Category: Albums

Sounds Heard: Amos Elkana—Casino Umbro

Like many 21st-century composers, the American-born, currently Israeli-based Amos Elkana has a complex national identity. He was born in Boston but grew up in Jerusalem. However, at the age of 20, he returned to the United States to pursue degrees in musical composition and jazz guitar (at NEC and Berklee, respectively). He later continued his training in France and Denmark and subsequently returned to Israel, but he crossed the Atlantic again to immerse himself in electronic music at Bard College, working under the tutelage of, among others, Pauline Oliveros, Larry Polansky, George Lewis, and the late Maryanne Amacher. Now back in Israel once again, Elkana’s compositional aesthetics are a clear by-product of his internationalism which includes a very strong American influence, particularly in its stylistic eclecticism. Casino Umbro, a new disc recently released on the American label Ravello Records (a subsidiary of the New Hampshire-based PARMA Recording Company), offers a generous cross-section of Elkana’s music—including chamber, orchestral, and vocal pieces—spanning 1994 to 2010. (For completists, Ravello has additionally released a track containing Elkana’s quirky 2005 double reed duo Plexure which is available exclusively from iTunes.)

The first track on Casino Umbro features a work of the same name which is also the most recent of the pieces collected here. But although its title is Italian for “Umbrian Noise” and the piece was composed during Elkana’s residency at Umbria’s Civitella Ranieri, it is—to my ears at least—the most immediately American sounding of all the works included on this disc. Scored for an unusual ensemble which combines past and present sonorities (two bass viols and a harpsichord versus violin and piano plus a flutist who doubles on modern and Baroque flutes), Casino Umbro is reminiscent of the exciting 1996 collaboration between the Common Sense Composers Collective and the San Francisco-based period instrument group American Baroque, as well as more recent efforts by composers associated with Bang on a Can. The seamless weaving of references from widely divergent chronological eras, rather than being jarring, are somehow comforting—after going through such a multifaceted musical history, we can now reap the sonic benefits of all of it and Elkana does so ecstatically.

In contrast, his second string quartet (composed in 2004) is much more a musical response to the music of the recent past—the 20th century. It is constructed based on a carefully plotted permutational system that has a kinship with the serial methods of Schoenberg but which is decidedly not 12-tone; rather, informed by fractal geometry, Elkana’s derivational tone matrixes allow for transformations of any collection of pitches, including repeated notes—something anathema to orthodox dodecaphonists.
The single-movement clarinet concerto Tru’a from 1994 is inspired by the shofar calls during the Jewish high holy days. Elkana’s wildly virtuosic solo clarinet part, convincingly delivered on the recording by Richard Stoltzman, shouts, sings, and dances, at times calling to mind the freneticism of klezmer and at other times the impassioned squawks of free jazz. It is set against an orchestral backdrop that hints at the timbre painting of ‘60s European composers such as Lutoslawski and Ligeti, as well as the rumblings of an Ashkenazi synagogue congregation which in Israel, as Hebrew University Professor Ruth HaCohen points out in her program notes for the disc, are frequently accused of being noisy.

But perhaps the most unexpected juxtapositions occur in Elkana’s 1998 song cycle Arabic Lessons, scored for three sopranos, flute (doubling piccolo), trumpet, tenor saxophone, cello, electric bass, and drum set. By settings the polyglot poetry of Michael Roes—in German, Hebrew, and Arabic—for three equal voices, Elkana finds a common musical ground for elements that uneasily share space. For modern day Israelis, many of whom are either survivors of or descendants of the Nazi Holocaust, the German language is still emotionally troubling; the ongoing stalemate between Israelis and Palestinian Arabs has created a society of mutual fear and distrust. In confronting the unsettling memories of the past and the lingering quagmires of the present through music that is alternately viscerally off-kilter and ravishingly beautiful, Elkana offers a path to the future that has eluded generations of politicians from all sides.


For the notationally curious, Elkana has made PDFs available for every one of his scores on his website. Hopefully the new CD and the instant availability of performance materials will spark a greater awareness of Elkana in the country in which he was born and largely shaped as a composer.

Sounds Heard: Gabriel Kahane—February House

One of the particular gems on Gabriel Kahane’s self-titled 2008 release was a track called “7 Middagh,” the lyrics of which teased out the story of the residents of 7 Middagh Street in Brooklyn. At this address, such cultural icons as George Davis, Carson McCullers, W.H. Auden, Benjamin Britten, Peter Pears, and Gypsy Rose Lee cohabitated as a kind of unconventional family in the 1940s. Additional research on my part revealed more of the tale underlying this artsy commune and, a little later, the news that Kahane would be creating a full-scale musical based on the story in order to fulfill the first commission of The Public Theater’s Music Theater Initiative.

