Category: Listen

Like walking along the stone floors of cathedrals built ages ago or gazing at the portraits of kings whose reins have long since ended, Gregory Spears’s Requiem offers its audience a similarly blurred aesthetic experience, dissolving the present moment into an imagined history suggested by the trappings of style and language.

For indeed, if you tuned in mid-broadcast and heard a few measures of this 2010 Requiem on your local NPR channel—catching a snippet of recorder, a strum across a harp, or that beautifully piercing soprano—you could be forgiven for mistaking it for a particularly entrancing early music performance. But stick with it a few minutes, and there would be no confusing Spears with a composer of centuries past. Requiem is not an exercise in historic recreation, but rather a melding of techniques and plotlines which combine to deliver an attention-grabbing meditation.

It is a meditation not strictly given over to God, however, but an alchemy of religion and bedtime story. Spears’s work mixes sacred Latin passages with bits of found Breton text and a 16th-century poem linking purity, death, and the image of a swan. It was originally commissioned by choreographer Christopher Williams to accompany his production Hen’s Teeth, and in a synopsis of that work he references the role of the “Graeae, or three swan-like crones of ancient Greek myth” as well as the Breton fairytale “Pipi Menou et les Femmes Volant,” which helps explain why Spears’s piece is divided into two parts, “Swans” and “Witches.”

In this incarnation, the work was recorded in the lovely acoustic environment of Corpus Christi Church in New York. The composer himself conducted the skilled roster of Baroque and Renaissance performers, an ensemble which includes Ruth Cunningham and Jacqueline Horner-Kwiatek (sopranos), Ryland Angel and John Olund (tenors), Lawrence Lipnik (tenor, recorders), Kurt-Owen Richards (bass, chimes), Jacqueline Kerrod (pedal harp), Christopher Williams (troubador harp), Daniel Thomas Davis (electric organ), and Elizabeth Weinfeld (viola).

Though a requiem, it’s not a particularly morose contemplation. Instead, its transportingly solemn moments are balanced with the fluttering ornamentation of the vocal lines in one place and with a turn towards animatedly percussive delivery in another. Sharply pulled chord clusters ring out from the harp to open the piece, the drone beneath hinting that something ominous might be ahead. It’s a method of punctuation that reappears and pulls a sonic thread through the work, though when it returns the road traveled seems not to have been as dark as it first appeared. Rather, like a Grimm’s fairytale, the cast of characters may not have found their happily ever after, but they sure learned a few things along the way. If only the current spate of fantasy storylines on network television were as emotionally complex.

It’s not such a crazy idea anymore for performing musicians to mix arrangements of pop and rock songs with classical fare in a concert setting—after all, one can hear Sybarite 5 playing Mozart and Led Zeppelin, Alarm Will Sound performing arrangements of Aphex Twin tracks and Conlon Nancarrow, or rising star cellist Joshua Roman playing Dvorak one day, and then rocking a Radiohead song with DJ Spooky later that week. Given this state of affairs, it seems perfectly natural that cellist Matt Haimovitz, who in the very early 21st century moved the Bach cello suites out of the concert hall and into what were at the time “alternative” performance spaces such as bars and nightclubs, would join forces with pianist Christopher O’Riley, who has created his own piano arrangements of songs by Nirvana and Radiohead to name just a few. Their joint effort is Shuffle.Play.Listen, a two-disc set containing an assortment of classical works on one CD, and arrangements of rock tunes by six different bands on the other CD.

Although the title of the recording suggests that the music can be mixed and matched at the whim of the listener, the obviously thoughtful ordering of pieces on both of the CDs suggests otherwise. The five movements of Bernard Hermann’s Vertigo Suite are carefully sprinkled throughout the first disc, framing spirited performances of Janacek’s Pohádka (Fairy Tale), Variations on a Slovak Folksong by Martinu, Stravinky’s Suite Italienne, and Le Grand Tango by Piazzolla. The second disc contains arrangements by O’Riley of songs from Arcade Fire, Radiohead, jazz guitarist John McLaughlin, Blonde Redhead, A Perfect Circle, and—an interesting choice that I was glad to see, having been an avid listener in the ’90s—Cocteau Twins. According to the booklet that accompanies the CDs, which contains an interview with O’Riley and Haimovitz by author Daniel Levitin, the hope for this project is that audiences for each style will have a listen and realize that there is much to be absorbed and enjoyed in all of the music represented here.

