Category: Albums

Sounds Heard: Dmitri Tymoczko—Beat Therapy

Dmitri Tymoczko’s recently published book, A Geometry of Music: Harmony and Counterpoint in the Extended Common Practice, is a fascinating attempt at a generalized music theory and is a synthesis of an extremely broad range of music which is at the same time extremely heady and a joy to read. So it should probably come as no surprise that Beat Therapy, a new disc of Tymoczko’s own compositions, is equally far reaching yet utterly entertaining.

On the surface Beat Therapy appears to be a jazz/funk album, albeit a somewhat quirky one. It is scored for an octet of trumpet, two saxophones, bass clarinet, piano, electric bass, and drums, plus a synthesizer. But although each of the album’s eight tracks contains improvised solos (according to the disc’s booklet notes), the material is pretty heavily notated. You can get an idea of this from the PDF of the score which is available on Tymoczko’s website; many of the seemingly improvisatory passages therein are actually completely written out. Another tip that this might not be exactly jazz is that Tymoczko himself does not perform on the album. Admittedly this is not without precedent—George Russell did not touch an instrument on his watershed first album, The Jazz Workshop (1957), nor did Charles Mingus on Me, Myself an Eye (1977) which was recorded only months before his death—but it is nevertheless far from the norm. Upon closer listening, you’ll also hear that there’s also almost no literal repetition in the material which is a big contrast to the still fairly ubiquitous head—series of solo variations—repetition of head recipe that has been used as the basic layout for jazz since well before the ascendancy of bebop. But again, there have been other notable examples that shattered this formula, particularly in the realm of free jazz and the sonic explorations of the alumni of the AACM, etc. Ultimately, like the output of Mingus, Russell (who notably was also an extremely significant music theorist), and the AACM folks, Tymoczko’s Beat Therapy is far reaching music that cannot be pigeon-holed by genre.

“Loop and Swing” has a somewhat funky groove but it is overlaid with aphoristic figurations performed by various members of the ensemble. It is a wonderful reminder that the sound world of Babbitt, Martino, Wuorinen, and other integral serialists is really not that far away from that of the post-bop of Eric Dolphy or even the pointillistic funk of Miles Davis’s On The Corner. Similarly, while there’s a toe-tapping steadiness to “Kachunk,” it is built from a sequence of seemingly random block chords in the piano—a terrain that George Russell had previously mined very effectively when he played piano on his seminal sextet recordings from the early 1960s. Compared with those two opening salvos, “Katrina Stomp” sounds relatively straight ahead, but the harmonies get gnarlier as the piece progresses. As Tymoczko acknowledges in his notes, it “took a darker turn as I reflected on what had happened to New Orleans.” The next track, “Sweet Nothings,” begins with a gorgeous long trumpet melody and once the whole band gets fired up it has an almost Gamelan-like feel, though the riffs never quite become ostinatos. The somewhat more subdued “The Mysterious Stranger,” though still clearly tonal, is built upon a rather off-kilter progression. As in A Geometry of Music, Tymoczko revels in the possibilities of a tonality which can go well beyond the narrow definitions promulgated by earlier theorists’ analyses of so-called common practice era repertoire. “Earthquake,” as you might imagine from the title, also navigates some atypical harmonic terrain but nevertheless maintains tonal pull and directionality. At one point the predominantly angular melodies are transformed into lockstep parallel sax lines reminiscent of the jazz-inspired music coming out of Ethiopia in the mid-1970s (music that has thankfully become available to the rest of the world through the Ethiopiques series on the Paris-based Buda Music label and which served as the haunting soundtrack for Jim Jarmusch’s 2005 film Broken Flowers). “Dreams May Come,” which gives the synthesizer a much more prominent role at the onset, remains conventionally diatonic by contrast. Finally, “Sayonara,” which also opens with the synthesizer, is both normal and strange at the same time. While it initially sounds like it would not be out of place on a jazz/funk fusion album, it grows progressively more chromatic and rhythmically skewed.

In A Geometry of Music, Tymoczko does a terrific job of revealing how so much seemingly disparate music has common ground. It’s extremely gratifying that he can not only talk the talk but walk the walk by seamlessly linking these common threads in his own music.

Sounds Heard: Music of Arlene Sierra, Volume 1

Composer Arlene Sierra is the closest thing to a “musical entomologist” that we will probably find in the world of contemporary music. The first word that comes to my mind when listening to her music is “spin,” and the accompanying visual is that of a spider weaving an intricate web with speed and dexterity, into which a myriad of other tiny creatures unsuspectingly wind themselves up. Indeed the titles of her pieces tend to gravitate towards the names of bugs and birds, and possess a whirling quality constructed of heavily layered snippets of musical material deftly orchestrated in such a way that the listener can enjoy the form and structure of the music from both a “bird’s eye view,” and also have a satisfying dig into the tiny details.