While the above-mentioned track does not appear in Kahane’s eventual full-evening musical February House (a show he wrote with Seth Bockley), its echoes are easy to trace. Within the first few moments of the production, as captured on the cast recording released on the StorySound label* in October, a brief lyrical reference calls to mind that earlier track. Yet in a broader sense, Kahane has once again crafted a collection of songs that navigate complex, sometimes bittersweet emotion across a music bed that floats and, importantly, propels the characters through the text before they drown under the sentiment.

Not to imply that every song carries such weighty seriousness. February House is, at its core, the story of people who are trying to make a home for themselves, and all the silly complications that can entail—arranging the personalities and the furniture into the available rooms (“A Room Comes Together”). Nine voices and the six-musician ensemble take the stage for an intimate tour of lives and love, the quick and witty sung repartee showing off the colorful personalities lashing themselves together within this Brooklyn outpost. That it is a place for the homosexual residents in the group to live more openly is a strong surface statement, but an undercurrent of feeling strange and alone runs deeply and more generally throughout the show and its characters.

These relationships are well complimented by the chamber ensemble, which provides color and context but generally keeps out of the spotlight. A fiddle line adds to a story, an elegantly sober piano empathizes. The song that held me most transfixed was actually a delicate solo outing that features McCullers (sung by Kristen Sieh), accompanied by only a plucked banjo line, during which she meditates on feeling weird and lonely in the midst of a freak show: “There’s a secret part of me gets so silent,/My communion at Coney Island, oh…” Kahane immediately follows that up with an intricate full-cast hug of a song (“Shall We Live Here”); the struggles of writing a line or paying the rent (“Discontent/Talk of the Town”) play out against a world that is marred by the horror of World War Two (“You Sit In Your Chair”). The house fights against bed bugs; the house fights for love.

But the center cannot, or at least does not, hold. McCullers and her husband decide to return to “Georgia.” Britten and Pears make plans to head to “California.” And George Davis, the godfather of the house, sings adieu to this fantasy in heartbreakingly revised/reprised versions of “Light Upon the Hill” and “Goodnight to the Boardinghouse.”

I’ve long been a fan of Kahane’s songwriting. His Craigslistlieder was as clever and quirky as its subject matter, and his first full-length disc provided a photo album of stories that proved a compulsive listen. With February House, he has taken the strengths of those previous projects—smart lyrics, even smarter compositional choices—and played them out across a larger storyboard, creating distinct voices for his characters that still solidly carry the attractive marks of his own.

*An earlier version of this review misidentified the StorySound label as the house label of the Public Theater. It is its own unaffiliated entity.

Sounds Heard: Michael Harrison & Maya Beiser—Time Loops

The cello is an ideal instrument for extensive multi-layering in performance—whether via pre-recorded tracks or live ensemble of multiple instruments—and arguably one of the performers who most expertly utilizes pre-recorded layers of sound is Maya Beiser. For the recording Time Loops she teams up with composer and pianist Michael Harrison to perform a number of Harrison’s works inspired by “music from ancient Greece and the Renaissance, Indian ragas and Minimalism.” All of his music is performed in just intonation, and the result is an ear-openingly clear, bright sound that fits the instrument beautifully and highlights the ecstatic, spiritual nature of the compositions.

The album begins with the three-movement Just Ancient Loops, which is by far the strongest and most engaging work on the disc. The first movement, titled “Genesis,” opens with bubbling, virtuosic pizzicato lines over a steady drone. This is soon joined by soaring melodic lines juxtaposed with hunks of chordal material that take a loose chorus-verse song format. The layers gradually pile up on one another and are then stripped away to reveal more minimal textures with opening lines peeking out from the melodic forest, only to snowball again and again.

The activity calms down in the serene second movement, “Chorale,” in which the focus is on long sinewy non-vibrato lines that rub against one another and wiggle with melismatic material over top a sparser pizzicato accompaniment. The third movement, “Ascension,” amps up the energy with a steady repeated 16th-note line that serves as grounding for short, excited bits of melodic material. These snippets swoop into and out of the foreground and start to rise in pitch to the outer reaches of the instrument to a dramatic climax and ending. To my ears the music evokes images of what the flight of Icarus would have been like had the wax on his wings not melted. Not included with the recording is a video by Bill Morrison which was created to accompany the piece; an excerpt can be seen in the video sample below.

