Category: Listen

Sounds Heard: Anthony Paul De Ritis—Devolution

Posted on August 14, 2012 by Matthew Guerrieri - Albums, Listen

Questions of “real” or “fake” are dialectically put aside on the Boston Modern Orchestra Project’s new recording of music by Anthony De Ritis, music in which, in a way, everything is real and fake all at the same time. Or, more precisely: this is music which is constantly, enthusiastically directing your attention to the materials out of which it’s fashioned. The manufactured nature of music, which the classical music tradition tries to misdirect away with notions of transcendence and sublimity, is here part of the whole point.

It’s most obvious on the title track, Devolution, a 2004 concerto for turntables (manned by Paul D. Miller, a.k.a. DJ Spooky) and orchestra. Using warhorses as familiar as Ravel’s Bolero and Beethoven’s Seventh as fodder for sampling and remixing (by soloist and ensemble alike) fairly ensures that the manipulations are going to be noticeable, the fragments effortlessly grabbing one’s attention. But De Ritis has a knack for translating some measure of that composerly prerogative into a listener’s experience as well; Devolution is a musical evocation of the tactile malleability of music itself, the finished product explicitly indistinguishable from the act of assembling the parts. (The performance, under the direction of Gil Rose, is a blast, hitting the score’s marks with a kind of joyfully volatile precision.)

But the older works on the recording already show hints of that process as well. Legerdemain, from 1994, mixes orchestral and computerized sounds, but in such a way that the boundaries are thoroughly blurred: Are those strings or a string pad? Oscillators or flutter-tonguing? On record, untangling the two is even more difficult, and one instead notices the score’s miscellany of dialects, flipping through expressionist angst and cinematic thrills in equal measure, a stylistic salmagundi to match the means of production. 1992’s Chords of Dust seems more straightforward, a tone poem inspired by the World War II memories of De Ritis’s father, but even here, the elements become noticeable as elements: the decorous march echoes, the mournful chorales, the Copland-esque optimism, the familiar toolbox for evoking the period and the event—but the arrangement positioned somewhere between those standard semiotic signals and a commentary on the act of signaling.

All three works take as their starting point some form of musical détente—between the concert hall and the dance club, or between instruments and electronics, or between the power of experience and the power of cliché. Whether or not such treaties need to be arranged anymore is debatable, but De Ritis has a flair for the negotiations. This is music that enjoys getting down to brass tacks, and noticing just how shiny they are, and how sharp.

NewMusicBox Mix 2: Strings of Summer

Posted on August 7, 2012 by Alexandra Gardner - Listen

Sometimes when a theme presents itself, the best action is to run with it! This edition of the NewMusicBox Mix consists almost entirely of music for string instruments. Directly below you will find a link to download a folder containing the eight tracks of the mix. In addition, each track is streamed separately on this page, with information about the recordings and purchasing links to encourage further exploration and continued listening.
These artists have very generously donated their tracks to this project, and we encourage you to support them by purchasing their albums and letting them know if you enjoy what you hear!—AG

DOWNLOAD NewMusicBox Mix 2: Strings of Summer

Janel & Anthony, Big Sur
Where Is Home
Cuneiform

Vijay Iyer, Playlist One (Resonance)
Performed by Cornelius Dufallo
Journaling
Innova

Armando Bayolo, Mix Tape: Kid’s Got the Beat
Performed by Jeffrey Weisner
Neomonology
Innova
Order Directly
(Release date: September 25, 2012)

Pauline Oliveros, Fed Back 2
Reverberations: Tape & Electronic Music 1961-1970
Important Records

Anthony Paul De Ritis, Legerdemain
Boston Modern Orchestra Project, Gil Rose, Conductor
Anthony Paul De Ritis: Devolution
BMOP Sound

Van Stiefel, Souls & Raindrops
Performed by Van Stiefel and Holly Nadal
Solaris
New Focus Recordings

Becca Schack, Pulse
Performed by Airi Yoshioka
Stolen Gold
Albany Records

William Brittelle, Loon Birds in Meshed Crystal
Performed by Nadia Sirota and Clarice Jensen (ACME)
Loving the Chambered Nautilus
New Amsterdam Records

Games Played: ToneCraft

Posted on July 31, 2012 by DanVisconti - Listen

Released for Google Chrome browser only: ToneCraft
Developer: DinahMoe

Human beings only come to grasp new concepts by relating them to something they already know; our predominant way of understanding the world—and expressing ourselves—is via metaphor. Our reliance on metaphor makes possible the absorption and mastery of many new things, but there is always a point at which the metaphor breaks down and the new idea must emerge in its own right.

