Tom Johnson: correct music | Andrew Nathaniel McIntosh, Douglas Wadle, Brian Walsh | populist records PR002
How on earth do you review Tom Johnson’s music? It is so purely procedural, so pre-compositionally precise it surely evades criticism altogether. You see it, or you don’t, and that’s it.
Except nothing created is really pure, an observation that enlivens all Johnson’s music just enough beyond the pedantic. His ironic, amused experimentalism is encapsulated in the narrator’s final words in Eggs and Baskets, an apparently straightforward exposition of a simple mathematical phenomenon: “And with six eggs? Well, let’s just let the musicians play … so that we can review all of this, and hopefully clarify everything.”
As well as Eggs and Baskets (1987), this disc contains another didactic piece – Squares (2008) for viola and narrator – as well as Tilework pieces for viola and violin (both 2003), and the 21 Rational Melodies of 1982. All are examples of what Samuel Vriezen in his sleevenote describes as Johnson’s ‘complete constructivism’, although the Rational Melodies are perhaps the most thorough melodic exploration of this method. Each follows a rigid logic. Sometimes this is easy to follow, sometimes not. Listening to the set as a whole one is aware of the constant rigidity of process, but at the same time its variable transparency. That flicker between the mundane and the mysterious lies, I think, at the heart of Johnson’s music.
I have another recording of the Rational Melodies, played on different flutes by Eberhard Blum. Perhaps because of the relatively heaviness of his instrument, and the need in this music above most others to get every note to sound cleanly and of itself, Blum takes almost all of the melodies slower than McIntosh. In some cases at half or even a third of the speed. Blum uses different sized flutes for each melody, and those played on alto and bass flute are slower than those played on piccolo. His set has a wider sonic and expressive range, but on balance I just prefer McIntosh’s version, if only because I’m a sucker for that hoe-down-y fiddle sound, which tethers Johnson’s mathematical abstractions, if only loosely, to a recognisable tradition.
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Naming both Tom Johnson and Samuel Vriezen in this review makes it opportune to mention Vriezen’s project to record Tom Johnson’s Chord Catalogue for piano. A recording already exists (played by Johnson himself), but Vriezen has taught himself to play these pieces at something like double Johnson’s speed – in the process revealing all sorts of hidden melodies and rhythms. He is currently crowd-sourcing the project through indiegogo, and with just over 5 weeks left until his funding deadline, why not consider a small donation?
Loré Lixenberg, Gregory Rose, Robert Worby | John Cage: Song Books | Sub Rosa SR344
Cage’s centenary year has seen a number of ambitious recording projects. Ranked highly among them must be this first complete recording of the Song Books, released on Sub Rosa. Cage’s two books contain 90 “songs” for solo voice – a total of at least six and a half hours of music, or 317 pages of score. For this 2-CD release the decision has been taken, probably wisely, to accept Cage’s permission to superimpose songs, and a total of seven Song Books Mixes have been made. These are presented alongside 14 individual songs.
It is a gargantuan effort for the three performers involved, Loré Lixenberg and Gregory Rose (voice), and Robert Worby (electronics). Better still, all 90 individual solos are apparently available for download through the Sub Rosa website (although at the time of writing I could not find these).
Presentation-wise, this is an exemplary release. The 24-page booklet includes not one but four essays: two by Cage scholars James Pritchett and Rebecca Y. Kim; two by Rose and Worby providing performers’ perspectives. There are lots of extracts from the scores, in all their variety, and some nice photos of Cage that I hadn’t seen before. The packaging is lovely.
But, ah, Cage. What about the music?
