Category: Listen

Equal parts porno mag and Bible, this 4-CD set may very well be the perfect desert island album. Each note of Alvin Curran’s sprawling masterpiece is pregnant with possibilities, most of which the composer spontaneously explores while coaxing the listener to peek over his shoulder and guess which note he’s going to write down next. This is music for cat lovers who understand and appreciate the allure of feline aloofness. Exponentially more addictive than any soap opera known to mankind, Curran’s music may actually grow tired of you listening before you even get a chance to become sick of it hanging around, purring in your lap.

Beautifully performed by Belgian powerhouse Daan Vandewalle, the beginning of Inner Cities 10 is an utterly moving statement: a heavenly undulation akin to the nature of the tides, and a growing tidal wave brewing into a full-blown tsunami. Nearly 50 minutes go by until one begins to fathom the magnitude of this unfolding musical orgy. Then, Vandewalle delivers the money shot in the form of a colossal orgasm that sonically encompasses the entire history of Western music. I’m not kidding. It’s two minutes of sheer heaven—not to discount the remaining four hours of kick-ass music on this stellar release.

—RN

While there are a whole slew of pieces on Gregg August’s new disc for a six-man ensemble, my ear zeroed in tightly on this brief work for solo bass. The piece carries no dedication, so if this is a tribute to any soul in particular that’s left a mystery. August opens the piece with a meditative feel, but doesn’t weight it down with too plodding a tempo. The line actually picks up speed to steam train pace, as if the music itself is carrying its passenger to glory, before returning once again to its opening theme and darkly introspective character.

—MS

This recording of choral works borrows its title from the five-part mass penned by Stephen Paulus that opens the disc, but there are a host of smaller works packed in behind that share a similar hovering, timeless quality. Leaving the formal Latin of mass behind, Eric Whitacre delves into the spiritual by meditating on just a few words borrowed from the first and last lines of a poem by e.e. cummings: “hope, faith, life, love…dream, joy, truth, soul.” The piece follows a predictable dynamic arch, peeking with a sort of celebrative fury on joy, but it would take a pretty jaded heart to resist this stripped down emotional urge into the light.

—MS

Niagara Brass Ensemble

Aside from microtones, my other big soft spot is quintuple time. Throw something in five and I’m bound to love it! So perhaps you should temper the rave you’re about to read about the second movement of Nancy Van de Vate’s Brass Quintet accordingly. The music spirals around a relentless 5/8 hocket between the horn, trombone, and tuba which further adds to the rhythmic excitement by juxtaposing three distinct timbres against five beats creating loops of 15. Still with me? Despite the math, it sounds totally natural and is the perfect groove for the angular trumpet melodies woven on top of it.

—FJO

Dominic Frasca has been dubbed “Guitar Hero of 2005” by Guitar Player Magazine, so despite the virtuosity on display, his first solo outing—originally a self-release but now being given a second pressing on Cantaloupe Records—might not really need the disclaimer that the entire album was performed “on solo guitar in real time, with no loops, overdubs, or other instruments.” Until you get to the fourth track, where there is so much going on at once I’m quite sure a Hindu god with a few extra hands must be helping him out. The hard-driving, 23-minute Deviations definitely owes some debt to the postminimalist camp, but there’s a little swagger to the line mixed with a fresh take on some classical guitar chops that set Frasca’s work apart.

—MS

Don’t let the spoofy title put you off. George Crumb’s Eine Kleine Mitternachtmusik owes nothing to Mozart’s elevator music classic. But as the title implies, the music certainly is dark in mood, taking advantage of the resonant qualities of the piano, augmented by the sostenuto pedal, stopped harmonics, and plucked strings. As it turns out, Crumb’s musical springboard is Thelonious Monk’s tune “‘Round Midnight,” here rendered into the sort of permanent darkness one would expect deep inside the artic circle in the dead of winter. Maybe save listening to this one until the next cold, pitch-black night, just add parka.

—RN

The most fascinating compositions by Robert Morris, the current chair of the composition department at the Eastman School of Music, have been large-scale environmental works that allow listeners to wander through them on their own. A new album of his recent much-smaller scale chamber pieces, while not requiring good walking shoes, also invites listeners to find their own paths by offering music that while highly organized does not impose structures that clearly spell out a specific narrative. Meandering River, a sprawling atonal fifteen-minute solo piano work from 2001, takes as its point of departure the fifty types of six-note harmonies in the 12-tone equal tempered system. But rather than treating these fifty hexachords equally, as an old school integral serialist might have, Morris allows certain combinations to have prominence over others which gives listeners the ability to focus in on them with greater clarity.

—FJO

Robert DeGaetano, piano

Indulging in the cliché that everything old was once new, it’s a rather lovely thing in the context of all this new music to step back onto Louis Moreau Gottschalk’s 19th century company with this new disc of some of the composer’s most popular songs. Considerably heavier than the rest of the polite parlor fare included is Union, a piece Gottschalk composed in 1862 during the Civil War and performed for Lincoln at the White House two years later. Sewn into the seams of this work are references to “The Star-Spangled Banner,” “Hail Columbia,” and “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” all varnished over with enough show-piece ornamentation to keep the soloist on the edge of the piano bench.

—MS

I have to admit that I’m not particularly fond of vocal music, or tubas either for that matter, which doesn’t quite explain why I immediately skipped to seventh track of this CD of music by Guillermo Gregorio. According to the track listing, Irish composer Jennifer Walshe—I’ve been a fan of hers for years—was the vocalist for a piece called Swiss Coplanar, here accompanied by Marc Unternährer on tuba and Jim Baker on piano. Walshe’s deadpan, yet powerful, delivery of Dada poet Hans Arp’s perplexing text colored by striking vocal fries and impossible shifts in pitch and timbre was riveting. A listen to the rest of the disc revealed a composer interested in unusual timbres, formalist constructions, and improvisation. Props to the people at New World for turning us on to another interesting composer.

—RN