Music of Arlene Sierra, Volume 1 is the first CD in a planned series by Bridge Recordings devoted to the music of this British-based American composer. All of the works on this first installment are given sparkling performances with particularly standout moments in the larger compositions, played by the International Contemporary Ensemble.

The buzzing, simmering Colmena is appropriately titled, in that the word is Spanish for beehive. It is like an aural excursion inside that structure, listening to the delicate balance of roles played by the labor of thousands of creatures. Birds and Insects, Book 1 is a series of works for solo piano that can be performed separately, or mixed and matched at the whim of the performer. Running the gamut from fierce through frenetic to delicate and lyrical, I wonder if some of the music from these pieces—substantial in and of themselves—served as stepping stones for the larger works on this recording, or the other way around? Sierra also transfers her affection for “small things” to everyday objects with her attractive settings of Two Neruda Odes, choosing Oda al plato (Ode to the plate) and Oda a la mesa (Ode to the table) for soprano, cello, and piano.

Three of the works on this disc are taken from Sierra’s military-themed Art of War series. The ferocious Ballistae for 13 players is a musical thrill ride inspired by the writings of Roman architect and engineer Vitrivius, outlining the construction of a machine of warfare. In the three-movement Surrounded Ground, the interactions between instruments are determined in part by Sun Tzu’s writings on military strategy. In the first movement, “Preamble,” all of the instruments are marching in one way or another, as if they were re-orchestrated from a score for multiple snare drums. “Feigned Retreat” stretches out the lines into a slower progression of events, fortified by strings around which the clarinet line slithers. The last movement, “Egress,” brings the rhythmic material back in a far more syncopated, frenzied fashion as the music dances about in search of a quick escape. The first movement of the two-movement Cicada Shell possesses the “marching,” skittering rhythms particular to Sierra’s compositional style, forming gradual diminuendos that shape the movement into a series of hairpins. The arresting, ultra-high opening of the second movement begins with piccolo that slowly nudges other instruments into the sound field, creating the opposite effect of the first movement with phrases forming long crescendi. Here the characteristic quick outbursts and skips that tend to accentuate the vertical aspects of the score (at least to my ears) are elongated into flowing linear sweeps that rotate the music into an expansive horizontal field.

Regardless of which listening approach you decide to take with these works—the view of the forest or of the trees—or in which order you decide to take them, the music reveals complexity and insight that will make you want to press play again and open your ears even wider for the next listen.

Sounds Heard: Harley Gaber—In Memoriam 2010

Harley Gaber left this world just as a recording of his In Memoriam 2010 was making its public way out into it. Only a few weeks after the release of this beautiful and sometimes terrifying album, Gaber’s friend and colleague at the Innova label, Philip Blackburn, passed on the news of Gaber’s suicide and shared some of the personal struggles and health concerns this composer and visual artist had been battling before his death.

Despite the sadness of the news, Blackburn noted, “Harley’s life and art were one; he and his music shared the same complex personality, uncompromised by marketing concerns or wanting to fit into any scene. His music has a small cult following because it anticipated some trends that happened decades later in the new music orthodoxy, but it is the high level of perfectly realized thoughts in sound, that could only have sprung from his fragile life of outsider-dom, that ensures his stature as one of America’s most important artists. I will miss his voice on the phone but know that it’s all there in his music.”

It is in a way a difficult thing to dig into this new piece and the deeper catalog of work now archived on Gaber’s website knowing that the creator is gone, but of course this is also the way to celebrate the work he left us. The fact that his final musical statement was intended as a memorial has a bit of dark poetry to it. In the illuminating notes that accompany the disc, Gaber references the source materials he electronically manipulated and collaged to generate various pieces of this composition—from Beethoven to Feldman—while also outlining some more abstract points of inspiration and motivation behind the completed work. Though the commission for it came from a family friend, Dan Epstein of the Dan J. Epstein Family Foundation, to honor his mother following her death, the piece is at the same time a much larger meditation, “a postscript or coda to the end of the world” as well as a consideration of some broader and more complex ideas that fascinated Gaber concerning consciousness and existence.

Though broken into six individually titled tracks for this album release, In Memoriam 2010 actually unfolds as a single, continuous, hour-long piece of music. It’s a massive, weighty statement that begins with “Cataclysm and Threnody” completely submerging the ear in a densely layered world of metallic sounds and haunting sweeps. The lines churn around on a current of air—something akin to a chorus of those plastic tubes children whirl around—to create an eerie drone of whistling sound. It’s disorienting and completely enveloping, like being caught up in a blinding storm.