First to say: this is a studio recording, prepared as such. So, for example, the electronic processing was carried out in post-production, not live. The recording acoustic (the Edward Boyle auditorium, St Hilda’s College, Oxford) is dry and silent. Facts like this give the set a polished feel that seems at first far removed from Cage’s chaotic carnival of the voice (“it’s like a brothel” was his own description). There are no glitches, no extraneous noises, and a frankly disconcerting sense of equilibrium, even when several songs are running at once. It sounds distinctly un-Cagelike; except that while listening I began to wonder where that notion originated anyway, and who’s to say they have ownership of it today. In his essay, in fact, Pritchett offers the advice (contrarian for a CD note) that “This is not music to sit down and listen to from start to finish … wandering and exploring is more in order.” Perhaps one needs to listen to the CD as though it is a live performance, so that life can still seep in.
The Song Books themselves are among Cage’s most remarkable achievements. Composed in 1970 in answer to a commission for two sets of songs from Cathy Berberian and Simone Rist, they began with an I ching consultation that stipulated that 56 and 34 songs for each book – 90 in total. Cage had just three months to meet his deadline. The measures he took to deal with the pressure of time lead to the songs’ diversity, and helped him unlock a range of new compositional methods. Pritchett calls it “one of the most intensely creative periods in Cage’s life.”
You’d be hard pressed to find two better singers than Rose, and especially Lixenberg, to perform this music with the required dedication. The virtuosity on show in, for example, Solo no.47 or Solo no.90 is impressive; to have sustained this across a total of 90 separate recordings is staggering. For my taste I had trouble with the electronics, which work closely with the grain of the voices – a legacy of modern-day technology; one for the HIP movement? – rather than against it, rather dulling the expressive edge.
Having said all that, when it works it works very well. Song Books Mix 2 (actually the final track of the CD 2) keeps 17 songs in a state of pleasing mutual sabotage for 23 minutes. It’s not as abrasive or as extrovert as some Cage performances, but neither does it allow gentleness and elegance to fade into mush.
In an interesting comparison of two recent-ish live performances of Song Books Ben Harper writes, “the closer [Cage’s music] comes to life the better it works as art”. Some will find too little “life” in these recordings, certainly. Nevertheless, this is a remarkable achievement, and one that may take some time to be repeated.
Note: the penultimate paragraph of this review was added shortly after its first publication.
Carla Rees, Scott Miller | Devices and Desires | rarescale records rr004
Back in November 2011, alto flautist and rarescale director Carla Rees gave the first performance of Anterior/Interior by Minneapolis-based electroacoustic composer Scott Miller. The next day they went into the studio to record the work, and finished so quickly that they had two hours spare. They recorded some improvisations – and the result is this CD. Two of those improvisations are semi-structured, the other three are completely free.
In the Book of Common Prayer “The devices and desires of our own heart” are occasions for sin. As a virtue, they are the basis of Miltonian free will. For an album of improvisations between flute – one of the most light-footed of all instruments – and computer the tension between freedom and constraint is presumably part of the thinking here.
Rees plays quarter-tone alto flute throughout. As one of the UK’s leading contemporary music flautists she’s well familiar with sonic potential of her instrument, and as well as tones and microtones harmonics and various modes of attack are used throughout. Nearly all the electronic sounds are sourced from the flute, whether from a sample bank or in real-time. Using Symbolic Sound’s Kyma X sound design environment, Miller manipulates and transforms these on the fly, in response to Rees’s playing. His performing style matches Rees’s in its gentle playfulness. (In liner notes to the CD, seemingly only available online, Miller explains that in live performance he controls his computer with an array of input devices, including iPad, foot pedals and Wii controllers.)
Anterior/Interior begins with the flute acting as a little more than a sound source, from which Miller’s computer analyses and resynthesises an array of textures. Slowly, though, the flute part takes on a character – lit by its electronic backdrop – as a lone keening voice, which becomes a song of increasing intensity until a swift dénouement. It’s a likeable introduction, and sets a lot of the sonic template for the rest of the album.
However, I much prefer the improvised tracks. Here Miller and Rees take their instruments, and their strange, asymmetric partnership into more interesting territory. In Beauty is Eternity Gazing in a Mirror, Rees’s microtones are transformed into squelching puddles, whooping insects and rainforest hum. (There is an air of David Tudor to a lot of the electronics, in fact.) Omaggio a 1961 explores drier reverb territory, while Haiku, Interrupted teases at decaying resonances, fading finally into the sound of a wheezing, broken children’s toy.