The following two works are interpretations for piano and cello of Gounod’s Ave Maria (which is itself a reworking of Bach’s Prelude in C Major from The Well-Tempered Clavier). In Time Loops Harrison reassembles the piece by playing a recording of the piano part backwards, accompanied by a retrograde live version of the primary melody on cello, and this work is immediately followed by a (literally) more straight-forward performance of the Bach/Gounod original by Harrison and Beiser. Arvo Pärt’s Speigel Im Speigel is also given a strong performance by the two performers, though I cannot help but wonder the reason for including these works—other than to demonstrate the creative impulses behind Harrison’s pieces—when Harrison’s compositions are so compelling in their own right.

One can hear how these three works serve as inspirational stepping stones for the works by Harrison, most apparently in Raga Prelude I (Yaman) for cello and piano, which employs melodic material from the North Indian Raga Yaman as well as whispers of the Gounod and Pärt.

The final and largest work Hijaz is composed by Harrison for Beiser and the composer himself with the Young People’s Chorus of New York City under the direction of Francisco J. Nuñez, as well as Payton MacDonald on tabla and shaker. The text combines a prayer written by Harrison, and spoken South Indian rhythmic syllables that offer a dynamic and textural contrast to big washes of more standard choral material. Intended to invoke a sense of pilgrimage to a wondrous place, according to the notes, it is a soaring, exultant work that indeed takes the listener on a journey through multiple states of emotion and a variety of shimmering sound worlds.

Sounds Heard: Christopher Bono—Invocations

The composer Christopher Bono is someone I had never before encountered until Invocations, an entire CD devoted to his music that arrived in the mail a few months ago. His own website does not offer a biography and the about page on his blog merely states the following:

“I enjoy all aspects of sound and music. As a composer and student of life, I am interested in new sound worlds, alternative states of consciousness and experience through sound, and collaboration.”

As it turns out, Bono has quite a fascinating life story which I eventually learned directly through email from him. He grew up in a St. Louis suburb and trained to be a professional baseball player (he was drafted by the Seattle Mariners) before physical injuries forced him to abandon athletic activities. At the age of 21, he taught himself guitar and initially explored rock. After experimenting with heavy metal and even country, he eventually turned his attention to classical composition. His mother was a trained classical musician, but sports had been his focus throughout his formative years. While the music he has gone on to write—at least from what I can glean from having listened to this disc—does not particularly conjure up America’s greatest pastime, it does sound like something written by someone who is somehow an outsider. While much of 21st-century contemporary composition is not beholden to any rules, to the extent that I could probably claim everyone to be an “outsider” in some ways, Bono’s music sounds as though everything he writes is something he is discovering for the very first time, even if there are clear reference points throughout to the sound worlds of other composers from both our own time and other eras.

The bulk of the disc is comprised of an elaborate three movement composition dedicated to the composer’s father, also entitled Invocations. Each of the three movements has a different instrumentation. The first part, “Exhaust,” is scored for string trio which Bono describes in his program notes as “exposed and vulnerable.” One violin shy of a full string quartet, the string trio has certainly had a far less illustrious history. While few composers have worked extensively in the string trio medium, some have created important individual works for it either relatively early—Ludwig van Beethoven (who actually wrote four of them), Henry Cowell, La Monte Young, Charles Wuorinen—or comparatively late—W.A. Mozart, Arnold Schoenberg, Irving Fine, Ljubica Marić, Ivan Wyschnegradsky, Elliott Carter—in their careers. So the idiom is not without illustrious pedigree. Perhaps even more than being “exposed and vulnerable,” there’s something somehow sonically pure and clean about the interplay of one violin, one viola, and one cello, and Bono in “Exhaust,” once again proves how emotively satisfying an instrumental combination it can be.

The second movement, “Fish, Father, Phoenix,” is something else entirely. Here a string quintet (with double bass) is joined by harp, winds, percussion, and a series of samples. Seemingly taking a cue from the documentary-like snippets of pre-recorded speech in Steve Reich’s landmark Different Trains, Bono weaves an elaborate soundtrack around fragments of a narrative. But unlike the speech samples Reich used, which—like those in Scott Johnson’s earlier John Somebody—determine the melodic shapes and rhythmic inflections in the instrumental music that accompanies them, Bono’s speech samples are but one timbral element in his multifarious sonic palette.

In “Sunday Stills the Willow,” the final section of the composition and also the shortest, the samples are gone but the rest of the ensemble remains. Gone also is the frenetic drive and what remains is extremely heartfelt but somehow more introspective.

Perhaps the most exciting music for me herein, however, is what comes next on the disc—The Missing, a work for string quartet composed in 2010.

