Category: Albums

Sounds Heard: Gene Pritsker—William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience

Posted on September 25, 2012 by - Albums, Listen

Arnold Schoenberg usually gets credited for the emancipation of the dissonance that defined much of the music of the 20th century. But if there’s anything that can be claimed to categorize the music of the 21st century a mere 12 years into it, I’d argue that it’s the emancipation of cognitive dissonance. In much of today’s music, elements that seem like they don’t belong together co-exist and, in so doing, frequently yield sonic experiences that can be initially jarring and which sometimes never intellectually resolve. As recently as the 1980s such contextual ambiguities would have been considered an irreconcilable aesthetic assault, much like those emancipated dissonances were to folks in fin de siècle Vienna even though to our 2012 ears they sound somewhat quaint. But like the expressionistic plunge into atonality and beyond mirrored the zeitgeist of a century ago, today’s ambiguous-seeming free-for-all recontextualization of any and all stylistic vocabulary is an accurate reflection of our current uncertain, contradictory times.

One might even posit that the reluctance toward having one’s creative expressions confined exclusively to a single musical style is a clear manifestation of this phenomenon. Today’s almost de rigueur amalgamations of contemporary classical chamber music, jazz, and rock (genres which now sometimes don’t even really sound all that different from one another) might actually belie a response to the world in which we live that goes far beyond any attempt at crossover. It’s not so much that the composers of today are embracing every sound by which they are surrounded in an effort to attain some kind of meta-style; such an effort would be indicative of the aesthetic positions of a previous era. Rather, this blurring of boundaries is the only possible reaction to being surrounded by all of these sounds and the musical styles from which they originate. We’re no longer attempting to make them all get along with each other so much as we’re resigned to the fact that it is impossible to separate them from one another anymore; perhaps those rare moments where stylistic disparities still result in clashes are the only remaining breakthrough moments we can have.

The creative output of a musician like Gene Pritsker, who self-identifies as a composer, guitarist, rapper, and D.J., seems emblematic of such a world view. Over the years I’ve heard his music both in symphony orchestra halls and clubs. In another era, it would not have fit comfortably in either setting but now it’s at home in both. And yet Pritsker’s chamber opera, William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience, recently released on Composers Concordance Recordings, still manages to sound unsettling to me. It still somehow defies any paradigm I try to create for it as I listen to it. Perhaps I still listen with 20th century ears.

Or perhaps it’s because of how I first came to hear the music Pritsker composed for this opera. A few years back, Innova released a recording of Pritsker’s Varieties of Religious Experience Suite performed by his group Sound Liberation in which he plays electric guitar and is joined by another electric guitarist, electric bass, drums, and cello. The music is a visceral jazz/rock/contemporary classical hybrid that comes across as something by a latter-day Frank Zappa, though probably more Jazz from Hell era than Mothers of Invention era. Zappa indeed would seem like a perfect role model for Pritsker, since in addition to being one of the first American composers to ignore the firewalls between commercially driven stylistic categorizations, Zappa also relished the role of provocateur. In our own time when these firewalls have long been eroded, and therefore there’s little provocation in continuing to mine their erosion, Pritsker’s attempts at doing so herein still manage to sound raw.

In the notes for that Innova release, the music was described as originally being the score for an opera derived from a somewhat unlikely source—a lecture by the 19th-century American philosopher William James. But since the music on that release was all instrumental, I didn’t think much about its operatic origins. However, now that I’m finally hearing Pritsker’s Varieties of Religious Experience in its original operatic context, my impressions of it have completely transformed. I originally thought of this music as an extremely effective genre-blurring romp whose effectiveness is in part attributable to its roughly hewn edges. But now what is center stage is the barrage of cognitive dissonances—narrative drama vs. non-linear narrative, sacred vs. profane, contemporaneity vs. historicism. These go far beyond the music’s combination of idioms (think Zappa’s jazz/rock/postclassical stew mixed with contemporary opera and musical theatre as well as hybrids like Adams’s Ceiling/Sky). And that barrage now completely defines my listening experience.

So much so, that rather than attempt to describe the opera play-by-play (which I think could run the risk of giving away the goods for anyone who hasn’t yet heard it and which would somehow diminish its impact), I will impart here a couple of the responses Gene Pritsker offered me after I sent him an email asking him to describe exactly what he is aiming to do in this opera.

Since my starting point for this music was the earlier recording of the instrumental suite, I was curious, now that the original opera was available on a recording as well, what Pritsker’s thoughts were about the relationship between these two recordings and if he considers the suite and the opera to be separate works. His rejoinder was as follows:

The two works treat the same material in a very different manner. The opera is focused on the narrative of the William James lecture and on supporting the vocal expression, while the suite takes more of a chamber jazz approach where the music is in a constant transition between the written material and improvisation, and the musicians play off each other. Since the opera was written first and the main musical ideas were composed while creating this opera I feel that it is the definitive composition for this material. But I think the suite takes this music to such a different place that it stands alone as a brand new piece of music, almost a variation on the opera. I have done this in the past with other music. A good example is a solo drum set piece which I turned into a solo violin piece.

I was particularly eager to learn more about Pritsker’s decision to convey the words and ideas of someone from the historical past with music that could not be construed as anything but 21st century, so I asked him about that as well, to which he responded:

The instrumentation of the chamber opera being scored for 2 electric guitars, cello and contra bass was intentional, since I knew I can perform it with my band Sound Liberation, so the adaptation of this music to a suite was pre-planned as I was writing the opera. I was not trying to create a period piece in any way. The most fascinating thing for me was the question: “How can I turn a dry (yet brilliantly written) lecture in to an operatic narrative?” As soon as William James enters the hall in my mind he steps into a no time place. It is not any century or any country or any period. It is a man with ideas trying to express his thoughts to the world and my job is to heighten and further enlighten these ideas and thoughts through music while creating a narrative (even a loose operatic one) in a lecture that never intended to have a narrative.

