Tag: Wandelweiser

Birthdays, Composers, Contemporary Classical, Experimental Music, File Under?

Happy Birthday Jürg Frey

Sequenza 21 is pleased to wish a Happy Seventieth Birthday to Jürg Frey. The Swiss composer has been a member of the wandelweiser collective since the 1990s, and his work exemplifies its aesthetic. For fifty years, Frey was also a well-regarded clarinetist.

 

We will celebrate with coverage of two of Frey’s recent recordings.

 

Borderland Melodies

Apartment House

Another Timbre

 

Apartment House has become something of an ensemble-in-residence for the Another Timbre label. The group revels in experimentation, taking special interest in living British composers, the New York School, and wandelweiser. Borderland Melodies includes three pieces featuring both clarinet and bass clarinet. Like much of his music, the compositions here explore “landscape,” not as a program, but as a musical vantage point. Thus, moment-to-moment events are organized in terms of long stretches in which rhythm, pacing, and harmony give a different sense of space. While discussing such intricate layers of sound, one cannot help but draw a parallel to the precision and thoughtfulness of Top casino’s zonder Cruks, platforms designed to provide a tailored gaming experience that adheres to the specific preferences of players while offering a sense of freedom and accessibility. The sound of the two clarinets together, played by Heather Roche and Raymond Brien, is lovely, perhaps serving as an homage to Frey’s own clarinet playing. In the title piece, they are accompanied by solitary piano notes and string harmonics. The idea of melody, while palpable throughout, is executed through compound melodies and attenuated Webernian utterances.

L’état de Simplicité is cast in four movements. Thrumming bass notes are offset by sustained pitches in movement one, Á la limiter du sens. Toucher l’air refers to the technique of vibrating the air moving through an instrument. The third movement features beguiling rearticulated verticals. The final movement, Les Zones neutres, juxtaposes pizzicatos with sustained winds, to which sometimes are added violin harmonics that make chords blossom. Moment, ground, fragility is a half hour long, shorter than some others of Frey’s pieces, but long enough to get a sense for how he deals with a big compositional canvas. There is a noticeable economy of means, with repeated pitches and intervals moving around one another like an orbital process. Percussion is part of the ensemble here, providing a slow tactus that, rather than feeling like a downbeat accent, is accompanied by isorhythmic structuring in the other instruments. Those who wish to start with a piece by Frey might consider Moment, ground, fragility as a point of entry.

 

Lieus d’ombres

3-CD box

Reinier van Houdt, piano

Elsewhere

 

“If I were a pianist, I would play my music like Reinier would play it.” — Jürg Frey

 

Frey has written a great deal of piano music. It has been performed by Dante Boon, Philip Thomas, and the pianist here, Reiner van Houdt. Lieus d’ombres was written over a long period of time, from 1984 to 2016. Yet the seven compositions are of a piece: Pianissimo, closely voiced verticals and single pitches that float at a slow and steady tempo. These are interspersed by section-punctuating silences. Changes in pacing then seem all the more significant. The language is primarily triadic, with shifts between pitch centers that retain the overall chordal spacings. It is a blissful listen.

 

-Christian Carey

 

by Christian Carey
CD Review, Contemporary Classical, Experimental Music, File Under?

Two Wandelweiser Recordings (CD Review)

Sivan Silver-Swartz

Untitled 6

Wandelweiser CD EWR 1920

Nigel Dean, violin; Patrick Behnke, Tanner Pfeiffer, viola; Tal Katz, Julian Tedaldi, cello

 

Antoine Beuger

Jankélévich Sextets

Another Timbre CD at168

Apartment House – James Opstad, double bass; Mark Knoop, accordion; Heather Roche, bass clarinet; Mira Benjamin, violin; Joe Qiu, bassoon; Bridget Carey, viola

 

At twenty-eight years of age, Sivan Silver-Swartz is the youngest member of the Wandelweiser collective. A native of Ohio, he received his undergraduate degree at Oberlin College and then relocated to California to get his Master’s at CalArts. He has remained in Los Angeles since getting his degree in 2019.