The piece opens with a series of extended techniques—e.g. bowing extremely close to the bridge, microtonal pitch slides, and various scrapes and squawks. What follows, though more traditional in its nature, is every bit as unusual—thematic material inspired by indigenous music from the West African nation of Togo is developed somewhat along the lines of middle period Beethoven. Imagine how different the world could have been if such music would have been written in the early 19th century.

The final track on the disc offers an alternative take on “Fish, Father, Phoenix” without the speech samples. Strangely, this version somehow sounds even more Reichian to me, albeit with a much more cinematic hue.

All in all, discovering Christopher Bono’s music has been a rewarding experience, one that makes me wish I had even more time to devote to listen to everything that comes my way.

Sounds Heard: Common Eider, King Eider—Sense of Place

It was hard not to reflect on Andy Doe’s record industry analysis while sorting through CDs this week, particularly the suggestion that “if a record isn’t unique, it shouldn’t have been made.”

There are plenty of unique albums out there, of course, but San Francisco-based Common Eider, King Eider’s Sense of Place is a particular standout in this regard. The physical product is actually a paired DVD and CD, the audio tracks included on each designed to be played simultaneously while footage documenting the building of a small cabin in Alaska fills the screen. The set also includes a 56-page softcover book almost exclusively devoted to images from that same Alaskan construction project, but also including a poem by Ben Chasny that might be a meditation on the merits of building a hut of one’s own, an outline of the genesis of the album (it almost reads like a score for the piece), or perhaps an even broader reflection on place and dreaming. Regardless, its admonishment that “one should always have a well built hut to keep an eye on the horizon” neatly compliments the piece contained on the discs in the separate folded paper packet.

It’s also where the words end, though in a sense the entire bundle taken together could be taken as more of a short story spare on words than a straight-up album. The unusual packaging of the project lends an air of mystery to the proceedings, like receiving keys and a map to an adventure of unknown parameters ahead.

While this is the first piece by Common Eider, King Eider that I’ve experienced, a perusal of their back catalog on their new website shows a deep affection for spare orchestration, slow evolution, amplified quiet. In Sense of Place, the ensemble (Rob Fisk, Blaine Todd, and Vicky Fong) keeps to that aesthetic, mixing an ambient score of male and female wordless vocal tones and whispers over a bed of distant organ drone, the character more ancient and haunted than necessarily delicate. The voices echo, sometimes muffled—frozen spirits calling across the snow-covered landscape as the images capture three people erecting a shelter among the trees.

The dual tracks (each emphasizes and/or compliments different parts of the mix as the work ebbs and flows) must each be started by the listener, make the recording alive in some sense, the slight variation possible lending an impermanent quality to each performance.

I will concede that visually, I wasn’t much of a fan of the work at first. The shaky, home-movie character disappointed me initially. It wasn’t beautiful in the way I was expecting it to be beautiful. On subsequent viewings however, my opinion did a 180, the style adding a kind of visual timbre to the piece and carving an additional interesting facet into this unusual travelogue. While the music moans closely to the ear, visually the audience is kept at arm’s length, observing either the very practical and rough ordinariness of building or catching glimpses of the landscape, the sun reflecting across vast expanses of crisp snow bed, mountains visible in the distance. As the piece moves towards its conclusion, I experienced a nervous tension in the isolated landscape. It was a relief whenever a person would appear in the frame.

Yet in the end, there is a fire going, a finished cabin, a shelter made—and, ultimately, an album constructed that’s part postcard and part poetry.

Sounds Heard: David Keberle–Caught in Time

Drawing on his work from the decade spanning 1997 to 2007, composer David Keberle’s new album, Caught in Time, showcases six chamber works that blend microtonality, extended performance techniques, and rich textural writing into spacious soundscapes for 21st-century ears.

Keberle revels in many details of performance technique that lend his work a haunting, organic, and particular quality, yet he is above all a composer who paints with broad brushstrokes. The works featured on this release all have an unhurried, larger-than-life, at times epic quality; this is music driven by powerful seismic forces lurking under the surface, music about events that resound with a global sense of scope and impact.

The disc opens with Keberle’s Soundings II, a piece recorded by commissioning flutist Tara O’Connor and the Pittsburgh Flute Club flute choir. The piece is the second in a series of pedagogical works in which Keberle sought to provide a way for student and professional performers of varying levels the opportunity to meet in a masterclass setting and explore the still relatively uncharted world of extended techniques. (In his notes, the composer explains that, “like an iceberg, classical flute study contains many unexplored sonic possibilities that lie under the surface.”) This is a fascinating idea for an educational piece, but in the hands of a composer less artistically assured it could have easily come off as a pedantic catalog of performance techniques. Far from a technical exercise, Soundings II is a haunting composition that weaves all kinds of breath sounds, key clicks, and microtonal glissandi into a large music space that is greater than the sum of its parts.