Beyond that, I think it’s best for everyone listening to do so without any additional baggage. We’ve certainly had enough of that in the 20th century despite all the attempts at emancipation.

Sounds Heard: Ion Sound Project and the Music of Jeremy Beck

Posted on September 11, 2012 by - Albums, Listen

Ion Sound Project, the fourth Innova recording dedicated to the music of composer Jeremy Beck, takes its title from the Pittsburgh-based chamber group of the same name. Stemming from a friendship with pianist Robert Frankenberry, Beck’s collaboration with Ion Sound Project began in 2007 at the University of Pittsburgh with a performance of his September Music, the piece which also closes this album. Beck’s music is unabashedly tonal, rhythmically intricate, and makes nods to the past while sitting squarely in the present. He is a prizewinner in the 2010 National Opera Association’s New Chamber Opera Competition, Boston Chamber Orchestra’s 2011-2012 Commission Competition, and the 2012 Aliénor International Harpsichord Composition Competition. When he’s not releasing new recordings of his work or receiving accolades from national and international competitions, he practices intellectual property (copyright and trademark) law, entertainment law, and general business law in Louisville, Kentucky.

Ion Sound Project opens with its strongest piece, In Flight Until Mysterious Night. Pulsing, jazz-inflected rhythms propel the work forward, recalling Copland’s Three Latin American Sketches in spots. Bright shifting harmonies in tandem with those syncopated rhythms pull the music this way and that, occasionally giving the listener the feeling you get when you are walking up (or down) a flight of stairs in the dark and you think there is one more stair, but there isn’t. Held together by the fluid playing of Frankenberry, this juxtaposition of largely accessible and recognizable pitch and rhythmic material with the occasional sharp left makes for compelling and interesting listening. Up next is by Beck’s Cello Sonata No. 2. , performed by Elisa Kohanski. The delicate and understated first movement starts quietly and builds to its animato namesake before returning to its hushed beginnings. The second movement features long melancholic melodies with sparse accompaniment in the piano before perking up with rhythms and harmonic language akin to In Flight Until Mysterious Night.

Soprano Margaret Baube Andraso joins ISP for In February, a work written in 2002 with text by the composer. For soprano, clarinet, violin, and piano, this one-movement song of love lost opens with a slow ostinato in the piano into which the other instruments weave. The simple melodies, accompaniment, and pacing make this a piece that could be at home in theater or film as easily as on the concert stage. Gemini for flute, cello, and piano features independent lines leading to tutti accents on upbeats that could be (at least rhythmically) straight out of any number of rock tunes from the ‘80s and that betray a contemporary classical style that formed in that period without sounding dated or borrowed. The ironically titled Slow Motion for piano and vibraphone takes cues from the collaborative work of Chick Corea and Gary Burton. Percussionist Eliseo Rael deftly trades polyphonic strains with Frankenberry, parts winding around one another before briefly coalescing in chords and accents that stutter step around, dressed in colorful harmonies. A less active choral section provides a respite from this activity before returning to the manic, quasi-improvisatory material from the top.

Third Delphic Hymn is a showcase for the evocative playing of violinist Laura Motchalov. Her ability to cleanly perform multiple lines at once sounds at times like two distinct players and is quite effective. This brief work is the oldest on the album (the original version for viola was written in 1980), but it is nonetheless a highlight both in terms of performance and composition, and I’ll admit to being disappointed that it ended so soon. This is not to say it was an inappropriate length, but that I was left wanting more. The final work on the album, September Music, initially picks up on the melancholy of Third Delphic Hymn in its modest tempo and longing harmonic language, and these characteristics continue for the most part in the second movement. The insistent third movement eventually displays many of the characteristics of the other works on the recording. Tutti climaxes rebounded from duo and trio excursions. Colorful clashes in the clarinet and flute, performed by Kathleen Costello and Peggy Yoo respectively, are answered by dramatic responses in the strings.

Ion Sound Project is a thoroughly engaging CD from top to bottom. Ion Sound Project (the group!) does a great job of presenting Beck’s work here, whether in solo or ensemble settings. Though architecturally rigorous, Beck writes clearly and without pretense, and while one might listen for the technical elements of his work, I think that would be missing the point. Well-wrought music should be architecturally sound as a matter of course, but checking that compositional tick-box alone does not necessarily a great piece of music make. If you’re interested in music that is for the most part harmonically tonal and rhythmically diverse, you’re sure to find a great deal of satisfaction in the world of Jeremy Beck.

Sounds Heard: Ernst Krenek—Complete Symphonies

Posted on September 4, 2012 by - Albums, Listen

Mere months after fleeing Europe for the United States, the composer Ernst Krenek visited the home of George Washington in Mount Vernon. “I was moved to tears hearing the tolling of the bell on a gunboat that passed by way down on the Potomac,” he wrote. “What a world of strength and beauty was irrevocably lost to us who are walking around among its august remains.”

That Washington moment might seem strange for an Austrian-born composer of Czech descent, but Krenek felt the gap between past and present as acutely in Mount Vernon as he did in Vienna. His hometown, and the locus of the culture he had held most dear, had succumbed to the Nazis and was no place for a composer of jazzy operas and atonal music. “I had become a preferred target of the rapidly increasing barbarian tribe of German supermen,” Krenek wrote in his memoirs.

Today, those memoirs languish practically unread at the Library of Congress. Though penned in English, they have only been published in an out-of-print German translation. The memoirs aren’t even listed in the library’s catalogue. (An intrepid librarian discovered them for me in the stacks.) Call up ML95.K83, and you will come face-to-face with a large box containing over a thousand typed pages, divided into six tattered envelopes. Each envelope bears the label: “This must not be opened before fifteen years after my death.”