ToneCraft—a musical toolkit that takes advantage of Web Audio API as a workspace for free composition—provides a fantastic metaphor for introducing unwitting normal people to the zany world of composing, albeit one that is far too limited for anything beyond some rudimentary dabbling. Professional musicians can expect very little from ToneCraft other than a few moments of amusement; but for people who have never tried composing and possibly cannot read traditional music notation, ToneCraft becomes more than an entertaining plaything: it set up one of the most effective metaphors for exploring various types of aural experiences through spatial and visual relationships.

Swedish developer DinahMoe created a three-dimensional grid environment ripped straight from an earlier Swedish game called MineCraft, with various elements corresponding to musical tones. Colors suggest different instruments or timbres; the X- and Y-axes represent pitch and duration, respectively; and the vertical Z-axis allows users to layer sounds to create rich contrapuntal textures. This is a lot of fun and a great way to get budding composers—especially kids—thinking about the actual parameters of sound rather than the frequently unhelpful stylistic dictates that too often serve as the entry point into music composition.

Beyond this fresh, sandbox-style approach to toying with sound, unfortunately, ToneCraft offers little to sustain attention; greenhorn composers who have gotten bit by the bug will likely move on to another type of technology—be it sequencer, microphone, or one of those endangered notation programs—for any real in-depth explorations. It’s fun to make random objects, then “play” them back to hear what they sound like—but it’s exactly here where the metaphor breaks down as the user progresses, because as the “compositions” get more sophisticated, the results become gray and jumbled, the software failing to produce distinct expressions of more complex visual input.

Still, ToneCraft is a remarkable experiment (or “lab” as the developer’s site indicates), not intended for long-term use but created to provoke an immediate spark: here are the most basic elements of sound design, made as intelligible and accessible as a set of childhood building blocks. For this achievement alone, ToneCraft is one of the very few musical games with any appeal for those folk who are intimidated by the idea of music’s conceptual side—and unlike the mainstream console games Guitar Hero and Rock Band, this one is largely user-directed: a very small sandbox that for a few brief hours makes the very hyped and mystified process of composing seem like child’s play.

Sounds Heard: John Luther Adams—songbirdsongs

Posted on July 24, 2012 by Matthew Guerrieri - Albums, Listen

Quite a number of years ago now, I spent a summer working for the Chicago Park District, which meant that I got to wear a bright orange t-shirt emblazoned with the Chicago Park District seal, including its motto—hortus in urbe, a garden in a city. Which is itself a clever inversion of the Chicago city motto, urbs in horto, a city in a garden. Which I loved: a civilized tussle over whether civilization itself is the insider or the outsider, whether the machinery of nature only acquires meaning if it has an empire of more obvious machinery to compare it with.

I mention this because it might go some small way toward explaining why I was almost constitutionally incapable of experiencing John Luther Adams’s songbirdsongs, in its recent recording by the Boston-based Callithumpian Consort, purely as a piece of music. Written between 1974 and 1980, songbirdsongs is very much a nature piece: birdcalls and the rustling ambience of their customary surroundings paraphrased into a nine-movement suite for two piccolos and three percussionists. But the simulation of nature is so particular, so intent on being perceived as faithful, that songbirdsongs becomes one of those nature pieces that gets me wondering whether the end result is supposed to be the aural equivalent of conservation land, or something more—which, depending on your point of view, might actually mean something less.

This is the third recording of songbirdsongs, following its original 1982 release on Opus One Records (with Adams himself among the percussionists) and a 1996 reading by The Armstrong Duo. The Callithumpian Consort’s version, directed by Stephen Drury, is bright and energetic, and, not surprisingly, sounds better than its predecessors: detailed and clear, even managing to conjure up a sense of acoustic space. But the piece was designed for big-room, scattered-about-the-perimeter spatial performance—and, even on headphones, that full-immersion, lost-in-a-forest experience is left to the imagination.

The music’s grammar might best be described as kaleidoscopically imitative: drums and winds aping each other, the layers building up to a static, busy landscape, melodic tweaks to each movement’s motives spreading from instrument to instrument. The transliteration of the birdcalls tends toward the diatonic, but then they pile up in competing, polytonal profusion, falling somewhere between Messaien’s chromaticism and the more poppy triads of other strains of minimalism. (It’s more far out than a lot of Adams’s later, more gently contoured music—such as Strange Birds Passing, which, in a performance by the NEC Contemporary Ensemble, makes a dulcet pendant to this recording.)

