Category: Albums

Sounds Heard: PRISM Quartet—Dedication

Among those who feel that contemporary culture is nose-diving to its demise, the death of the long form is a common reason cited. People, they contend, no longer possess the attention spans needed to process anything that requires an investment of more than a few moments of one’s precious time. Our minds think in terms of search engine queries, and 140 characters has shifted from being not nearly enough to much too long. For those people, Dedication, the latest release by the PRISM Saxophone Quartet, might be just another sad example of our culture’s downfall.

That’s not to say that the short form can’t also be virtuous and meaningful. Take the example of haiku, in which brevity and concision is not simply an aspiration, but a requirement. You don’t hear people arguing that Matsuo Bashô, Yosa Buson, or Kobayashi Issa were eroding Japanese culture with their 17-syllable verses. Quite the contrary. Their work is the embodiment of the less-is-more pathos. And if ever there was an art form that could sometimes use a reminder of that maxim, it is contemporary classical music.

In celebration of its 20th anniversary, the PRISM Quartet issued a call to more than 20 composers, asking them to write short works to mark this milestone. The majority of these micro-compositions last between one and two minutes, each providing a fascinating window into its composer’s unique approach to the ensemble. While a few contributors appear to have either been uninspired by the task or simply unable to cram a grand idea into a compact form, a handful embraced the challenge, delivering compelling results.

Among the CD’s most intriguing compositions are those that take advantage of the saxophone’s full expressive range and sonic potential. Both Gregory Wanamaker and Keno Ueno possess a substantial knowledge of the instrument’s capabilities and use a range of multiphonics to elicit very different outcomes. Wanamaker’s Speed Metal Organum Blues uses the technique to invoke the chaos and feedback-driven energy of a sweaty mosh pit at a heavy metal concert while Ueno’s July 23, from sunrise to sunset, the summer of the S.E.P.S.A. bus rides destra e sinistra around Ischia just to get tomorrow’s scatolame, makes the acoustic ensemble sound like a remarkable, high-end synthesizer. Often pigeonholed as a “new complexity” composer, in A Fractured Silence Jason Eckardt demonstrates a sharp sense of timing, applying silence liberally between short bursts of captivating sounds and textures previously unknown in the saxophone quartet literature.

Other standout tracks include Donnacha Dennehy’s dizzying Mild, Medium-Lasting, Artificial Happiness and Dennis DeSantis’s Hive Mind, which overcomes the lure of counterpoint to produce a gritty and aggressive single-voice anthem.

Throughout the album the PRISM Quartet plays with remarkable tightness, demonstrating a precision that would likely make a robot envious. They not only handle the demands of the modern works with ease, but also exhibit a keen flexibility, making more traditional compositions such as Adam Silverman’s simple and exquisite Just a Minute, Chopin sound equally as convincing. Yet despite their obvious command of what, for lack of a better term, is “concert music,” the ensemble, perhaps unwilling or unable to shed the saxophone’s historical baggage as a jazz instrument, still feels compelled to wade into those waters. In these instances, even guest artist Greg Osby can’t help the group swing.

***

Brian Sacawa serves as saxophonist with The U.S. Army Field Band from Washington, D.C., curates Baltimore’s Mobtown Modern Music Series, and races his bicycle at the elite level. You can find him on the internet.

Sounds Heard: Michael Torke—Tahiti

Tahiti is the latest recording released by Michael Torke’s Ecstatic Records, the label he founded in 2003 in order to release his new material and to distribute his older recordings. The current trend of self-publishing/recording composers was still a fairly new and rarely implemented concept in 2003, and the number of established composers leaving the safety of traditional models to set out on their own was virtually non-existent. After the demise of Argo Records in the late ’90s, Torke tried for some time to get the rights for his recordings, but it wasn’t until 2001 that he gained some traction. Andrew Cornall (his former producer) approached Torke with an offer to assist him in acquiring the rights for those recordings, and it was at this meeting that the seeds of Ecstatic were sown.