The stand-out track is possibly Seriously, this is a commitment, which blends a quirky electronic bleep-beat with occasional Coltrane-esque howling from Rees. Here, more than in any other track, Miller and Rees accentuate the differences between their instruments (rather than their synthesis), and it leads to some of the most fruitful points of dialogue.
Devices and Desires may be ordered through the rarescale website and elsewhere.
When the JACK Quartet made their Wigmore Hall début in July last year it felt like both a first date and a moment of arrival. The Hall – more often a venue for classical recitalists than avant-garde explorers with uncompromisingly capitalised names – was buzzing with anticipation, and an entirely different audience from its usual crowd. It was also sold out. If there was any slight disappointment that the JACKs had (quite understandably) opted for a relatively safe programme of Cage, Ligeti, Pintscher and Xenakis (rather than, say, Ablinger, Cassidy, Radulescu and Zorn), it was soon tempered by a blistering recital that shone bright new light on previously familiar works, danced in the crystal clear Wigmore acoustics and pinned its audience to the back of their seats.
Thankfully, the whole thing was recorded and has now been released on the Wigmore Hall’s Live label. Regardless of my hyperventilating first paragraph, this is a CD that I can strongly recommend to all. In particular, I contend, its immediacy and absence of undue reverence make it a great entry-level disc for newcomers to the modernist chamber repertoire.
Three of these works are three or more decades old now: this is still powerful music, but it has shed its tendency to frighten. In his excellent liner notes (extracted here), John Fallas notes that:
“The Quartet comes to this music as a quartet might more ordinarily come to works from an earlier century. Modernism now has its own classics, and the energy so abundantly on display here is the energy of a young quartet discovering these works anew and making them its own.”
As Fallas notes, the Arditti and LaSalle quartets are the JACKs’ two great forebears (they are also, respectively, the dedicatees of the pieces by Xenakis and Ligeti). So how do they compare? What does a new generation, 21st-century quartet bring?
Well, first, commanding, high contrast, fabulously controlled (yet thrillingly liberated) performances. They are less intellectual, perhaps, or less febrile than the Ardittis (who are the closest comparison) but this is not at the expense of care or precision. And, having grown up with modernism in its mature phases, they are more confident in the language than the pioneering LaSalles. With the JACKs’ performances of Ligeti’s Second Quartet, Cage’s String Quartet in Four Parts and Xenakis’s Tetras, the idea of a robotically definitive version is thrown gratefully out of the window. At the best moments it feels like these pieces are breathing freely for the very first time.
Let’s start with Tetras. Compared to the Arditti Quartet’s recording on Gramavision, the dynamics are less terraced (though overall envelope is just as wide), and there is a greater sense of linear continuity and flow; of events cascading into and shaping one another. A more marked difference is that the JACKs’ Wigmore recording is more than a minute longer than the Ardittis’, but the same amount slower than their recording for Mode’s Xenakis Edition. I like the extra time: there’s room to appreciate fine details such as the phasing harmonic beats in the viola’s first salvo (which really sing in the Wigmore version). More pointillistic passages, such as the section of scrapes and crunches at around 2 minutes are highly coloured drifts in the Ardittis’ hands. With more space, and deeper bite, the JACKs tease them out into absurdist drama, and the Wigmore Hall’s generous acoustic really allows every detail to speak.
However, the Arditti Quartet has changed line-up many times in the 30 years that they have been playing Tetras, so a definitive “Arditti version” doesn’t exist. Here, as a point of comparison, is a live video of the current incarnation, with Irvine Arditti, Ashot Sarkissian, Ralf Ehlers and Lukas Fels:
In contrast, String Quartet in Four Parts almost zips by. The recording by the LaSalle Quartet on DG, for example, sounds almost funereal in comparison, a good 25% slower overall. The JACKs’ version has a more sing-song, almost folky quality that highlights the Appalachian pastoral thread that runs through Cage’s music, but it risks obscuring the cubistic, fragmentary structure of the work. Certainly the LaSalles’ version is more overtly weird. But in the end I think the JACKs pull off a careful balance of segmentation and conjoining tendencies. (Incidentally, they’re considerably stricter about Cage’s instruction to avoid all vibrato.) If you want a more ‘cubist’ version, in which the additive structure is more apparent, then the Ardittis on Mode is what you need.