Krenek was a man of many contradictions in a century full of them. He hoped to succeed Mahler as a great symphonist, but became best known for an opera about jazz (the 1927 Jonny spielt auf). He was rejected by the Nazis for being a radical and by the postwar avant-garde for being a conservative. Constantly adapting to new circumstances, learning new musical languages to fit the times while pushing to new creative heights, Krenek seemed one step behind the curve, unable to catch up with the speed of the 20th century.
Reading the memoirs while listening to a new boxed set of the composer’s five symphonies—recorded over the past two decades by the North German Radio Philharmonic Hanover and released in May by CPO—helps rekindle Krenek’s world of strength and beauty, revealing the tumultuous life and searing music of an unjustly overlooked composer.

Krenek’s life and music inform us about the cultural heritage of Vienna, but perhaps more importantly about what happened to that legacy when Hitler forced a generation of artists and intellectuals into exile. Two of Krenek’s five symphonies were composed after he arrived in the United States, and they reflect his turbulent years as a émigré. Though some exiles felt, as Arnold Schoenberg famously put it, “driven into paradise,” in the case of Krenek it was a paradise in which his name, once heralded in the 1920s, was largely and unfairly neglected.

Krenek began writing his memoirs in 1942 in St. Paul, Minnesota. He thought himself near death, and fervently documented in English his childhood in Vienna, his twenties in Berlin, his return to his home city, and its downfall in the 1930s (born in 1900, Krenek died in 1991, making him an almost exact contemporary to Aaron Copland).

The memoirs move at a luxuriously slow pace, but are rife with insights into the cultural life of 20th-century Europe. In Vienna, Arnold Schoenberg was seen as a “local lunatic, a pure crank of no significance”; in Germany, Paul Hindemith obsessed over miniature trains; and in France, Igor Stravinsky insisted that Krenek eat salad with olive oil to gain the affections of women. Unfortunately, the memoirs conclude in 1937, leaving scant details about his American life.*

The memoirs also provide a gaze into Krenek’s own multifaceted identity, one that would acquire even more intricacy when the composer went into exile. “I am neither Czech nor German, and being Austrian appears to practically every living person as an artificial abstraction,” he wrote.

Krenek’s five symphonies mirror the complexities of his persona and the upheavals of his life. His First Symphony premiered in Berlin in 1921, heard by Wassily Kandinsky and Walter Gropius; his Fifth was premiered in 1950 by the Albuquerque Civic Symphony, and heard by, well, the residents of New Mexico.

In his early twenties, having relocated from Vienna to Berlin to follow his teacher Franz Schreker, Krenek composed his first three symphonies. They are a remarkable feat: over two hours of seething, post-Mahlerian grandeur, written in under two years. The First Symphony, a single movement broken into eclectic sections, is murkily atonal, with sudden fugal outbursts—a young man demonstrating his command of traditional counterpoint. The Third is a lighter work, though it still packs a punch.

Of this early trio, it is the Second Symphony that most intrigues. In 1922, Krenek fell in love with the youngest daughter of Gustav Mahler, Anna, whom he married and divorced in less than a year. Krenek dedicated his Second to Anna. He writes in his memoirs of his skepticism towards the idea that personal matters could inspire great music, but this symphony is one of his most towering works.

Hovering between Romanticism and modernism, it is a weird piece from its very opening, an ethereal duet of violins and plinking celeste. The music rises to massive climaxes that suddenly dissolve into mist before chaotically rushing forward to the next explosion. There is a sardonic streak throughout, channeling the other great post-Mahler symphonist of the day, Dmitri Shostakovich (who himself may have been inspired by Krenek’s music). One hears a fully formed musical personality—Krenek’s lifelong balancing act between reverence and cynicism.

The 25-year break between the third and fourth symphonies did not bode well for a composer hoping to succeed Mahler, as both symphonist and family member. But Krenek abandoned the genre when his opera career took off with the success of Jonny spielt auf, which briefly made him one of the most famous composers in Europe. Combining elements of jazz and late romanticism, Jonny was a surprise hit at its Leipzig premiere in 1927, and went on to tour Europe. A tale of a black jazz violinist who helps liberate a composer from esotericism, it became a kind of fable for the wild culture and loose morals of Weimar-era Europe, and a pioneering work in the cutting-edge genre of Zeitoper.

In the wake of sudden fame, Krenek found himself at what he called an impasse, unwilling to continue down the path of populist opera. He turned towards Arnold Schoenberg’s twelve-tone system, ideas of which he gleaned from the composer’s disciples, since he was not allowed into the Schoenberg’s inner circle after a nasty battle earlier in their careers.

Neither the jazz-celebrating Jonny nor his subsequent twelve-tone turn ingratiated Krenek with the Nazis. Thugs disrupted performances of his music in Vienna and Munich, and rumors that he was Jewish (he wasn’t) led to cancelled concerts. Krenek had the unique position of being a composer who could be indicted as both an American-pandering populist and a mathematical formalist: the very ideal of the Nazi conception of degenerate art.

When Hitler annexed Austria in 1937, Krenek was in Brussels. He frantically applied for a visa and sailed to the United States. Over the next decade, he moved from university to university, started cranking out his memoirs, and composed a startling amount of music.

The final two symphonies, written in Albuquerque and Los Angeles in the late 1940s, harken back to his youth in Berlin. Despite Krenek’s engagement with twelve-tone techniques throughout his American career, both works are freely atonal, and less forbidding than much of his later output.

The Fourth is elegiac, even Copland-esque in its opening woodwind lament, though it still retains Krenek’s quintessential acerbity. As in the earlier symphonies, moments of utter weirdness puncture the music, like a lurching crunch of brass in the finale, a bleak revision of the Fanfare for the Common Man.

If the Fourth represented Krenek’s attempt to make his style more accessible, he didn’t tweak it enough. It premiered at Carnegie Hall, but the present recording is the first performance of the work in nearly sixty years. The Fifth, Krenek’s briefest symphony, reclaims some of the classicism of his earliest works, ending with a mordant fugue that recalls his first attempt in the genre.