Launching Ecstatic Records showed that while Torke was already thoroughly established as a composer, he was still looking forward—not only in terms of the music he wrote but also in terms of the life and business of composing. Torke currently spends the bulk of his time in Las Vegas (far from the influence and trappings of contemporary concert music culture), and it’s in this environment that his work on Tahiti began to take shape.

Performed by the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic’s contemporary music group, Ensemble 10/10 (led by conductor Clark Rundell), and coming in at just over 17 minutes, the album’s first track, Fiji, quickly reveals itself as a Torke joint. Calling for five percussionists and utilizing a variety of Latin-centric instruments (congas, bongos, and claves, oh my!) to create a virtually non-stop bed of percussion, Fiji relentlessly percolates, pausing only during the occasional breakdown and turnaround before returning to a constantly shifting texture that just won’t sit still. Joining the percussion are pairs of oboes, clarinets, and bassoons, which are matched with pairs of violins, violas, and cellos, respectively. While the result is five percussionists and six (x2) other instrumentalists, this description does not really convey the weight of the result. The aforementioned are truly paired, as they double every note and rhythm throughout the piece, resulting in a sound with the density of a chamber orchestra but the clarity of a smaller chamber group. Adding to the effect, never have so many percussionists played so little. Joining the drums are a variety of shakers, bells, and the like, but given the simplicity of the lines, the impact is that of a single percussionist (perhaps with an extra arm) working with a very thick group of other instrumentalists to create a deceptively simple texture derived from the rhythms played by the percussionists.

Following Fiji is the eight-movement title track, Tahiti. While the movement titles are drawn from the Society Islands of French Polynesia, Torke points out in his liner notes that they do not directly speak to characteristics of their namesakes. Instead, they are meant to give a more general impression of “the idea of humidity: they attempt to capture the perfume of leisure time in a very warm and sunny beautiful place.” By and large Torke captures this, especially in the second movement, “Moorea—green cliffs.” Here the percussion again mimics a single drummer, but one languidly playing a half-time groove while strings and winds wistfully trade lightly syncopated melodies. “Bora-Bora—lagoon” also calmly leads the listener along with high winds and bright percussion, the only wrinkle in the journey being the 3 + 5 grouping in the chorus giving a slight disturbance to an otherwise balmy trip. “Tahaa—white sand” takes the listener in a new rhythmic direction, notably with straight eighth-note lines that move around the orchestra accompanied by long flowing string lines, which then trade to pizz. strings and long wind lines. While this direction is new, the movement is also notable in that the percussion is almost non-existent.

“Maupiti—by the reef” takes the “drum kit approximation” concept to its most fully realized state. Listeners of a certain vintage might be called back to any number of TV theme songs of the ’70s and ’80s (many of which were fantastic, thankyouverymuch) which featured drum kits along with studio orchestras. Music starting with two bars of loud, staccato, tutti eighths followed by two quieter measures would fit in any number of pieces and could go in as many directions, but the use of the toms and snare to give a pick-up (anacrusis, for those keeping score[1]) into the main theme is the first sign that we might be settling in to watch the ABC lineup of 1983. A straight rock beat (complete with tambourine playing eighths in a spot-on impression of a closed hi-hat, along with complementary eighths in the orchestra that are begging to be played by guitar and bass) accompanies a lovely theme that actually features some of the most rhythmically adventurous and involved music on the disc. This is accentuated (in the ears of this listener) by the harmonic and melodic choices that I can’t help but hear as TV theme-song-ish.[2]

“Huahine—under the moonlight” returns the listener to the islands with slowly pulsing rhythms and a haunting clarinet solo line. The only problem with this movement is that both the clarinet line and the piece end too soon. I could have gone around once or twice more. Finally, we hear “Farwell” which aptly wraps up Torke’s trip to the islands, complete with cymbal crashes (there are those downbeat accents…) seemingly mimicking crashing waves.

In the liner notes, Torke says (not about Tahiti in particular), “I have always wanted to write a composition that would inspire a woman, coming home from a long day of work, to draw a bath, light candles, and listen to it on her pink iPod.” Whether that goal played a role in the development of these pieces or not, he may very well have achieved it in places on this disc. Torke was an unapologetically “listenable” composer before that was fashionable, and in many ways Tahiti shows a continuation of that ethos. While there is plenty of substantial and interesting material here, this is clearly music written with people in mind, not composers. Its overall impact is thoughtful, approachable, and decidedly Torke.

