, and there is so little jazz concept and aesthetic in them that they are pretty much sui generis. One of the fascinating features of his music is that, while he can be heard at the drum kit, the sense of rhythm as time is almost nonexistent (except in “Template”). The music is full of space, a sense that notes and events are placed intuitively (which I deeply admire, it’s extremely difficult to develop the ear and confidence to write such sparse yet finely structured music), the feeling of an internal journey without beginning or end. Feldman is the heuristic commonly applied to Sorey’s composing, but that’s misleading. Feldman, especially his mature music, wrote scores that are dense with activity. Sorey shares a taste for low dynamics, but the sparseness of his music sounds closer to Cage, only with an entirely different idea of expression. Imagine a Miles Davis trumpet solo removed from a tune, with the space inside expanded by magnitudes, and you get some idea of both the manner of this album, and how great the music is.
  • Bora Yoon, Sunken Cathedral. Tremendously beautiful and involving. This is the audio portion of Yoon’s ambitious multimedia project that will appear at the Prototype Festival next month. The sound combines the purity of her voice. chant, electronic textures, folk instruments, spoke word, and more. Another concept that is fiendishly difficult to hold together, and the firmness of her form makes this exceptional.
  • Tristan Perich, Surface Image. Perich’s work combines imagination and process: as his pieces go along, or as you see them in an installation, the path connecting conception, process and execution is always clear. That alone is both important and satisfying, but the results, like this mesmerizing, new post-minimal piece for piano and electronics, are great music in their own right.
  • a.pe.ri.od.ic, Jürg Frey: More or Less. It’s a good year when I have to choose between this and Andy Lee’s album of Frey piano music, the difference being that I found myself listening to this set of amazing chamber pieces, in excellent performances, a little more often.
  • Harry Partch, Harry Partch: Plectra and Percussion Dances. Self-recommending. This is the first complete recording of the title work, and the CD includes a spoken introduction by Partch that he delivered in 1953.
  • Peter Söderberg, On the Carpet of Leaves Illuminated by the Moon. Söderberg plays the lute, and on this record he performs music by Alvin Lucier, James Tenney, John Cage and Steve Reich. That’s really all you need to know.
  • Flux Quartet, Morton Feldman: String Quartet No. 1. Utter masters of this music. Flux followed up what is now an almost routinely great concert of Feldman’s String Quartet No. 2 with this release. The finest recoding of the String Quartet No. 1, and the finest traversal of the complete string quartet music by Feldman.
  • Ursula Oppens, Bruce Brubaker, Meredith Monk: Piano Songs. Not songs, but piano music, with occasional shouts and yelps. Echt-Monk, the physical vitality of her music, the way the pianos sound like they are hopping and dancing, is a tribute to her compositional ideals. A little disorienting at first to hear her style applied to the keyboard, but it gets better with every listen.
  • Dai Fujikara, Dai Fujikara: ICE. This is simply one of the finest collections of music at the cutting edge of the classical tradition that I’ve heard in years. Fujikara renders the densest and most complex ideas with complete clarity and control of his materials, and ICE plays the music like they’ve been working on it for years. Which they pretty much have.
  • Sarah Cahill, Mamoru Fujieda: Patterns of Plants. Fujieda’s work is one of the most striking compositions in contemporary music. The music is literally organic, composed out of Fujieda’s recordings of electrical activity in plants. What comes out is music that has an uncanny feeling of belonging to every place and epoch, yet having no identifiable national or temporal features. It is truly strange and beautiful. Cahill plays it with the attention to detail and musicality that one usually hears pianists bring to Schubert. Not a complete set of this magnum opus, but the most extensive to date.
Post-WWII playing

