Category: Albums

Sounds Heard: Aaron Siegel—Science is Only a Sometimes Friend

from Science is Only a Sometimes Friend by Aaron Siegel

Purchase directly from LockStep RecordsAaron Siegel: Science is Only a Sometimes Friend Mantra Percussion: Joe Bergen, Al Cerulo, Mike McCurdy, Justin Wolf, Levy Lorenzo, Chris Graham, Mike Pride, and Sam Sowyrda, glockenspiels; Aaron Siegel, organ (LockStep Records)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Aaron Siegel talks to Mike McCurdy, one of the eight glockenspielists from the ensemble Mantra Percussion, about the evolution of Science

Sounds Heard: Mike Vernusky—Music for Film and Electro-Theatre

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sounds Heard: Evan Chambers—The Old Burying Ground

 

Purchase:

Spark of Being

The Old Burying Ground
(Dorian)

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sounds Heard: Spark of Being—Music by Dave Douglas, Film by Bill Morrison

Purchase:

Spark of Being

Spark of Being
(Greenleaf Music)

Performers
Keystone:
Dave Douglas, trumpet and laptop
Marcus Strickland, tenor saxophone
Adam Benjamin, Fender Rhodes
Brad Jones, Ampeg Baby Bass
Gene Lake, drums
DJ Olive, turntable and laptop

 

Spark of Being, a multimedia collaboration between composer Dave Douglas and filmmaker Bill Morrison, coincides with the one hundredth anniversary of the first Frankenstein film, a twelve-minute silent movie from Thomas A. Edison Studios. That Frankenstein, directed by J. Searle Dawley in 1910, is subtitled, “A Liberal Adaptation from Mrs. Shelley’s Famous Story.” (See the film on YouTube.) Spark of Being is a much closer adaptation, for Douglas and Morrison have managed, like Dr. Frankenstein himself, to create life from scraps of the used and rejected—sounds and moving images in their cases.

Morrison pieced his film together from archival and “distressed” footage—passages of film so badly used by time and indifferent storage that he cedes any remaining representational use to their increased power to convey abstract, emotional content. With suggestive, cobbled film and his reliance on the viewer’s familiarity with the story, Morrison fashions his wordless narrative.

Douglas sampled audio from Stanford University’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics to create an electronic soundscape that feels as deeply embedded in the film’s images as it does in the music made by the rest of the ensemble. This he includes in his compositions to accompany the silent film.

The music for Spark of Being lies in a unique area between music improvised for silent film and movie soundtrack, a new space that makes this collaboration and its results magical. Douglas wrote a jazz-based score with room for improvisations; the film “rolls” while the electric sextet, Keystone, performs the music live. The members of Keystone are: Dave Douglas on trumpet and laptop; Marcus Strickland, tenor saxophone; Adam Benjamin on Fender Rhodes; Brad Jones, Ampeg Baby Bass; Gene Lake, drums; and DJ Olive on turntable and laptop (although the night I attended the performance in Columbus, Ohio, Geoff Countryman substituted for Olive). (There are three CDs of music written for Spark of Being, all released on Greenleaf Music: 1. Soundtrack; 2. Expand; and 3. Burst. These can be purchased individually or as a box set with notes.)

It’s a struggle to find proper vocabulary for this work of art, because it draws wholesale on two well-established art forms yet fuses the two completely into something else. To speak of this work only as “a film” is incorrect. It’s not even a “film with soundtrack” in the usual sense (although Douglas does use the word “soundtrack” to describe his work). Although it remains a “silent film” for me, it’s in a very enriched sense. Because the fusion of sight and sound is so complete, it enters my mind “silently,” that is, as a single, whole event that lacks nothing. I compare this to a traditional silent film, which lacks sound. This is, I think, the greatest achievement of the collaboration.

In Dawley’s Frankenstein, as in most silent films, frames with captions tell us not only what is happening, but also how to interpret the mood and action. (E.g. “Frankenstein appalled at the sight of his evil creation.”) In Morrison’s film, we have not captions but chapter titles: “The Traveler’s Story” or “The Doctor’s Wedding.” Titles announce in the most general terms what will follow, and then the music and imagery create the narrative and its emotion. This is the way chapter titles work in literature.

By controlling the expectations for Spark of Being with this strong, traditional structure, Morrison and Douglas allow themselves maximum creative scope within their own media of film and music. The predictable authority of literary formality provides a stable context for artists and audiences alike.

Within this context, everything about Spark of Being feels loose and exploratory. Morrison gives us both documentary-style and abstract/distressed passages; black and white and luridly colored film; and slowed or sped up movement all as his mix of narrative devices. The film is in turns poignant, sad, thrilling, confusing, and filled with awe, disgust, or outrage. Yet we never wonder where it is all going.

Douglas’s music both intensifies and complicates emotions that are suggested visually. The score serves literally as the film’s “Spark of Being.” Without this score, the emotional content would be merely described. As the music is played by the musicians on the stage, the audience experiences emotion not as voyeurs, but as is it is felt in life: in several ways simultaneously, and not all of them consciously.