Without pause, the piece shifts into the second section, “Threnody and Prayer,” which turns calmer, more dreamlike and fantastical in its sense of stretched reality. It still maintains that whistling character, but now it’s more distorted, as if a calliope was somehow audible many miles above the earth. In the third section, “Ground of the Great Sympathy: Aftermath,” human voices enter the soundscape, adding snatches of sung lines and gasps of breath.

The final three portions of the work— “In-Formation,” “Coalescing,” and “…With Completion”—develop cohesively in a much more subtle, unhurried way. The sense of anxiety and confusion that has tinted the work up to this point seems to leak away and a patient reflection and resolve moves in behind it. Though the whistling rushes of air, the metallic shimmers, and the non-verbal human elements of the sonic palette carry through, the density decreases and the music spreads out more broadly around the listener. In the end, it drifts away like a satellite fading out of range, sending back only ever-weakening pulses until is disappears completely.

Sounds Heard: Pieces from the Past by Philip Corner for the Violin of Malcolm Goldstein

Philip Corner’s 1962 Piece for Malcolm Goldstein by Elizabeth Munro is undeniably an extraordinarily difficult way to open a recording; it’s hard to imagine it luring people to listen through the entire track and beyond to whatever else follows it unless they are already hardcore devotees of uncompromising experimentalism. Yet that’s precisely what Pogus Productions has done on Pieces from the Past by Philip Corner for the Violin of Malcolm Goldstein, a CD retrospective which features a rare, long out of print track and four previously unreleased tracks from live performances. Positioning this stark music at the very beginning, however, provides an ideal grounding to help listeners understand the unusual nature of this extraordinary composer-performer relationship.

Corner and Goldstein both boast serious Uptown compositional credentials—both studied with Otto Luening at Columbia University in the late 1950s. But they were subsequently drawn into the equally rigorous world of the Downtown avant-garde just as the multidisciplinary Fluxus movement was starting to evolve John Cage’s indeterminacy into the realms of conceptualism and minimalism. A watershed opus that has gone down in history as the pivotal moment for this phenomenon in music is La Monte Young’s Composition 1960 # 10, whose score is simply the sentence: “Draw a straight line and follow it.” Just as Cage had opened the door for music to go literally anywhere in Imaginary Landscape No. 4, 4’33”, and subsequent compositions, Young opened another door for music to go absolutely nowhere. And the way we create, perform, and experience music has never been the same since, even though most music still occurs in an arena that remains somewhere between anywhere and nowhere.

But what kind of music results if you follow a line that is not straight? Such is the gambit realized in Corner’s 1962 Piece for Malcolm Goldstein by Elizabeth Munro. As with Young’s seemingly unassuming work from just two years earlier, the music for Corner’s Piece is not notated in a conventional sense; rather it is simply one very long, unbroken line drawn on an adding machine roll that rises and falls, twists and turns. To further add to the indeterminate nature of the undertaking, Corner did not even draw this line himself but rather enlisted the help of visual artist Elizabeth Munro to execute one seemingly endless, continuous horizontal form. Transforming this image into music, as Goldstein has done on this nearly 21-minute live recording from a 1984 concert at Experimental Intermedia, is also almost an act of co-composition. And since he is also a composer of extended-duration works employing structured improvisation, as well as conceptual and indeterminate elements, he is an ideal collaborator. In addition, the violin, with its possibility for an infinite gradation of pitches, is the perfect instrument on which to convey an extremely meticulous sonic translation of every jagged contour and loop rendered by Munro’s hand.

While none of the other works by Corner on the present disc offer as fluid a continuity between conception, visual instruction, and sonic realization as Piece, the extremely wide range of violin sounds they each exploit reside in similar aesthetic terrain. The two Pieces for String Instrument, Nos. 3 and 5, both from 1958, already reveal Corner’s extreme tendencies; exaggerated portamenti and distorted bowings abound. But unlike his later continuous arcs of sound, the music here is very much a byproduct of the then contemporaneous zeitgeist of musical pointillism; each utterance feels like a self-contained sonic atom. The performance of No. 3 is here blended with Corner’s much later Gamelan Antipode/s (1983), which though notated on a standard G-clef using familiar-looking noteheads and dynamic markings, yields music that is in no way conventional. Admittedly, verbal instructions burst from the margins of the score to explicate the desired sounds that traditional music notation cannot transmit to a performer. The Gold Stone (1975), which is literally named for Goldstein (Stein = Stone), is another graphic score that leaves lots of room for improvisatory interpretation and takes full advantage of the violin’s limitless pitch spectrum creating a melody of infinite microtonal gradations. For the performance featured herein of Gamelan Maya (1980)—a live recording from Belgium in 1981—Goldstein is joined by Corner at the piano for what is arguably one of the most austere violin and piano duos ever attempted. Though Goldstein uses all kinds of extended techniques (an extraordinary wide range of bow pressure ranging from barely touching the string to digging into it full force, and he even sings along with his playing), he is basically playing the same note over and over again for about 17 minutes as Corner accompanies him doing the same.

