Category: Listen

John Aylward’s passion for contemporary music has already manifested in a surprising number of ways for someone barely over thirty. An accomplished concert pianist who champions recent compositions, the Tucson-born, Boston-based Aylward is also a formidable music theorist who has written extensively about Elliott Carter. He’s additionally the artistic director of the modular East Coast Contemporary Ensemble, and in that role founded the Etchings Festival, an annual international forum based in Auvillar, France. But above and beyond all of these things, Aylward is a composer of challenging yet compelling instrumental, vocal, and electronic works, so it is gratifying to hear an entire disc devoted to his music.

Stillness and Change, issued last month on Albany, offers four of Aylward’s chamber works, all composed within the last three years. The disc, which featured definitive performances by members of the East Coast Contemporary Ensemble, is an excellent snapshot of where he currently is as a composer. Although it’s a shame that room could not have been made for at least one of his electronic compositions or live electronic improvisations herein as well. However, folks eager to discover this aspect of his compositional identity can explore links to entire sound files on the music page of his website.

But even listeners whose sole encounter with Aylward’s music will be this new Albany disc should immediately hear that the kind of acute attention to sonority which typifies most electronic music is at play in his purely acoustic music as well. Aylward’s keen sense of instrumental possibilities and how to effectively balance them is perhaps most clearly evident in the opening work which lends the disc its title, Stillness and Change, a 2008 composition for “Pierrot plus percussion”: flute, clarinet, violin, cello, piano, and percussion. This enduring timbral combination has been a perennial favorite of Aylward, who has previously written at least two other works so scored as well as pieces for subsets of this configuration and a work for mezzo-soprano and “Pierrot”. Aylward’s ongoing experience with writing for this ensemble is a refreshing contrast to most composers who only write a single Pierrot work; as a result, this quintessentially contemporary music instrumentation comes across sounding as inevitable as a string quartet despite several things that Aylward does to intentionally sabotage the blending of layers. Like Carter, Aylward creates multiple simultaneous independent strands and revels in sonically oxymoronic passages that are fast and slow at the same time.

Images of Departure (2009), a de-facto sonata for viola and piano (here performed by Mark Holloway and Stephen Gosling), is a tour de force three-movement showcase for the most unduly neglected member of the string family. The terse energetic opening is followed by a deeply moving “Elegy” whose harmonies, as the composer acknowledges in his program notes, are indebted to Olivier Messiaen. The final movement is an exciting virtuosic romp. Written during the final illness of his uncle William Gerard Aylward, to whose memory the entire disc is dedicated, Images of Departure is a hefty musical statement that very effectively demonstrates that the middle fiddle is as capable of gravitas as its bigger and smaller brethren.

Songs from the Wild Iris is a song cycle derived from five poems by Louise Glück. Glück’s nature-inspired writings have served as the catalyst for many of Aylward’s compositions over the years, including purely instrumental works such as the aforementioned Stillness and Change. (In fact, even the title Stillness and Change comes from a line in Glück’s poem Island.) By avoiding inappropriate melismatic flourishes and keeping the spare instrumental textures that accompany the vocal line relatively unobtrusive, Aylward creates an ideal musical frame in which Glück’s words are always comprehensible. The composition of these attentive settings both predates and postdates the other compositions on the disc, revealing that these poems were in the back of his mind even as he was creating all of the other music herein.

A different kind of spareness informs Aylward’s 2009 composition Reciprochal Accord, which is scored for a duo of violin and cello. Inspired by his analysis of Carter’s Fifth String Quartet, Aylward explores contrasting proportionate tempos between the two players. In a lucid introductory essay accompanying the disc, composer Christian Carey makes some fascinating observations about place in his comparisons between Aylward and Carter. Carter, a lifelong New Yorker, had his great compositional epiphany while working on his First String Quartet in a desert near Tucson, whereas Aylward grew up in Tucson but composed all of the works on the present recording after moving to the Northeast. While Carey eschews the oversimplification of a Southwest/Northwest dichotomy running through the music of both of these composers, Aylward, like Carter before him, creates a thoroughly organic music which clearly and effectively channels multiple places.