The music—scored and improvised—always responds to the content of the film’s chapters. Douglas’s music is programmatic in the simple sense that it reflects the action of the story in ways reinforcing or ironic. From chapter to chapter the music changes and its various aspects are emphasized: tempo, instrumental voicing, sampled sounds, rhythmic elements vs. lyrical ones, and so on.

Like the film, the music narrates the story. Douglas has created haunting lyrical themes linked to recurring story elements (such as “Creature Theme”). Douglas notes his connection with Miles Davis that listeners will inevitably hear in this score. (He furthermore tips his hat to Don Cherry, Woody Shaw, and a long list of young trumpeters including Taylor Ho Bynum, Nate Wooley, and Ibrahim Maalouf.) While “Milesian” may indeed describe accurately the long, lyrical phrasing, the settling in middle register, the unrushed tempo, and the trumpet technique, reference to Davis won’t explain why the approach is so well conceived for this project.

For, whatever the film’s pace, imagery, or mood, Douglas’s score floats its recurring calm themes through the action and images. The dreamy chromatic motives are tinged with a piquant combination of color and melancholy that transfers itself into the film. These chromatic qualities are furthermore supported by the cold electronic samplings. Some of the sounds—whistling wind, waves, birdcalls, whale songs (I presume)—remind us explicitly of the story’s Arctic frame and the snowy scenes we watch through the Creature’s eyes in the wintry “Swiss” mountains.

The relaxed, hopeful musical subjects glide over lines that change as continually as the imagery in the film. All the musical layers are colored with chromatic sound. The electronics and the drumming too are highly tinged with tonal variety (which may result from improvisation as much as from scoring).

Douglas’s top lyrical, mid-tempo line is set in contrast to many types of sonic layers: sometimes pools of shimmering sound, sometimes drumming that is deeply layered within itself, with a rhythm that drives as intensely as a musher across the tundra. The trumpet and saxophone melodies form a shuttle that pulls the dominant ideas through the multitextured weft of Spark of Being.

In his liner notes to the box set of CDs related to Spark of Being, Douglas writes that the project “began its life as a meditation on humanity and technology.” While both artists plumbed up-to-date technology in their media to create this work, the result does not feel to me like a statement about the good or evil of technology in human affairs.

It is more to the point when Douglas says that he and Morrison were “both interested in a collaborative piece about human invention: from the profound to the quirky, from the benign to the disastrous.” They do not interpret the Creature as a golem, stupid and unfitting, but more as Shelley wrote him: essentially human, grappling with the “desire to be whole.” It is “the sting of the creature’s wound at being spurned by his creator” that is the worst part of his life.

Shelley published Frankenstein only two hundred years ago, but its lasting power is actually rooted in her ancient sources: The novel is subtitled, The New Prometheus. The author was well aware that she was recasting the story—as old as art, as fundamental as human consciousness—of conflict between creator and created. Prometheus was the god who formed humans from lumps of clay and then gave them fire when they came to life. For his efforts, Zeus chained Prometheus to a mountain where an eagle feasted on his self-regenerating liver every day.

Douglas and Morrison contribute Spark of Being to a long tradition of meditations on the gift of life and the terrible shock of life; metaphorically, to the bliss and misery of being an artist. In fact, their joint approach—for all the media elements that place it in this very contemporary moment—evokes Greek drama. There is nothing violent or appalling shown on screen, an artistic decision that is refreshingly out of step with the tradition of Frankensteins. We are used to much being made of the horror of the monster’s creation and hideous appearance. Here we don’t even see the Creature for most of the film because we are looking through his eyes. When we finally view him, he appears only as a large, plain, awkward-seeming peasant: No one special. A person. By avoiding set pieces suggested by the tradition of retellings, Morrison and Douglas have, like tragedians, placed the horror ob skene—in the wings—allowing us to contemplate the story, in our own minds, leaving the shock and sorrow to the most poignant stage of all: imagination and our experience of our own feelings.

Perhaps the greatest beauty of Douglas’s writing is that it reflects this decision to give scope to the viewer’s inner vision. His melodic motives are so beautiful and easy to retain that they become instant memory, pervasive in the mind. The rhythms, tones, and electronically produced soundscapes that build the story and its emotional palette occur in a general context of temperance.

Musically, there are no lurid moments, nothing grandiose, or outrageous. This is not to suggest that the score lacks contrast or excitement: far from it. There are three-minute drum solos of astonishing speed, intensity, and color, in which Lake displays his virtuosity on a very large kit. There are passages when Douglas and Strickland blow like men possessed. Yet one never feels anything behind the performance of the music but respect for the story’s characters, for the audience, and for the other musicians making it. This is no doubt one result of combining score and improvisation. It obviously results, too, from artists who are doing what artists do: taking on life’s big questions.