  • Nils Bultmann, Troubadour Blue. A set of musical rich and beautiful viola improvisations that delve deep into the history of western music.
  • Bernd Klug, Cold Commodities. A gripping, surprising, unique and accomplished album that combines found sounds, electronics and improvisation with tremendous rigor and expression.
  • Asphalt Orchestra plays the Pixies: Surfer Rosa. An amazing record. These arrangements are imaginative sonic adaptations of the classic Pixie’s album, transforming the originals into something more complex and more consistently satisfying.
  • Robin Williamson, Trusting in the Rising Light. A strange, entrancing disc from one of the founders of The Incredible String band. This is a collection of songs that, though originals, have deep roots in ancient memories and traditions. WIlliamson’s voice is ravaged with age, making the expression that much more effective. Fantastic accompaniment from Mat Maneri and Ches Smith.
  • Lumen Drones. Post-rock meets Hardanger fiddle. Difficult to describe, the music drone based, full of rhythm and improvisation, tough and delicate at once. Must be heard, it’s completely wonderful.
  • Carolina Eyck, Christopher Tarnow, Improvisations for Theremin and Piano. Much more than a curiosity, this is fascinating set. Eyck is a tremendous theremin player, with complete command of tone and texture. Mostly quiet and tonal, the playing is superb, don’t be thrown by the twee track titles.
  • Battle Trance, Palace of Wind. I have the privilege of experiencing a performance of this piece by this quartet of tenor saxophonists, and it was jaw-dropping and powerful. Imagine Colin Stetson times four, playing non-stop for about forty five minutes with a romantic conception of transcendence, and you have some idea of the depths of this album.
  • Travis Just + Object Collection, No Song. Downtown to the max, turned up to 11! The good natured aggression of this record adds a sense of fun, but the playing is purposeful, intense, and heavier than the doomiest sludge. (http://shop.khalija.com/album/no-song)
  • Plymouth. The members of this band are Jamie Saft, Joe Morris, Chris Lightcap, Gerald Cleaver and Mary Halvorson. They play dense, lively, passionate, intelligent noise improvisations. Excellent in every way, and the best release so far from Rarenoise records.
  • Thurston Moore/John Moloney, Caught on Tape. Loud, but delicate. The muscularity hides what, underneath, is a severe, even ascetic aesthetic, a search for beauty in the midst of conflict, like the edge of razor blade, shining through a pile of trash. Pretty much Moore’s finest moments as a guitar player.
Electronic Music
  • Dave Seidel, ~60Hz. As pure as music gets. Seidel’s pieces are made by combing sine waves and letting them play. Engrossing and gorgeous.
  • John Supko, Bill Seaman, s_traits. This record is astonishing. I’ll refer you to Marshall Yarbrough’s article for the details, but this upends every idea of structure and form and makes it work. Hard stop listening to.
  • No Lands, Negative Space. A prime example of the possibilities of electronic music: this band’s debut (mainly it’s Michael Hammond), is as abstract as Ussachevsky and as appealing as Tangerine Dream. Excellent.
  • Guenter Schlienz, Loop Studies. A haunting exploration of looped acoustic instruments and electronics. The music seems to be coming from the type of future that the past imagined would arrive. (https://sinkcds.bandcamp.com/album/loop-studies)
  • Philip White, Documents. Plastic, complex sound produced from the raw musical data extracted from a series of well-known, popular recordings. (https://philipwhite.bandcamp.com)
  • Michael Pisaro, Continuum Unbound. Field recordings and instrumental music, listening across the three discs is a transporting experience. (http://michaelpisaro.blogspot.com/2014/05/continuum-unbound-fall-2014.html)
  • Rand Steiger, A Menacing Plume. Electro-acoustic works with a classical feel of modernism. Steiger is fine composer and the pieces, including the superb title work and Résonateur, are played expertly by Talea Ensemble.
  • Jacob Cooper, Silver Threads. There are many projects that combine voice and electronics, but they are rarely as accomplished as this set of electronic art songs, with the terrific Mellissa Hughes singing.
  • Juan Bianco, Nuestro Tiempo. Electronic music from Cuba that might have been a mere object of curiosity, but Bianco, who was unknown to me when this arrived, is a serious and excellent composer, with a sense of vitality.
  • Faures, Continental Drift. Like atmospheric haze composed of tiny, shiny crystals; pristine, warm, enveloping. (https://homenormal.bandcamp.com/album/continental-drift)

This is not the type of music in which there are frequent reissues, but notable this year is a Cello Anthology, a box set of four CDs with a beautiful, thick book. This collects performances and biographical information of the new music cellist Charlotte Moorman, without whom the musical landscape would be very different and far more impoverished. 
by George Grella
Chamber Music, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Electro-Acoustic, Events, Experimental Music, Festivals, New York, Performers

