Category: Listen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

Purchase:

Graham Reynolds:
The Difference Engine
Innova

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

At the present time we have available for our perusal an extraordinary amount of music, more than in any other period in human history. And within that overwhelming assemblage there are countless treasures which instantly call attention to themselves, and still more that gradually reveal their priceless secrets when patiently examined through repeated listening. Then there are a handful of works which not only grab your attention from the first second you hear them straight through to the end (allowing you to do absolutely nothing else in the interim) and reveal additional charms when listened to multiple times, but also stay in your mind even after you have finished listening. Such a work is Aaron Siegel’s Science is Only a Sometimes Friend.

When it arrived on my desk, the cover immediately jumped out at me with its crisp, vibrant colors and the juxtaposition of photos of man-made and natural objects—a section of a toy glockenspiel and an array of leaves and flowers. The eight slabs of the toy glockenspiel, all uniformly parallel though each in a completely different pastel shade, provide a somewhat jarring contrast to the seeming randomness of the more muted green leaves which are impossible to accurately count and also obscure the equally unquantifiable yellow flowers (plus several purple ones that sprawl onto the back of the gatefold of the CD slipcase). In fact, it is difficult to determine with certainty if the photo is right side up or upside down, or even what plant or plants these leaves and flowers come from. It is a very apt visual metaphor for the sonic house of mirrors that is Aaron Siegel’s nearly 42-minute single movement composition from 2009, scored here for eight glockenspiels and organ.

Science is a relentless cascade of overlapping semiquaver ostinatos played on the glockenspiels, which shimmer as they gradually change against a much slower ever-shifting series of chords played on an electric organ. It is one continuous ecstatic sonic event that mesmerizes, transfixes, and transports. While you are listening to it, you feel like you have been teleported through a vortex of endless doorways which keep opening but ultimately never go anywhere and that your journey will never end. And when it does, it is a really hard crash back to reality. (To celebrate the release of the disc, Science will be performed live in New York City as part of the Incubator Arts Project’s concert series at St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery on May 24; I hope they’re equipped to handle to the potential after effects of a whole group of people coming down simultaneously at the end of the concert.)

From the opening measure of Aaron Siegel’s Science is Only a Sometimes Friend though to the very end the ecstatic intensity never eases up. Score © 2009 by Aaron Siegel, reprinted with permission from the composer.

Unfortunately the CD comes with no program notes, but according to an email response I elicited from the composer:

“When I wrote Science Is Only a Sometimes Friend, I had been thinking a lot about the limits of rationalism. As a society, we have been infatuated with the slow march of scientific and technological progress for a very long time. And we are getting to a point in the history of humanity where we actually think we have discovered absolute understandings about so many things. I am no enemy of science, but I also think there is something exciting about believing in something that can’t concretely be proved or reasoned. I think this embrace of mystery is a really important part of making art and I think it is also a big part of listening to and experiencing Science Is Only a Sometimes Friend.”

Curiously, the work was originally conceived as an outdoor composition in which the regularity of the eight glockenspiels’ interlocking grid is not pitted against slowly moving organ chords but rather by audience participation on toy glockenspiels. The indeterminate result is certainly less immediately rational; its lack of grounding is akin to Terry Riley’s In C without the pulse (which was added to that piece during the rehearsal process). At the same time, the outdoor version is unabashedly corporeal and far less narcotic. Below is a segment from that original performance which is also fascinating; it’s a pity that both versions could not have been released together as a 2 CD set.

Admittedly Siegel’s compositional gambit in Science clearly echoes such minimalist classics as Steve Reich’s Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices, and Organ, Terry Riley’s Olsen III (as well as In C), and—for its volume and sheer visceral intensity—early Philip Glass pieces like Music in Similar Motion and Music in Fifths, all of which were composed long before Siegel (b. 1977) arrived on the scene. But Siegel’s musical vocabulary—which not only embraces uncompromising minimalism and indeterminacy, but also free improvisation and elements of indie rock, and which thus far has also yielded trippy all-electronic compositions, a series of 21 aphoristic solo percussion compositions for his own performance, and an unusual somewhat Dadaesque opera called Brother Brother, plus sideman stints with Anthony Braxton and collaborative improvisations with violinist Sam Amidon as well as the cooperatively led trio Memorize The Sky (also featuring Zach Wallace and Matt Baude)—is not watered-down second generation revisionism. It is, rather, a vital continuation of several important strands of maverick American experimental music.

