Category: Listen

A few years ago Italian guitar virtuoso Marco Cappelli decided to chart, for himself, the state of music in downtown Manhattan, asking ten scenesters to compose for his extreme guitar—a six-string acoustic guitar retrofitted with ten sympathetic resonating strings. The collection of pieces, dubbed the Extreme Guitar Project, is as divergent as the group of old-schoolers that penned the sonic grab bag. One of the standouts on the disc sounds like a harebrained idea: a guitar piece for right hand only. Sure, there’s a tradition of left-handed piano compositions. This notwithstanding, Annie Gosfield’s Marked by a Hat is neither gimmicky nor, upon casual listening, revealing of its handicapped nature. In fact, the one-handedness only further focuses the piece’s exploration into unusual tunings and timbres. Cappelli proves to be adept both as performer and cartographer.

—RN

No word on whether either Milton Cross or Steven Dye wore one of those little plastic wristbands in support of “Pope John Paul for Sainthood” during the recording of this album. Anyone? Anyone? But back to the music. While there are quite a few rooms to wander through while listening to this limited edition disc, I’m most intrigued by the delicate, dreamy intimacy the duo captures on Clear Sky Model. Remarkably, this is on a disc advertised with the line “If you like bass clarinet, violin, homemade horns, piano, electronics—or more specifically, all of those things at once!—then check it out,” so don’t say you weren’t warned. And okay, all hell does sort of break out in the middle of this 10-minute piece, but still. It’s the sort of soundtrack you’d expect would accompany a screening of one of those old Super 8 films people find in their parents’ attics. Something vaguely innocent that wouldn’t seem ominous at all except for the music telling you the “real” back story. I mean, sure, they’re frolicking in the waves and having a hell of a honeymoon now. But they better enjoy it, because in ten years, they’ll have three kids to feed, a second mortgage to sweat, and one of them will be caught having an affair with that guy down the street.

—MS

It’s been imprisoned, dropped, burned, buried, drowned, and force-fed. Needless to say, the piano has had a pretty rough life. But now in the 21st century, it seems composers are letting up a bit, allowing the instrument a little breathing room to recuperate from its decidedly tumultuous past. The ten piano compositions featured on Jeri-Mae G. Astolfi’s latest CD, Mélange, reinforce the trend of strictly keeping the fingers right where they belong: on the keyboard. But not all of the music sits up straight with its hands folded. Take Craig Weston’s …into all crevices of my world, with its timbre-bending digital accompaniment. After the opening gesture floats in your ears, lush reminisces of Debussy are soon dashed by odd bell-like tinkles that echo the piano, only in a slightly different tuning. At first I thought it might simply be a prepared piano piece, but then an eerie veil crept in, an impossible sustain hovering over repeated piano gestures. Weston’s piece is about establishing a vivid atmosphere, not virtuosic flash, although there is a little bit of that too in the music’s final climax.

—RN

I’ve been a fan of jazz pianist/composer Chick Corea ever since I first heard his wacky post-Return to Forever fusion record, The Mad Hatter, in the late ’70s. Amidst the chameleonic range of styles on that album and others I subsequently explored, his writing for string quartet within larger ensembles always stood out to me, and I always wondered what he would do given the chance to write a work scored exclusively for this most hallowed chamber ensemble. While his immediately identifiable piano touch is missing, Corea’s signature mix of percussive tunefulness and trickster experimentation can be clearly heard in his five-movement 2004 composition, The Adventures of Hippocrates, in an extremely idiomatic performance by the Orion String Quartet.

—FJO

I’ve had a few life-changing epiphanies over the years with the music of Philip Glass. The first was my introduction to Glass—North Star and then Einstein in quick succession—and I had a second, more profound one (since it literally refocused my own compositional energies) when I heard Satyagraha. I’ve remained a fan all these years, but the last “Wow-I’m-totally-blown-away” moment for me was when I heard the Nonesuch recording of his Symphony No. 2 nearly a decade ago. I just couldn’t get over the bitonality and the way his instantly recognizable compositional voice could be used in such a maximalist context. It was in my Walkman for weeks. Glass’s new eighth symphony, his first symphony in the traditional sense since that piece (Symphonies 3 through 7 were either only for strings [3], based on music by David Bowie [4], or also incorporated voices [5,6,7]), is the follow-up I’ve been waiting for ever since.

–FJO

You’ve seen a lot of Belinda Reynolds around NewMusicBox lately—she’s been offering us a weekly crash course in issues related to composing for students. When I heard Play, the work inspired by a game she plays with her students on her new disc, I found my ear coyly charmed in a way I was not expecting. But the rest of the disc might serve as required listening for composers who fear that writing for amateur players will buff the edge off of the skill and inventiveness they might display in the rest of their work. Seems the opposite is true, at least in Reynolds’s case. The album’s title track has a mysterious, fairytale quality to the opening flute line, and though the cello and piano pull things down a slightly darker path, the music finds itself cycling around again, not quite down the same path, but through similar trees.

–MS

You can take the listener anywhere, you just have to be sure you’ve given him something to hold onto. I don’t know who first said that, or in what context. And it might be one of those “somethings” that’s different for everyone and that you only recognize when you hear it. Robert Carl’s Open for string trio does it for me, though. At the outset I have no idea where the path is leading, but throughout the three sections (played more or less straight through with only the briefest pauses) there seems to be a sonic banister under my left hand that assures I won’t get lost or left behind along the way. His writing fits in my ear, even when it surprises me. And in spite of the work’s title and the expansive glissandi that are especially pronounced in the opening section, there’s something big and emotional that wraps itself around and creates a shelter in which to listen.

–MS

Imagine having your master’s thesis in composition personally commissioned by a top international soloist and then released on that same soloist’s latest CD. That’s exactly what happened with Clarice Assad’s Violin Concerto, which was submitted in fulfillment of a composition degree at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. The soloist in this instance is Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg, who pairs Assad’s new work with one of the most celebrated violin concertos of all time, the Tchaikovsky, which she has surprisingly never before committed to disc. It’s an extremely tough act for anyone to follow, whether a grad student or a Pulitzer Prize winner, but Assad’s sometimes Zappa-esque and occasionally castanet-filled, Latin-tinged opus—she is, after all, the daughter of Brazilian guitar master Sergio Assad—proves an exciting complement to its older, more European-sounding companion.

–FJO

I’m a little bit Scelsi. And I’m a little bit Persian folk music in fugal counterpoint. That’s the message Reza Vali’s second string quartet belts out, more expressively than any Osmond family member could ever dream. Melodic lines run from utterly rapturous arcs to nail-biting microtonal collisions. I have to admit that even for someone as jaded as me, I found myself enjoying the sometimes dance-like flavor of this half an hour exotic journey. Please excuse me now; I’m craving some fesenjaan.

–RN