This makes it clear why that Milesian cool evenhandedness was such a thoughtful choice on Douglas’s part. He could write anything he wanted, but he chose lyrical, moderate, and chromatic for the silent story of Frankenstein. It’s a gracious choice that reinforces the atmosphere of beauty in which the collaborators have reset the myth that has been so often cast in the grotesque.

If you look at that original 1910 silent film, you will hear screams and groans. Between Douglas’s music and Morrison’s moving images, sound and pictures deliver in Spark of Being a much more potent notion of story effectively told in silence.

Sounds Heard: Dickie Landry—Fifteen Saxophones


Fifteen Saxophones by Dickie Landry

Purchase on CD and vinyl

 

Dickie Landry: Fifteen Saxophones
(Unseen Worlds 06)

Performers:
Dickie Landry, tenor saxophone with delay and overdubs
Engineered by Kurt Munkacsi

 

 

It’s amazing to discover how much the post-genre polystylistic free-for-all of early 21st century music was already happening in the music of many of the forgotten composers and improvisers of the 1970s. The spirit of adventurousness that permeated all kinds of musical genres in the late 1960s led to some truly undefinable sonic experiences throughout the following decade, evolving into a truly cross-pollinated aesthetic only to be much more niche-defined and streamlined, for the most part, as soon as the 1980s hit. It’s a sobering historical lesson that creators of our own time and their fans should remain mindful of lest it happen again. New World’s triple CD release a few years back introduced new millennium listeners to the provocative music of gay African American iconoclast Julius Eastman, whose compositions foreshadowed a post-minimalist sound world even as strict minimalism was still in its heyday. Equally revelatory is the music of Dickie Landry.

Fans of Philip Glass will remember the Cecilia, Louisiana, born and raised Landry as the saxophonist who participated in all of the classic 1970s recordings of the Philip Glass Ensemble, first on Glass’s own Chatham Square label and then on Tomato Records. Perhaps Landry’s most unforgettable moment in music history was his saxophone solo in the bed scene of the premiere production of Einstein on the Beach, the only section in the entire opera that momentarily broke away from Glass’s crystalline cellular structures and allowed some improvisation to creep in. On the original recording of Einstein it sounds like the performance by a fabulous composer in his own right. Well, it is.

Landry’s own music from the 1970s is a fascinating amalgam of minimalism, free jazz, and psychedelia, indicative of the kind of omnivorous creativity that pervaded Downtown Manhattan at that time. Three of his comprovisations were released on an LP by a small independent label called Northern Lights back in 1977, and was later briefly available in Europe on Wergo, but it has been out of print for decades. This album has been one of the holy grails for record collectors. Thankfully, Unseen Worlds has seen fit to re-issue this important historic missing link on both CD and LP, and it sounds tremendous in both formats.

The opening track, “Fifteen Saxophones,” is indeed that, but they are all played by Landry thanks to a delay unit and overdubbing and the sorcerer-like engineering of Kurt Munkacsi, another alumnus of the Philip Glass Ensemble whose ability to mix the inputs of the other members of Glass’s ensemble live during performance Glass considered so significant that he placed him alongside them onstage as a member of the group. Landry’s resulting chorus of saxophones is wonderfully dreamy but not in a lulling way. There is occasionally a slightly assaultive quality to Landry’s timbre that always keeps you a bit on edge and makes for even more exciting listening.

On “Alto Flute Quad Delay,” Landry switches, as you might infer, to alto flute. The overall tone is much smoother. Its relative serenity acts as something akin to an ear rinse for what comes next—the wild “Kitchen Solos.” On the LP, the listener is required to flip sides before this third and final piece begins which allows for even more preparation time.

On “Kitchen Solos”—named since it was performed live at the famed Downtown music space, The Kitchen, but just as easily a metaphor for its “kitchen sink free-for-all”—Landry pulls out all the stops, so to speak. The dream has turned into a nightmare, but one that you won’t necessarily want to wake up from too soon. Landry’s saxophone tone becomes downright menacing at times and its multiple iterations through electronic enhancement create a threatening army. This totally unexpected sound world that is equal parts Albert Ayler and Philip Glass, with a little Don Ellis thrown in, was a path that no one else took at that time. One can only hope that in the vaults somewhere there is a lot more of it. And luckily Landry is also still around, in Lafayette. (An interview with him from 2009 can be found here.) Rightfully the re-issue of this music should make people aware of his singular voice and lead to opportunities for him to share it with audiences in a live setting once again.

Sounds Heard: Todd Reynolds—Outerborough

If you’ve ever seen violinist and composer Todd Reynolds perform live, you are aware of the “one-man band” aspect of his work. Surrounded by computers, mixers, cables, and foot controller pedals aplenty—not to mention the likelihood of video, and possibly even robots—Reynolds creates a musical experience that one might only expect from a much larger ensemble. The audience is treated to a relaxed, friendly demeanor that is at the same time intensely focused on the musical performance at hand, which, given that Reynolds is dedicated to incorporating improvisation into his work, will also be full of musical elements unique to that particular chunk of time and space.