Ligeti’s Second String Quartet was written for the LaSalle, and along with other works commissioned by the Quartet (including quartets from Lutosławski and Penderecki) it helped define the possibilities of postwar, post-Bartók string quartet composition. Some would have it that it is one of the finest quartets of the 20th century, and one of the high points of Ligeti’s output. I have to confess that I’m not one of those people. While I frequently fall for large-scale Ligeti (of the Lontano sort), chamber Ligeti sounds to me fiddly and fussy. (Oddly, I have the opposite reaction to Xenakis.)
My reaction at the July 2011 concert was one of the strongest of the recital, and I remember it distinctly: that was an outstanding performance, but in its fidelity it has only strengthened my feelings against the piece. So the fault remains mine, possibly shared with Ligeti, but certainly not the JACKs’.
The LaSalles’ recording (again on DG) is hard to beat, and is one of the landmark recordings of its time. But again, the difference is that between an ensemble crackling with the energy required to continually reinvent itself, and one for whom this language is its mother tongue. What you lose in precarious tension you gain in confidence and swagger. (Although there are still moments when the JACKs take their technique right to the edge.)
The only non/not yet-classic on the disc is Matthias Pintscher’s Study IV for Treatise on the Veil. This takes its inspiration from Cy Twombly’s monumental 1970 painting Treatise on the Veil.
Cy Twombly: Treatise on the Veil (Second Version). House paint and crayon on canvas.
Pintscher’s piece is the fourth in a series for related small string groups; he talks more about Study for Treatise on the Veil I (for violin and cello) and its origins in Twombly’s painting in this interview with Mark Mandarano. In particular he refers to his attempts to create a musical analogue for the kinds of visual perspectives that artists like Twombly produce in their paintings.
(An interesting aside: Twombly’s Treatise on the Veil is one of a series of ‘Veil’ pieces, one of which, The Veil of Orpheus, he explicitly linked to a musical work itself, Pierre Henry’s Le voile d’Orphée of 1953.)
The JACK Quartet have a close working relationship with Pintscher, and in many ways he’s a perfect introduction for a recital like this to their work with living composers. But for me he’s just not as interesting as some. Study has a lot going on, technically, in a post-Lachenmann kind of way, but overall it feels too episodic, the sounds too purposeless. Still, bits of it are very pretty, and it may be that with many more listenings its overall shape will start to reveal itself.
All in all, then, a highly recommended disc, for lovers of contemporary music, newcomers, and fans of string quartet history. You can buy a copy here.
This is Wigmore Hall Live’s first exclusively contemporary release since, appropriately, the Arditti’s recital disc recorded in 2005, which itself featured a (more poised, less energetic) performance of the Ligeti Second. In recent years the hall has increased its commitment to live new music (the hall’s Twitter account informs me there have been 400 premieres since 2005), and the Fondation Hoffmann Commissioning Scheme means that new works are being created every season. Let’s hope that means more all-contemporary recitals like this one making it to disc.
[Final paragraph adjusted 31 May to incorporate mention of current new music at WH.]
Update: the whole album is now available on Spotify:
His fifth and latest CD, Simulated Music, is released this weekend. It’s an hour-long collection of nine electronic pieces whose USP is that they were all composed quickly, ‘with a minimum of deliberation’. The composer’s description recalls surrealist automatic writing procedures, but it doesn’t really prepare you for the music, which, in its droney/noisey/whispery way is much more coherent than a surreal stream of consciousness, shaped into bold, expansive gestures – some pieces are essentially a single sweep of an idea. That has something to do with the nature of electronic composition, I suppose – the machine is more likely to maintain an idea or certain parameters of an idea than to switch erratically and unpredictably among possibilities – but nevertheless each piece has an air of uncertainty about it, from the very first, whose opening voice-like drone soon sags into an indefinite downward glissando, rendering every new moment unstable.