Although the musical material on each disc is substantially different, several elements serve to smooth the leap between genres. That everything is molded to fit the cello and piano duo lends consistency to the two CDs, as does the idea that all of the works on both discs are, in essence, translations—from film, ballet, or song formats that employ visual and/or text material, to purely instrumental content. O’Riley claims that he chooses what songs to arrange based on the level of complexity they present—intricacies that are both musically compelling from the standpoint of a classical musician, and that can be effectively arranged for a duo format. The pieces from disc one already employ folk or popular influences as musical stepping stones, and so with disc two the musical view is simply shifted to place the spotlight directly on the songs themselves, all of which are constructed with musical material that can be traced to the classical tradition. Whichever way one chooses to listen—be it shuffled or linear—the implication that classical and rock music, when interpreted by capable ears and hands, are not so very disparate, is well-communicated in this recording.

Eclectic ensembles that often employ state-of-the art electronic gadgetry, and/or amplification, seem to be receiving the most media attention lately as the instrumentaria of choice for the chamber music of our time. But centuries-old configurations still inspire a great many composers out there. While everyone knows that the string quartet is far more than alive and well by now, other time-tested combinations have also continued to inspire a broad range of music. Take, for example, the so called “piano + one” model which has been around since the 18th century, engendering countless works involving every conceivable instrument from the still ubiquitous violin and cello to the banjo and even the Chinese pipa and the Basque txistu. Among the more effective “piano + one” possibilities is piano plus flute which goes back to at least Mozart and counts among its enduring repertoire works from Franz Schubert, Felix Mendelssohn, Cecile Chaminade, Serge Prokofiev, York Bowen, Samuel Barber, Paul Bowles, Francis Poulenc, Olivier Messiaen, Aaron Copland, and even John Cage. And in recent years, several recordings have shown that the combination of flute and piano continues to be intriguing. The Utah-based flutist Laurel Ann Maurer has released numerous discs featuring recent American works. And two years ago, as a result of a Meet The Composer project with New Zealand-born flutist Marya Martin, a collection of eight new American works were released on Naxos with their scores simultaneously published as a set by the Theodore Presser Company. Now added to that already significant discography is a generous 2-CD collection of 11 heretofore unrecorded American works on Innova performed by flutist Mimi Stillman accompanied by Charles Abramovic, both of whom are also founding members of the Philadelphia-based Dolce Suono Ensemble.

Perhaps it is a tad misleading to say that Odyssey, the name of Stillman’s collection, contains 11 new American works for flute and piano. Three of the works—the title piece Odyssey by Gerald Levinson, Daniel Kellogg’s Five Sketches, and David Bennett Thomas’s Whim—are solo flute pieces (another grand tradition with illustrious antecedents in Bach, Debussy, and Varèse). And two are actually transcriptions. Michael Djupstrom’s 2007 Sejdefu majka budaše, originally for flute and guitar but re-arranged for flute and piano by pianist Charles Abramovic for the present recording, is a loose setting of a Balkan folk song. The duo’s version of the aria “A Quality Love” from Richard Danielpour’s Margaret Garner, his 2005 operatic collaboration with Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison, is one of the only transcriptions Danielpour has ever permitted of his music. Five Sketches alternates between completely chromatic and diatonic movements, albeit with occasional blue notes thrown in for good measure. Whim (2009) is a delightful exploration of skewed rhythmic groupings whereas Odyssey explores the instrument’s entire range not only in pitch but in timbre as well. Curiously Odyssey, the oldest piece in this collection, was composed all the way back in 1973, which is before more than half of the composers featured herein were actually born! Stillman has finally righted a discographical wrong by being the first person ever to commercially record it as well as Andrew Rudin’s 1979 Two Elegies for flute and piano. The latter is an extremely emotional and highly engaging work from a composer who is probably most known for his pioneering electronic composition Tragoedia, which was issued by Nonesuch in 1968 and is one of the earliest widely released recordings featuring the Moog synthesizer.

The remaining flute and piano works in the collection offer a fascinating cross-section of what American composers have been exploring for this combination over the past decade. Katherine Hoover, who in addition to her activities as a composer is also a flutist and has composed extensively for her instrument, is here represented by a work from just two years ago, Mountain & Mesa, which Stillman premiered at the National Flute Association’s national convention in the summer of 2009. I was particularly drawn to the final movement, “Dizi Dance,” which is Hoover’s personal impression of Chinese traditional music. Chinese music also serves as the departure point for the Duet for Flute and Piano by Zhao Tian. Composed in 1999 and revised in 2005, here Dai minority folksongs from China’s Yunnan Province are only one of the influences—the other is the jazz piano playing of Chick Corea. Quite a world apart from these pieces is David Ludwig’s 2002 Sonata, a formidable three movement work which shows some influence of Argentinian music, and Elements, a 2000 piece by Mason Bates, which will surprise listeners who only know of his electronica infused compositions. I was perhaps most surprised by Benjamin C.S. Boyle’s Sonata-Cantilena, a work composed just two years ago that sounds like it could be part of the standard repertoire for flutists for years to come. That it is unrepentantly tonal—its role models are Barber and Poulenc—is nothing to be apologetic for in the 21st century when all aesthetic positions are equally valid and when all continue to yield captivating music.