 

***


1.     In college I went to a local CD shop (ask your parents) to pick up a few CDs. On my way to the counter I noticed a CD for a thrash metal band called Anacrusis. While I was checking out the CD cover, the shop owner walked over and noticed my prospective purchases were a bit different than what I was presently checking out. When he asked me why I was having a look at the disc, I told him what anacrusis meant. He didn’t believe me and said he was going to call his mother (who was the staff accompanist for the local university) to confirm. I said that not only was I right, but I was willing to bet the purchase price of the CDs I’d planned to purchase.

And that, my friends, was how you got free music in the early ’90s.

2.     The only movement that is more adventurous is the first movement, “Tahiti—Papeete,” which features three against four polyrhythmic elements that when played straight are quite effective. And when Torke carves out the occasional beat, even more so.

Sounds Heard: Line Upon Line Percussion

This past May, NewMusicBox contributor Andrew Sigler and I each covered Austin, Texas’s “Fast Forward Austin” festival, and those looking for an audio snapshot of that city’s emerging new music scene would do well to give Line Upon Line Percussion’s new album a listen. This trio of percussionists—Adam Bedell, Cullen Faulk, and Matthew Tedori—formed at the University of Texas at Austin in 2009, and the four composers whose works are featured on the album are all Austin-based as well.

They were also all born in 1980 or after, with included works composed in 2009 and 2010. As one might expect, the influence of minimalism and New York’s Downtown scene is felt in their respective pieces, some more strongly than others. The homegrown way the album was put together—with Line Upon Line members commissioning brand-new works from local composers—led the ensemble to request four very different pieces that would each touch on different areas of the ensemble’s versatility.

James D. Norman’s Redshift (2010), which leads off the disc, is inspired by a concept from physics regarding the change in frequency of sound (or light) as an object moves away from the listener. As Norman explains, “This relationship of source and observer is the fundamental process at work in Redshift, relating player to player and ensemble to listener.” The work expands an initial unison line in a variety of ways, morphing and stretching in a kind of quasi-heterophonous texture that balances an interplay of quick-decaying instruments along with more sustained tones (including some impressively pure bowed cymbal playing). Redshift has the most spare and symmetrical instrumentation of any work on the album—six metal planks, six wood planks, and a crash cymbal—yet Norman’s inventive and constantly varying orchestration propels the work forward. The timbres are never far from the tinge of Gamelan music, with the metal plates providing plenty of clangorous overtones that sound rich and bell-like on this recording.

Steve Snowden is a composer who grew up in rural Missouri, and some of his previous works have turned to folk sources for inspiration. His contribution, A Man with a Gun Lives Here (2010), is based on the secret codes used by hobos as they roamed the country during the Great Depression, but the music in this case is devoid of folk tunes or invocations of particular styles (Snowden’s Appalachian Polaroids, a work featured at last year’s “Fast Forward” festival that incorporated an actual folk tune). Instead, his piece for this disc unfolds naturally from the history and character of vagabond culture.

“The Hobo Code is a fascinating system of symbols understood among the hobo community,” Snowden explains. “Because hobos weren’t typically welcomed (and were often illiterate), messages left for others in the community had to be easy for hobos to read but look like little more than random markings to everyone else to maintain an element of secrecy. Each movement of this piece is based on one of these symbols and, just like those resourceful hobos, makes use of very limited materials.”