In the notes for that 1982 recording, Adams wondered if he had “abdicated the position of Composer (with a capital ‘C’),” but, flattened from a spatial experience to a recorded one, songbirdsongs shows a notable amount of usable space between capital and lower-case composing. All the compositional decisions, the design of the rhetoric, if not exactly of the structure, seem to come to the fore when filtered through the microphone—and it was those sections in which the composer’s hand was most noticeable that I found the most arresting: the bright, Martinů-like busyness of “Apple Blossom Round,” or the bass-drum thwacks and furious twittering of “Joyful Noise,” the aviary having a go at a Sousa march. The marimba-roll drones behind “Mourning Dove” were such lovely sounds in themselves that I found myself wishing that the simulated doves, plangent as they were in their ocarina guise, would take a break.

It’s the complicated nature of such loveliness that is the source of most of the work’s drama, at least for me. The musical motion is constant—motives and sounds never quite come back or combine in the same way twice—but it is movement without a strong musical direction, except forward in time. But there’s a tension between the natural world songbirdsongs is meant to evoke and the artificial means of the evocation that gives the music an interesting texture. Lovely things happen in every movement of the piece, but in a way that is meant to feel accidental and found, rather than designed and anticipated. At the same time, while the natural sounds are presented in a more organic way than, say, Ravel’s pre-dawn Daphnis birds or even Messiaen’s collections, the translation into instruments is palpably inescapable. In the grand scheme of life on earth, flutes and vibraphones and even ocarinas are, after all, pretty advanced technology. I kept thinking back to another warhorse, Respighi’s Pines of Rome, with its obbligato of nightingale-on-phonograph-record, and the more I thought about it, the less I could say whether one captured birdsong was more “real” or more “fake” than the other. Had the garden invaded the city, or the city the garden? The more songbirdsongs left that an open question, the more I got lost in it.

Sounds Heard: Sergio Cervetti—Nazca and Other Works

Posted on July 17, 2012 by Frank J. Oteri - Albums, Listen

I was delighted when earlier this year when Navona Records released Sergio Cervetti’s Nazca and Other Works, since it was finally an opportunity for me to hear an entire disc of music by a composer whose music I have been intrigued with since the early 1980s. Thirty years ago I fell in love with a 10-minute piece for solo guitar called Guitar Music: The Bottom of the Iceberg that I heard at the Columbia University Music Library when I was an undergrad there. It was on an LP issued by CRI, a label which then had a reputation for primarily releasing austere modernist pieces by composers based in academia. (This was a decade before CRI launched the Emergency Music Series, which redefined the label in its final years.) I religiously listened to everything put out on CRI even though most of it was very different from the music I personally wanted to write. But Guitar Music: The Bottom of the Iceberg was music I very much wanted to write—its relentless minimalism felt inevitable as well as bit subversive, although admittedly the latter was heightened by its appearing in the same catalog alongside Roger Sessions, Seymour Shifrin, Mario Davidovsky, et al. Who was this composer, Sergio Cervetti? There was an additional piece of his on the same side of that LP which involved a multi-tracked solo clarinet in textures that can best be described with decades of hindsight as proto-ambient. But, as far as I could tell, nothing else of his had ever been recorded. The notes on the LP offered very little information, not even a photo. He was born in Uruguay in 1940, moved to the United States in 1962 to further his composition studies, and his recent music explored “restricted pitch classes.” (How’s that for a serial explanation of minimalism?)

Fast forward several decades. I briefly met Cervetti at some composer gathering in New York City and told him how much I loved that guitar piece. Not long after that he very kindly mailed me a score of it. Returning to the piece so many years later, after all the uptown vs. downtown battlegrounds had lulled to a cease fire at least in my own personal purview, it still stood out and sounded every bit as exciting as when I had first heard it. (An audio file of the piece is on our online library, so you can listen to it, too.) I also managed to track down a few other recordings of Cervetti’s music. There are three captivating and idiomatic yet completely contemporary sounding solo harpsichord pieces on a disc issued by Vienna Modern Masters in 1999. Another VMM disc issued that same year featured an exciting Latin-tinged orchestra piece of his called Candomble II. Some of his music was used in the motion picture Natural Born Killers and the commercially released soundtrack for it includes an edit of his Fall of the Rebel Angels scored for a virtual orchestra. Nevertheless, even after learning about all this other music, having only a handful of short pieces on compilations led to aesthetic experiences with his music which were ultimately unfulfilling. Each of them created such an evocative sonic universe; I found it extremely frustrating every time I was jolted into another reality when someone else’s music, no matter how satisfying it too might have been in its own right, appeared on a subsequent track.