Video courtesy Mimi Stillman

Benjamin Broening’s catalog is rich in electroacoustic works, and as founder and artistic director of the University of Richmond’s Third Practice Festival he has likewise affirmed that the marriage of experimental sonic expressivity with an almost vocal sense of line is not merely one of convenience, but rather a deep source of inspiration. With the composition and support of electroacoustic music taking such a central role in Broening’s work, one might expect electronic timbres to predominate in his compositions. Instead, Broening often lets his electronics sing in the subtlest and most unobtrusive of tones, rarely the focal point but always imbuing the music with nuance and expressive shading.

Nowhere is Broening’s tendency toward the refined, elegant, and expressive given better voice than in this new disc of piano nocturnes, a fitting moniker for these moody, introspective works that luxuriate in atmospheric filigree akin to the piano works of Chopin and John Field. Broening’s nocturnes play out as both starkly spare and lovingly ornamented. The music floats freely above cavernous spaces, trembling over resonant harmonies reminiscent of a spikier, French-influenced palette of rich, occasionally romantic sonorities. Pianists Ruth Neville and Daniel Koppelman give impressive readings of Broening’s works, managing to sustain interest across passages of extremely quiet music and exploding in the album’s few moments of fury with an assured sense of ensemble.

This kind of “slow music,” occasionally rhythmic though rarely constant, is captivating when handled by a composer with the skill and imagination to approach each moment with renewed freshness; Broening is more than up to the task and listeners will likely want to revisit the disc many times to dwell in the particular, fully imagined moments that remain especially poignant.

Fortunately, Broening has encouraged just this kind of re-engaging. The pieces on Recombinant Nocturnes all share the same musical DNA, with melodic and rhythmic ideas from Nocturne/Doubles (the earliest work on the disc) showing up in the other compositions as well. Broening encourages playing the disc on shuffle mode in order to uncover new relationships between movements and pieces, with the core material constantly recombining in new and surprising ways—one of the featured pieces, Double Nocturne for two pianos, is literally a superimposition of the two solo piano works also recorded on the disc. I spent a good part of the weekend with the album endlessly shuffling, and it’s a testament to Broening’s musicianship that the material manages to sustain interest and yield new insights through so much repetition. The modular nature of the album is above all an expressive tool in service of the musical material, exposing the listener to an unconventional sense of time that’s just right for the dreamlike nachtmusik and its lonely wanderings.

Recombinant Nocturnes is a gorgeous disc of music, and Broening never allows this core fact to be usurped through the kind of technical or conceptual conceits that might have distracted from the magic. It is adventurous, experimental music that is not so caught up in being experimental that it cannot also be thoughtful, eloquent, and disarmingly direct as well. It’s one of the most persuasive accounts of a contemporary composer engaging a tried-and-true form—the piano nocturne—with both an individual imagination and just the right amount of affectionate familiarity.

Hybrid musical genres are hardly earth-shattering in the second decade of the 21st century. I would even posit that they are normative. But every now and then some music comes along containing a clash of sensibilities that forces listeners to confront head on the limitations of listening to music within the context of a genre, whatever genre, as well as attempting to listen beyond genre. Take, for example, the seemingly innocuously titled Modern Music, recently released by Nonesuch. While it is ostensibly a series of duets performed by jazz pianists Brad Mehldau and Kevin Hays, the disc’s digipack cover and spine contain the additional credit “composed and arranged by Patrick Zimmerli.”

Brad Mehldau has established himself as one of the leading jazz pianists of our time. But he has also accompanied classical vocalists such as Anne Sophie von Otter and Renée Fleming. While his Trio performs his original compositions as well as skewed takes on jazz standards, they’ve garnered a great deal of attention for their interpretations of music by Radiohead, Soundgarden, and other rock bands. Kevin Hays’s career to date, on the other hand, has hewn closer to jazz traditions. He has worked with such living legends as Sonny Rollins, Benny Golson, Ron Carter, and Jack DeJohnette. In addition, he has recorded three albums as a leader for Blue Note Records, which for generations has been something of a jazz seal of approval.