Snowden’s A Man with a Gun is scored for a single shared bass drum and several additional implements, emphasizing the communal and ritualistic elements of the composition’s subject. The first movement, “Be Prepared to Defend Yourself,” lopes along with a series of rugged, uneven gestures for bass drum, played in a variety of ways that wring a lot out of a fairly humble instrument, while the second movement, “There are Thieves About,” serves up a sneaky rhythmic groove augmented by metal plates placed on the surface of the bass drum. The final movement, “A Man with a Gun Lives Here,” adds a three-pound sack of buckshot to the mix, which is dropped, smacked, dragged, and eventually poured onto the drum head. It’s a tribute to Snowden’s resourcefulness that after the effect of the entire bag being poured onto the drum—a point many composers might have considered a suitable cadence—Snowden instructs the players to tilt the drum head and spread the buckshot over its surface, creating a sonority akin to tidal surf cresting and receding. Snowden’s exploration of the physical impulse have rewarded him with a large palette of timbres, and his work has a rustic, red-blooded quality that is missing from a lot of timbre-oriented percussion music. Line Upon Line delivered the requisite (and at times acrobatic) choreography and lent the piece’s timbral explorations an expressive element.

Zack Stanton’s Echoes of Veiled Light (2009) was a response to the ensemble’s request that he compose them a quiet piece—always a challenge of subtlety and restraint when writing for percussion, and one that Stanton seems well-equipped to meet. The work is based on the echoing and close imitation of successive musical ideas, woven into a delicate filigree that successfully blends pitched and non-pitched sounds. The influence of minimalism and postminimalism is present but, refreshingly, it never overwhelms Stanton’s own voice. The work reveals great textural sophistication, as well as a sustained, lyrical impulse that is a nice contrast to what is largely a groove-based album.

Ian Dicke’s Missa Materialis (2010) caps off the disc. The work was inspired by Austin’s Cathedral of Junk, a structure welded together by artist Vince Hannemann out of assorted debris. While Snowden’s contribution allowed its attitude to be revealed through the interplay of musical objects, everything in Dicke’s junkyard mass seems to have crystallized around the vivid metaphor of our society’s ritual cycle of materialism. The first movement features slammed trash can lids, as well as the sound of what I think is a newspaper placed over an open trash can and then tapped. The visual element strikes me as so important that I had a very different experience watching a video of the piece and hearing the same sounds on the CD. Dicke has a knack for clever and pungent combinations of timbres, and many of his unlikely but fresh combinations carry the music even without the added theatrical effect of seeing what trash items produce each sound.

The work’s second movement ends in a gesture that struck me as a good example of one of the things that Dicke brings to the table as a composer—a great ear for sound and an understanding of how to best let its innate qualities shine through. The movement ends in a duet of winding ratchets, overlapping unevenly and stuttering over each other in a kind of highly active stasis. Other moments, including a ghostly musical saw part in the third movement and whipped trash bags in fourth, coax unexpectedly varied timbres from seemingly limited sources. Fragments of material linger, dreamlike, as things to be reveled in, suddenly stopping or occasionally spinning into cathedral-like structures. The work reflects its liturgical inspiration not only in its final quotation of Latin text, but in the way that each gesture is suspended, meditated upon, and slowly passed between players.

This disc introduces us to an ensemble that is rhythmically tight and sensitive as well as timbrally curious, and their commitment to local composers telegraphs their seriousness in making contributions to the percussion repertoire. The effort is also an example of how a “garage band,” local, do-it-yourself impulse worked alongside the more traditional commissioning process—a marriage of old and emerging paradigms that is versatile and undogmatic. Line Upon Line’s debut release is a great way to sample a local scene and the ensemble’s considerable range of abilities.

Sounds Heard: John Aylward—Stillness and Change

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sounds Heard: Keeril Makan—Target

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sounds Heard: Seven Storey Mountain II

The second piece of composer and experimental trumpeter Nate Wooley’s planned seven-part Seven Storey Mountain cycle dropped on Important records last week. For this round, Wooley engaged Chris Corsano (drums) and C. Spencer Yeh (amplified violin) to join him in creating the forty-three minute, highly improvisatory single-track recording.

It is a haunting, often aggressive sound world that moves from a place of chilled droning into a dense and pummeling chaos, before returning to a stressed restraint reminiscent of the work’s opening moments. In his notes to the release, Wooley cites the piece’s exploration of fear, anger, and “spiritual catharsis.” After listening to the work several times, all I wanted to do was have a conversation with him about the music that was ultimately created. Luckily for me, he was game to engage in a little Q&A.—MS

***

Molly Sheridan: I have to suspect that your Seven Storey Mountain cycle has a connection to Thomas Merton’s autobiography of the same name. Can you speak some about the connection between Merton’s words and the music you have created?