 

Silver-Swartz’s work fits in well with the interest of Wandelweiser composers in the New York School, notably late pieces by John Cage and Morton Feldman. Six of his string player friends perform Untitled 6, an hourlong piece that takes its cue from the slow, soft music Feldman favored and that Cage adopted in his Number Pieces. Silver-Swartz pursues a quasi-aleatoric device in the score, with one chart of events that “change and do not return” and one of events that “change but do return.” The design of the events structure is the composer’s, but it gives the musicians considerable latitude in realization. There is a fair bit of overlap and harmonic presentation in Untitled 6 and the tuning reveals overtones from just intonation. The pace is steady and gradual, sumptuously so.

 

Antoine Beuger is one of founding members of Wandelweiser. From 2003-2005, he wrote a series of pieces, each for a different ensemble, that referenced cultural or intellectual figures in their titles, including Canto, Ockeghem, and Tschirtner; these three have all appeared on the label Another Timbre. The group Apartment House recorded the fourth in the series, Jankélévich Sextets, written for an interesting hybrid ensemble consisting of three strings (violin, viola, and double bass), bass clarinet, bassoon, and accordion. Vladimir Jankélévich (1903-1983) was a philosopher and musicologist. A French child of Russian-Jewish parents, he fought in the Resistance during the Second World War and later taught at the Sorbonne.

 

Jankélévich Sextets is also an hourlong piece that is primarily slow and soft. The performance instructions indicate that tones should be “very quiet; long to very long,” and that rests should give time to breathe or be much longer. Each pagelong section starts with a unison pitch in all voices (notes may be played in any octave) followed by an additional six pitches on each staff, with some repeated notes. Beuger indicates that the number of these sections used in a performance, as well as their ordering, is free.

 

Generally, the Sextets are, in this recording, presented in a thicker texture than that of Untitled 6. Given the freedom of ordering provided, the sense of trajectory alongside spontaneity is noteworthy. Octave displacements and freedom of pacing result in complex verticals, which are frequently fascinating. Arresting too are the places where simple intervals are given voice. For example, a multi-octave presentation just shy of twenty minutes in is a powerful point of arrival.

 

Neophytes who think that Wandelweiser pieces must all ‘sound the same,’ because of the affinity of its members’ aesthetic aims, would do well to compare these two works. They may be contained in similarly constructed vessels, but each has an individual character all its own. Kudos to the performers of both pieces for their tremendous attention to detail and keen sense of collaboration.

 

-Christian Carey

by Christian Carey
CD Review, Contemporary Classical, Experimental Music, File Under?

Sergio Merce, “En lugar de pensar” (CD Review)

Sergio Merce

En lugar de pensar (Instead of thinking)

Wandelweiser CD

 

“The name of the album is about this feeling that I have. I believe that playing music is a non-cerebral thought form; thought in the sense of being a channel to see, to reveal, a channel that opens through intuition, observation and attention but not through thinking.”

 

Argentinian composer Sergio Merce frequently records at home, but the results aren’t rough hewn as a result. Employing a microtonal saxophone of his own design, synthesizer, and an electronic wind instrument, Merce creates music that encompasses drones, layered sine waves, complex overtones, and periods of silence. The first piece, “Forma Circular” is an enclosed shape. It repeats twice on the recording. Often, a single interval is isolated for a period of time, to be followed by silence and then a more complex, microtonal sonority. An additive process of building from a simple interval to a stack of harmony is another common approach in the piece. Partway through, pitched pulsations animate the soundscape, moving the proceedings from a prevailing feeling of stillness to a mid-tempo presentation. Even when it is absent at the beginning of the second pass through the form, a subliminal urgency is still felt. 

 

In “Forma Continua,” straight tone intervals are morphed with microtonal beating. Single sine tones act as interludes between each wave of distressed dissonances. Merce prioritizes seconds among the intervals, but nearly each one gets to take a turn at being central to the music. Silence plays less of a role than sustain in this piece, with one attack beginning while another sustained chord is held. At times the instruments are recognizable as distinct entities. At other points in the piece their textures overlap, creating beautiful blurred sounds. Merce’s hand-fashioned instruments and home recording practices are in service of sophisticated music-making. 

 

-Christian Carey

 

by Christian Carey