Three tracks from Simulated Music are currently available on Cummings’ Soundcloud page; three earlier albums are also available through Bandcamp. You can pre-order a copy of Simulated Music directly from Cummings himself, but I believe the CD run is limited to 50 numbered copies, and mine’s number 23, so you’d better be quick.
I’ve been in love with this CD pretty much since I received a copy of it a few weeks ago, but I’ve been putting writing about it in case I kill the magic off.
But here I am. Czernowin’s music – here represented well by Winter Songs III for ten instruments and electronics, and the cycle of chamber pieces Shifting Gravity (comprising Anea Crystal: Seed 1, Sahaf, Anea Crystal: Anea, Sheva and Anea Crystal: Seed II) – is some of the strongest being written at the moment. Timbrally, gesturally and structurally unpredictable, even gauche (the saxophone, electric guitar, percussion and piano ensemble of Sahaf simply shouldn’t work; even less when sandwiched between two relatively straightforward string quartet pieces) it is also heartbreakingly vulnerable. Its sounds – often rasping, grating bundles of energy – project across impossibly large spaces, like concrete cantilevers, precisely tensioned just short of breaking point. Listening is like discovering butterflies trapped under stones.
All of the playing is excellent, but particular commendation must go to Ensemble Nikel for negotiating the vertiginous peaks and troughs of Sahaf, and to ensemble courage who transform the empty rattles and scrapes in the first section of Winter Songs III into the only thing you want to hear.
P.S. Coincidentally, a video interview with Czernowin was posted yesterday to NewMusicBox – the video also includes a clip of Anea Crystal: Seed I performed by Either/Or as well as extracts from other pieces. Have a look.
Innova’s fourth annual survey of graduate composition at Stanford showcases music by Alexander Sigman, Sebastian Semper, Juan Cristóbal Cerrillo, Mauricio Rodríguez, Patricia Elizabeth Martínez and Kristian Ireland. Yes, these are essentially student pieces, and yes the recording quality isn’t absolutely professional standard – but these are some sharp compositional minds, and the performers include the legendary Ensemble SurPlus, so attention is demanded. The best pieces (and hence names to keep an eye on) are probably Sigman’s reflets/réflexions/implosions, a fragmentary, prickly stream of consciousness for alto sax, and Cerrillo’s siempre otra cosa (estación violenta), which has an unusually episodic/dramatic shape that is both surprising and rewarding. Ireland’s string quartet, clearing (I), is also pretty intense.
Metaphysics comprises a hand-drawn graphic score, drawn across twelve 6-foot paper panels, and two hanging mobiles. It was displayed for a year at the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford, and during that time received 45 performances from ensembles and individual musicians (including So Percussion, Graeme Jennings, Ken Ueno, Beta Collide and Applebaum’s Stanford colleague Brian Ferneyhough).
Sensibly, innova and Applebaum have opted not to preserve one or two complete performances on this disc, but have instead gone for the more creative solution of a ‘Metaphysics Mix’, comprised of 1-minute excerpts from each of the 45 performances, each of which is accompanied by appropriate photos. It’s not a complete performance of the score, but it is a pretty decent condensation of the year-long installation (which seems to me closer to the spirit of the thing than any one performance could be). In addition, the DVD includes two scrolling animations of the score (one slow, one fast). This is hypnotically beautiful and in these animations you really do sense the possibility of a visual music.
The whole, excellent package is rounded off with a 20-minute documentary on Applebaum and the piece that includes perceptive and provocative input from several prominent musicians and musicologists. A highly recommendable record of a major project in graphic notation.