Keberle’s Four To Go for Pierrot ensemble is cast in four miniature movements that bustle along with a sense of motion that is a refreshing contrast to the opening work’s unhurried wide spaces. Even working with movements of two or three minutes, Keberle seems to paint postcards that function as windows onto spaces more vast than can be contained within the boundaries of each miniature’s brief duration.

David Keberle is also a clarinetist specializing in new music, and he performs on two of the other chamber works featured here, including the 15-minute work for clarinet and piano titled Incroci (literally “crossover” or intersection, and the closest word approximating the term “crossover” in Italian). Keberle’s performance reveals his secure technique and imaginative sense of tone color—many of his microtonal fingerings alter the instrument’s tone even more than they alter pitch, and in Keberle’s musical universe it’s clear that pitch and tone color are interrelated at an almost organic level. One of Keberle’s great strengths as a composer is his understanding of how several seemingly disparate elements may be combined to create impressions of singular expressive power.

The disc concludes with settings of three Yeats poems performed ably by tenor Rob Frankenberry with Eric Moe on piano. It’s interesting to hear Keberle’s compositional muse channeled into a slightly more linear/narrative mold, and both composer and poet seem well-served by the encounter. A very active piano accompaniment provides most of the textural interest, with a surprisingly art song-like vocal part.

This disc represents my first encounter with David Keberle’s music and rarely have I been so taken by a composer’s use of time as aural and expressive space. Each of these works cultivates its own musical space: an atmosphere that belongs to that work alone.

Sounds Heard: Guy Klucevsek—Polka from the Fringe

Decades ago there were several endeavors to commission a bunch of living composers working in a broad range of styles to write short dance pieces for solo keyboard. Perhaps the most famous of these initiatives was The Waltz Project which yielded a collection of 17 solo piano works composed mostly in 1977 by an extraordinary collection of people including—among others—Philip Glass, Milton Babbitt, Roger Sessions, John Cage, Lou Harrison, Joan Tower, and one-time Grateful Dead keyboardist Tom Constanten. The scores were subsequently published by C.F. Peters and, in 1981, Nonesuch released an LP of performances of them by a group of pianists that included Alan Feinberg and Yvar Mikhashoff.

Although that LP has been long out of print and has yet to be reissued on CD, many of those waltzes were re-recorded by Eric Moe, along with some new ones, on a 2004 Albany disc entitled The Waltz Project Revisited. Perhaps even more ambitious was Mikhashoff’s Tango Project. Between 1983 and 1991, he had amassed some 127 tangos by 127 different composers—another amazingly eclectic list including Babbitt and Cage (together again), as well as Chester Biscardi, Carla Bley, Alvin Curran, William Duckworth, Miriam Gideon, and Ralph Shapey. Sadly Mikhashoff succumbed to AIDS in 1993, but a year before his death he recorded 19 of these tangos and a disc featuring those performances was released posthumously by New Albion Records on the CD Incitation to Desire (which was named after Biscardi’s tango).

Guy Klucevsek’s Polka from the Fringe is another one of these projects and is much in the same spirit, albeit with a few twists. Between 1986 and 1988, Klucevsek commissioned a bunch of composers to write polkas for another keyboard instrument, the accordion. While for most people in this country the accordion primarily conjures up oom-pah bands at old beer halls, generations ago it also inspired compositions by Henry Cowell, Paul Creston, and Alan Hovhaness. In Europe the instrument is now regularly used in cutting-edge new music. (There’s actually a substantive list of European avant-garde compositions for solo accordion and orchestra!) But here in the United States there have only been a handful of accordionists who have attempted to explore a broader range of possibilities, though admittedly Pauline Oliveros as well as William Schimmel and Klucevsek—both through their own compositions and commissioning work from others—have done a lot to recontextualize the instrument. Polka from the Fringe, however, is an attempt to get composers to directly engage in the squeezebox’s more quotidian roots.