So it is such a pleasure to listen to Nazca and Other Works, the Navona CD devoted exclusively to the music of Sergio Cervetti. I’ve since learned that there are several additional discs of Cervetti’s music for virtual orchestra floating around in the world, so my journey with his music is apparently far from over. Nevertheless, Nazca is a great destination. The disc opens with an evocative single movement work for soprano and orchestra composed in 1991 called Leyenda which uses as its text an excerpt from Tabaré, an 1888 epic by Uruguay’s national poet Juan Zorrilla de San Martín (1855-1931). It is extremely lush and expansive, very far removed from the insistent austerity of Guitar Music: The Bottom of the Iceberg. But if that early guitar piece is comparable to pieces like Steve Reich’s Violin Phase or Philip Glass’s Music in Similar Motion, Leyenda is comparable to the music of post-Wound Dresser John Adams.

Next comes the brief Chacona para el Martirio de Atahualpa (“Chaconne for the Martyrdom of Atahualpa”) composed the following year. Composed on a commission to write a work commemorating the quincentenary of the “discovery” of the Americas from the International festival of Contemporary Music in Alicante, Spain, Cervetti chose to create music inspired by the forgotten native peoples of South America. Scored for harpsichord and 11 instruments, the Chaconne evokes the demise of the last Inca emperor Atahualpa (1497-1533) through a wild, relentless and occasionally polytonal conga which eventually peters out, leaving only a jagged monotone on the harpsichord, which to my ears sounds like a great sonic metaphor for the flat line that streams across a vital life signs’ monitor in a hopsital when someone dies. Cervetti’s music here also reminds me at times of the great Manuel De Falla Harpsichord Concerto from 1926, the work that proved that the harpsichord, rather than being a relic of a by-gone era, still had a lot to say in contemporary music. But the Chaconne is only one of four movements which altogether comprise a harpsichord concerto entitled Los Indios Olvidades (“The Forgotten Indians”), which, if the remainder is as exciting as this, would be an extremely worthy heir to De Falla. The total timing of the disc is already over 67 minutes so there would have been no way to include the entire piece and everything else that’s on the disc and I wouldn’t want to lose any of the other works. Still, I’m disappointed to only hear part of the piece, especially since I know from those three Cervetti solo harpsichord pieces how effectively he writes for the instrument.

The majority of the disc is devoted a very recent work by Cervetti, a monumental five-movement tone poem for string orchestra from 2010 entitled Nazca. Nazca is also inspired by indigenous South American traditions. The Nazca civilization flourished in what is now modern day Peru for over a thousand years, from roughly 300 B.C.E. until about 800 C.E. Nazca civilization is mostly known to the rest of the world because of a series of mysterious geoglyphs rediscovered in 1927 which some folks have touted as being an attempt at communication with extraterrestrials. In more recent times, the modern city of Nazca was almost completely destroyed by a 6.4 earthquake in 1996; miraculously only 17 people died and the city has since been completely rebuilt. Cervetti’s music evokes the seeming timelessness of this place as well as its amazing ability to endure. Sections of this piece are somewhat reminiscent of the music of the so-called “Holy Minimalists,” folks like John Tavener or the Eastern Europeans like Arvo Pärt, Peteris Vasks, or the late Henrik Górecki. The work’s finale, “Las Manos, Himno” (“The Hands, Hymn”) additionally conjures, to my ears at least, the angel series of orchestral pieces by contemporary Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara. But all is not peace and serenity. The penultimate movement, “Sueños Del Extraterrestre” (“Dreams of the Extraterrestrial”) evokes the unattainable other through music filled with ghostly harmonics, somewhat amorphous low register pulsations and occasionally frenetic rhythms.