Often when contemporary music is characterized with words such as “thorny” or “gnarly,” one can more or less guess what to expect upon listening. It is rare to hear music that glances off these characterizations, taking the listener down a separate yet related path of a different sensibility that is intricate on its own terms. Composer Keeril Makan’s new CD Target takes that less traveled bearing, giving the ears a workout with timbral complexity drawn from a remarkably spare amount of material that sneaks up and delivers a whollop of powerful emotional content.

The disc’s opening track, 2, is a sinewy, angular duet for violin and percussion performed by Either/Or duo. The two instruments are treated as one throughout the piece; in the first half as a continuous stream of spiky energy, and quite the opposite in the second half, a noisy wall of sonic disturbance comprised of sustained tones and unstable harmonics.

Zones d’accord is a meditation in extended technique for cello, ranging from precariously balanced, gauzy sounds to ear-splitting scratches and tremolos. Originally composed as a musical accompaniment for a dance work, the title refers to the relationship between sound and movement.

The five-movement work Target, described in the liner notes as “a political commentary on U.S. military intervention abroad” was written for the California E.A.R. Unit with mezzo-soprano Laurie Rubin, and incorporates to dramatic effect both original text by poet Jena Osman and snippets from U.S. military leaflets and documents. The interior three movements, —”Leaflet,” “Psyops: Know Your Target,” and “Leaflet II”—illustrate the dehumanizing nature of the texts with auras that are quirky, haunting, and aggressive in turn. The downward spiraling waves of the outer framing movements, “Twister I” and “Twister II,” reveal a seasick feeling of upset gliding just below the surface of the music.

Last but not least is the percussion work Resonance Alley, scored for three cymbals and a gong. According to the liner notes, the performer controls the speed at which musical events progress, and percussionist David Shively draws an enormous variety of slowly transforming textures and complex harmonic content from the metallic instruments over this nearly 30-minute performance. Although the recording is of excellent quality, as is the case throughout the disc, this is a work that would be especially satisfying to hear live.

The strength of the music on Target is its clarity and focus of intent—composer and performers drawing complexity from simplicity. All the fat has been cut away, leaving music that is lean, angry, and dramatic.

For decades, one of the great lacunae of recorded music has been William Schuman’s 1942 Secular Cantata No. 2 – A Free Song, a setting for baritone, chorus, and orchestra of excerpts from Civil War poems by Walt Whitman. That this less than 14-minute piece was the very first work ever to win a Pulitzer Prize for Music (back in 1943) should have been reason enough for someone to issue it commercially. So the mind boggles that it has taken nearly 70 years—and a year after Schuman’s centenary in 2010—yet this summer has seen the release of not one, but two “world premiere recordings” of A Free Song, both from groups based in Illinois. Given how diffuse the new music community remains despite high speed internet connections, they can both probably be forgiven for not knowing of each other’s recording. And both recordings offer merits not only in terms of the dedicated performance of the work in question, but in the programming of the remaining material on each respective disc.

Conductor Ian Hobson leads the Sinfonia da Camera and the University of Illinois Chorale and Oratorio Society in a recording of A Free Song on Albany Records. It’s part of an all-Schuman disc mostly devoted to his choral music rarities but also including the justly famous and frequently recorded American Festival Overture from 1939 which serves as a rousing opener. Prelude for Full Chorus of Mixed Voices with Soprano, also originally completed in 1939 in a version for female chorus but reworked for mixed chorus (as it is heard here) in 1942, is a relatively austere and introspective setting of words by another great American writer, Thomas Wolfe—a passage from the novel Look Homeward, Angel. The remainder of the disc is devoted to one of Schuman’s final major works, the 40-minute cantata On Freedom’s Ground, which was commissioned for the 1986 celebration of the 100th anniversary of the dedication of the Statue of Liberty by a consortium involving eight American orchestras. Hearing these works from both the beginning and end of Schuman’s career back to back reveals a remarkably consistent compositional voice throughout and begs the question of why this music has still not entered the repertoire of orchestras in this country.