Selections from the repertoire Klucevsek engendered were originally released on cassette in the late ‘80s and then on two different CDs in the early ‘90s on now-defunct labels. Starkland’s new 2-CD release of Polka from the Fringe has finally made this material available once again and collects it for the first time in one place. All in all, the discs contain a total of 29 tracks written by Klucevsek and 27 other composers. While neither Babbitt or Cage is represented (too bad), the range here is as broad as the Waltz and Tango projects and perhaps somewhat more so since the resulting pieces not only include solo accordion compositions but also pieces for a full polka band (the band’s name is Ain’t Nothin’ But A Polka Band) in which Klucevsek is joined by David Garland singing and whistling, John King on guitar, violin, dobro, and vocals, David Hostra on a variety of basses from stand up to electric to tuba, and Bill Royle on drums, marimba, and triangle, as well as other occasional guest musicians such as violinist Mary Rowell and percussionist Bobby Previte.

The music turns on a dime from track to track. The sheer loveliness of William Duckworth’s Polking Around or Mary Jane Leach’s Guy De Polka conjures up a very different mood from the spikiness of pieces like Aaron Jay Kernis’s Phantom Polka and Mary Ellen Childs’s Oa Poa Polka. I couldn’t get enough of the relentless experimentalism of Daniel Goode’s Diet Polka (a personal favorite), but Peter Garland’s pastoral Club Nada Polka, which immediately follows it on the CD, was nevertheless a fascinating juxtaposition. Many of the composers used the polka as a springboard for out and out zaniness, such as Fred Frith’s The Disinformation Polka, Lois V Vierk’s Attack Cat Polka, or Pontius Pilate Polka by Microscoptic Septet leader Phillip Johnston. Then there’s Elliott Sharp’s Happy Chappie Polka, a visceral minute and a half of punk assaultiveness that should forever put an end to the mistaken belief that polkas are milquetoast. It’s a 1979 piece which predates Klucevsek’s commissions, but it is a very welcome inclusion nevertheless.

In the very extensive booklet packaged with the discs, which includes the complete lyrics for all the tracks featuring vocals (try to sing along), there are informative essays about the genesis of the project by Klucevsek as well as Elliott Sharp. In his essay, Sharp says that he and Klucevsek both found inspiration in a dismissive comment made by Charles Mingus: “Let the white man develop the polka.” I would have loved to have heard what Mingus might have done with polkas. (A Mingus album released only a year before his death completely redefined the Colombian cumbia.) Perhaps an even broader range of adventurous creative musicians will be tempted to tackle the polka after hearing what Klucevsek and his compatriots did with it now more than 20 years ago. Perhaps, better still, the next time someone comes up to you claiming to be able to define new music, tell him or her to listen to these recordings.

Sounds Heard: Duo Scorpio—Scorpion Tales

With Scorpion Tales, Duo Scorpio doesn’t require you to set aside all of your wedding prelude and garden party images of the harp before you hit play, but they are going to stretch those sonic ideas out of whack once things get going. This may be the sum distillation of the work included on this album—it doesn’t build barriers out of repertoire, but it does open quite a few windows in the library.

And that suits the broader mission of the ensemble quite neatly. When harpists Kathryn Andrews and Kristi Shade founded Duo Scorpio (they were both born on November 5, 1982, hence the astrological nod), they noticed somewhat of a hole when it came to contemporary repertoire for this instrumentation and set about trying to correct that absence through commissioning and arranging existing compositions. A portion of that work resulted in a Kickstarter campaign to record some of these pieces and promote them more broadly—an album that would ultimately feature three premiere recordings (including one commission) plus three other pieces for harp duo by contemporary composers. They exceeded their $12,000 goal and produced an impressively packaged collection drenched in the ethereal photography of Frances J. Melhop.

The disc takes its name from the nearly 15-minute work contributed by Robert Paterson (a commission by Duo Scorpio and the American Harp Society), each of its three movements a play off of the scorpion—animal, vegetable (hot pepper), and Greek mythological legend. Plenty of those iconic cascading harp lines run through each of the movements, but they appear in the mix amid intricately orchestrated moments, two harps and four hands filling the sonic image from top to bottom to deliver a neatly locking quartet-worth of sonic information. The play of harmonics, the dark and loose vibration of low strings, and the tight unison playing elsewhere accent the balanced clockwork-like integration of these passages.

Premiere recordings of Sebastian Currier’s Crossfade and Stephen Taylor’s Unfurl both take the harp out a few paces further into the stereotype-challenge, playing more aggressively with technique, rhythmic material, and slightly altered tuning. In Crossfade, quickly strummed repeated notes and patterns build a bed of nervous energy atop which each instrument rises and recedes, riding her own wave and offering sharp statements as she passes by, one often interlocking with the other in interesting ways. Where Currier was rhythmically adventurous, Taylor creates a floating (or perhaps drowning) world of unconventional harmonies. The retuning of certain strings is something his program notes suggest is an optional way to present the piece, but I can’t imagine the work not having this amazing color. Despite the sharp staccato of much of the delivery, this gives the same material an intriguing watery-edged gloss. For Caroline Lizotte’s Raga, the duo grabs a few extra-curricular percussion instruments and mixes in some Hindustani-flavored extended techniques in the harp lines, conjuring Indian colors that float in and out of the frame, accenting more than stealing the focus of the work. Perhaps we might subtitle this one “two Western harpists dream of the Subcontinent.”