Pre-Columbian culture is also the inspiration behind the final work featured on the disc, Madrigal III, which is a gorgeous setting for two sopranos and chamber ensemble of a text by Nezahualcoyotl (1402-1472), a non-Aztec Nahuan poet who ruled the city-state of Texcoco in the Central Mexican plateau region. Madrigal III is also the earliest of Cervetti’s works on the present disc; it was composed in 1975, merely one year after that solo guitar piece of his that first intrigued me about his music. It is clearly also the by-product of his then minimalist sensibility. When a full assessment of the breadth and depth of the minimalist movement in music is made one day, hopefully Cervetti’s important contributions will not be overlooked. Now that there is finally some adequate documentation of his music we can be hopeful.

Finally, a word about the documentation that accompanies this new recording: at first glance, the three-panel digipack which the CD is packed in, though attractive, seems to offer only the most perfunctory of notes about the pieces and a very short bio, albeit this time with a photo of the composer. But upon putting the CD into the disc drive of your computer, you’ll discover, as I did, a seemingly endless array of additional materials. I usually prefer listening to CDs in actual CD players rather than through my computer’s audio system since I associate my computer with work and my audio component system with play, but this disc forces me to change my tune. Not only are there a longer biography and detailed program notes for every single piece on the disc, in both English and Spanish, there’s also an extensive video interview with Cervetti filmed on a street in the Czech city of Olomouc (presumably recorded during the sessions for the present disc) in which he talks candidly about the need for composers to take charge of recordings of their own music as well as his lack of interest in Donizetti and Puccini. Though marred by frequent street noises, it’s an invaluable document. If that’s not enough, there are also full scores for every piece that appears on the disc, several of which are also printable off-line, as well as two ringtones based on Cervetti’s music. He’s made quite a journey from those restricted pitch classes!

Sounds Heard: Third Coast Percussion—John Cage: The Works for Percussion 2

Posted on July 10, 2012 by Alexandra Gardner - Albums, Listen

John Cage’s centennial year has resulted in a gaggle of new recordings, multimedia offerings à la 4’33”, as well as festivals and events around the country. Whether or not one embraces wholeheartedly Cage’s later integration of chance procedures and conceptual thought into his works, there is no denying that some of his most compelling music is the early compositions for percussion, which provide a wealth of insight into the composer’s internal musical landscape. At the time these pieces were created, his sonic palette, which consisted of pretty much everything and the kitchen sink, was somewhat revolutionary, though it has now become a common language for percussionists. The Chicago-based ensemble Third Coast Percussion has released a new CD and separate surround sound DVD on Mode (available either individually or together) of six early percussion works that will perk up the ears (and eyes, if you choose to include the DVD) of anyone even remotely interested in percussion music performance and/or John Cage.

The discs begin with Cage’s three Constructions, presented in reverse chronological order. Third Construction features the widest selection of instruments, with metal, wood, and skin categories all represented in force. The constantly grooving rhythmic complexity and the extensive instrumentation make it a milestone in percussion repertoire. Second Construction begins with a gamelan-esque arrangement of oxen bells, joined by a repeating rhythmic melody on piano grounded by snare drum brush work, and an assortment of shakers and small drums. First Construction (in Metal) is just that—a metallic rainforest of thundersheets, tam-tam, cymbals, and “piano innards.”

The 1936 work Trio is a short three-movement composition scored for bass drum, woodblocks, bamboo sticks and tom-toms. Heard after the Constructions, its dance-like, often gently bubbling rhythms sound relatively simple in comparison, and it is illuminating to hear how Cage’s future sense of rhythm and structure grew out of this work.

The Quartet for unspecified instrumentation has been sending percussionists on junkyard treasure hunts since it was created in 1935. Here Third Coast has separated the four movements into separate instrument groupings of primarily wood, metal, and skin, and the third movement employs the harp of an old upright piano as the primary instrument to create a beautiful and otherworldly soundscape.

The final piece, Living Room Music, finds the performers inside architect Bruce Goff’s Ruth Ford House, literally playing the space—metal beams are struck with spoons, carpet is scraped. There is the open-handed thwacking of wooden surfaces in the first movement, “To Begin.” For the second movement, “Story,” they relax in comfy chairs and, as the liner notes state, “rap” Gertrude Stein. Slide whistle is featured in the “Melody” movement with a background of spoons and a very familiar computer bleep sound that many will immediately recognize. “End” is all glass objects all the time. While every one of the performance films is beautifully presented, with lots of close-ups of fascinating instruments and the hands playing them, the video of Living Room Music captures the space and the performers in a way that makes you really wish you could be there, hanging out with them.