While Pieces from the Past by Philip Corner for the Violin of Malcolm Goldstein is hardly a disc you’re likely to spin to create the right ambiance at your next dinner party, spinning it in such a setting might generate hours of provocative conversation.

Sounds Heard: Judith Shatin—Tower of the Eight Winds

Composer Judith Shatin has been making engaging electro-acoustic music for years from her home base of Charlottesville, Virginia, where she serves as a professor and director of the Virginia Center for Computer Music at UVA. Her recent Innova release, Tower of the Eight Winds, caught my eye because it contains primarily works for violin and piano without electronics. Teaming up with the Borup-Ernst Duo (Hasse Borup on violin and Mary Kathleen Ernst on piano), Shatin has assembled a vivid set of compositions, rendered in well-recorded, vigorous performances.

The inspiration for three of the five works on the CD is drawn from Greek mythology. Each movement of Icarus is based on some aspect of the myth, with the instruments suggesting the characters of Icarus (violin) and his father (piano) throughout the work. The first movement, “Majestic”, portrays confidence and grandeur, while “Delirious” illuminates the occasionally fraught relationship between father and son, with sharp musical corners for violin and edgy rhythmic material. “Soaring” stretches out and elegantly depicts the two floating in the sky, under the heat of the sun. In the more choppy, intense “Wild,” you can hear the frenzy and confusion of Icarus’s fall to earth.

The composition Tower of the Eight Winds, after which the disc is titled, takes its name from the Tower of the Winds, located at the Acropolis in Athens. Each movement explores the motion of sound through time by illustrating a different “type” of wind as described in Bowditch’s The American Practical Navigator. “Taku” is rhythmically driving and intense, inspired by a type of wind common in Southeast Alaska, whereas the musical landscape of “Barber” is dotted with sharp bursts of more dissonant material contrasted with violin trills and harmonics. “Caver” depicts a gentle breeze in the Hebrides, while the gusty “Williwaw” streaks through at a breakneck pace from start to finish.

Sandwiched between the above two compositions is the one electro-acoustic work on the recording, Penelope’s Song for violin and electronics, in which the violin performs over a series of rhythmic patterns created from the recorded sounds of a wooden loom, evoking the image of Penelope weaving as she awaits the return of Odysseus in Homer’s Odyssey. The electronic sounds form an arc through the piece, becoming increasingly processed and then moving back to less audio manipulation towards the end. The violin travels through a wide range of emotions—high and breathy, jumpy and intense, lyrical. In the end the instrument scampers up the high range, jumping off into the stratosphere.

Widdershins for solo piano begins in angular spurts, then stretches out luxuriously in the second movement, and becomes faster, heavier, and energetic in the third with big, pounding chords, topped off by a surprisingly straightforward ending cadence.

Constructed from four sections of the Strauss operetta Die Fledermaus, Fledermaus Fantasy is predictably the most traditionally “classical” sounding of the works on this disc. It sports many very familiar elements of the original work, with slight detail-oriented twists and turns that mix in Shatin’s own compositional voice.

With extensive imagery set out in all of these works, the message comes through loud and clear that Shatin is a very visual composer. Throughout this CD, and indeed in many of her other compositions, both electro-acoustic and purely instrumental, you get the sense that she is painting with sound, or building musical terrain for the listener to hike through, panoramic views included.

Sounds Heard: Vicious World Plays the Music of Rufus Wainwright

When I opened the mailer that contained Vicious World Plays the Music of Rufus Wainwright, I questioned the prudence of this recording decision before I even had the shrink wrap fully removed. I mention this just in case your anti-muzak instincts are already telling you something similar. For those open-minded enough to wait until you actually hear a bit of it before making such a judgment call, well, you’re less jaded than I am.

As it happily turned out, this was not at all an ill-conceived, maybe we can trick people by way of association, kind of outing. As soon as I saw Aaron Irwin‘s name topping the roster of musicians, I began to hope for good things (he also arranged quite a few of the album’s charts; Matthew McDonald handled the rest). Irwin’s earlier albums for Fresh Sound/New Talent are the kind of discs I keep around with a note reminding me to keep track of the artist’s future efforts. As soon as I started listening and reading the media materials that accompanied Vicious World. . . I was intrigued by what this album might represent. “With all due respect to the grand masters of the Great American Songbook,” the one-sheet suggested, “it’s high time that current jazz artists seriously investigate the work of contemporary composers as a vital source of inspiration.”