Whether he is performing his own compositions or those written by others specifically for him, it is clear that his musical interests are extremely varied, reaching beyond his classical training toward raga, electronic, jazz, rock and folk music to name a few. With his new Innova double-cd Outerborough, the listener is invited to browse inside one musician’s varied logbook of musical experiences, both internal and external.

The first disc, titled InSide, is dedicated to compositions by Reynolds himself, while the other, OutSide, features works written for Reynolds by other composers. InSide reveals the previously mentioned store of musical inspirations, ranging from the thumping beatbox sounds, sampled yells, and searing electric guitar of Transamerica, to the gently pulsing pizzicato violin loops and tamboura drones of The Solution, or the lovely re-interpretation of a holiday classic, Icy Sleeves of Green v.2.0. Scurrying sixteenth-note loop beds of Taskforce: Farmlab, commissioned by choreographer Stephen Koplowitz, combine with intertwined arco violin lines to create a lush rhythmic atmosphere well-suited to its intended use for dance. The ornery, in-your-face Centrifuge represents one section of a larger work for the Albany Symphony’s Dogs of Desire, performed by the GuitarBot of The League of Musical Urban Robots (LEMUR). Its metallic frenzy contrasts sharply with the dark, singing End of Days for multi-tracked viola. The title track, Outerborough, sports urgent, pulsing loops of violin, kick drum, and voice underneath sustained violin glissandi, periodically spiraling to frenzied climaxes and then settling back into the primary groove.

With the disc OutSide, the listener discovers another sphere of musical influence—that of the composers with whom Reynolds has collaborated over the past several years. On most of this disc the composers share the production role with Reynolds, each revealing a personal approach to sound manipulation and mixing. Phil Kline’s A Needle Pulling Fred begins delicately with sparse contrapuntal violin lines, and gradually intensifies with lower tremolos and percussive sonorities. Tree-oh is classic Michael Gordon minimalism—serrated lines multiplying, dividing, and ultimately subtracting back to the initial beginning riff. Also of a related stylistic camp are Ken Thomson, who joins Reynolds on bass clarinet for his piece Storm Drain, and David Lang, whose fiercely pounding work Killer closes the disc. Fast Pasture by Nick Zammuto of the Books is the most synth-oriented of the lot—a violin’s jaunt through a forest of Max/MSP adventures.

Inward bound by Paul de Jong (who joins Reynolds on cello for this track) has a “Bookish” sensibility—apropo, as he is the other half of the Books—with an everything-but-the kitchen-sink feel that includes stuttering sonic textures, jump-cutting, and thickly overlaid surfaces. An infectious rhythmic track joined by old recordings of Robert Johnson and Reynolds switching into “fiddle” mode open Michael Lowenstern’s Crossroads. These elements, combined with low synthesized kick drums more often found in techno music, make for an arresting hybrid mix.

Two works on the OutSide disc pair Reynolds with spoken word. And the sky was still there by David T. Little recounts the experiences of a soldier wrestling with the impersonal nature of the army and with the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy. The taped voice, processed in various ways throughout the piece, is accompanied by bubbling synthesizer lines, and Reynolds’ violin adds dramatic support for the engaging story as it unfolds. We hear Reynolds’ speaking voice at the opening of Paula Matthusen’s The End of An Orange, as he recites a text about questioning one’s memory, written by Abi Basch. Text and violin sounds are re-sampled and granulated to create a seamless flow between live and recorded elements.

No matter in what order you choose to listen to these discs—or even mix and match compositions from each—you are in for an absorbing variety of music that illustrates the multifaceted career of a performer, composer and improviser.

Sounds Heard: Letters to Distant Cities

With the first languid lines of “The Sea,” My Brightest Diamond seduces those listening to Letters to Distant Cities (New Amsterdam) into a waking dream. It’s a lullaby that hums gently into our ears and rocks us off into an album offering a host of ambiguous material—the sort of bedtime story that will require repeated visits in order to examine its poetic content from different perspectives and shuffle again through its associated, open-to-interpretation multimedia.

Purchase:

Letters to Distant Cities

Letters to Distant Cities
(New Amsterdam 027)

Performers:
My Brightest Diamond
Shara Worden
Rob Moose
Clare and the Reasons

 

Letters, representing the creative efforts of a small roster of contributors, comes packaged in a plain black box like a gift. Twenty-four CD-case-sized black and white photographs by Murat Eyüboglu printed on heavy stock accompany the album, which contains a swift quarter-hour of poetry written by Mustafa Ziyalan and recited by My Brightest Diamond frontwoman Shara Worden. The 24 poems, each of which are also printed on the square cards, are punctuated by spare musical commentary for violin written and performed by Rob Moose. The experience, at turns heavy and light with emotion, is cleanly delineated by two proper songs: “The Sea,” on the front end and “Invisible,” by Clare and the Reasons, at the back. This is an album that works especially well delivered through headphones, increasing the intimacy of the storytelling and allowing the listener to best appreciate the spread of the music around the stereo field.