Nate Wooley: It’s connected more to Merton as a person, and maybe even more connected to the kind of person that he represents to me than that specific work.  I’ve been interested in comparative religion for a long time, and specifically comparison of the mystical traditions of different religions, after reading Aldous Huxley’s Perennial Philosophy in college.  It’s not something I’m consuming as aggressively now, but there are certain archetypes of the mystic in print that I still find interesting on an intellectual and personal level.  The ones that resonate with me, like Merton, especially, and St. Augustine, affect me, not because of their spiritual communion, but because of the honesty in which they talk about their failure and their fear along the path.  After reading a lot of mystical writing, I (as a natural born cynic) tend to start to question the idea of a spiritual human being born directly from the lotus blossom or the brow of Zeus and endowed with a direct connection to the higher being without any question that the path they are on is the right one.  The idea of the perfect being, although it is a basis of a lot of mystical thought, has always seemed false to me.  My experience is that every single path is full of doubt and fear and questioning, and this is what makes the effort worthwhile.

Musically, Seven Storey Mountain is more about the courage of allowing myself to fail and frightening myself as an artist.  I was asked to do a commission for Festival of New Trumpet, and I wanted to be able to do something that would be honest and create a situation that could fail.  I think, especially in a very specific, media-driven culture of art, we tend to view artists in this same “born from the lotus blossom” way that one may be inclined to view a mystical idea of the perfected being.  We only see the successes, are only allowed to see the successes.  It makes sense from a market perspective, but I’ve always connected more with the idea of taking a risk, presenting it to the people around you (knowing it’s a risk) and allowing the ensuing conversation to be about whether your success was important or not.  I see that in Merton’s writing about his struggles in Seven Storey, and that was the original idea behind starting on a massive 7-part music cycle with tape, amplified instruments, drone elements, and a changing cast of characters, which is not the typical recipe for musical success in this period of marketing works that must be able to be easily and cheaply reproduced for larger audiences.

MS: This is the second installment of what will be a multi-version project with a strategy for a sort of “evolution”, I suppose you might say. How and why have you decided to incorporate this structure into the piece?

 

NW: The evolution is important to me. It’s the center of the whole idea really.  If we’re talking about doing something that frightens you and allows for failure, which ultimately allows for growth, then it has to be allowed to evolve.  The structure came out of a hope that I could make the seven separate parts change over a long period of time without the feeling that it was simply an excuse to put out seven disparate records under a loose concept.  To that end, there are a couple of elements that are always present and hopefully will allow for evolution and honest expression.  The first, and most obvious I think, is the tape component.  The tape provides the framework for the live musicians, as far as timing and sense of narrative arc.  Each version of the piece (we just performed the third version in March with the players from the first two versions plus two vibraphones at Issue Project Room) has this tape component which provides a skeletal architecture for the live musicians to work on top of, whether they are playing notated parts or improvising.  The way I’ve dealt with the evolution of something so static is to take the tape component from the previous iteration, strip it down to its barest components and build the new tape piece on top of that skeleton.  As each version of the tape is made, the essential structure from the previous versions get boiled down to an even more concentrated essence of what that information is about, and the structure changes to reflect the new version while maintaining a connection to the past versions.

Another agent of evolution, and this one is much easier in a way, is the fact that the musicians change from version to version.  My own playing hopefully changes, of course, but there is a big difference between the way Paul Lytton approaches the drum set and the way Chris Corsano approaches the drum set in this situation.  And, happily, when we did the third version with both Paul and Chris they changed the way they approached the music again to accommodate each other and the new piece.  The structure for the musicians is pretty open.  There is a drone component, played by David Grubbs and C. Spencer Yeh in the first two versions, there is a momentum-based component, played by the drummers, and then there is a voice or intoning element which is played by the amplified trumpet always.  As you change the players, the interpretation of drone and momentum changes and evolves based on their knowledge of the piece and what I write for them based on my ongoing knowledge of the piece. The difference in their approaches becomes a built-in evolution or way of changing without really trying.