The song catalog of Rufus Wainwright, as it turns out, is a rich one to mine in this way. Irwin has assembled a sort of jazz chamber ensemble consisting of himself (saxophone/clarinet/flute), Matt McDonald (trombone), Sebastian Noelle (guitar), Thomson Kneeland (bass), Danny Fisher (drums), Eliza Cho (violin), and Maria Jeffers, (cello). The players are clearly familiar with the source material, and the resulting performances add a new timbral palette and tight, well-considered improvisations (no track exceeds the seven minute mark) into the mix.

The interpretations remain true enough to the spirit of the original compositions that they will likely appeal to even longtime Wainwright fans. The emotion—that reach right into your chest and twist connection—that the songwriter is deservedly celebrated for is on display here as well, albeit with a distinctively jazz subtext. When the trombone steps in to croon the main line, such as on “Nadia,” the intonation is a little loose; it’s on point for the main notes but plays dirty getting to them in a neat mimic of Wainwright’s nasal, wait-and-reach-for-it delivery style. The strings maintain the fragility carried by many of the original “man and his piano” works while the winds and brass play around the vocal lines and ornament the material in fresh ways. Sebastian Noelle’s work on guitar deserves a special shout out for the commentary his playing adds to the arrangements—at one turn bone china delicate and at another a white gloves off, full-on strut.

In a way, the absence of the original lyrics allows a certain subtlety to emerge, as Wainwright’s tales of love, loss, and torment lose their specific targets in the sway of “Dinner At Eight,” or when “This Love Affair,” here coated in more sass and aggression than lamentation, grinds the melody into the room.

As an album, the tracks hang together as a beautiful songbook, contemporary without ever feeling gimmicky. Most importantly, perhaps, these musicians succeed in selling their argument that the source material for new standards is rich and waiting.

Rufus Wainwright’s original “Going To a Town,” for those who would like to revisit:

Sounds Heard: John Cage—The Works for Percussion I

Decades before the advent of hip-hop and other sampled-based music, John Cage created a radical series of works which included turntables as musical instruments and worked in snippets of pre-recorded music created and performed by other people as part of the compositional fabric. That Cage is mostly remembered nowadays instead for his pioneering use of percussion and electronics, sticking objects inside a piano to change its tone, creating music based on indeterminate processes, and a work in which the performer is instructed not to intentionally make a sound for four minutes and thirty three seconds, is perhaps somewhat unfortunate—despite the obvious significance of those achievements—given the fact that music based on sampling has become so prominent in our culture. But the history of music might finally get properly rewritten thanks to the first-ever integral recording of Cage’s complete cycle of Imaginary Landscapes which is paired with two different performance of the contemporaneous and similarly forward-sounding Credo in US.

All in all there are five works which Cage named Imaginary Landscapes. The first three date from the time that Cage created his now seminal percussion compositions and are scored for percussion ensemble as well. But unlike his more well-known Constructions, created roughly during the same period, the Imaginary Landscapes pieces add an additional electronic component. The first of them, dating from spring 1939, requires two variable speed turntables on which recordings of test tones are manipulated, admittedly not quite in the same way that a DJ would manipulate vinyl in the future but reminiscent enough to be acknowledged as a precedent. The second in the series, completed in 1942, also uses a phonograph needle, this time functioning as a contact microphone on a coil of wire. No. 3, also from 1942 but actually composed shortly before the second one (an earlier abandoned version of No. 2 was first performed in 1940), uses both test tone recordings on the variable speed turntables as well as the needle-amplified coil to particularly ferocious and disturbing effect—the work was created in direct response to the advent of the Second World War. While these three works have previously been recorded on a landmark series of Cage’s complete percussion music by the Italian Amadinda Percussion Group for Hungaraton (the sixth and final volume of which was released earlier this year), the present Mode recording is the first to utilize the specific 78-rpm test tone recordings that Cage originally specified.

But arguably even more revelatory sonic treats are to be found in Imaginary Landscapes Nos. 4 and 5. Imaginary Landscapes No. 4 (from 1951) might be Cage’s most cited musical composition after 4’33” (from the following year), and like 4’33” it is a piece of music that is more talked about than actually listened to. The instrumentation for No. 4 consists exclusively of 12 radios operated by 24 performers following a precisely notated score instructing them to raise and lower volume, turn the dial, etc, all led by a conductor. Obviously the source for all the sounds that are heard in the piece are derived from whatever is being broadcast on the radio during the time and place of the performance. As a result, the actual sonic content can vary widely. A live performance in New York City in the early 1990s which concluded a new music concert was somewhat disappointing, since it mostly consisted of overlapping talk radio fragments; legend has it that the premiere performance was even less sonically stimulating, since most stations were not 24/7 back in 1951 and had gone off the air for the night prior to the performance. There could also never be a way to recreate the sound of that original 1951 performance as any performance of Imaginary Landscapes No. 4 will reflect the time and place it which it is being performed. So while it might be a little disconcerting to suddenly hear the words “Abu Ghraib” in a composition from sixty years ago, as you will on the present recording (which was made in 2006), it’s inevitable.