25 Years of New York New Music, a 5-disc, 61-track compilation of works composed by Fellows of the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) is a superb case in point. The goal, as stated in the liner notes by innova‘s Philip Blackburn and NYFA’s Cristian Amigo, is to ‘acknowledge the place of these composers in the larger narrative of American music history’, and in musical terms it seems to do this exceedingly well.
For an archival project like this, however, the quality of the documentation has to be of a high standard, and unfortunately this isn’t the case here. One thing niggles in particular: often little information is provided about the context for each piece (at minimum, its date of composition). This is essential if you want not simply to slap this stuff onto disc but to construct a coherent and structured collection of work with its own narrative shape, as Amigo and Blackburn claim to do. As soon as I heard Mary Jane Leach’s incantatory Night Blossoms, for example, I wanted to know where she sat historically in relation to the much better-known Meredith Monk. 25 years is a long time in new music, and it makes a difference whether something was composed in 1983 or 2008, unless you’re assuming a de facto, homogenous classicism (which this is anything but).
I’m not, therefore, going to try reconstruct the history that is represented on this disc, or elucidate the story it’s trying to tell. There is some loose structure applied to the five discs, in that one is clearly more jazz/improv-based, one more orchestral-based, but the overlaps are too great to declare absolute distinctions. There is a wide range of music, wide enough that it’s not possible to pin down many unifying elements. As far as they exist, they are negatives: this is (almost all) music that is anti-classical, that rejects – quite simply and usually with minimal fuss – the conventions of concert hall, standard genres, traditional ensembles. (I say almost all because in occasional cases, like Aaron Jay Kernis’s Ecstatic Meditation 4 or George Tsontakis’s Gymnopodies, the traditional tropes of classical music are still very much to the fore.) This isn’t a world of Fluxus-type agitations either: composership–or musicianship in the case of the pieces with improvisation–is highly valued, as is good taste.
Sometimes the taste is a little too good, as in the several examples of super-cute acoustic electronica. There are now albums and albums that follow this sort of decorative, sort-of-minimalist formula (some of them, indeed, may be found on innova). Alarm Will Sound’s Aphex Twin album is a high-water mark for this kind of thing (and an exception in being an album of covers not new pieces) but they are demon players drawing on outstanding source material. Very little matches up. Often it feels like a nascent genre that has substituted the courage to state something of its own for the cynicism of synthesis, crossing two trends – postminimalism and post-techno – which are themselves shadows not pillars. Cross a shadow with a shadow and you’re left with nothing.
Nevertheless, even works like David van Tieghem’s Waiting for the Gizmo No.1 or Bora Yoon’s G I F T, both of which could sit comfortably on the next Groove Armada compilation CD, have an innocence that puts all cynical thoughts to rest: innocence, in the best possible sense, is a rewarding common theme throughout all five discs. (I was going to say propose Judith Sainte Croix’s Los Pajaros Blancos de la Noche Profunda as another example, until I read in the notes that ‘Jungle imagery is used to convey quantum physics ideas … The piano gestures represent non-physical energy waves that …’ Yawn. The worst kind of verbiage, needlessly weighing down music that is deliciously feather-light on listening.)
New music fans will probably head first for the rare cuts by better-known names in this collection: interestingly, most of these (Pauline Oliveros, Annea Lockwood, Meredith Monk, Eve Beglarian, Joan Tower, Augusta Read Thomas) are women – indeed women composers are very well-represented. But don’t neglect the lesser lights – as well as those already mentioned, pieces by Iconoclast, Bruce Gremo and many others are not to be overlooked. Despite its frustrations, this is an endlessly fascinating collection that I’ll be dipping into for months to come. Someone else can do the musicology that makes sense of it all.
