Category: Tracks

The Mathematics of Resonant Bodies

If flashbacks to math class still inspire sweaty palms and dry mouth, no need to worry: John Luther Adams and Steven Schick handle all the beat counting here. Even if you can still solve a quadratic equation, you have to wonder how Schick manages to keep it all straight over the course of this 70-minute piece for solo percussionist and related processed sounds. It doesn’t seem fair to isolate a movement out of this multifaceted work. The unrelenting sharp rat-a-tat of stick on drumhead that opens the piece gives way to sounds ranging from deep and distant rumbles and an orchestra of glassy ringing triangles to crashing symbols and an entire section dedicated to the air raid siren (that one’s definitely not to be missed). Written as a follow up to Adams’s Strange and Sacred Noise for percussion quartet, this music is similarly broad in size and scope, making Schick’s solo performance all the more remarkable.

—MS

And the Archytan Transpositions

The electronically realized microtonal explorations of American composer Warren Burt (who has spent many years in Australia) are frequently triggered by something in the corporeal, non-electronic realm. In the case of the approximately 2-hour composition featured on the present disc, that trigger is a set of self-built aluminum tuning forks tuned to a 19-tone, just intonation scale that Burt then multi-tracked and transposed via computer to achieve a 53-tone scale. Still with me here? If not, fear not—though mathematically conceived, Burt’s ethereal music works equally well as ambiance. However, if you’re using this as lifestyle music, it could change your life!

—FJO

Flea Circus at Tivoli

While so much choral music exploits the wonderful harmonies that result from blending voices together effectively, Avshalomov’s “Flea Circus at Tivoli”—in keeping with the non-linear aspects of his wife Doris’s poem which it sets—eschews these niceties and revels in the wonderful sonic chaos that can result from having a bunch of people singing, speaking, and in other ways conveying a text at the same time but not together.

—FJO

Jungles

Having only ever previously heard Michael Sahl’s music in obtusely hysterical songs for the musical theatre, I had no idea what to expect from a disc of his instrumental music. Jungles (1990), a fully-notated score for jazz/rock quintet featuring electric violin, electric guitar, piano, bass, and drums, is a peculiar hybrid. Composed before the instrumentation of the Bang on a Can All-Stars became a new music standard, Sahl’s more progish than punkish quintet is not nearly as aggressive as most of the repertoire promulgated by the BoaC crowd and effectively demonstrates that such an ensemble is capable of an extremely wide emotional range.

—FJO

Ainadamar

Okay, in a way, I’m almost giving away the goods by showcasing this brief scene just as Golijov’s Ainadamar is beginning its ascent towards the climatic death of the heroine, Margarita Xirgu (sung by Dawn Upshaw). But it this moment of emotion that still haunts corners of my mind even months after seeing the live performance. All three women intertwine themselves in the pain of it, physically and musically, with a mortally wounded Upshaw projecting soaring soprano lines from the stage floor. The tragedy, shocking on its own, is amplified by the reality that it’s a history lesson on the brutality and oppression of war that even decades later we still haven’t managed to grasp.

—MS

A Little Cowboy Music

Until I heard this CD, I only knew of Rodney Lister from his often insightful posts to Sequenza21. A Little Cowboy Music, composed in 1980, is a polytonal quodlibet for clarinet, violin, contrabass, and piano which combines seven classic American “cowboy” tunes ranging from “The Streets of Laredo” to the theme song from Roy Rogers’s TV show. Remember when Esa Pekka Salonen claimed in our talk for NewMusicBox last year that “there are no tools you can lift out of” the music of Charles Ives “without resulting in plagiarism”? He ought to listen to this extremely inventive Ivesian descendant!

—FJO

Trancelation

According to the composer, Trancelation was inspired by Cuban polyrhythms, and if you listen carefully, you can hear a relentless, clearly articulated clave played on a high B amidst all sorts of admittedly un-Cuban sounding angular figurations scattered throughout the rest of the range of the piano.

—FJO

Fanfare for Double Brass Sextet

It was great to hear trumpeter Jon Nelson and his cohorts in the Meridian Arts Ensemble play a 1993 brass quintet fanfare by Milton Babbitt at the American Music Center’s annual awards ceremony last month, as well as Babbitt’s much longer Counterparts (1992) at the benefit concert later that evening. But Babbitt’s ultimate brass behemoth is his 1987 Double Brass Sextet Fanfare for which Nelson has assembled a group of new brass music junkies in order to bring to life on the new CD Metalofonico!. Scored for 12 players (that magic combinatorial number) and clocking in at only 3 1/2 minutes, the Double Sextet combines breadth and concision. In fact, the two sextets even play the same music, only one plays it backwards. See if you can hear the point of rotation, which occurs about midway through the excerpt featured here. I’m not sure I can, but I’m not sure it ultimately matters, as just focusing on the smaller surface details can be equally rewarding listening.

—FJO

Charcoal

How long have you been watching her, sitting there in the corner? Maybe it’s time you got up and asked her to dance. You might find out that she’s not so shy after all. Not only that, but she’s got you dizzy after just the first turn around the floor. How much have you had to drink tonight, anyway? But the music is lovely, a clarinet and trumpet off on their own sort of pas de deux with bass and drums dutifully chaperoning.

—MS

Chiaroscuro

Until I heard Corigliano’s mind blowing Circus Maximus for massive wind band at Carnegie Hall last year, my favorite piece of his was this intimate set of three short movements for two pianos tuned a quarter tone apart from 1997, which I knew from a Vanguard recording by the Duo Turgeon who commissioned the work. Although microtonal embellishments are featured in a number of his other works, perhaps most noticeably in the otherworldly opening of his Pied Piper Fantasy, Chiaroscuro is his only all-out microtonal composition to date. And Corigliano’s music shows such sensitivity and command for the quartertonal idiom—no gimmicky half-sharp tremolos here—that I wish he’d consider venturing beyond 12-tone equal temperament in a larger scale work. But for now, it’s nice to have a second recording of this remarkable music, a harbinger that a microtonal composition might actually be headed toward becoming standard repertoire. (I can dream, can’t I?)

—FJO