Releasing a commercial recording of Imaginary Landscapes No. 4, as Cage originally conceived it, has heretofore proven to be a challenge that few people were willing to embark on since tracking down and licensing every tiny snippet that could occur in its approximately four and a half minutes would be both a musicological and legal near impossibility. Years ago HatArt released a recording of Imaginary Landscapes No. 4 using their own back catalog as the sound source for the “radio” broadcasts. But drawing exclusively from the back catalog of any label, let alone one that is as specific as HatArt (20th century classical music and experimental jazz), fundamentally goes against the open-endedness of possibility that Cage’s score requests and therefore does not seem at all like what he was going after sonically. A contemporary music ensemble from Norway risked potential lawsuits and issued a relatively convincing recording of Imaginary Landscapes No. 4 back in 2003, but not having enough members to read through all 24 parts simultaneous they overdubbed, which also seems to be somehow going against the spirit of the piece. So once again the current Mode release is a first, and to further bask in the glory in this discographically watershed moment, they perform it twice. The other thing that having two different recordings herein proves is that the snippets of other folks’ music—which are obviously completely different in the two performances—matter little to overall sound of the piece so it would be ludicrous to claim that anyone’s intellectual property rights were violated here.

But the stakes prove arguably even higher in the fifth and final installment of the series, which is a graphic score charting the playback of 42 recordings. The piece was initially inspired when the dancer Jean Erdman, for whom Cage was composing a score, demonstrated her ideas for the dance by improvising to the jazz records in her personal collection. Cage—who did not like jazz at the time and wanted to do something to come to terms with his disliking them—asked to borrow her recordings, transferred them to magnetic tape, and with the assistance of David Tudor and querying the I Ching, created an eight-track collage of them. In the final score for the piece, the specific 42 recordings are left up to the performer. As in No. 4, the present recording offers two versions—one using exclusively recordings of Cage’s own music, the other using the jazz recordings he would have originally had access to. And like No. 4, the overall impact of the two realizations is somewhat similar, but the version using historic jazz recordings is magical. Once again the musical excitement does not derive from any specific snippet of music but rather from their juxtaposition and simultaneity. Curiously, Imaginary Landscape No. 5 gets Cage name checked in Kembrew McLeod and Peter DiCola’s recently published book Creative License: The Law and Culture of Digital Sampling (Duke University Press, 2011) in which the work is described as “a radical move at the time, though par for the course in popular music production today.”

Perhaps the most aesthetically indicative example of Cage’s use of pre-existing music is in his often previously recorded Credo in US, also presented here twice as a frame for the five Imaginary Landscapes, opening and closing the CD. A 1942 dance score for percussion quartet which also employs piano, radio, and a phonograph, Credo is an unusual and somewhat humorous departure from the throbbing incessancy of the percussion ensemble and prepared piano music he was creating at that time. While the unpitched percussion herein is reminiscent of the other music he was writing in the early 1940s, some of the piano passages make references to boogie-woogie and cowboy music. The radio and phonographic components take the music even further away from Cage’s recognizable sound world since they can, in fact, be anything. The score asks that the records spun on the phonograph be of classical music—the first realization uses a recording of Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony while the other uses Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Wagner, and von Suppe. But as in the later Imaginary Landscapes, the specific choice does not really make that much of a difference. What is attention grabbing, rather, is how such seeming tame music clashes with the seeming barbarism of the percussion ensemble which performs heedless of the flow of the pre-recorded music.

Indeed, the principal difference between the works by Cage which employ others’ musical materials and latter-day musical appropriations are that the materials, in and of themselves, do not fundamentally shape the sound world of Cage’s pieces. They are not “hooks” as they are in pop tunes, or even integral ingredients in a larger formal scheme as they are in the music of John Oswald (e.g. Pluderphonics) or Gregg Gillis (a.k.a. Girl Talk). Ultimately it is not so much about a specific sample, rather than the possibility of any sample, a collection of sounds whose melodies, harmonies, rhythms, and timbres are beyond Cage’s compositional control. Cage, of course, would later take this idea to its logical conclusion in works like 4’33” in which any sound that occurs during its duration is part of the listening experience or his happenings of the 1960s and 1970s in which the simultaneity of unrelated performances of music that was not originally his winds up creating his music, as in his Musicircus from 1967 or Apartment House 1776 from 1976. That such work has its origins in sample-based pieces by Cage himself which predates the entire acknowledged canon of sample-based music changes the entire history of contemporary music once more. As a result, though Cage’s aesthetic was all about eroding role models and hierarchies, these pieces might ironically establish Cage as the most influential harbinger of the music scene of today.