In my experience, Cage’s percussion music is best fully appreciated live; being able to see performers play the arrays of coffee cans, flower pots, drums, utensils, and bells brings the music’s visceral character to the forefront of the listening experience. In this case, an added benefit is being able to watch Third Coast Percussion obviously having a blast performing all of these works. The DVD beautifully conveys both the richness and the delightful quirkiness of Cage’s percussion music, instilling a deeper appreciation of the composer’s creative outlook. The recordings alone are of exceedingly high quality and satisfying in and of themselves, and the DVD adds another layer of depth, personality, and—quite literally—color to the music that is well worth the investment.

Talk About Sound: Austin New Music Coop and Cardew’s The Great Learning

Posted on July 3, 2012 by AndrewSigler - Listen

Written over several years in the late ’60s and early ’70s, Cornelius Cardew’s The Great Learning was performed over two evenings by the Austin New Music Coop in the spring of 2011. Terabytes of high definition audio and video were recorded during those performances, excerpts of which appear throughout this podcast. (They have been made available as individual listening samples below, as well.) Also included here are extremely detailed and comprehensive program notes and examples of reductions of the score created by the ANMC which were used by the section leaders and conductors to communicate Cardew’s performance concepts to the performers.

I was joined by Steven Snowden and Ian Dicke in a conversation with ANMC members Brent Baldwin, Nick Hennies, Brandon Young, and Travis Weller about their experiences putting together this massive work. My thanks to all the participants for their time and contributions to this podcast, and in particular to Travis Weller for compiling the additional material.

(Musical excerpts in the podcast appear in the following order: Paragraph 3, Paragraph 1, Paragraph 2, Paragraph 7, paragraph 5, Paragraph 6, Paragraph 4.)

DOWNLOAD Talk About Sound: Austin New Music Coop and Cornelius Cardew’s The Great Learning

About Cornelius Cardew and The Great Learning
(from the ANMC website)
Cornelius Cardew was born May 7, 1936, in Winchcombe, Gloucestershire, England, and killed in a hit and run automobile accident in London, December 13, 1981. He taught at the Royal Academy of Music in London as well as other schools. With Michael Parsons and Howard Skempton he formed an improvisational ensemble, The Scratch Orchestra, which premiered the entire cycle of The Great Learning. He was active in the seminal chamber ensemble AMM with Eddie Prevost, Keith Rowe, John Tilbury and Christopher Hobbs. Cardew’s concern for human rights and economic justice led him into Marxist politics and renunciation of his experimental music during the 1970s. Instead, he pursued popular styles of music-making. At the very end of his life (and after Mao Tse-Tung’s death), he appeared to be open to reclaiming aspects of his earlier broad approach to sonic art.
Cornelius Cardew’s 1970 masterpiece The Great Learning is a work in seven parts or “Paragraphs” based on translations of Confucius by Ezra Pound and is composed for trained and untrained musicians. The piece instigated the formation of the experimental musical ensemble The Scratch Orchestra, who also gave The Great Learning its premiere. Now, four decades after its completion, Cardew’s obsessively constructed 5+ hour composition has become an often recalled and imitated masterpiece of counter-culture avant-garde. The influential piece, one of the earliest pieces to be called “minimalist” by composer/critic Michael Nyman, conjures at once Ligeti’s clouds of sound, Webern’s pointillism, Reich’s phasing cycles, and Cage’s conceptual provocations. This feast of varied sound-theater events includes a pipe organ with whistling chorus, cascading waves of percussive sound, loud and soft laughter music, an orchestra of droning contra-basses and large brass instruments, and swirling clouds of a cappella voices. Sadly, a complete presentation of The Great Learning is exceedingly rare, due largely to its demands of 50+ performers, several unconventional instruments, a pipe organ, and necessarily open-minded interpreters.

Sounds Heard: Due East—drawn only once

Posted on July 3, 2012 by Molly Sheridan - Albums, Listen

I have been especially attracted to music that has a visual component of late. I get excited when concerts include film projections, and I often find myself reaching for the recordings packaged with DVDs first. I know there are those who would say that this reflects a childish inability to focus on recorded sound without fiddling with my cell phone. Admittedly, this may not be entirely off base, and visual presentations that accompany music can run the risk of simultaneously adding and subtracting (or sometimes only subtracting) from the experience. More often, however, I find that they provide a banister into certain new works on first listen and a kind of bonus poetry to music that is already familiar.