Another fifty years passed, and Krenek wrote much music—electronic pieces, operas for stage and television, choral masterpieces like the Lamentio Jerememiae Prophetae—but not another numbered symphony. He dabbled in American themes: Santa Fe Timetable, a choral work setting the names of various train stops between Albuquerque and Los Angeles; a ballad of the railroads; a set of George Washington piano variations.

Despite his love for American culture, Krenek continued to feel like an outsider. The kind of writing which might have gained him an audience in the United States—the blend of lush early modernism and jazz found in Jonny—remained behind, part of the lost world of late imperial Vienna.

Living in its august remains, he pressed onward and adapted to his new home, even if it was less welcoming than the old. His music went unheard; it is worth resurrecting.

*Those interested can consult John L. Stewart’s 1991 biography of the composer; Claudia Maurer Zenck’s German-language study Ernst Krenek, ein Komposer im Exil; Krenek’s own 1974 Horizons Circled: Reflections on my Music; and two generalized studies, Driven into Paradise and A Windfall of Musicians.

Sounds Heard: Robert Carl—From Japan

Posted on August 21, 2012 by - Albums, Listen

I am already on record as an admirer of Hartford-based composer Robert Carl’s music. His compositional language, which to my ear mixes a nuanced experimentalism within organic phrasings, speaks to me on a deep and strangely (considering that all the pieces I’ve heard are wordless) philosophical level. It readily takes me to an existential thinking place. Given that, I admittedly approached his latest release on New World Records, From Japan, with high expectations.

The slow pacing of the opening composition, A Clean Sweep (2005), invites deep and careful listening to the tones of a single shakuhachi (played here with notable sensitivity by Elizabeth Brown), and it accomplishes this without ever inducing the feeling that the listener is trapped in an expensive hotel spa. This is attributable in part to the way the poetic breath of the instrument is held in sharp contrast against a metallic, whining drone of variable pitch, which keeps a steady twist of tension running through the work. The two elements tangle on equal sonic ground, the drone taking on the role of a dance partner rather than a chaperone. A second performance of the work closes the disc, for which the composer joins Brown in a shakuhachi duet of sorts, the two artists leaning into and away from each other over the drone, providing slight variations on a single melodic line. It makes for a naturally more complex and crowded reading, but also one filled with more warmth in the companionship of making it.

In between these neat bookends are three later works by Carl. In the course of its 16-minute run time, Bullet Cycle (2007) takes the listener on a journey that mixes recordings made inside Japan’s high-speed bullet trains with the sounds of acoustic musicians (two improvising soloists and a percussive time keeper, roles here performed by Katie Kennedy, cello; Bill Solomon, vibraphone; and Sayun Chang, percussion). The world Carl establishes drifts in more of a leisurely spiral than typical point-to-point travel, the music mimicking something more akin to a dozing passenger’s experience—uneasy sleep regularly interrupted by train announcements and noise, the passage of time and miles strangely difficult to quantify, personal thoughts mixed up with glimpses of passing scenery, yet always the rocking train encouraging the mind to drift until just before the destination is reached.

Carl incorporates recorded sounds from Japan even more concretely in his electronic installation Collapsible Mandala (2008-09), his sources ranging from chattering birds to aggressive explosions, from children at play to adults in prayer. Though designed to be expanded and collapsed to suit various programming situations, the piece is here presented in a 26-minute version. In addition to the various ambient sound sources—which are collaged into sections ranging from seconds to minutes in length—the work includes fast fades into significant periods of silence (sometimes more than a minute in duration) between scenes. My experience of this structure surprised me; rather than allowing me to sink deeply into the music, I felt it as an extreme surface tension, the image of the preceding section echoing in the suddenly enforced quiet while my ear strove to catch the beginning of the next; meanwhile, the noise of my own listening environment taunted me with distractions.

At the very heart of the disc is Brown Velvet (2009-10), a piece for bassoon and live electronics (performed for this recording by Ryan Hare with Aleksander Sternfeld-Dunn on laptop). Echoing elements of A Clean Sweep, the piece sets the woodwind against a deep drone of fluctuating pitch, its timbre this time more muted yet more ominous. Once again a deliberately paced dance plays out between the players, the drone supporting the movements of the bassoon, the bassoon made all the stronger in its ability to envelope the listener in the seductive richness of its tone. I never thought much about the dark beauty of the bassoon before, but this work makes it an unforgettable star.

Taken as a whole, the work included on From Japan may stand as a document to Carl’s multifaceted exploration of the intersection between American and Japanese musical culture. In much broader and perhaps simpler terms, however, it is evidence of how careful a listener Robert Carl is, and how generously he invites us all to listen with him.

Sounds Heard: Anthony Paul De Ritis—Devolution

Posted on August 14, 2012 by - Albums, Listen

Questions of “real” or “fake” are dialectically put aside on the Boston Modern Orchestra Project’s new recording of music by Anthony De Ritis, music in which, in a way, everything is real and fake all at the same time. Or, more precisely: this is music which is constantly, enthusiastically directing your attention to the materials out of which it’s fashioned. The manufactured nature of music, which the classical music tradition tries to misdirect away with notions of transcendence and sublimity, is here part of the whole point.

It’s most obvious on the title track, Devolution, a 2004 concerto for turntables (manned by Paul D. Miller, a.k.a. DJ Spooky) and orchestra. Using warhorses as familiar as Ravel’s Bolero and Beethoven’s Seventh as fodder for sampling and remixing (by soloist and ensemble alike) fairly ensures that the manipulations are going to be noticeable, the fragments effortlessly grabbing one’s attention. But De Ritis has a knack for translating some measure of that composerly prerogative into a listener’s experience as well; Devolution is a musical evocation of the tactile malleability of music itself, the finished product explicitly indistinguishable from the act of assembling the parts. (The performance, under the direction of Gil Rose, is a blast, hitting the score’s marks with a kind of joyfully volatile precision.)