Sometimes “soundtrack” CDs can invite a degree of skepticism, in that often the music composed for film or video does not stand alone as effectively as when paired with its accompanying medium. However, the second release from Austin, Texas-based composer and sound artist Mike Vernusky is an example of such a format that does not suffer from being presented as audio alone. This is a collection of music composed both for film and “electro-theatre,” defined as music for live actors with electronic sound, which creates a vivid radio play-like journey through sculptural forests of sound.

The music composed for film includes the work Nylah, for filmmaker Scott Nyerges, which creates an arc, beginning as a smooth, metallic drone that is punctuated with slowly increasing droplets of percussive sound, transitioning into layered washes of what could include processed guitar and helicopters, and traveling back to the initial sonic world, ending with a single scraped metal guitar string. Missing combines an especially otherworldy mix of electronic sound with archival musical material that was created for filmmaker Daniel Maldonado. The triptych of short, intense pieces that comprise the work Hidden, also created for Maldonado, are sprinkled throughout the recording.

Thou, parts one and two—also presented separately—are thickly layered variations on primarily pipe organ recordings. Part 1 is more of a darkly ambient wash that builds to a frenzy and features two dramatic “false stops” in the middle of the work, while Part 2 explores the more rhythmic side of processed organ that nimbly morphs into field recordings of birds.

The largest work on the disc (in both scope and theme) is Dallas, which relates a surreal tale based on the biography of Clint Hill, the secret service agent who rushed to the body President John F. Kennedy immediately after he had been assassinated. Under My Coat is the Truth, is the shortest work, a bite-sized ride in an elevator from a strange, hazy dream.

Music for Film and Electro-Theatre would be perhaps best enjoyed with headphones, or very high-quality speakers, to fully take advantage of the musical gestures throughout the stereo field that help emphasize dramatic elements in the works. The sonic material, which is extremely well-recorded, thoughtfully orchestrated, and deftly mixed, is consistently rich and made of varied textures, ranging from smooth and silky, to bright and shimmering, to gritty and extra crunchy.

Although I found myself wishing for more information in the form of liner notes about the works and the media with which they are paired, there is an advantage to not having access to this information. Dramatic through lines are not at all forced, and the listener is free to let imagination take over the interpretation of the progression of musical events. And even though many of these works were originally created for presentation in tandem with other art forms, they have absorbing tales to tell on their own.

Purchase:

The Old Burying Ground
(Dorian)

Performers
University of Michigan Symphony Orchestra
Kenneth Kiesler, conductor
Tim Eriksen, folksinger
Anne-Carolyn Bird, soprano
Nicolas Phan, tenor

 

As anyone who shares composer Evan Chambers’s interest in historic cemeteries knows, there is often a very rich world on display just inside the gates. A catalog of family histories, and often their tragedies, is carved into the stonework.

Chambers took his experience of these gravesites, particularly a visit to The Old Burying Ground in Jaffrey, New Hampshire, and set a collection of epitaphs and new poems reflecting the suffering and the peace he found there. The resulting composition is a nearly hour-long work for orchestra and three vocalists—one a folksinger and the other two singing in a classical style.

“The piece is folk-inspired classical done really, really right,” Tim Eriksen, the folksinger featured in this recording, says of the piece in the video embedded above. “I sort of hear it as half way between Rite of Spring and Appalachian Spring.”

Indeed, the classical voices travel comfortably alongside the sweeping strings, and the folksinger (American folk style/Sacred Harp) seems to stir the orchestra, the slight tension in the uncommon juxtaposition agitating the sonic field to intriguing effect. Eriksen’s striking performance proves to be a disc highlight, though the University of Michigan Symphony Orchestra, Anne-Carolyn Bird, and Nicolas Phan all turn in excellent performances. There’s an echo audible in the recording of the solo narrator, his voice likely left to ring through the performance hall, but the intimacy of the text might have been better served by a closer mic’ing.

Chambers’s score is generally lush and sweepingly cinematic, the orchestra allowed to step forward as an equal partner with the narrators and singers. In two of the work’s stand-out sections—”O Say Grim Death” and “Oh Drop On My Grave”—the ensemble shows some percussive bite, pulling the work away from its more reflective course. I found the emotional variety of these darker, sharper expressions particularly engaging.

The selected texts themselves avoid clichés, and instead illustrate a poetic sadness and stoic practicality in the face of death and the indifference of passing of time. “Whatever thoughts there may have been,/whatever worries and struggles—/are lost in the uncut grass,” the narrator says, reciting a poem by Richard Tillinghast. “…The stones yield their names to the weather.”