I got to thinking about all this again while listening to Due East’s drawn only once (late to the game, seven months after its release date—my apologies), a recording from the duo of flutist Erin Lesser and percussionist Greg Beyer, produced with a small cast of additional players. The album comes packaged as both an audio-only CD recording of two works by John Supko, as well as a 5.1 surround sound DVD which features accompanying videos by Kristine Marx and Don Sheehy.

To my eye, I couldn’t divorce the quick-cut style of abstract and processed imagery used in both video pieces from the way a feed of Instagram snapshots offers snatches of experience, shared and made romantic through filters and reinterpretation at a remove, half-glimpsed understandings of the intimate experiences of others.

This fit neatly with the push and pull of the music itself while leaving plenty of air in the room and sidestepping the idea that there was any sort of direct soundtracking occurring. Both pieces ride a disquiet of rapid motion that contrasts with a simultaneously delivered deeper meditative and exploratory spirit. (See liner notes for Supko’s discussion of his use of “tuned randomness” in the works, and a deeper analysis of how and why these aural images are created.)

The opening track, This Window Makes Me Feel, begins with a kind of inability to start, the closely mic’d shuffling pages and the stammer of breath the only sounds accompanying the visual images caught through (appropriately) windows, first bucolic and then urban in flavor (Hello, NYC pedestrians!). The narrator is hesitant to begin, apologetic even, and then she finally lets loose her rapid whisper of Robert Fitterman’s poem of the same name, only some of the words and phrases coming to the surface clearly—again, as with the visual, more of a half-grasped overheard confession than a message intended for the listener directly.

Beneath and around this 15-minute vocal bed, the breathing flutter of flute, the spare piano (David Broome) and percussion tones, the long pure notes sung by Hai-Ting Chinn (who makes an incantation out the work’s title) and plenty of ambient bits from the city streets ground the piece, anchoring the fidgeting admissions in the embrace of the wider, heavier world.

While the opening work carries a decidedly personal, perhaps even voyeuristic, and urban flavor, the latter, Littoral, feels both more outward looking and more expansive in scope (and not just because it clocks in at a lengthier 35 minutes). Here again the momentum to begin is slow to gain speed, the flute the most aggressive player in the fight to get free of the lethargy, though the percussion keeps at her heels. The tension ratchets up one notch at a time, and it’s not until more than eight minutes in that the first of the piece’s two text sources enters, recited by the author: Cees Nooteboom’s poem “Cartography (for Christina Barrosa)”. The flute and percussion weave in and around the language, reaching up and out until, in the middle of the poem, they suddenly fall, and the line goes fuzzy as if the listener has slipped out of signal range and a much stranger message in a bottle has drifted in to take its place. Up to this point in the work, the listener has been hearing (and seeing, for those watching along at home) allusions to large bodies of water, riding the sway of the current both by ear and by eye, but now a processed voice (the composer’s) narrates an excerpt from Richard Hakluyt’s The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques & Discoveries of the English Nation (2nd edition, 1598-1600). As this glimpse of an historical ghost fades back into the spray. Nooteboom’s poetry returns, the pulse is up, the character sharper and more insistent. By the piece’s concluding moments, the pace may have cooled down again, but it’s been a tough voyage and we are all dirty and out of breath, a little older than when we embarked.

Sounds Heard: Volti—House of Voices

Posted on June 19, 2012 by Alexandra Gardner - Albums, Listen

The San Francisco-based Volti has been a consistent innovator in vocal music for over 30 years. The mission of the 25-member a capella ensemble is to think outside the box of choral music, and to continue expanding that landscape by commissioning new works and championing the music of living, breathing composers. In its latest CD House of Voices, Volti brings its exceptional musicality to the table once again.

The first piece, by Yu-Hui Chang, uses text from two poems by Billy Collins, U.S. poet laureate from 2001-2003. Both movements of Being: Two Collins Songs address personal awareness of both the mental and physical realms. However, “Shoveling Snow with Buddha” is energetic, employing contrapuntal lines and conveying the conversational tone of the text, while “The Night House” relays more vertical chordal structures with a rich, though more subdued sound.

Ted Hearne’s five-movement work Privilege is the most wide-ranging and dramatic of the pieces on this disc. As the composer chosen for Volti’s 2009-10 Choral Arts Laboratory, he has asked a great deal of Volti in this adventurous work, and they have certainly delivered. The first and third movements use texts written by Hearne himself, from the standpoint of a privileged member of American society, and the texts of the second and fourth movements are snippets from an interview with The Wire producer David Simon that address the income divide between rich and poor, while the final movement, “We Cannot Leave,” is a setting of an anti-Apartheid Song translated into English. The tart harmonies and sinewy lines of this composition seem to be recorded at closer range than the other pieces, bringing a sense of intimacy to the piece, placing the listener very near the ensemble as if in a small, intimate performance space.