Patrick Zimmerli, whose role on Modern Music is more amorphous, perhaps requires a slightly longer introduction. An impressive saxophonist and band-leader, Zimmerli’s quartet session Twelve Sacred Dances, released in 1998, was one of the discographical highlights of the Chriss brothers’ late lamented A&R tenure at Arabesque Records. While the compositions on the album were clearly platforms for a heady interplay between Zimmerli’s tenor sax, percussionist John Hollenbeck and two thirds of The Bad Plus (pianist Ethan Iverson and bassist Reid Anderson), the music’s harmonic vocabulary—as well as its frequent contrapuntal layering of timbres—might occasionally fool less-than-completely-attentive listeners into thinking they’re hearing a new music ensemble reading through a complex contemporary score. A later Arabesque release featuring two piano trios (that is, the classical piano trio of violin, cello, and piano as opposed to the jazz piano trio of piano, bass, and drums) reveals Zimmerli’s thorough adeptness at bona fide score-based composition for performers other than himself (on the recording Scott Yoo, Michael Mermagen, and John Novacek). On close listen, though, the music has a recognizable jazz tinge; in fact, at times it’s ironically more overtly swing-oriented than Twelve Sacred Dances. But if those two albums revealed a creator who was at the same time a jazz-inspired classical composer and a contemporary classical-minded jazzer, the lines get even more blurry on Phoenix, a Songlines disc from 2005. Therein Zimmerli combines his saxophone (this time a soprano) with a jazz piano trio (the one that’s piano, bass, and drums), a string quartet, and electronics to boot, creating music that’s at times contemporary jazz, at times a chamber orchestra, and at times techno-sounding.

As with the aforementioned album of piano trios, Zimmerli does not play at all on Modern Music. Rather, every note uttered herein has been performed by Mehldau and Hays, who are both formidable improvisatory pianists, and that’s where Zimmerli’s exact role starts to get confusing. Unlike in classical music where the composer of the music being played remains the auteur even if he or she (sadly more usually he) has been dead for hundreds of years, jazz inverts the paradigm: the performer is the auteur no matter what he or she is playing. No matter how much larger Herbert Von Karajan’s name looms over Beethoven’s in his endless series of recordings of the latter’s music, listeners to these recordings are still supposedly hearing the music of Beethoven, whereas John Coltrane’s performances of “My Favorite Things” ultimately have very little to do with Rodgers and Hammerstein. So what exactly is the role of a non-participatory “composer” on an album by two jazz improvisors? For starters, this particular project was instigated by Zimmerli even though Mehldau and Hays—who had never previously appeared on record together—have traveled in the same circles since the late ’80s and wanted to collaborate for a very long time. In addition to producing the session, Zimmerli also determined what repertoire Mehldau and Hays recorded, although to describe his contribution above all else as the person who “composed and arranged” the music seems slightly misleading to me. Originally the idea was for Mehldau and Hays to perform arrangements by Zimmerli of pieces of modern classical music. The project began with them performing an arrangement of Richard Strauss’s late composition Metamorphosen. Other pieces originally intended for similar treatment were Arvo Pärt’s Tabula Rasa, Henryk Gorecki’s Symphony No. 3, Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians, and Philip Glass’s String Quartet No. 5. In addition, a jazz standard was chosen (Ornette Coleman’s “Lonely Woman”) and each of the pianists were also asked to contribute an original piece. In the end, the Strauss, Pärt, and Gorecki wound up on the proverbial cutting room floor, and Zimmerli composed a total of four originals for the project. However, since there are a total of nine tracks on the final album, that means that most of the music herein was not composed by Zimmerli.

But if one is to assign an auteur to this project it would probably still have to be Zimmerli since the curating of the repertoire is perhaps the single most important ingredient here. There is a remarkable consistency of compositional voice throughout, despite there being six composers involved in total. Zimmerli’s own compositions, in particular the title track and the disc’s opener (“Crazy Quilt”), prove that a musical goldmine can result when minimalist compositional processes are subjected to improvisational whimsy. Although perhaps there’s no more undeniable evidence for that than to hear what Zimmerli gets Mehldau and Hays to do with the opening chord sequence of Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians. Robert Fripp once commented that while he enjoyed Reich’s music, its preconception lacked “the random factor, the factor of hazard.”

By further blurring the lines between composition, performance, and authorship, Mehldau, Hays, and Zimmerli have certainly added that hazard factor. Whose music it is will ultimately depend on what context you bring to it, but wherever you’re coming from it will change the way you think about things.