Viola & …

On Monday, January 24, 2011 at 8:00 p.m. at The Bushwick Starr in Brooklyn, violist Wendy Richman of the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) will present “Viola & “, the first program in her “Vox/Viola” project, in which she presents new and important works for singing violist and/or electronics. The program features works by Arlene Sierra, Lou Bunk, Hillary Zipper, Kevin Ernste, Kaija Saariaho, Giacinto Scelsi and Sequenza21’s own Senior Editor, Christian Carey. I caught up with Ms. Richman via email to speak with her about the project’s origin and her interest in performing “one-woman duos.”


“It’s not entirely fair for me to say all the pieces are one-woman duos,” she says. “There’s a very active partner, sound designer Levy Lorenzo, doing much of the program with me.” The idea for these programs goes back several years, growing in part out of Wendy’s involvement with a number of composer friends who happened to work extensively with electronics, but “also because I liked the idea of having a recital program that was totally self-contained. In my imagination, I could pack my laptop, mic, and a pedal, meet with a sound guy for 10 minutes, and—bam!—the show would go perfectly.”


The reality of doing recitals with live electronics proved more complicated than Richman imagined, however, until she met Lorenzo while performing Kaija Saariaho’s Vent Nocturne at an ICE Saariaho portrait concert in New York’s The Tank, where Lorenzo was the audio engineer. “I really experienced the piece differently during that performance. Levy is a fantastically sensitive musician, in addition to [having] great technological skills. Maybe it was in part the rather cramped quarters of the Tank, so we were essentially onstage together, but I’d never really approached playing this music as a duet. Now, it’s really important to me to approach it that way, so the electronics part is not only ‘live’ but ‘alive’.”


“About five years ago,” she adds,” I began playing Scelsi’s Manto, a three-movement work whose movements can be played separately, all together, or in any pairing. The last movement’s instruction states that it is for ‘altiste/chanteuse (necessarily female),’ and ‘the text is a speech of the Sibyl [a prophetess or seer].’ I was learning the piece during a really hard time in my life, when I was recovering from a bad accident, and I think I was looking for music that really spoke to me. Well, the Scelsi did! I guess I was speaking/chanting to myself, (because) it was the first piece in a long time that I had an extremely visceral response to, and that particular commitment seemed to speak to audiences. I received really positive feedback about it and began to feel that it was my piece.”


While there are a number of violinists who sing and play at once (Courtney Orlando of Alarm Will Sound and Monica Germino, of the Dutch group Elektra come to mind), singing violists remain something of a rarity. “I knew that there were some other string players who had done similar things but hadn’t heard much about viola/voice works aside from the Scelsi, and basically I just thought it would be a fun project for me to do.”


So at the urging of the composer Ken Ueno, Ms. Richman embarked on blazing a trail as a singing violist commissioning a number of composers to write pieces for her. The commissioning process, she says, was refreshingly informal and casual. “I talked to composer friends and told them that I don’t have any money (yet!) but that I’m fairly confident I can get a decent number of performances. Their responses varied, of course, but for the most part they were all interested and it was just a matter of time (many had paying commissions that would obviously take priority). I currently have eight finished pieces (three of which are being premiered on the 24th), and a total of about twenty composers who have committed to writing things over the next few years.”


The group of composers on the “Viola & “ program represents a highly eclectic and diverse group. This may seem unusual, but it stems from Ms. Richman’s refreshingly open and friendly approach to commissioning new works. “After hearing (a composer’s) music and liking it, the most important thing for me is that I like the composer (himself) and want to work with (him). In some ways, that’s more important to me, because they might find themselves making stylistic adjustments anyway given the relative newness of the genre to them. I needed to feel like we connected as friends so I could be really comfortable in the collaborative aspect of the project.”


Viola &
Violist/vocalist Wendy Richman and Engineer Levy Lorenzo
Part of The Forge’s Forgefestival
Monday, January 24, 2011 at 8:00 p.m.
Admission: $10
The Bushwick Starr
207 Starr Street
Brooklyn, NY 11237
Info Line: 201.875.8573
www.theforgenow.com

by Armando Bayolo