Domink Karski: Streamforms
Brian Ferneyhough: Unity Capsule
Evan Johnson: L’art de toucher le clavecin, 2*
Malin Bång: Alpha Waves
Salvatore Sciarrino: Venere che le grazie la fioriscono
John Croft: … ne l’aura che trema
Richard Barrett: Inward**
Richard Craig, flute
Karin Hellqvist, violin*
Pontus Langendorf, percussion**
There may have been a time, in the late 70s/early 80s, when Ferneyhough’s Unity Capsule sounded like an unrepeatable new benchmark for modern flute writing. Yet programmed among works by Dominik Karski, Evan Johnson, Malin Bång, John Croft and Richard Barrett, even this radical classic seems to breathe the air of an older planet. Another modern standard, Sciarrino’s Venere che le Grazie la fioriscono, written 13 years later, paradoxically seems even more remote.
If Richard Craig has recorded some of Unity Capsule‘s descendants on this quite brilliant CD the resemblances are rarely straightforward. The thing about children is that you don’t get to choose which bits of genetic code get passed on. Stockhausen would advise his students ‘If you want to become famous just take a magnifying glass and put it to one of my scores, and what you see there, just multiply that for five years’, and if Unity Capsule has an inheritance it appears on this evidence to have taken this sort of select and zoom form.
The pieces by Karski and Bång are the closest sonically (apart from the Sciarrino they are also the only other pieces for unadorned solo flute); Johnson further problematises the role of notational (and musical) redundancy; Croft vastly expands the world within and without the instrument; and Barrett is, supposedly, one of Ferneyhough’s most direct descendants.
But one shouldn’t assume those sorts of contacts. Barrett’s piece Inward (along with the pieces by Johnson and Croft one of three heart-achingly beautiful tracks here) surrounds the flute in a fragile halo of percussion, a hint of the wider halo that the piece possesses in its other incarnations as the core of Schneebett, itself the third movement of the cycle Opening of the Mouth. The image is one of withdrawal or enshrouding, an almost spiritual internalisation, that is ultimately undone by a series of six monstrous percussion strikes. Something I’ve long admired about Inward, and this section of Opening of the Mouth, is how it employs East Asian sonic signifiers – flute, bell trees, bamboo sticks, Thai gong, temple block – but negotiates its way around a plastic, Orientalist presentation. The fact that Barrett invites such comparisons and then responds to them as part of his music’s expressive argument is the sort of thing that sets him far apart from the more aesthetically-minded Ferneyhough.
Karski’s Streamforms is the most melodic of all the pieces here, in the sense that it is concerned with exploring variations of a single parameter within otherwise stable fields over relatively sustained periods of time, which in a roundabout way will bring you a tune. I’m not sure that’s precisely the composer’s intention, but it is the effect of his piece, which in spite of its incursions and disruptions deals largely in extended lines and arcs. Malin Bång is a completely new name to me; her Alpha Waves borrows the metaphor of sleep cycles and switches sharply between a variety of events ranging from the calm to the violent (including some extraordinary growling sounds).
Richard Craig giving the premiere of Streamforms, live performance, Stockholm, 2009
The two best new works, however, are those by Johnson and Croft. Coming after the Sciarrino, which ends with a flat, focussed stream of tongue slaps and breath noises, Croft’s fantasia for alto flute and electronics is like stepping onto another world. The title alludes to ‘the air that trembles’ that Dante encounters in the first circle of hell, inhabited the ancient poets and philosophers, before crossing into the second circle, the realm of the excessively passionate and, rather like the Barrett, there is a sense of both withdrawing and projecting, an almost erotic play with a threshold. In its own way, Johnson’s L’art de toucher le clavecin for piccolo and violin similarly toys with boundaries. But here the path is more tentatively trodden; at times even the border itself seems to evaporate. The dialogue – hence the reference to Couperin’s instructional pamphlet – is between ground and ornament, but everything is ultra-cautiously proposed, bundled under fantastic layers of contingencies and securities. It sounds like the recipe for a health and safety nightmare, but Johnson’s skill is for extracting something rare and precious from out of such pressure.