When I am old, I would like to form an all-female salsa band, and we will tour the world, performing in senior citizen homes everywhere. A girl has to have something to look forward to in her later years, right? Well, drummer Terri Lyne Carrington, who is by no means an old lady and has been playing since an incredibly young age, is not waiting around to form her “dream team.” With her latest CD, Mosaic, she has assembled a jaw-dropping lineup of musicians who happen to all be female, including Cassandra Wilson, Esperanza Spalding, Nona Hendryx, Tineke Postma, Sheila E., Geri Allen, and many others. The intention of the project, as the liner notes describe, is to “comment on historical, current and appropriately feminine themes with the intent to offer an informative, enjoyable listening experience, driven by creativity and consciousness.” It’s not just for girls, though—the music, which is firmly rooted in jazz but touches upon numerous other styles such as funk and hip-hop, speaks just as strongly as one might expect from any world-class lineup of performers.

Several of the compositions on Mosaic were written and/or arranged by Carrington, such as “Magic and Music”, “Mosaic Triad”, and “Insomniac”, while other tunes were penned by different members of the project. Accordingly, each song is musically distinctive, and literally has it’s own voice since Carrington handpicked a singer for every one. The very first track, “Transformation”, hooks you immediately. Written and sung by Nona Hendryx, this funky opener highlights saxophonist Tineke Postma and trumpeter Ingrid Jensen, who contributes a solo on flugelhorn that reaches some searingly high notes. The sparkling mix, which allows for all the parts to be clearly heard, such as Linda Taylor’s electric guitar track that peeks out from the background at just the right moments, is typical of the entire recording. Gretchen Parlato sings unusual and intimate versions of Irving Berlin’s “I Got Lost In Her Arms” and “Michelle” by John Lennon and Paul McCartney, which follow one another without pause.

“Unconditional Love” by Geri Allen opens with a mambo rhythm played on congas, processed with a bizarre yet compelling tinny reverb, while bassist Esperanza Spalding sings a winding, wordless melody that pairs nicely with the solo saxophone lines that accompany her. Spalding also sings on her own “Crayola”, which is perhaps the most original, quirky tune on Mosaic, with its rapidly contorting melodic lines.

Terri Lyne Carrington is a fantastic, strong drummer with a penchant for asymmetrical meters, as one can hear in “Soul Talk”, with its loping 11/4 bass line. Apparently this tune caused a bit of angst for vocalist Dee Dee Bridgewater, who states in the video below that she had a terrible time getting the changes straight. In the end, the arrangement sounds like it was a piece of cake to perform, and Bridgewater sums things up with the statement, “That’s what Terri Lyne does to you. She will take you places you think you can’t go—she’ll challenge you.”

If you can’t convince the members of So Percussion to stop by your house and play a show in your living room, their latest release, It Is Time, just might offer the next best thing.

The disc contains only a single work—Steve Mackey’s five-movement, 38-minute It Is Time—which was composed expressly for the quartet. It comes bundled, however, with a 5.1 surround sound DVD of a complete performance that allows the viewer to get up close and personal with each of So’s members and peer over their shoulders as they work their way through the piece. The black box-like theater setting in which it was recorded keeps all the focus on the men in black and the myriad instruments the piece incorporates—from a single metronome to a full compliment of drums, bells, whistles, and assorted noisemakers—all played against a backdrop of video footage that imitates or accents the percussive action in the foreground.

While the almost-concert-at-home performance was a great bonus, I actually found myself more strongly attracted to the audio-only portion of the recording package. Where the video allowed me a peek at the performers in action (a treat I missed when the work was premiered at Carnegie Hall’s Zankel Hall in March of 2010), the range of sound employed in Mackey’s music is so rich that it rewards focused attention. A continuously shifting timbral palette manipulates the pace of passing time. Of the many striking moments, the microtonal tuning of the steel drums was a particularly ear-catching highlight.

Structurally, Mackey has divided the work so that the first four movements (“Metronome,” “Steel Drums,” “Marimba,” and “Drums,” respectively) move almost seamlessly from one to the next and allow each of the quartet’s members to take a featured turn in the spotlight. “Epilogue,” the brief two-minute closer, balances on the lethargic but not melancholy tones of the bowed saw, and sets up a stunningly punctuated end to this sonic ride.

Among those who feel that contemporary culture is nose-diving to its demise, the death of the long form is a common reason cited. People, they contend, no longer possess the attention spans needed to process anything that requires an investment of more than a few moments of one’s precious time. Our minds think in terms of search engine queries, and 140 characters has shifted from being not nearly enough to much too long. For those people, Dedication, the latest release by the PRISM Saxophone Quartet, might be just another sad example of our culture’s downfall.