The other recording of A Free Song takes a very different but equally appropriate programmatic approach. For conductor Carlos Kalmar’s recording on Cedille with the Chicago-based Grant Park Orchestra and Chorus, A Free Song is placed alongside two other works which were awarded Pulitzer Prizes in the first decade of the award—Aaron Copland’s celebrated Appalachian Spring and Leo Sowerby’s largely forgotten The Canticle of the Sun, which is another world premiere recording. While the performance here of Copland’s signature work is thoroughly satisfying, it seemed like a lost opportunity. This recording features the familiar full orchestral suite, which was first performed in October 1945, rather than the original 1944 version of the score (the full ballet arranged for 13 instruments), which is the version of the piece that actually received the Pulitzer—a detail that even the disc’s booklet notes acknowledge. Aside from a fascinating historic re-issue of Copland’s own recording of this more fragile and intimate version (which includes out-takes from rehearsals as well) released by Sony in 2000, the only other account of it I know is a wonderful self-produced LP pairing it with Ives’s Three Places in New England released back in the 1980s by the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra (and which, to be best of my knowledge, has never been re-issued in a digital format). The Canticle of the Sun, on the other hand, is another total revelation. Though his music is rarely performed today, Sowerby, a long-time resident of Chicago, was once one of America’s most widely performed composers. Ironically this powerful work, a half-hour long setting of Malcolm Arnold’s translation of the “Prayer of St. Francis of Assisi” for chorus and orchestra, has only been performed about a dozen times since its premiere and mostly in a reduced orchestration of organ, two pianos, brass, and percussion.

As for A Free Song, although William Schuman thought of himself primarily a composer of instrumental music and considered his choral output less consequential, his setting here reveals him to be a deeply moving and sensitive interpreter of important American poetry. At the time this work was initially composed, the United States had just entered the Second World War. During this almost impossible to imagine period of American unity and determination, a disappointed Schuman, who himself was unable to enlist due to a degenerative muscle disease, wrote this composition as a patriotic call to arms. While it might be too optimistic to assume that this long-overdue revival of it could take us out of our own extremely divisive times, A Free Song is a stirring and powerful celebration of liberty that Americans should listen to with pride and appreciation.

As for which recording to listen to, one which summarizes Schuman’s achievement as a choral composer or one which groups his music with contemporaneous works by other major American composers, why not listen to both? Better yet, round up a chorus and orchestra and head down to Washington, D.C. to perform it live outside of the nation’s Capitol; those folks should listen to it, too!

If you tend to conjure programmatic stories while listening to instrumental music, even where no clues as to the composer’s intent are on offer, Brooklyn-based percussion group ensemble et, al. is shortcutting some of the imaginative work for you. With track titles such as A Beautiful Walk Through an Industrial Wasteland and Confessions of an Honest Man, the ear is set up to translate the sounds along a certain storyline. That said, this music by Ron Tucker is simple, direct, and clear enough that these proffered banisters need be nothing more than artful suggestion.

A collection of five short tracks adding up to just 20 minutes of music, this EP feels like more of an amuse-bouche than an image of the ensemble’s full reach, but the character of the music is enchanting enough to make it an attractive listen. Each piece rings out as if the lid has been lifted up on a new music box, the lines mixing vibraphone, marimba, and glockenspiel with percussive sounds made using less traditional wood, metal, and glass objects. With these raw materials, the ensemble employs a musical vocabulary just quirky and mysterious enough that it would comfortably fit into the films of Jean-Pierre Jeunet.