MS: This single-track recording spans a little more that 40 minutes. All of it rewards careful listening, but of all the moments, the one that most grabbed me by the ear was the post-climax dying away of the sound at around the 37-minute mark, after which the music returns to a tense restraint reminiscent of the work’s opening moments. As a listener, this gives the piece a kind of traditional narrative structure. Was that an intentional shape planned among the performers in advance? Were there other discussion or instructions given to the players?

NW: The structure is planned out to a certain extent before we play.  It is essentially a very rough and ugly arch form of some sort every time.  I tend to view this piece as an exploded time scale of an epiphanic moment, and as such, it always comes from a place of placidity and moves into something that is full of action, uncertainty, discovery, and then returns to the calm with something added from the new knowledge gained, which is a traditional narrative structure, like you said.  Often the pieces return to the same material in the tape that we started with, but there is a very obvious added counterpoint as well as we finish the piece.

The players have very little in terms of written instructions, especially in these first two versions of the piece.  The drone component is always based on a pitch and that pitch may change, and so there is a score denoting that, but often with the momentum parts, and especially because it’s been Paul and Chris, I’ve just given them the structure of the piece, so they can track their build in relation to the tape, and then I let them go.  Really, most of the writing falls to my own part, as far as texts to mumble through the amplifier, certain blocks of sound and feedback I would like to come in at specific points against the tape, etc.  The subtext of the piece, though, has been a feeling of religious ecstasy.  Some writers have talked about it as my search for that experience specifically, and that may have been me misspeaking at some point early on, but the subtext of that mystical feeling in this piece is really based on the techniques of building upon a drone, the rise and fall of energy, and a very sustained point of high energy and volume.  I try and structure the pieces and write the scores in a way where it’s clear to the players that this is the aim, and then I let them fill in the language they find most appropriate.

MS: Were there multiple recordings of version II that you selected from for this release?

NW: We did do two recordings of this second version, one at Issue Project Room (which is the one that was released on Important) and one that went live on the air at WFMU, but I don’t particularly like doing this piece that way.  I prefer for there to be one performance and one recording.  I don’t think this is a piece that should be rehearsed.  A lot of the work is dependent on the players interpreting certain core ideas (drone, ecstasy, propulsion, sustained energy) and the more times you do a piece like this, the more they develop an articulated concept of what those things are for that piece.  I feel like this piece is already too drenched in concept in a lot of ways and usually the second performances feel like the musicians are playing more out of an executable idea than a physical reaction to the music and each other.  Also, doing multiple versions takes away from that feeling of fear and the possibility of failure that is so key to me, so I try and keep the recorded versions down to the barest minimum, based on what the engineer needs to successfully capture such an extreme dynamic level.

MS: I had never heard of Merton’s book before listening to your music, but I have to admit that now my subsequent experiences of it are colored by what I read in his introduction to his autobiography. He writes, “I seek to speak to you, in some way, as your own self. Who can tell what this may mean? I myself do not know, but if you listen, things will be said that are perhaps not written in this book. And this will be due not to me but to the One who lives and speaks in both.” Am I getting carried away if I apply this sentiment to your music here as well?

NW: Well, I think there is a connection there to be sure.  I don’t think that a higher being is speaking through me to the listener, which I think Merton is getting at near the end of that quote, but the idea of connection is certainly valid.  I am trying to connect with people.  Not necessarily with a specific message, but just in a way of being intimate.  I’m not a socially open person necessarily, but I do have the desire to have intimacy with people, to share something of myself with them and vice versa.  A lot of my music springs from that desire and I think these pieces are maybe the most apt physical representation of it through my use of the voice through the trumpet and the sheer physicality of the volume.  I think the work on Seven Storey has always had the aim of wanting to reach out and speak to the person listening….as themselves. I think as a listener there is enough abstraction in the actual music that you tend to put your own narrative on it and that is the hope, as Merton puts it…to reach out, in as raw and honest a way as I can and share something with the listener that will hopefully lead them down a different path or maybe provide some confidence in the one they’re on already.