That’s not to say that the short form can’t also be virtuous and meaningful. Take the example of haiku, in which brevity and concision is not simply an aspiration, but a requirement. You don’t hear people arguing that Matsuo Bashô, Yosa Buson, or Kobayashi Issa were eroding Japanese culture with their 17-syllable verses. Quite the contrary. Their work is the embodiment of the less-is-more pathos. And if ever there was an art form that could sometimes use a reminder of that maxim, it is contemporary classical music.

In celebration of its 20th anniversary, the PRISM Quartet issued a call to more than 20 composers, asking them to write short works to mark this milestone. The majority of these micro-compositions last between one and two minutes, each providing a fascinating window into its composer’s unique approach to the ensemble. While a few contributors appear to have either been uninspired by the task or simply unable to cram a grand idea into a compact form, a handful embraced the challenge, delivering compelling results.

Among the CD’s most intriguing compositions are those that take advantage of the saxophone’s full expressive range and sonic potential. Both Gregory Wanamaker and Keno Ueno possess a substantial knowledge of the instrument’s capabilities and use a range of multiphonics to elicit very different outcomes. Wanamaker’s Speed Metal Organum Blues uses the technique to invoke the chaos and feedback-driven energy of a sweaty mosh pit at a heavy metal concert while Ueno’s July 23, from sunrise to sunset, the summer of the S.E.P.S.A. bus rides destra e sinistra around Ischia just to get tomorrow’s scatolame, makes the acoustic ensemble sound like a remarkable, high-end synthesizer. Often pigeonholed as a “new complexity” composer, in A Fractured Silence Jason Eckardt demonstrates a sharp sense of timing, applying silence liberally between short bursts of captivating sounds and textures previously unknown in the saxophone quartet literature.

Other standout tracks include Donnacha Dennehy’s dizzying Mild, Medium-Lasting, Artificial Happiness and Dennis DeSantis’s Hive Mind, which overcomes the lure of counterpoint to produce a gritty and aggressive single-voice anthem.

Throughout the album the PRISM Quartet plays with remarkable tightness, demonstrating a precision that would likely make a robot envious. They not only handle the demands of the modern works with ease, but also exhibit a keen flexibility, making more traditional compositions such as Adam Silverman’s simple and exquisite Just a Minute, Chopin sound equally as convincing. Yet despite their obvious command of what, for lack of a better term, is “concert music,” the ensemble, perhaps unwilling or unable to shed the saxophone’s historical baggage as a jazz instrument, still feels compelled to wade into those waters. In these instances, even guest artist Greg Osby can’t help the group swing.

***

Brian Sacawa serves as saxophonist with The U.S. Army Field Band from Washington, D.C., curates Baltimore’s Mobtown Modern Music Series, and races his bicycle at the elite level. You can find him on the internet.

Tahiti is the latest recording released by Michael Torke’s Ecstatic Records, the label he founded in 2003 in order to release his new material and to distribute his older recordings. The current trend of self-publishing/recording composers was still a fairly new and rarely implemented concept in 2003, and the number of established composers leaving the safety of traditional models to set out on their own was virtually non-existent. After the demise of Argo Records in the late ’90s, Torke tried for some time to get the rights for his recordings, but it wasn’t until 2001 that he gained some traction. Andrew Cornall (his former producer) approached Torke with an offer to assist him in acquiring the rights for those recordings, and it was at this meeting that the seeds of Ecstatic were sown.

Launching Ecstatic Records showed that while Torke was already thoroughly established as a composer, he was still looking forward—not only in terms of the music he wrote but also in terms of the life and business of composing. Torke currently spends the bulk of his time in Las Vegas (far from the influence and trappings of contemporary concert music culture), and it’s in this environment that his work on Tahiti began to take shape.

Performed by the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic’s contemporary music group, Ensemble 10/10 (led by conductor Clark Rundell), and coming in at just over 17 minutes, the album’s first track, Fiji, quickly reveals itself as a Torke joint. Calling for five percussionists and utilizing a variety of Latin-centric instruments (congas, bongos, and claves, oh my!) to create a virtually non-stop bed of percussion, Fiji relentlessly percolates, pausing only during the occasional breakdown and turnaround before returning to a constantly shifting texture that just won’t sit still. Joining the percussion are pairs of oboes, clarinets, and bassoons, which are matched with pairs of violins, violas, and cellos, respectively. While the result is five percussionists and six (x2) other instrumentalists, this description does not really convey the weight of the result. The aforementioned are truly paired, as they double every note and rhythm throughout the piece, resulting in a sound with the density of a chamber orchestra but the clarity of a smaller chamber group. Adding to the effect, never have so many percussionists played so little. Joining the drums are a variety of shakers, bells, and the like, but given the simplicity of the lines, the impact is that of a single percussionist (perhaps with an extra arm) working with a very thick group of other instrumentalists to create a deceptively simple texture derived from the rhythms played by the percussionists.

