Category: Listen

Performed by the Los Angeles Master Chorale, with Grant Gershon conducting

Steve Reich has a signature sound and it’s all over this work in the same way a master painter can often be ID’d by his brush strokes. We can anticipate how he’ll move through the music well enough to take pleasure when he does what we expect and then get a little giddy when he trips us up a little. The harmonies and the rhythmic pulls on display here are a picture of Reich at his craft (I only hesitate to say “height” as this work did not supplant my personal Reich favorites). If you’re wondering how you might get similar results, you might take Reich’s example. He tells Tim Page in the booklet notes, “I just set out to have a good time composing…Sometimes when you start off doing what you know how to do, it can lead you to things you never knew you knew how to do!”

—MS

Sweet Heresy is an extremely unusual disc of duo performances on instruments created and performed by Untravelled Path, which is Mitsuko and Arthur Fankuchen of Taos, New Mexico. Theirs is an extraordinarily uncompromising slow and inward music inspired by musical traditions from around the world utilizing such instruments as bowed deep bass monochords played like the South Indian vina, a 48-key quartertone kalimba (I want one, don’t you?), and shakuhachi-type instruments with larger finger holes to allow for all sorts of microtonal fingering variants. Sadly, their self-proclaimed anti-authoritarian tendencies belie giving potential listeners much information on their CD, which lists only the names of instruments used on each track rather than titles and does not even include their last names. Their website—www.untravelledpath.com—while equally cryptic about their identities, at least offers some wonderful images of the instruments they play as well as a brief history of how they came to create the music they make.

I can’t swim, but I love floating in water, an activity to which I can devote myself until quite frozen and pruny. Zeitgeist’s performance of Apnée (poetry by Philippe Costaglioli) pushes the floating listener much further down beneath such a surface idyll. The piece is a mix of percussion, bass clarinet, voice, and electronic processing, and the effect really does conjure a kind of listening through black water. The balance seems to be left hanging between enjoying the weightless recreation and wondering what else might be lurking out there in the darkness of a deep ocean.

—MS

Copland’s Piano Variations sounds like a recipe for hobo soup: austere structure, an atonal sounding theme, set theory-like development, massive chords, jazzy rhythms, moments of show tune whimsy, tone clusters, and one kitchen sink. This piecemeal classic gets the raucous performance it deserves delivered by Benjamin Pasternack. And the best part of all, it’s on Naxos. Blessed be the name of the almighty label which is merciful to the poor musician’s wallet.

—RN

A few years back, in the final days of CRI, I wrote the booklet notes for Martin Bresnick’s Opere della Musica Povera. The more I listened to his music, the more excited I became about the whole process of music and composing. It actually got me out of a major creative slump. Part of why Bresnick is such a successful teacher—Michael Torke, the whole Bang on a Can triumvirate, the members of the Common Sense Composers Collective—is because his own music is simultaneously so open minded and so intoxicating. The pieces on this latest disc equally fascinate, and grow more and more interesting the more you hear them. I admit that the first time I heard Songs of the Mouse People, in a live concert performance, I was somewhat disappointed. But I was blown away when I heard it again on this CD and like it more each time I hear it, especially how the cello and vibraphone seamlessly switch roles in a chain of modulations in the penultimate movement, “A Thousand Shoulders Tremble (under a burden actually meant for one).” This time, I don’t have to listen to the disc again and again for any particular reason…I just want to. But what’s more even exciting is how much inspirational fuel is in here as well. Put it on for an hour, and then go write your own next masterpiece!

—FJO

For those in the crowd just counting the days until we can get rid of the pop/classical divide, Mikel Rouse throws his sledgehammer at the wall with a new album quite appropriately dedicated to both Steve Reich and Brian Wilson. Squint one eye and it seems to be all pop lyrics and pulses, squint the other and the careful layering and unique pitch choices show elements of a more new music composerly approach. The opening track, “JC Love Field,” demonstrates the concept quite neatly. It has the beats, the rhymes, the “baby”s in the lyrics, but then the harmonies get all wacky and the rhythm starts to collapse in on itself and you know it’s not quite the Casey Kasem countdown that’s coming through your speakers.

—MS

Over a delicate backdrop of percussion, spare bass lines, and vivid electronic washes, trumpeter Terence Blanchard’s pronounced tone soars, effortlessly sketching elegant melodic phrases with a steady ebb and flow. With its catchy tune, the title track of Flow—an apt descriptive—manifests on three separate occasions over the course of the album. The overall vibe is cool as tundra. Yet the band’s performance radiates enough confidence to melt the permafrost. But no worries, listening doesn’t contribute to the problem of global warming.

—RN

Nexus and the Iris Chamber Orchestra conducted by Michael Stern

As Garry Kvistad, one of the members of the percussion quintet Nexus, reminded me at the release party for this new Ellen Taaffe Zwilich disc on Naxos, there is no such thing as a percussion instrument with an indeterminate pitch. Every instrument has a pitch, but most composers who write for percussion ignore this and accept whatever the pitch of the percussion instrument used in a performance happens to be. Not so, says Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, who worked meticulously with Nexus’s extensive instrumentarium of percussion instruments from around the world. But none of these instruments are used for effect or to conjure some sort of tourist exoticism. Rather, Zwilich emphasized the pitch capabilities of a family of instruments not usually treated as melodic and created a piece where every resulting pitch is carefully worked out. The result is one of the most melodious and harmonious of percussion concertos and one of Zwilich’s most exciting compositions to date. I was thrilled that this remarkable piece, which is also very exciting to watch, was part of NewMusicBox’s first-ever Webcast of an orchestral concert a little over a year ago, but I’m even more thrilled that it’s finally available on CD. Now if only I could hear it live. Wherever you are, demand that your local orchestra programs this blockbuster piece!

—FJO

Have you ever seen old celluloid film catch fire and burn itself up while projected on the big screen? What would music sound like melting in such a way? Listening to jazz violinist Matt Maneri’s lastest release in his Blue Series, I can’t help but conjure the image as the recorded line moves in and out of warped focus. The somber melody stoically stumbles forward seemingly unaware of its rapid deterioration, while overlaid are the frantic beats of T.K. Ramakrishnan’s unsinged tabla playing. Appropriately, perhaps, the piece comes to no audible resolution, as if the tape simply burned away entirely and left no trace of what once was there.

—MS

Bagpipes, theremin, and the accordion…some instruments are simply disadvantaged, i.e. people really hate them. But when used in certain settings, even these ugly ducklings can sound like swans. So what do you do with an organ that sounds almost as crunchy as Elaine Stritch’s voice? The Ken Clark Organ Trio decided to play some rather swanky, yet downright gritty jazz. But it’s not all rasp here—actually the overall impact is one of cool restraint. It’s not something I would call cheap, as suggested by the track’s title “K Mart Special,” but there is definitely something tawdry going on here—almost sexy, but in a really creepy way. Let’s just say is something like the gap between Lauren Hutton’s teeth or Cindy Crawford’s mole and just leave it at that.

—RN