Across the board, the pieces seem to project a whimsical profile, never straying into violent or oppressive sonic terrain. Where A Beautiful Walk Through an Industrial Wasteland rambles along a clear path while tossing in enough new timbers as the scenery changes to keep the ear engaged, In a Crowded Room With Nothing to Think About traces and retraces material, highlighting new colors on each pass. With its airy, reverberant tones, Confessions of an Honest Man turns out to be less angst-ridden and more transcendental that the title might have implied, but Finding Simple Wonders as the Day Turns the Night delivers exactly the kind of twilight magic you might expect—well, if you often find yourself in a darkly magical world at sundown, at least.

The EP includes a final “hidden” track—an arrangement of Für Alina by Arvo Pärt. The compositional voice here is obviously a diversion from what has come before, yet it still connects, even considering its heavier, more circumspect tone and the deep piano drone that underscores the track. At first it feels like perhaps too weighty an anchor, but its inclusion serves as a neat nod to Tucker’s musical influence.

And then the tape has indeed run out, leaving us to wonder where Ron Tucker and ensemble et, al. will take us next.

Although Chris Shultis’s career as a musician and scholar has been long and multifaceted, his colleague Richard Hermann pointed out to me that he is, in a sense, a young composer: It was not until the late 1980s that Shultis (b. 1957), initially a percussionist, began to write music full-time. I first encountered his work in 2004; a number of pieces that appear on this year’s Devisadero date from around the same period. The handsomely packaged disc includes Openings (2004-07) for wind ensemble, Songs of Love and Longing (2001-03) for soprano and piano, “a little light, in great darkness” (1995-2000) for soprano saxophone and woodwind quartet, and Devisadero (2002-07) for piano.

The guiding principle of Openings is the increasingly generous ladling-out of conventional specimens from the worlds of concert band music, symphonic music, and film and television music with occasional enigmatic interruption. But this description makes it seem much less gripping than it really is: Shultis’s adroit selection and arrangment of these specimens offer a cutaway view, revealing plenty of unoccupied storage space for the affective freight—bombast, dread, elation—that these musical containers are supposed to bring us. At what level Shultis accepts that these snatches of soothing or stirring music really do mean what they purport to is beside the point: Even if they sprang to his ear without solicitation “as [he] walked up the Spruce Spring Trail near Red Canyon campground in the Manzano Wilderness for the first time,” their disposition is so canny (and Shultis’s experimentalist credentials so impeccable) that they just can’t be taken at face value. The same mode of rhetorical disassembly characterizes Songs of Love and Longing, whose passages of opaque, putatively neutral material—more than are found in Openings—stud it so densely that they risk losing their potency to remind us of the piece’s very wide possibility-space. It’s a minor quibble, though: I love pieces that confront these sorts of problems.

I have a hazy memory of hearing the somewhat older “a little light, in great darkness” about seven years ago and not being able to make much sense of it; I’m glad it reappeared on this disc, because it presents a useful contextualization for the rest of the pieces included here. At a very static almost-fifteen minutes, “a little light, in great darkness” clarifies Shultis’s roots in post-Cageian experimentalism; however, hints of restlessness and impatience with the piece’s highly constrained sound-world emerge.

These moments of recognition—acknowledgments that the piece’s sparse, obscure non-gestures are not as resistant to interpretation as they might have seemed—surely informed Openings and Songs of Love and Longing, but they blossom even more audaciously on the disc’s title track. Devisadero, another trail-walking piece, skirts Windham Hill-style New Age naturism. Unlike that literature, however, Shultis’s rewarding piece dances on the edge of not making sense, taking a dialectical view of nature and Nature.

In each case, Shultis’s pieces raise more questions than they furnish answers. What I find especially pleasing about the disc Devisadero is that it helps us organize these questions and try to reconstruct Shultis’s own encounters with them; it’s a fascinating document in the continued journey of this young composer.

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.

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.

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.