But the older works on the recording already show hints of that process as well. Legerdemain, from 1994, mixes orchestral and computerized sounds, but in such a way that the boundaries are thoroughly blurred: Are those strings or a string pad? Oscillators or flutter-tonguing? On record, untangling the two is even more difficult, and one instead notices the score’s miscellany of dialects, flipping through expressionist angst and cinematic thrills in equal measure, a stylistic salmagundi to match the means of production. 1992’s Chords of Dust seems more straightforward, a tone poem inspired by the World War II memories of De Ritis’s father, but even here, the elements become noticeable as elements: the decorous march echoes, the mournful chorales, the Copland-esque optimism, the familiar toolbox for evoking the period and the event—but the arrangement positioned somewhere between those standard semiotic signals and a commentary on the act of signaling.

All three works take as their starting point some form of musical détente—between the concert hall and the dance club, or between instruments and electronics, or between the power of experience and the power of cliché. Whether or not such treaties need to be arranged anymore is debatable, but De Ritis has a flair for the negotiations. This is music that enjoys getting down to brass tacks, and noticing just how shiny they are, and how sharp.

Sounds Heard: John Luther Adams—songbirdsongs

Posted on July 24, 2012 by - Albums, Listen

Quite a number of years ago now, I spent a summer working for the Chicago Park District, which meant that I got to wear a bright orange t-shirt emblazoned with the Chicago Park District seal, including its motto—hortus in urbe, a garden in a city. Which is itself a clever inversion of the Chicago city motto, urbs in horto, a city in a garden. Which I loved: a civilized tussle over whether civilization itself is the insider or the outsider, whether the machinery of nature only acquires meaning if it has an empire of more obvious machinery to compare it with.

I mention this because it might go some small way toward explaining why I was almost constitutionally incapable of experiencing John Luther Adams’s songbirdsongs, in its recent recording by the Boston-based Callithumpian Consort, purely as a piece of music. Written between 1974 and 1980, songbirdsongs is very much a nature piece: birdcalls and the rustling ambience of their customary surroundings paraphrased into a nine-movement suite for two piccolos and three percussionists. But the simulation of nature is so particular, so intent on being perceived as faithful, that songbirdsongs becomes one of those nature pieces that gets me wondering whether the end result is supposed to be the aural equivalent of conservation land, or something more—which, depending on your point of view, might actually mean something less.

This is the third recording of songbirdsongs, following its original 1982 release on Opus One Records (with Adams himself among the percussionists) and a 1996 reading by The Armstrong Duo. The Callithumpian Consort’s version, directed by Stephen Drury, is bright and energetic, and, not surprisingly, sounds better than its predecessors: detailed and clear, even managing to conjure up a sense of acoustic space. But the piece was designed for big-room, scattered-about-the-perimeter spatial performance—and, even on headphones, that full-immersion, lost-in-a-forest experience is left to the imagination.

The music’s grammar might best be described as kaleidoscopically imitative: drums and winds aping each other, the layers building up to a static, busy landscape, melodic tweaks to each movement’s motives spreading from instrument to instrument. The transliteration of the birdcalls tends toward the diatonic, but then they pile up in competing, polytonal profusion, falling somewhere between Messaien’s chromaticism and the more poppy triads of other strains of minimalism. (It’s more far out than a lot of Adams’s later, more gently contoured music—such as Strange Birds Passing, which, in a performance by the NEC Contemporary Ensemble, makes a dulcet pendant to this recording.)

In the notes for that 1982 recording, Adams wondered if he had “abdicated the position of Composer (with a capital ‘C’),” but, flattened from a spatial experience to a recorded one, songbirdsongs shows a notable amount of usable space between capital and lower-case composing. All the compositional decisions, the design of the rhetoric, if not exactly of the structure, seem to come to the fore when filtered through the microphone—and it was those sections in which the composer’s hand was most noticeable that I found the most arresting: the bright, Martinů-like busyness of “Apple Blossom Round,” or the bass-drum thwacks and furious twittering of “Joyful Noise,” the aviary having a go at a Sousa march. The marimba-roll drones behind “Mourning Dove” were such lovely sounds in themselves that I found myself wishing that the simulated doves, plangent as they were in their ocarina guise, would take a break.

It’s the complicated nature of such loveliness that is the source of most of the work’s drama, at least for me. The musical motion is constant—motives and sounds never quite come back or combine in the same way twice—but it is movement without a strong musical direction, except forward in time. But there’s a tension between the natural world songbirdsongs is meant to evoke and the artificial means of the evocation that gives the music an interesting texture. Lovely things happen in every movement of the piece, but in a way that is meant to feel accidental and found, rather than designed and anticipated. At the same time, while the natural sounds are presented in a more organic way than, say, Ravel’s pre-dawn Daphnis birds or even Messiaen’s collections, the translation into instruments is palpably inescapable. In the grand scheme of life on earth, flutes and vibraphones and even ocarinas are, after all, pretty advanced technology. I kept thinking back to another warhorse, Respighi’s Pines of Rome, with its obbligato of nightingale-on-phonograph-record, and the more I thought about it, the less I could say whether one captured birdsong was more “real” or more “fake” than the other. Had the garden invaded the city, or the city the garden? The more songbirdsongs left that an open question, the more I got lost in it.

Sounds Heard: Sergio Cervetti—Nazca and Other Works

Posted on July 17, 2012 by - Albums, Listen

I was delighted when earlier this year when Navona Records released Sergio Cervetti’s Nazca and Other Works, since it was finally an opportunity for me to hear an entire disc of music by a composer whose music I have been intrigued with since the early 1980s. Thirty years ago I fell in love with a 10-minute piece for solo guitar called Guitar Music: The Bottom of the Iceberg that I heard at the Columbia University Music Library when I was an undergrad there. It was on an LP issued by CRI, a label which then had a reputation for primarily releasing austere modernist pieces by composers based in academia. (This was a decade before CRI launched the Emergency Music Series, which redefined the label in its final years.) I religiously listened to everything put out on CRI even though most of it was very different from the music I personally wanted to write. But Guitar Music: The Bottom of the Iceberg was music I very much wanted to write—its relentless minimalism felt inevitable as well as bit subversive, although admittedly the latter was heightened by its appearing in the same catalog alongside Roger Sessions, Seymour Shifrin, Mario Davidovsky, et al. Who was this composer, Sergio Cervetti? There was an additional piece of his on the same side of that LP which involved a multi-tracked solo clarinet in textures that can best be described with decades of hindsight as proto-ambient. But, as far as I could tell, nothing else of his had ever been recorded. The notes on the LP offered very little information, not even a photo. He was born in Uruguay in 1940, moved to the United States in 1962 to further his composition studies, and his recent music explored “restricted pitch classes.” (How’s that for a serial explanation of minimalism?)