Ziyalan’s poems are delicate, half-grasped glimpses at storylines, and Worden’s spoken word delivery brings the texts alive without veering into uncomfortable overacting. A subtle shift in her tone easily alters the mood from naïve excitement to experienced reflection. Eyüboglu’s images of the same young woman caught over and over again as she moves through various landscapes, sometimes seemingly unaware that she is being watched and at other times staring the observer down directly, cut another facet into the tales.

Illustrating the verbal images, Moose colors the scenes with his writing for violin. In certain places, he offers only a snatch of melody, a few harmonics shifting our gaze in between the poetry of “The Starfish” and “The Sleeper.” At other turns, such as in “Letters To Distant Cities,” he provides a comfortable bed on which Worden lays out the texts. Other tracks offer even more developed mini-compositions, as in the midst of the “Midsummer’s Winter,” when plucked and bowed tracks braid themselves together in duet or when the crescendoing, sul ponticello lines of “Dimming Eyes” twist the tension in the melody. The scoring keeps the ear moving along a timeline that follows no clear narrative path but discourages lingering complacently in any one place or emotion.

On it goes, and then, just as smoothly as the listener slipped inside this dream, the credits seem to roll. The upbeat, gently plucked banjo and ethereal female vocal line that dominates the album’s final track, “Invisible” contributed by Clare and the Reasons, allows for a brief backward aural glance but float us persistently towards the exit. Do come again, the music seems to invite, but for now it’s time to move along.

Sounds Heard: Ben Johnston—String Quartets Nos. 1, 5, and 10

String Quartet No. 10: Spritely, not too fast by Ben Johnston

Purchase:
Ben Johnston: String Quartets Nos. 1, 5, and 10
New World Records (80637-2)
Performers:
Kepler Quartet:
Sharan Leventhal, violin I
Eric Segnitz, violin II
Brek Renzelman, viola
Karl Lavine, cello

Spanning five decades and scales ranging from familiar 12-tone equal temperament to an extended just intonation pitch continuum that has more than 1200 discreet pitches per octave, the ten Ben Johnston string quartets are one of the pinnacles of the American chamber music canon, but few have attempted to explore them. The 1964 Second Quartet, which has a mere 53 pitches per octave, had been released on a Nonesuch LP decades ago and the Kronos Quartet subsequently championed the Fourth Quartet (1973), a.k.a. “Amazing Grace,” making it Johnston’s most widely known work, but the Kepler Quartet upped the ante in 2006 when their remarkably fluid accounts of Quartets 2, 3, 4, and 9 were released by New World Records in honor of Johnston’s 80th birthday in 2006. For the first time, the staggering range of this music was apparent—from the heady iconoclastic approach to serialism early on to the staggering harmonic and contrapuntal possibilities of Johnston’s middle-period to the instantly accessible yet still totally wacky world of the most recent pieces. And for five years, those of us who were floored by this recording have been waiting desperately for more. Therefore, New World’s just released disc featuring the Kepler’s accounts of 1, 5, and 10 —all of which, to the best of my knowledge, are world premieres—is cause for ecstatic celebration, especially since this second installment contains even more musical surprises.

The Second String Quartet created a unique, almost three-dimensional approach to serialism by exploring the possibilities of a twelve-tone row in just intonation which, by the very nature of the tuning system, must include more than those twelve pitches when the row transposes to other pitch classes. But Johnston’s earliest essay in quartet form, subtitled “Nine Variations”, finally shows us how he got his serial chops. A series of brief movements, all derived from the same 12-tone row, Johnston’s 1959 quartet is clearly indebted to the music of Webern and the epitome of the late 1950s American compositional zeitgeist. But it is also more than that as well. In its stark juxtaposition of sounds and silences it is equally indebted to John Cage, whose music is often thought of as the antithesis of the compositional rigor of post-war American serialism because of the indeterminate processes he pursued in his own compositions. A work like Johnston’s First Quartet creates an effective rapprochement between seemingly opposing aesthetics, and ekes out moments of tenderness (as in the fifth “Fluid, pulsating” variation) and high drama (as in the sixth “Assertive” variation) which also connect him to important American tonal quartet composers of that time like Quincy Porter and David Diamond who eschewed the compositional extremes of control and chaos.

By the time the Fifth Quartet was composed, a full twenty years later in 1979, Johnston had mastered an entirely new compositional language involving a completely new world of harmony based on just intonation relationships extended up to the 13th harmonic of the overtone series. But, like the First Quartet, No. 5 is also a set of variations, although this time based on the Appalachian gospel hymn “Lonesome Valley.” If there’s any precedent for the kinds of compositional juxtapositions and transformations Johnston achieves here it is Charles Ives. (There are no real precedents for his particular approach to microtonality.)