Works by Bernard Andrès bookend the disc: the shimmering Le Jardin des Paons and the exotic Parvis. Both works, in their way, showcase the diverse range of timbral color that the harp is capable of delivering. If there was actually any question at the outset that the harp was the instrument of angels, fairies, and cocktail receptions, Andrews and Shade will likely have erased that notion by the close of the album (if they hadn’t succeeded in doing so within the first five minutes). Scorpion Tales is a showcase of way contemporary composers are finding their music within its timbral compass, and it’s likely to leave music makers and fans inspired to seek out more. I suspect Duo Scorpio will consider that appraisal mission accomplished.

Sounds Heard: Annie Gosfield—Almost Truths and Open Deceptions

In the liner notes of her latest recording, Almost Truths and Open Deceptions, Annie Gosfield writes of her “parallel lives” performing music with her own band and writing fully notated compositions for other musicians and ensembles. With both of those worlds represented on this recording, it seems more that her two creative worlds are deeply interconnected, influencing one another and sharing common musical elements and sources of inspiration.

One of the striking things about Gosfield’s music is its unusual combination of visceral rawness and otherworldly distance. It often has a very direct sort of in-your-face quality while her obsession with broken machinery and obsolete technology crafts a somewhat ghostly scrim around the instrumental sounds. But because her connection to the technology is personal—much of it has been inspired by her family history—it is mysterious in the way that wandering around in a grandparent’s attic searching for old letters or hidden secrets can feel haunting and nostalgic at once.

The first track, Wild Pitch, was composed for the ensemble Real Quiet, featuring cellist Felix Fan (a major player, literally, throughout the CD), percussionist David Cossin, and pianist Andrew Russo. The piece travels through episodes of strong, lyrical cello lines that spill into frenetic ensemble interludes, which do indeed give the impression of a baseball game gone mad. The instruments flail away only to exhaust themselves into new contemplative states that give rise to more cycles of stillness and activity. An enticing assortment of small percussion instruments such as cymbals and small gongs mesh well with the sound world created by the piano and cello, and the score is thoughtfully arranged with all instruments nicely balanced in the mix.

Gosfield performs often on a sampling keyboard, mapped with a selection of sounds that seems to bear no relation to a piano keyboard. (I have often wondered how she keeps track of all the samples!) It is a nice surprise to hear her playing an actual piano on Phantom Shakedown, accompanied by an arsenal of electronic sounds created out of recordings made from failing technology, such as a broken radio. Her playing contains hints of numerous styles, from Romantic era to ragtime, and this combination of piano with electronics is quite beautiful and artfully coordinated, especially when the piano lets up after periods of intense activity, allowing the electronics to shine through to the foreground.

The showcase work of this disc, Almost Truths and Open Deceptions, is a hefty chamber concerto for cello with 2 violins, viola, contrabass, piano, and percussion featuring cellist Felix Fan again in the spotlight along with the other 3/4ths of the Flux Quartet. Gosfield pulls a nice big sound out of the ensemble during several raucous tutti sections; about 11 minutes into the work, the group flits briefly into a nightclub-ish sound, evoking a more intimate, smaller space. The music again builds, up to a different shift in texture to pizzicato strings and a pounding bass drum. After another boisterous period, the cello calms everything down to a wavering drone on D that gradually fades into silence.

The following track, Daughters of the Industrial Revolution, is a big change in instrumental scope and sonic palette. Written for Gosfield’s mixed quartet, it features rock guitar and drums with sampled machine and factory sounds set to a pulsing 4/4 groove. In Cranks and Cactus Needles Gosfield brings her passion for the sounds of broken and obsolete technology directly to her instrumental writing, as the Stockholm-based ensemble The Pearls Before Swine Experience recreates the warping, uneven sounds associated with old 78rpm records through their instrumentation of violin, flute, cello, and piano. This piece is structured differently than the others on this disc (to my ear), with a smoother through-line and more subtle gradations between the contrasting spare and busy textures that characterize much of Gosfield’s work.