Fast forward several decades. I briefly met Cervetti at some composer gathering in New York City and told him how much I loved that guitar piece. Not long after that he very kindly mailed me a score of it. Returning to the piece so many years later, after all the uptown vs. downtown battlegrounds had lulled to a cease fire at least in my own personal purview, it still stood out and sounded every bit as exciting as when I had first heard it. (An audio file of the piece is on our online library, so you can listen to it, too.) I also managed to track down a few other recordings of Cervetti’s music. There are three captivating and idiomatic yet completely contemporary sounding solo harpsichord pieces on a disc issued by Vienna Modern Masters in 1999. Another VMM disc issued that same year featured an exciting Latin-tinged orchestra piece of his called Candomble II. Some of his music was used in the motion picture Natural Born Killers and the commercially released soundtrack for it includes an edit of his Fall of the Rebel Angels scored for a virtual orchestra. Nevertheless, even after learning about all this other music, having only a handful of short pieces on compilations led to aesthetic experiences with his music which were ultimately unfulfilling. Each of them created such an evocative sonic universe; I found it extremely frustrating every time I was jolted into another reality when someone else’s music, no matter how satisfying it too might have been in its own right, appeared on a subsequent track.

So it is such a pleasure to listen to Nazca and Other Works, the Navona CD devoted exclusively to the music of Sergio Cervetti. I’ve since learned that there are several additional discs of Cervetti’s music for virtual orchestra floating around in the world, so my journey with his music is apparently far from over. Nevertheless, Nazca is a great destination. The disc opens with an evocative single movement work for soprano and orchestra composed in 1991 called Leyenda which uses as its text an excerpt from Tabaré, an 1888 epic by Uruguay’s national poet Juan Zorrilla de San Martín (1855-1931). It is extremely lush and expansive, very far removed from the insistent austerity of Guitar Music: The Bottom of the Iceberg. But if that early guitar piece is comparable to pieces like Steve Reich’s Violin Phase or Philip Glass’s Music in Similar Motion, Leyenda is comparable to the music of post-Wound Dresser John Adams.

Next comes the brief Chacona para el Martirio de Atahualpa (“Chaconne for the Martyrdom of Atahualpa”) composed the following year. Composed on a commission to write a work commemorating the quincentenary of the “discovery” of the Americas from the International festival of Contemporary Music in Alicante, Spain, Cervetti chose to create music inspired by the forgotten native peoples of South America. Scored for harpsichord and 11 instruments, the Chaconne evokes the demise of the last Inca emperor Atahualpa (1497-1533) through a wild, relentless and occasionally polytonal conga which eventually peters out, leaving only a jagged monotone on the harpsichord, which to my ears sounds like a great sonic metaphor for the flat line that streams across a vital life signs’ monitor in a hopsital when someone dies. Cervetti’s music here also reminds me at times of the great Manuel De Falla Harpsichord Concerto from 1926, the work that proved that the harpsichord, rather than being a relic of a by-gone era, still had a lot to say in contemporary music. But the Chaconne is only one of four movements which altogether comprise a harpsichord concerto entitled Los Indios Olvidades (“The Forgotten Indians”), which, if the remainder is as exciting as this, would be an extremely worthy heir to De Falla. The total timing of the disc is already over 67 minutes so there would have been no way to include the entire piece and everything else that’s on the disc and I wouldn’t want to lose any of the other works. Still, I’m disappointed to only hear part of the piece, especially since I know from those three Cervetti solo harpsichord pieces how effectively he writes for the instrument.

The majority of the disc is devoted a very recent work by Cervetti, a monumental five-movement tone poem for string orchestra from 2010 entitled Nazca. Nazca is also inspired by indigenous South American traditions. The Nazca civilization flourished in what is now modern day Peru for over a thousand years, from roughly 300 B.C.E. until about 800 C.E. Nazca civilization is mostly known to the rest of the world because of a series of mysterious geoglyphs rediscovered in 1927 which some folks have touted as being an attempt at communication with extraterrestrials. In more recent times, the modern city of Nazca was almost completely destroyed by a 6.4 earthquake in 1996; miraculously only 17 people died and the city has since been completely rebuilt. Cervetti’s music evokes the seeming timelessness of this place as well as its amazing ability to endure. Sections of this piece are somewhat reminiscent of the music of the so-called “Holy Minimalists,” folks like John Tavener or the Eastern Europeans like Arvo Pärt, Peteris Vasks, or the late Henrik Górecki. The work’s finale, “Las Manos, Himno” (“The Hands, Hymn”) additionally conjures, to my ears at least, the angel series of orchestral pieces by contemporary Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara. But all is not peace and serenity. The penultimate movement, “Sueños Del Extraterrestre” (“Dreams of the Extraterrestrial”) evokes the unattainable other through music filled with ghostly harmonics, somewhat amorphous low register pulsations and occasionally frenetic rhythms.

Pre-Columbian culture is also the inspiration behind the final work featured on the disc, Madrigal III, which is a gorgeous setting for two sopranos and chamber ensemble of a text by Nezahualcoyotl (1402-1472), a non-Aztec Nahuan poet who ruled the city-state of Texcoco in the Central Mexican plateau region. Madrigal III is also the earliest of Cervetti’s works on the present disc; it was composed in 1975, merely one year after that solo guitar piece of his that first intrigued me about his music. It is clearly also the by-product of his then minimalist sensibility. When a full assessment of the breadth and depth of the minimalist movement in music is made one day, hopefully Cervetti’s important contributions will not be overlooked. Now that there is finally some adequate documentation of his music we can be hopeful.