Following Fiji is the eight-movement title track, Tahiti. While the movement titles are drawn from the Society Islands of French Polynesia, Torke points out in his liner notes that they do not directly speak to characteristics of their namesakes. Instead, they are meant to give a more general impression of “the idea of humidity: they attempt to capture the perfume of leisure time in a very warm and sunny beautiful place.” By and large Torke captures this, especially in the second movement, “Moorea—green cliffs.” Here the percussion again mimics a single drummer, but one languidly playing a half-time groove while strings and winds wistfully trade lightly syncopated melodies. “Bora-Bora—lagoon” also calmly leads the listener along with high winds and bright percussion, the only wrinkle in the journey being the 3 + 5 grouping in the chorus giving a slight disturbance to an otherwise balmy trip. “Tahaa—white sand” takes the listener in a new rhythmic direction, notably with straight eighth-note lines that move around the orchestra accompanied by long flowing string lines, which then trade to pizz. strings and long wind lines. While this direction is new, the movement is also notable in that the percussion is almost non-existent.

“Maupiti—by the reef” takes the “drum kit approximation” concept to its most fully realized state. Listeners of a certain vintage might be called back to any number of TV theme songs of the ’70s and ’80s (many of which were fantastic, thankyouverymuch) which featured drum kits along with studio orchestras. Music starting with two bars of loud, staccato, tutti eighths followed by two quieter measures would fit in any number of pieces and could go in as many directions, but the use of the toms and snare to give a pick-up (anacrusis, for those keeping score[¹]) into the main theme is the first sign that we might be settling in to watch the ABC lineup of 1983. A straight rock beat (complete with tambourine playing eighths in a spot-on impression of a closed hi-hat, along with complementary eighths in the orchestra that are begging to be played by guitar and bass) accompanies a lovely theme that actually features some of the most rhythmically adventurous and involved music on the disc. This is accentuated (in the ears of this listener) by the harmonic and melodic choices that I can’t help but hear as TV theme-song-ish.[²]

“Huahine—under the moonlight” returns the listener to the islands with slowly pulsing rhythms and a haunting clarinet solo line. The only problem with this movement is that both the clarinet line and the piece end too soon. I could have gone around once or twice more. Finally, we hear “Farwell” which aptly wraps up Torke’s trip to the islands, complete with cymbal crashes (there are those downbeat accents…) seemingly mimicking crashing waves.

In the liner notes, Torke says (not about Tahiti in particular), “I have always wanted to write a composition that would inspire a woman, coming home from a long day of work, to draw a bath, light candles, and listen to it on her pink iPod.” Whether that goal played a role in the development of these pieces or not, he may very well have achieved it in places on this disc. Torke was an unapologetically “listenable” composer before that was fashionable, and in many ways Tahiti shows a continuation of that ethos. While there is plenty of substantial and interesting material here, this is clearly music written with people in mind, not composers. Its overall impact is thoughtful, approachable, and decidedly Torke.

***

1.     In college I went to a local CD shop (ask your parents) to pick up a few CDs. On my way to the counter I noticed a CD for a thrash metal band called Anacrusis. While I was checking out the CD cover, the shop owner walked over and noticed my prospective purchases were a bit different than what I was presently checking out. When he asked me why I was having a look at the disc, I told him what anacrusis meant. He didn’t believe me and said he was going to call his mother (who was the staff accompanist for the local university) to confirm. I said that not only was I right, but I was willing to bet the purchase price of the CDs I’d planned to purchase.

And that, my friends, was how you got free music in the early ’90s.

2.     The only movement that is more adventurous is the first movement, “Tahiti—Papeete,” which features three against four polyrhythmic elements that when played straight are quite effective. And when Torke carves out the occasional beat, even more so.

This past May, NewMusicBox contributor Andrew Sigler and I each covered Austin, Texas’s “Fast Forward Austin” festival, and those looking for an audio snapshot of that city’s emerging new music scene would do well to give Line Upon Line Percussion’s new album a listen. This trio of percussionists—Adam Bedell, Cullen Faulk, and Matthew Tedori—formed at the University of Texas at Austin in 2009, and the four composers whose works are featured on the album are all Austin-based as well.