And what of those two classics? Craig’s Sciarrino is much more reserved and less overtly dramatised than some others, such as Alter Ego’s 1999 recording. (The CDs title – Inward – seems more and more apt.) It’s less instantly captivating as a result, but I think gains a Pan-like mystery in return. His Unity Capsule is a full five minutes (nearly a third) shorter than Paula Rae’s premiere recording with ELISION from 1998 (which is too languid for my taste) and still four minutes shorter than Kolbeinn Bjarnason’s much tighter performance of 2002. The details fly by at a hell of lick, in fact but, crucially and miraculously, not at the expense of precision. This is a performance that is dense – high resolution – but not hurried. Craig instills the piece – so often caricatured as a Sisyphean struggle against an unyielding notation – with fearsome confidence, swagger even. Thirty-five years on its challenges may have been parried, absorbed, reflected and dispersed anew, but it speaks now with a commanding and often beautiful authority.
Update, 9 Sept 2011: This disc is now available on Spotify. If you have Spotify, you should listen to it.
(A shorter review of this CD, by Peter Grahame Woolf, is at Musical Pointers.)
Philip Thomas, piano
Edges Ensemble
Another Timbre at37
This is a newish release from Another Timbre. Not a label I knew before now; clicking through their back catalogue that may be because their focus is more improv-based than I’m usually familiar with. But a recent series of discs around the theme ‘Silence and after’, marking the fiftieth anniversary this year of Cage’s Silence, marks a distinct turn towards composed music.
Of course, in the case of Pisaro, ‘composed’ comes with some heavy qualifiers. Michael Pisaro‘s music hails from that hazy boundary between the intended and the serendipitous. Fields have ears 1 for piano and tape (2008), played beautifully by Philip Thomas, at first recalls the final section of Christopher Fox’s More Things in the Air than are Visible: melancholy piano chords float in a haze of ambient, natural sound. In the case of the Pisaro, this sounds like a field recording made in a summer meadow, surrounded by birdsong. The Fox soundtrack (or at least that on Ian Pace’s recording on Metier) is more urban, but at the same more naturalistic: there is pronounced (even enhanced?) mechanical hum and hiss on the Pisaro tape, ironically alerting us to the materiality of every sound we hear. The piano sits somewhere within this soundscape, both artificial and completely natural.
fields have ears 4 (2009), is somehow less present, in spite of its realisation here for a large ensemble of 14 instruments. As a single note on the inlay puts it, it is ‘intended to be very quiet, with the sounding sections being only “slight indentations” in the surrounding silences’. For all that, they are fascinating indentations, like tiny geodes of sound, as though micro-climatic forces had compressed the surrounding air into miniature sonic-crystal formations. A lot of post-Cage, Wandelweiser-related pieces are impressive in their seismography of the sound/silence interface, but few pieces that I’ve heard articulate quite such a sense of depth residing behind those flickering charts.
Between these two related pieces, the earlier fade for piano (2000) is much more austere: a series of tones, each different, seemingly unconnected, repeated at decreasing volumes and allowed to fade into nothing. The whole sequence spans 20 minutes. Here, without a soundtrack and very little else to cling onto, the ear’s attention is turned to the ways in which silences or unintentional ambient noise structure a composed process that is both extremely simple and completely obscure. As the piano tones fade out of earshot – in absolutely predictable fashion – they invite the ear deeper into a quiet world beyond the generative, organising, cultured attack and beyond that still further into the anarchy of silence.
N.B. If you’re in London and you’d like to hear some of Pisaro’s sonic seismography live, then get yourself to The Nunnery Gallery, Bow Road, this Saturday for music by Pisaro, performed by Jennifer Allum (violin), Dan Shilladay (viola), Rebecca Dixon (cello), Dominic Lash (double bass), Henri Växby (guitar), Jamie Coleman (trumpet) and Tim Parkinson (voice).
During 1996 Pisaro wrote eight pieces under the collective title of ‘Mind is Moving’. For this event Pisaro has designed a schemata which specifies entry points and duration for each performer in the course of the 3-hours performance.
Date: Saturday 12th February Time: 6.30pm – 9.30pm Entrance: Free