Finally, a word about the documentation that accompanies this new recording: at first glance, the three-panel digipack which the CD is packed in, though attractive, seems to offer only the most perfunctory of notes about the pieces and a very short bio, albeit this time with a photo of the composer. But upon putting the CD into the disc drive of your computer, you’ll discover, as I did, a seemingly endless array of additional materials. I usually prefer listening to CDs in actual CD players rather than through my computer’s audio system since I associate my computer with work and my audio component system with play, but this disc forces me to change my tune. Not only are there a longer biography and detailed program notes for every single piece on the disc, in both English and Spanish, there’s also an extensive video interview with Cervetti filmed on a street in the Czech city of Olomouc (presumably recorded during the sessions for the present disc) in which he talks candidly about the need for composers to take charge of recordings of their own music as well as his lack of interest in Donizetti and Puccini. Though marred by frequent street noises, it’s an invaluable document. If that’s not enough, there are also full scores for every piece that appears on the disc, several of which are also printable off-line, as well as two ringtones based on Cervetti’s music. He’s made quite a journey from those restricted pitch classes!

Sounds Heard: Third Coast Percussion—John Cage: The Works for Percussion 2

Posted on July 10, 2012 by - Albums, Listen

John Cage’s centennial year has resulted in a gaggle of new recordings, multimedia offerings à la 4’33”, as well as festivals and events around the country. Whether or not one embraces wholeheartedly Cage’s later integration of chance procedures and conceptual thought into his works, there is no denying that some of his most compelling music is the early compositions for percussion, which provide a wealth of insight into the composer’s internal musical landscape. At the time these pieces were created, his sonic palette, which consisted of pretty much everything and the kitchen sink, was somewhat revolutionary, though it has now become a common language for percussionists. The Chicago-based ensemble Third Coast Percussion has released a new CD and separate surround sound DVD on Mode (available either individually or together) of six early percussion works that will perk up the ears (and eyes, if you choose to include the DVD) of anyone even remotely interested in percussion music performance and/or John Cage.

The discs begin with Cage’s three Constructions, presented in reverse chronological order. Third Construction features the widest selection of instruments, with metal, wood, and skin categories all represented in force. The constantly grooving rhythmic complexity and the extensive instrumentation make it a milestone in percussion repertoire. Second Construction begins with a gamelan-esque arrangement of oxen bells, joined by a repeating rhythmic melody on piano grounded by snare drum brush work, and an assortment of shakers and small drums. First Construction (in Metal) is just that—a metallic rainforest of thundersheets, tam-tam, cymbals, and “piano innards.”

The 1936 work Trio is a short three-movement composition scored for bass drum, woodblocks, bamboo sticks and tom-toms. Heard after the Constructions, its dance-like, often gently bubbling rhythms sound relatively simple in comparison, and it is illuminating to hear how Cage’s future sense of rhythm and structure grew out of this work.

The Quartet for unspecified instrumentation has been sending percussionists on junkyard treasure hunts since it was created in 1935. Here Third Coast has separated the four movements into separate instrument groupings of primarily wood, metal, and skin, and the third movement employs the harp of an old upright piano as the primary instrument to create a beautiful and otherworldly soundscape.

The final piece, Living Room Music, finds the performers inside architect Bruce Goff’s Ruth Ford House, literally playing the space—metal beams are struck with spoons, carpet is scraped. There is the open-handed thwacking of wooden surfaces in the first movement, “To Begin.” For the second movement, “Story,” they relax in comfy chairs and, as the liner notes state, “rap” Gertrude Stein. Slide whistle is featured in the “Melody” movement with a background of spoons and a very familiar computer bleep sound that many will immediately recognize. “End” is all glass objects all the time. While every one of the performance films is beautifully presented, with lots of close-ups of fascinating instruments and the hands playing them, the video of Living Room Music captures the space and the performers in a way that makes you really wish you could be there, hanging out with them.

In my experience, Cage’s percussion music is best fully appreciated live; being able to see performers play the arrays of coffee cans, flower pots, drums, utensils, and bells brings the music’s visceral character to the forefront of the listening experience. In this case, an added benefit is being able to watch Third Coast Percussion obviously having a blast performing all of these works. The DVD beautifully conveys both the richness and the delightful quirkiness of Cage’s percussion music, instilling a deeper appreciation of the composer’s creative outlook. The recordings alone are of exceedingly high quality and satisfying in and of themselves, and the DVD adds another layer of depth, personality, and—quite literally—color to the music that is well worth the investment.

Sounds Heard: Due East—drawn only once

Posted on July 3, 2012 by - Albums, Listen

I have been especially attracted to music that has a visual component of late. I get excited when concerts include film projections, and I often find myself reaching for the recordings packaged with DVDs first. I know there are those who would say that this reflects a childish inability to focus on recorded sound without fiddling with my cell phone. Admittedly, this may not be entirely off base, and visual presentations that accompany music can run the risk of simultaneously adding and subtracting (or sometimes only subtracting) from the experience. More often, however, I find that they provide a banister into certain new works on first listen and a kind of bonus poetry to music that is already familiar.

I got to thinking about all this again while listening to Due East’s drawn only once (late to the game, seven months after its release date—my apologies), a recording from the duo of flutist Erin Lesser and percussionist Greg Beyer, produced with a small cast of additional players. The album comes packaged as both an audio-only CD recording of two works by John Supko, as well as a 5.1 surround sound DVD which features accompanying videos by Kristine Marx and Don Sheehy.

To my eye, I couldn’t divorce the quick-cut style of abstract and processed imagery used in both video pieces from the way a feed of Instagram snapshots offers snatches of experience, shared and made romantic through filters and reinterpretation at a remove, half-glimpsed understandings of the intimate experiences of others.