But all this serves as an appetizer for Johnston’s tenth, and to date final, quartet, a remarkable four movement work in which vernacular Americana and scales formed from higher partials are so seamlessly intertwined as to sound inevitable. Johnston’s hitherto unexplored sonic geography here becomes something of a promised land, a place that anyone would enjoy visiting and where folks who probe deeper might want to live for the rest of their lives. And after you hear what he does to “Danny Boy” in the last movement you may never be able to hear the tune again without imagining Johnston’s extended just intonation harmonization of it.

So now with 1 through 5 and 9 and 10 out of the way that leaves only three more to go: 6, 7 and 8. But if the seven quartets recorded thus far were Herculean feats that make preparing for Elliott Carter’s Third Quartet seem like child’s play, the most laborious of the lot is still to come. The Seventh Quartet, the one that has more than 1200 distinct pitches in it, is reputed to be the most difficult to perform string quartet ever composed. Last year, Kyle Gann posted Timothy Ernest Johnson’s MIDI keyboard realization of it on his ArtsJournal blog. But after hearing what the Keplers have been able to pull off, through a combination of their immense musicality and their close work with Andreas Stefik (who prepared MIDI realizations of all of the Johnston quartets they’ve recorded thus far to help them master these unfamiliar intervals), I firmly believe that they are equipped to do it. And hopefully we won’t have to wait another five years.

Writing Music for Someone Else’s Instruments: Creating New Music for the Partch Ensemble

I had the opportunity to work with Harry Partch when I sang one of the principal roles in his opera Delusion of the Fury. During the course of rehearsals for the performances in Los Angeles and the subsequent Columbia Masterworks recording sessions, I had time to see and hear many of his instruments and fell in love with them. They were unusual and idiosyncratic and Partch’s microtonal music created a memorable sound world.

But when I was asked to compose an original work for a set of replicas of Partch’s instruments, I was faced with the challenge of learning their complex technique and notation. Partch uses a tuning system different from the 12-tone equal-tempered scale, and therefore pitches are not equivalent to those of conventional instruments. John Schneider, director of Partch, a unique ensemble that performs on replicas of Partch’s instruments and for whom I wrote my new work, explains:

The instruments are tuned to the system called Just Intonation which is a method of tuning the musical scale according to the laws of Nature, using the notes that are inherent in every musical tone. A byproduct of this system is that each note, the so-called ‘A’, ‘B’, ‘C’ s has at least 4 or 5 shadings according to it’s use – producing far sweeter consonances and far more ferocious dissonances than the scales currently in music. The result is a scale of at least 43 notes per octave, instead of the standard twelve.

To facilitate performance of these new intervals, the notation used to convey what to play on these instruments is also much different from standard music notation. Many are notated in proportions rather than in notes, and most use a tablature that is unique to Partch—a very eccentric instrument-based notation that rarely shows what you hear, but rather what you DO to get what you hear which is somewhat like playing a 3-dimensional chess game. Learning this new language was essential to convey my musical ideas to the players.

Because Partch was involved with theater, I decided to create a theater piece using the instruments themselves as characters in the drama. Each voice has its own personality and their interactions form the basis of my composition. The work was commissioned by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in conjunction with an exhibition of artwork by John Baldessari, so I chose the names of Baldessari’s works for the title of my piece, There Isn’t Time and for each movement.

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Harry Partch performing on the Cloud Chamber Bowls.
All photos from the original Gate 5 recordings of Harry Partch’s music. Special thanks to Sedgwick Clark.

The first movement, “Line of Force,” introduces five instruments: Cloud Chamber Bowls, Diamond Marimba, Kithara, Bass Marimba and Harmonic Canon. The Cloud Chamber Bowls are 11 dome-shaped glass bowls of differing sizes, hung on a rack 7 feet long and 6 feet high. The frame is of metal, the bowls are glass carboys, and they are hung with rope for suspension purposes. The instrument is constructed of the tops and bottoms of 12-gallon Pyrex carboys (the bottoms are inverted). The bowls are played with mallets of different degrees of hardness, and this, together with where the bowls are struck, affects the tone profoundly. There are two basic ways to strike the bowls: on the side, which creates a full, warm, sustaining sound, and on the top, which produces a sound more like a high marimba—short, staccato and sharp. The bowls give a bell-like tone, and each has at least one inharmonic overtone. When one of them breaks it is virtually impossible to find an exact duplicate. Each bowl’s sound is so complex it cannot be represented by a single pitch but rather a collection of pitches.

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The Diamond Marimba (Gate 5)

The Diamond Marimba is 40 inches high at the back, 33 at the front and 36 inches across the top. The blocks are Brazilian rosewood and Pernambuco, mounted on thin foam rubber; the resonators are plexiglass. The 36 blocks are arranged in diagonal rows, so that one sweep of the mallet will sound an arpeggio-like chord. Strokes with the right hand are major; those with the left hand are minor (from top to bottom). The range is almost three octaves, beginning with the approximate C# above middle C.