Sounds Heard: William Schuman—A Free Song, Finally!

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

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

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

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

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

Sounds Heard: Ecosono—Agents Against Agency

Music and environmental concerns have long gone hand in hand for artists with the sort of wanderlust that manifests as a passion for discovering sonic source material beyond traditional musical instruments and for presenting work outside of standard concert hall settings. The artist collective called Ecosono is devoted to melding experimental sound art and environmental preservation, in an effort to highlight ecological awareness through innovative musical creations. Their new DVD, Agents Against Agency, documents nine multimedia projects exploring the interconnections between musical expression in dialog with the surrounding environment, both natural and manmade.

The works presented on Agents Against Agency vary widely in scope, and each group has its own concept of what combining music with nature means. The first presentation by Ted Coffey, Parabolic Fountain Music, mounts six sculptural parabolic speakers in a Virginia stream and pairs their highly focused sounds with swirling video of the immediately surrounding area. According to the program notes (presented in the “Extras” section of the DVD), recordings of ducks and loons are used to control the synthesis of other recordings of streams and oceans, making up the sonic portion of the work. Although the camera motion managed to make me seasick (I’ve never been very good on boats), the video still shots are quite beautiful, as is the speaker display, which would be a treat to experience live.

Drum Circle by EMMI (Expressive Machines Musical Instruments) is a charming performance by a robot percussion ensemble placed into a forest setting. The robot arms playing assorted small instruments such as woodblocks, flower pots, and small pieces of metal—along with a snare drum and djembe—create surprisingly quiet, spare music, and although it is not specifically stated in the notes, I assume they are responding to the serene forest setting. This is Sunday drumming in the park taken to a new level.

The dramatic landscape of the Namib desert in southern Africa serves as the setting for Sandprints by MICE (Mobile Interactive Computer Ensemble). Microphones buried in the sand transform the desert into “a dynamic control interface for the ensemble.” The song that slowly emerges begins with processed, rhythmic, “sandy” sounds that are contrasted with a melody whistled by the performers. Additional melodic lines are layered over top, resulting in a quirky dance tune—so much so that once the music has completely blossomed, a group of dancing people emerge over a sand dune to join the ensemble and make it a party.

Before the Seiche, by Christopher Burns and David Dinnell, is pure computer-generated sound—noise and digital feedback—accompanied by lovely, foggy, processed videos that use monochrome analog capture of approaching storms.

Two of the works on the DVD explore the acoustics of an object by relocating the listener inside the object itself. In Ghost in the Machine, Yuri Spitsyn explores the acoustics of a computer using vibration sensors to amplify its internal rumblings during normal use. The musical portion of Matthew Burtner’s (dis)Locations records the sound of one saxophone playing as it is amplified through another (making the inside of a saxophone the concert hall) and travels into a refreshingly dense and timbrally interesting sonic world. The accompanying visual story is a sort of scavenger hunt in which pieces of a saxophone are discovered in a forest and assembled on the spot.

Two other works are more standard improvisations for ensemble taken outside of a traditional space. The Pinko Communoids perform A Long Pond in a field in Maine with percussion, guitar, and accordion, while 12 Dog Cycle with Rosalind Hall employ extended vocal techniques, saxophone, and accordion in an abandoned, crumbling, and highly resonant brickwork factory in Melbourne. This film is perhaps the most visually stunning of all, mixing ultra-saturated color with shadow and light play as the ensemble wanders about playing in the space during the early morning hours.

While the presentation of the works on Agents Against Agency range from polished multimedia works to rough and tumble performance documentation, as in Unity Groove for a large-scale ensemble of 250 laptop performers, this is a compelling selection of art that is both engaging to the ears and to the eyes—well worth checking out for fans of computer music and for those interested in the multitude of ways that sound and ecology (in whatever fashion one may define those words) intertwine.

(The following video shows an excerpt of Sandprints, which is also available on an earlier Ecosono release.)

Sounds Heard: ensemble et, al.—When the Tape Runs Out

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

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

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

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

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

Sounds Heard: Christopher Shultis—Devisadero

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

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

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

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

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