This fit neatly with the push and pull of the music itself while leaving plenty of air in the room and sidestepping the idea that there was any sort of direct soundtracking occurring. Both pieces ride a disquiet of rapid motion that contrasts with a simultaneously delivered deeper meditative and exploratory spirit. (See liner notes for Supko’s discussion of his use of “tuned randomness” in the works, and a deeper analysis of how and why these aural images are created.)

The opening track, This Window Makes Me Feel, begins with a kind of inability to start, the closely mic’d shuffling pages and the stammer of breath the only sounds accompanying the visual images caught through (appropriately) windows, first bucolic and then urban in flavor (Hello, NYC pedestrians!). The narrator is hesitant to begin, apologetic even, and then she finally lets loose her rapid whisper of Robert Fitterman’s poem of the same name, only some of the words and phrases coming to the surface clearly—again, as with the visual, more of a half-grasped overheard confession than a message intended for the listener directly.

Beneath and around this 15-minute vocal bed, the breathing flutter of flute, the spare piano (David Broome) and percussion tones, the long pure notes sung by Hai-Ting Chinn (who makes an incantation out the work’s title) and plenty of ambient bits from the city streets ground the piece, anchoring the fidgeting admissions in the embrace of the wider, heavier world.

While the opening work carries a decidedly personal, perhaps even voyeuristic, and urban flavor, the latter, Littoral, feels both more outward looking and more expansive in scope (and not just because it clocks in at a lengthier 35 minutes). Here again the momentum to begin is slow to gain speed, the flute the most aggressive player in the fight to get free of the lethargy, though the percussion keeps at her heels. The tension ratchets up one notch at a time, and it’s not until more than eight minutes in that the first of the piece’s two text sources enters, recited by the author: Cees Nooteboom’s poem “Cartography (for Christina Barrosa)”. The flute and percussion weave in and around the language, reaching up and out until, in the middle of the poem, they suddenly fall, and the line goes fuzzy as if the listener has slipped out of signal range and a much stranger message in a bottle has drifted in to take its place. Up to this point in the work, the listener has been hearing (and seeing, for those watching along at home) allusions to large bodies of water, riding the sway of the current both by ear and by eye, but now a processed voice (the composer’s) narrates an excerpt from Richard Hakluyt’s The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques & Discoveries of the English Nation (2nd edition, 1598-1600). As this glimpse of an historical ghost fades back into the spray. Nooteboom’s poetry returns, the pulse is up, the character sharper and more insistent. By the piece’s concluding moments, the pace may have cooled down again, but it’s been a tough voyage and we are all dirty and out of breath, a little older than when we embarked.

Sounds Heard: Volti—House of Voices

Posted on June 19, 2012 by - Albums, Listen

The San Francisco-based Volti has been a consistent innovator in vocal music for over 30 years. The mission of the 25-member a capella ensemble is to think outside the box of choral music, and to continue expanding that landscape by commissioning new works and championing the music of living, breathing composers. In its latest CD House of Voices, Volti brings its exceptional musicality to the table once again.

The first piece, by Yu-Hui Chang, uses text from two poems by Billy Collins, U.S. poet laureate from 2001-2003. Both movements of Being: Two Collins Songs address personal awareness of both the mental and physical realms. However, “Shoveling Snow with Buddha” is energetic, employing contrapuntal lines and conveying the conversational tone of the text, while “The Night House” relays more vertical chordal structures with a rich, though more subdued sound.

Ted Hearne’s five-movement work Privilege is the most wide-ranging and dramatic of the pieces on this disc. As the composer chosen for Volti’s 2009-10 Choral Arts Laboratory, he has asked a great deal of Volti in this adventurous work, and they have certainly delivered. The first and third movements use texts written by Hearne himself, from the standpoint of a privileged member of American society, and the texts of the second and fourth movements are snippets from an interview with The Wire producer David Simon that address the income divide between rich and poor, while the final movement, “We Cannot Leave,” is a setting of an anti-Apartheid Song translated into English. The tart harmonies and sinewy lines of this composition seem to be recorded at closer range than the other pieces, bringing a sense of intimacy to the piece, placing the listener very near the ensemble as if in a small, intimate performance space.

By comparison, the works that immediately follow seem almost conservative, although they are no less elegant. In Daglarym / My Mountains, Donald Crockett attempts to recreate the landscape of Tuva by using melodic and text material from Tuvan folk songs gathered by musician and researcher Katherine Vincent. Crockett stays largely within Western harmonic language in this piece, straying only occasionally into a slightly nasal singing technique during the interpretation of carefully chosen Tuvan words. Eric Moe’s The Crowds Cheered as Gloom Galloped Away is a characteristically energetic and effective setting of an equally characteristically quirky choice of text dealing with antidepressants that come packaged with… tiny ponies. It’s disconcertingly whimsical and somber at once. As with the Yu-Hui Chang piece mentioned earlier, Wayne Peterson creates two clear, no-nonsense settings of texts by a single poet—in this case, Delmore Schwartz—in this case about the beauty of art and of contemplating the free-spiritedness of childhood as respite from the pains of contemporary life.

The big finish on House of Voices is the 15-minute tribute to the power of the moon, Luna, Nova Luna, by Volti composer-in-residence Mark Winges. This lush, dramatic work combining Volti and the Piedmont East Bay Children’s Choir includes a cornucopia of texts with moon references, and really does travel to the moon and back in its range of dramatic contrast and musical language, laid bare by deft combinations of child and adult voices. Winges is obviously extremely familiar with the voices of Volti, and supremely comfortable working in the realm of choral music in general, as if driving a well-loved car that has been in the family for ages.

Within the choral music world this recording might be considered crazy, heady stuff, but to these ears it is first and foremost inspiring, magnificently performed music. Virtuosic? Absolutely. If this recording doesn’t make every composer who listens to it crave to write choral music, and in particular for Volti, I don’t know what will.