The Kithara is more than 7 ½ feet high to the top of the music rack; 5 feet broad at the base, tapering to 38 inches at the tops of the arms; the same width throughout, 7 ¼ inches. The soundboards (string sides of each of the six resonators) are thin vertical-grain Sitka spruce. The other sides are ¾ inch redwood. The two sides, at the bottom, are ¼ inch redwood ply. The strings are mando-cello, guitar, tenor guitar, and banjo, and the heads are guitar tuning heads. The instrument is arranged in twelve hexads, each containing four to six identities of a tonality. Four are used with ½ inch glass rods for stopping purposes. The Kithara is played with fingers, and with celluloid and felt picks attached to the fingers at right angles.

The Bass Marimba is 5 feet high (to the block level, not including the music rack) and 7 ½ feet long. The longest block is 52 inches, the shortest 27 inches. The player stands on a riser 22 inches high. The resonators are organ pipes, and frame is metal. The blocks are vertical-grain Sitka spruce, mounted on rope. The Bass Marimba has eleven blocks ranging from the low cello C to the Bb below middle C (approximately). It is played with a variety of heavy and light mallets, bare hands (as in bongo drumming), felt-covered sticks on the edges of the ends, and wire whisks.

The Harmonic Canon is 30 inches high in front, 36 at the back (not including the music rack) and slightly more than 6 feet long. The resonating chambers are each 30 ½ by 22 ½ inches, outside. The frame is made of redwood with thin vertical-grain Sitka spruce soundboards, oak ends on the resonating chambers, spruce bridges, mandolin tuning heads fixed on strap brass, with guitar second strings on Pollux (right) and guitar second and fifth strings on Castor. The Harmonic Canon can produce any pattern that is desired.

At the beginning of the piece, two drummers, playing a fierce rhythm, enter from the back of the hall, walk onto the stage, circle each player in turn, and surround them. The drummers accompany each instrument in turn, giving the opportunity to hear each separately before the end of the movement when all play together.

The second movement, “Falling Clouds,” stations 2 players on either side of the Cloud Chamber Bowls. The music is a conversation between the tones, each player being assigned specific bowls, and each phrase descending in asymmetrical patterns.

The Hypo Bass is the highest key of the Marimba Eroica, the A an octave above the lowest piano A. The metal key is mounted at the nodes on foam rubber. The instrument is played with heavy padded mallets, and with hands in padded gloves. The third movement, “Spaces Between,” has 2 Hypo Bass instruments on either side of the Bass Marimba and the Diamond Marimba. At first, these deep, resonant tones are separated by long pauses, giving them a chance to ring. Gradually the pauses between the notes shorten and the space dissolves.

I composed an original theme with 24 variations for the fourth and final movement, “Story in 24 Versions.” In several variations, I quote fragments from Partch’s Oedipus and Castor and Pollux. Progressing with increasing complexity to the 12th variation, the remaining 12 variations add each of the preceding variations in reverse order, and summarize material used in the first 3 movements of the piece.

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The Harry Partch Instrumentarium (Gate 5)

In conceptualizing the music, it was necessary to refresh my memory of the instruments. Dean Drummond, the director of the Harry Partch Institute at Montclair State University, generously allowed me to spend an afternoon with Nate Liberty, a graduate student, who demonstrated Partch’s original instruments, giving me time to study each sound and to touch and play each instrument myself so that I could reacquaint myself with their special aural and kinetic properties. Because they are handmade works of art, their visual and spatial dimensions are an integral part of their function. As this was my first venture into Partch’s 43-tone tuning system and into microtonality in general, I had a lot of new information to absorb. In the end, I did use all of the pitches on each of the instruments as well as Partch’s notation system.

Applying this knowledge to my composition was both stimulating and challenging. I could not rely on techniques I would use on the instruments of the orchestra, nor did I want to force them into patterns that did not suit them. Discovering what they could do particularly well was my goal. Although his instruments are idiosyncratic to his own composing style, from the experience I have had writing There Isn’t Time, I can attest to the degree of flexibility they offered me. I felt that through them I was able to express my own compositional voice.

Partch’s original instruments are fragile and irreplaceable but the efforts of groups performing on replicas, like John Schneider’s Partch, afford wider access to this new sound world. According to Schneider:

My replicas were designed to be much heartier than the originals, and road-ready, in other words, designed in such a way that then can be broken apart for compact shipping. Several have been ‘improved’ by changing designs which hampered their ability to sound. Harry himself rebuilt the Kithara, for example, three times, each time improving what was lacking in the last one. I also use light amplification on the weaker instruments (as did HP, using a 15″ Jenson speaker & an amplifier with the first Kithara, way back in 1945!). There have been no controversies about the reproductions (as of yet!)…and my activities are fully endorsed by Danlee Mitchell and the Harry Partch Foundation.