By comparison, the works that immediately follow seem almost conservative, although they are no less elegant. In Daglarym / My Mountains, Donald Crockett attempts to recreate the landscape of Tuva by using melodic and text material from Tuvan folk songs gathered by musician and researcher Katherine Vincent. Crockett stays largely within Western harmonic language in this piece, straying only occasionally into a slightly nasal singing technique during the interpretation of carefully chosen Tuvan words. Eric Moe’s The Crowds Cheered as Gloom Galloped Away is a characteristically energetic and effective setting of an equally characteristically quirky choice of text dealing with antidepressants that come packaged with… tiny ponies. It’s disconcertingly whimsical and somber at once. As with the Yu-Hui Chang piece mentioned earlier, Wayne Peterson creates two clear, no-nonsense settings of texts by a single poet—in this case, Delmore Schwartz—in this case about the beauty of art and of contemplating the free-spiritedness of childhood as respite from the pains of contemporary life.

The big finish on House of Voices is the 15-minute tribute to the power of the moon, Luna, Nova Luna, by Volti composer-in-residence Mark Winges. This lush, dramatic work combining Volti and the Piedmont East Bay Children’s Choir includes a cornucopia of texts with moon references, and really does travel to the moon and back in its range of dramatic contrast and musical language, laid bare by deft combinations of child and adult voices. Winges is obviously extremely familiar with the voices of Volti, and supremely comfortable working in the realm of choral music in general, as if driving a well-loved car that has been in the family for ages.

Within the choral music world this recording might be considered crazy, heady stuff, but to these ears it is first and foremost inspiring, magnificently performed music. Virtuosic? Absolutely. If this recording doesn’t make every composer who listens to it crave to write choral music, and in particular for Volti, I don’t know what will.

Sounds Heard: Jherek Bischoff—Composed

Posted on June 12, 2012 by Molly Sheridan - Albums, Listen

Jherek Bischoff’s Composed is presented by its Brassland label as “orchestral pop,” and a quick review of his track-by-track collaborators—David Byrne, Caetano Veloso and Greg Saunier, Mirah Zeitlyn and Paris Hurley, Nels Cline, Craig Wedren, Carla Bozulich, Zac Pennington and SoKo, and Dawn McCarthy—makes that an obvious circle to draw. The project’s own PR points out that its “creation was informed by Jherek’s history of playing in indie bands (Parenthetical Girls, Xiu Xiu, The Dead Science and more), a fervent desire to make great pop music and a love affair with the potential of the orchestra.”

Now, if I never had to hear another clichéd discussion of “blurring genre lines” again, I would sleep just fine at night, but in this case it strikes me how comfortably Bischoff’s music achieves his stated goals—mixing and matching stylistic elements of both worlds and ending up with something uniquely his rather than just a gloss of orchestral color decorating a rock band. More than that, however, what really makes this orchestral song cycle stand out to my ear is the diverse range of timbral color the vocalists brings to their tracks (a few of which were co-written by the singer alongside Bischoff). Taken as an album-length work, the collection of unique voices Composed encompasses as part of its scheme is impressive; that it all comes together so seamlessly is a credit to the strength of Bischoff’s singular one.

Beneath these distinctive actors, the orchestra lays out an occasionally pointed but more often lush and sweeping sound bed, remarkable considering how it was assembled. According to the composer, the album was written on the ukulele and then recorded one instrument at a time using a single microphone and a laptop, with Bischoff traveling house-to-house (via bicycle, no less) to capture each part in various musicians’ living rooms. Aside from being an adorable backstory, it also makes Composed an interesting compositional project: a deep bag of puzzle pieces later assembled by the composer into (DIY-affordable) sonic images as memorable for their clever lyrical content as they are for the places their musical lines travel. Whether it’s the rhythms in “The Secret Of The Machines,” the harmonies of “Eyes,” or the tempos in the sparing duet that is “Young And Lovely,” each song is playing a game just a little more startling than anticipated. It’s an easy stretch of the ear that keeps things exciting, not a breach of expectation so severe that it provokes an aural confrontation. And if you find yourself inspired to sway along in time, I suspect the orchestra won’t mind the impromptu accompaniment.

Molly Sheridan

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