Almost Truths and Open Deceptions is a selection of well-constructed, carefully recorded works that show how the parallel pathways of a band member and concert music composer can gel into a singular artistic vision.

Sounds Heard: Boiling Point—Music of Kenji Bunch

Nashville’s all-volunteer Alias Chamber Ensemble received a Grammy nomination last year for their Naxos recording of Gabriela Lena Frank’s Hilos, and this season the ensemble—which donates 100% of its proceeds to other community-based nonprofits—has already been hard at work on a new collaboration with Nashville Opera as well as promoting their new CD for the Delos label. The plucky and progressive ensemble reflects a certain homegrown, do-it-yourself spirit, and the decision to follow the Frank release with the equally earthy and folk-inspired music of Kenji Bunch makes for an inspired follow-up.

Bunch is a violist and former member of the Flux Quartet, and his performing and composing often inform each other; Bunch’s recent viola showpiece The Devil’s Box was premiered at last year’s SONiC Festival at Zankel Hall with the composer as soloist, weaving folk sources into notated music of exceptional energy, expression, and charm.

Boiling Point represents some of my favorite and most personal chamber music of the last decade,” Bunch explains. “These are the works that have led me to define my approach as a composer of what I like to call New American music. Just as we see a culinary movement that incorporates locally sourced ingredients and unexpected creative flourishes into traditional forms to re-imagine classic American dishes, I draw from regional vernacular musical elements, infuse them with avant-garde improvisation, Romantic lyricism, and classical forms, and humbly offer my idea of chamber music for the 21st century.”

The disc features nine tracks, although listeners are strongly encouraged to purchase the album’s digital edition which features a final duet between Kenji Bunch and ensemble cellist Matt Walker. The first work, String Circle, is a string quintet featuring Bunch on the extra viola. The work’s first movement, “Lowdown,” moves through several moods in less than five minutes, seamlessly transforming the simplest open string sounds into laid-back grooves. Folk-derived string techniques like slides, bends, and percussive “chops” lend the music a primal character. Bunch uses drones in more than one movement of the piece, and his music always has a strong tonal center. That’s perhaps because Bunch stays very close to his materials, exploring all kinds of possibilities within vernacular idioms, rarely blending them to noticeable effect and never holding them at a distance. String Circle is closer to Appalachian Waltz than to Bartók; it is folk music for classical players more so than a contemporary composition tinged with folk influences. It is music with an immediacy and authenticity that is clearly audible from the first measures.

Alias negotiates material both rough-edged and refined in this composition, capturing moments like the rickety, old-timey pizzicato fourth movement, titled “Porch Picking.” Surprisingly, for music with such a folk basis there isn’t as much outright soloing as one might expect, and the majority of the movements groove well below peak intensity. The final movement, “Overdrive,” is wilder and also draws from a crunchier harmonic palette than the other movements; it’s a great ending to a piece that serves as effective a calling card as any to introduce listeners to the range of styles Bunch has absorbed.

The next works on the disc, Drift and 26.2, find Bunch working in a less Americana-styled idiom; it’s refreshing to hear examples that blend influences more completely with his own compositional voice, yet at the same time I find myself more excited by the works that give themselves wholly and unabashedly to the particulars of folk techniques that Bunch utilizes so persuasively. Luminaria for violin and harp stands out among these less overtly vernacular works, with lots of fine dialogue and some exquisitely ornate violin playing over the work’s many trill figures.

Boiling Point for amplified string quartet, bass, and drums takes the album in a new direction, with more improvisatory playing from the ensemble and a more contemporary hard-rock feel. The work accompanies a teakettle, which is set to begin heating during the course of the piece, the whistle coinciding with the piece’s climax. It’s a clever idea that works well even without the visual cue, hinting at a path unexplored on the rest of the album.

For those who purchase the album’s digital edition, Double Down is likely the best performance of the disc, with playfulness, drama, and elan, kind of a distillation of all that String Circle has to offer. Bunch and cellist Walker engage in some friendly competition and some of the only real dirty playing on the album—it’s an electrifying mix of deft compositional choices and wonderfully intuitive soloing that also suggests the kind of skilled improviser/performer by whom Bunch’s music is best represented.

There’s a tension between the different approaches to integrating classical and vernacular traditions on this disc, and that’s why it’s so fascinating to hear Kenji Bunch at work with an ensemble as talented and dedicated as Alias. I’m curious to see whether he will likewise “double down” on any one style or notational approach or continue to explore a wide breadth of genres and approaches. The works recorded on this disc give a lot of insight into Bunch’s musical journey and the kinds of close collaborations that fuel his creative efforts.