Since their formation in 1991, Partch (the ensemble) has toured on a regular basis, including a three-week residency in Japan, under the auspices of the American Embassy’s prestigious Interlink Festival, and a NEA-sponsored cultural exchange to Mexico where it represented Los Angeles at the Guadalajara International Book Fair. In the United States, the ensemble has appeared on the Songlines series at Mills College, Sacramento’s Festival of New American Music, Minnesota Public Radio’s American Mavericks, and, since 2004, has performed annually at Disney Hall’s REDCAT Theater. Dance collaborations include Molissa Fenley’s new choreography of Castor and Pollux, and a residency at Salt Lake City’s Repertory Dance Theater (RDT). The group has also recorded for Bridge, Innova, Mode, and New Albion and are the resident ensemble of MicroFest, Los Angeles’ yearly festival of microtonal music.

I believe that other composers could gain a great deal by writing for these instruments. We are always searching for new sounds, and Partch offers a sound world of staggering variety and beauty, based on natural acoustics and the kind of pure consonance we seldom hear in our “tempered” world.

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Victoria Bond

Composer and conductor Victoria Bond’s extensive catalog includes works performed by the Houston, Dallas, Shanghai, and Richmond Symphony Orchestras, the Saint Paul, Indianapolis and Cleveland Chamber Orchestras, American Ballet Theater, Pennsylvania Ballet, Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, New York City Opera, and members of the New York Philharmonic. She was recently honored with the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Walter Hinrichsen Award, established by the C.F. Peters Corporation for the publication of a work by a gifted composer. As a conductor, she has led more than a dozen major orchestras and opera companies throughout the U.S., Europe, Brazil and China.

What Did You Just Call Me?

This past week I finally finished my Rome Prize project. I immediately rewarded myself by taking off for a weekend at the beach just north of Rome.

As I’ve been coming to a close with this piece, I have struggled with putting a title to it. A song cycle of five movements, it comprises texts in Latin (the 1555 papal bull condemning the Jews of Rome to a ghetto), Italian (Verrà la morte e avrà I tuoi occhi, by Cesare Pavese), Hebrew (various psalms and excerpts from the book of Lamentations) and English (Loan, by the American poet Jorie Graham).

At first, I wished to call the work Cum Nimis Absurdum (“Since it is Absurd”), referring to the papal bull. The work itself begins with this text and is ferociously set with vicious, fast, aggressive string writing immediately setting the tone for a work that begins angrily. But taken as a whole, the piece, at least as I see it, is one of reconciliation and hope. So I then considered calling it Verrà la morte e avrà I tuoi occhi (“Death will come and she shall have your eyes”). Still quite dramatic, I thought, but at least not in Latin (alienating).

I emailed the two choices to one of the foremost experts on Jewish history at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He responded:

Since you asked me, I’ll give you an honest opinion:

I wouldn’t “fool around” with “Cum nimis absurdum” because it marks a tragic episode in Jewish history. As to Pavese’s poem, the title, in my opinion, is too long; moreover, its first three words are likely to scare off the audience before the piece gets started.

Sorry.

Of course I should have known better than to ask an academic for title advice. I asked one of the literature fellows at the American Academy. She also felt that at Latin title was off-putting. She liked the Pavese poem, though preferably in English.

Death will come and she shall have your eyes.

I liked it. But when I passed it by the director of the academy, she asked me—if I don’t wish to alienate my audience—why I would choose a title whose meaning is difficult to comprehend. What does this title have to do with my project?

Choosing a title can be difficult. We are not writing a doctoral thesis—our title doesn’t need to describe the meaning of a work. But what should a title do? What do the words scherzo or capriccio or impromptu do for Brahms, Schubert, Chopin? Are they at odds with the meaning of the pieces? Are they intentionally ambiguous? I often wonder if they are worse than calling a piece untitled. If untitled may not be helpful, at least it’s not misleading.

Daniel Mihalyo, a fellow in architecture at the academy, wrote to me:

In my opinion there are four types of titles:

  1. Titles that expand the meaning of an artwork by being open-ended and not too specific.
  2. Titles that are highly specific and that narrow the potential meanings of an artwork where the artist hopes to pin down a single definition.
  3. “No title” or “untitled” is always a safe option but it can be seen as evasive, expressing uncertainty or the best defense against any narrowing or specificity of meaning.
  4. Artsy titles that attempt to impart an intelligence beyond the value of the work….examples include word puns, smarty pant attempts to misdirect viewers or intentional references to better known artworks (like “The Thinker”).

I’ve also noticed that titles are also frequently indicative of the era and tend to by stylistically alike. Young Women on the Beach and The Sick Child are titles from a generation, as are titles from this year’s Whitney Biennial such as Museum of Failure: Collection of Impossible Subjects & Invisible Self-Portrait in my Studio and Crystal Chain Letter Complex (Dark Episode).

In the art world we have Piss Christ and Cremaster Cycle and of course lots and lots of Untitled. Does anyone get pissed off at works called Untitled? Does an abstract piece of art or music substantially gain power from its name?