Sounds Heard: Du Yun—Shark In You

Du Yun has made a name for herself as a versatile composer and theatrical performer working in a variety of mediums, from orchestra music to art installations. For her recent CD Shark In You, she dons her “pop” hat, incorporating synth textures and trip-hop beats into her creative musical output. Joining forces on several tracks with composer/turntablist Erik Spangler, composer/electro-acoustic trumpeter Gareth Flowers, and cellist Matt Haimovitz, Du Yun unleashes a recording with an ultra-visceral sensibility that ropes the listener in through its attractively bizarre sonic landscape. The music gets so weird you kind of just have to keep listening.

The CD begins with an introductory burst of noise that gradually intensifies, leading into Stay, which swirls with jazzy horns, moody bass lines, synth tidbits, and processed vocals over a skittering beat. The title track Shark In You sports an infectious rhythm derived from sampled didjeridoo, sprinkled with Spangler’s characteristic DJ-style scratching and intensely whispered and semi-sung vocals by Du Yun.

Panacea is more foreboding, an aria with strange, granulated electronic background noises that morph into driving synthesized drum patterns. In contrast, The Gray feels more like sultry cabaret, with intimate vocals, keyboard, horns, and a light touch with brushes on the drum set, while encounter has a radio drama quality—it tells a story of a conversation with a woman waiting for a bus—punctuated with bursts of piano, accordion, and drums on top of a wash of kazoos.

The tracks (If you say so…), i-Goh-Doh and especially Johnny I Hardly Knew Ye Remake are perfectly suited for the catwalk of any high-end fashion show, with their head-bobbing synth lines and thumping beats. I can only imagine what outfits would go with this music.

One of the most substantial works on this disc is the track Miranda, which, for all of the sonic territory it covers, feels like an opera condensed into just under six minutes. Co-written with Haimovitz, who also penned the lyrics, it is a thickly packed, dramatic musical expanse of voice, cello, piano, and percussion.

Throughout the CD, Du Yun’s voice is the mainstay—secretive whispers, singsong chanting, breathy gasps, and tortured screeches are everywhere, moving from front and center in some tracks to misty background washes in others. Although she tends towards sotto voce vocals, Du Yun is anything but shy or inhibited—she lets it all out in one way or another on every track, in such a way that by the end the listener feels as though s/he has been granted a temporary stay inside the artist’s brain. The consistently improvisatory, stream-of-consciousness feel that permeates every track is precisely what makes this set of compositions hang together.

Sounds Heard: Robert Paterson—Star Crossing

These days, it’s all the rage for composers to fashion DIY ensembles to present their works. But composer Robert Paterson has a wider curatorial vision. Even though it’s only been around since 2005, the American Modern Ensemble has become one New York’s go-to groups for fresh programming and outstanding performances of new music. This is no mean feat in a field crowded by a plethora of capable, indeed abundantly talented, ensembles. It seems only fitting, then, that after being such a staunch advocate for many others’ works as the ensemble’s Artistic Director, Paterson should record AME doing a program of his own music.

Star Crossing, released on the ensemble’s own imprint, features seven instrumental chamber compositions. Paterson’s music is vibrantly scored and well crafted. He knows the AME players like the back of his hand, and it shows in pieces that seem tailor made to the ensemble’s strengths. One accustomed to AME’s programming and marketing campaigns likely will have noticed that they enjoy bringing a sense of humor to bear. While AME—and Paterson—certainly take the preparation and performance of new works very seriously, they don’t want to be seen as taking themselves too seriously.

One can readily hear a derivation of this whimsical nature—Paterson’s own sense of humor—evident in his Sextet. The composer describes the piece as having the loose program of a crime caper film, and the piece features police whistles and bucolic chase sequences aplenty to underscore this idea. But these elements never cross the line from witty to goofy. Instead there’s a lightness of touch and nimbleness of pacing that’s serves as a bright tonic and promising opener.

If one were to characterize Paterson’s arrangements, they often seem to shimmer. This is in part due to his experience as a percussionist—he’s one of the pioneers of six-mallet marimba playing—and his penchant for pitched percussion. Matthew Ward is his able stand-in on this disc, and he ornaments The Thin Ice of Your Fragile Mind with a bell, glockenspiel, and chime filled sheen that nicely offsets its somewhat more pastoral passages for strings and winds. The title track also uses mallet instruments, this time in a more propulsive fashion, mimicking trills found in the winds and strings and trading jabs with Stephen Gosling’s punctilious piano. Later, clarinetist Meighan Stoops is given some fetching, low-lying lines that dovetail with Gosling’s left hand. Once again, one is struck by the lustrous quality Paterson evokes. His is a harmonic language that’s very comfortable evoking glimpses of tonality, but in fleeting fashion as part of an overall palette that encompasses modality, octatonicism, and post-tonal vignettes as well. It’s an effective and fluid amalgam.