They were also all born in 1980 or after, with included works composed in 2009 and 2010. As one might expect, the influence of minimalism and New York’s Downtown scene is felt in their respective pieces, some more strongly than others. The homegrown way the album was put together—with Line Upon Line members commissioning brand-new works from local composers—led the ensemble to request four very different pieces that would each touch on different areas of the ensemble’s versatility.

James D. Norman’s Redshift (2010), which leads off the disc, is inspired by a concept from physics regarding the change in frequency of sound (or light) as an object moves away from the listener. As Norman explains, “This relationship of source and observer is the fundamental process at work in Redshift, relating player to player and ensemble to listener.” The work expands an initial unison line in a variety of ways, morphing and stretching in a kind of quasi-heterophonous texture that balances an interplay of quick-decaying instruments along with more sustained tones (including some impressively pure bowed cymbal playing). Redshift has the most spare and symmetrical instrumentation of any work on the album—six metal planks, six wood planks, and a crash cymbal—yet Norman’s inventive and constantly varying orchestration propels the work forward. The timbres are never far from the tinge of Gamelan music, with the metal plates providing plenty of clangorous overtones that sound rich and bell-like on this recording.

“The Hobo Code is a fascinating system of symbols understood among the hobo community,” Snowden explains. “Because hobos weren’t typically welcomed (and were often illiterate), messages left for others in the community had to be easy for hobos to read but look like little more than random markings to everyone else to maintain an element of secrecy. Each movement of this piece is based on one of these symbols and, just like those resourceful hobos, makes use of very limited materials.”

Snowden’s A Man with a Gun is scored for a single shared bass drum and several additional implements, emphasizing the communal and ritualistic elements of the composition’s subject. The first movement, “Be Prepared to Defend Yourself,” lopes along with a series of rugged, uneven gestures for bass drum, played in a variety of ways that wring a lot out of a fairly humble instrument, while the second movement, “There are Thieves About,” serves up a sneaky rhythmic groove augmented by metal plates placed on the surface of the bass drum. The final movement, “A Man with a Gun Lives Here,” adds a three-pound sack of buckshot to the mix, which is dropped, smacked, dragged, and eventually poured onto the drum head. It’s a tribute to Snowden’s resourcefulness that after the effect of the entire bag being poured onto the drum—a point many composers might have considered a suitable cadence—Snowden instructs the players to tilt the drum head and spread the buckshot over its surface, creating a sonority akin to tidal surf cresting and receding. Snowden’s exploration of the physical impulse have rewarded him with a large palette of timbres, and his work has a rustic, red-blooded quality that is missing from a lot of timbre-oriented percussion music. Line Upon Line delivered the requisite (and at times acrobatic) choreography and lent the piece’s timbral explorations an expressive element.

Zack Stanton’s Echoes of Veiled Light (2009) was a response to the ensemble’s request that he compose them a quiet piece—always a challenge of subtlety and restraint when writing for percussion, and one that Stanton seems well-equipped to meet. The work is based on the echoing and close imitation of successive musical ideas, woven into a delicate filigree that successfully blends pitched and non-pitched sounds. The influence of minimalism and postminimalism is present but, refreshingly, it never overwhelms Stanton’s own voice. The work reveals great textural sophistication, as well as a sustained, lyrical impulse that is a nice contrast to what is largely a groove-based album.

The work’s second movement ends in a gesture that struck me as a good example of one of the things that Dicke brings to the table as a composer—a great ear for sound and an understanding of how to best let its innate qualities shine through. The movement ends in a duet of winding ratchets, overlapping unevenly and stuttering over each other in a kind of highly active stasis. Other moments, including a ghostly musical saw part in the third movement and whipped trash bags in fourth, coax unexpectedly varied timbres from seemingly limited sources. Fragments of material linger, dreamlike, as things to be reveled in, suddenly stopping or occasionally spinning into cathedral-like structures. The work reflects its liturgical inspiration not only in its final quotation of Latin text, but in the way that each gesture is suspended, meditated upon, and slowly passed between players.

This disc introduces us to an ensemble that is rhythmically tight and sensitive as well as timbrally curious, and their commitment to local composers telegraphs their seriousness in making contributions to the percussion repertoire. The effort is also an example of how a “garage band,” local, do-it-yourself impulse worked alongside the more traditional commissioning process—a marriage of old and emerging paradigms that is versatile and undogmatic. Line Upon Line’s debut release is a great way to sample a local scene and the ensemble’s considerable range of abilities.