Embracing the Wind is a lithe and mercurial essay that features a beautiful keening solo from violist Danielle Farina, offset by post-impressionist arpeggiations from harpist Jacqueline Kerrod and sultry alto flute lines from Sato Moughalian. Paterson adopts a more reflective and overtly lyrical demeanor in Elegy, scored for two bassoons and piano. A piece commissioned in memory of cellist Charles McCracken, it is often reminiscent of American neoclassicists such as Walter Piston and Vincent Persichetti, with chorale-like passages for the bassoons offset by pandiatonic interludes for piano. But even writing in this more conservative style doesn’t cause Paterson’s inspiration to flag: the piece is considerably charming.

The final two works on the disc—Skylights and Quintus—round things out with some of Paterson’s most ambitious music to date. The former incorporates a slightly more aggressive and dissonant profile, with long-breathed contrapuntal lines for winds and strings alike. Cellist Robert Burkhart and violinist Robin Zeh truly shine here, digging in to some impressive cadenza passages. Quintus makes a foray into extended techniques—with alternate sticking techniques for marimba, multiphonics for clarinet, and muting inside the piano. It’s also Paterson’s work at its most tightly coordinated, featuring numerous angular lines that ricochet from part to part in a caffeinated colloquy.

While Star Crossing showcases an imaginative and varied collection of chamber works, one gets the feeling that Paterson’s scoring would do particularly well “writ large.” Fortunately, with commissions in the offing, it appears that we’re going to get to hear a number of orchestral works in the future from this talented composer.

***

Christian Carey is a composer and performer based in New York and New Jersey. He’s Senior Editor at Sequenza 21 where he also maintains his own blog, File Under?

Sounds Heard: Graham Reynolds—The Difference Engine

Purchase:

 Graham Reynolds-The Difference Engine

Graham Reynolds:
The Difference Engine
Innova

Performers:
Leah Zeger, violin
Jonathan Dexter, cello
Graham Reynolds, piano

 

Austin, Texas-based composer Graham Reynolds’s The Difference Engine: A Triple Concerto does not waste notes getting your attention. A shriek of scraped strings launches a frantic run through the opening moments of this five-movement work, scored for violin, cello, and piano with small string chamber ensemble. According to Reynolds, the speed was a nod to Charles Babbage and his work on the first programmable computer and was “inspired by the ferocious pace of both Babbage’s thinking and the calculating speed of his invention.”

In the 20 minutes of music that follow the high-velocity kick off, The Difference Engine spans moments of beautiful melancholia to coarse, bow-grinding rhythmic churning. That Reynolds is no stranger to composing for theater, dance, and film is evident even in this purely instrumental work. (His score for Richard Linklater’s A Scanner Darkly may be the most high-profile project, but his catalog runs much deeper than that, much of it involving his long-standing Golden Arm Trio.) His language here is evocative and direct: It is as if Reynolds is delivering to your ear a mysterious and ambiguous tale in sound—wildly open to interpretation, of course, but it’s a page-turner nonetheless.

The pace of the first movement, “The Cogwheel Brain,” glides into the soft reflection of “Ada.” Delicate piano notes inside a lush string bed of unison playing lead toward moments of mournful solo cello and violin lines. A light blooms in the music as it moves, however, settling into a bittersweet memory of a piece.

The muffled tones of a prepared piano and gritty string playing that follow kick the imagery in a new direction for the third movement, “Cam Stack & Crank Handle.” In contrast with the awesome mechanical rhythms coming out of the ensemble, a secondary theme literally swoops in with an irresistible shoulder-shaking and hip-swaying beat—and enough swagger and glissandi to seduce the house.

Reynolds takes another turn toward the quiet in the broad and reflective “Late at Night/The Astronomer” before launching into the flash of the work’s closing movement. Showcasing a similar speed and fire found in showstopper masterpiece cadenzas of many years past, the three soloists are given room to throw down, pausing for only a few moments of thematic respite before they and the chamber players behind them make their wild and full-speed dash for the double bar.

Five more tracks of remixed material follow up on this conclusion however, providing a kind of dessert at the end of the disc that allows other minds to dig around in the music and spin the frame. Contributions from Octopus Project, Adrian Quesda, Peter Stopchinski, DJ Spooky, and the composer himself each offer a twist on various moments from the proceeding concerto, processing and overlaying new electronic sounds into the mix. The degree of fresh creativity brought to the music varies, with Adrian Quesda contributing what may be the most memorable remix in the set: a sultry soundtrack tinted with 1970s character that would probably make Connery-era James Bond feel right at home.