Boring Like A Drill.

A few months ago I noticed the change in Jürg Frey’s music in recent years, when discussing two contrasting but very fine albums of his earlier and later music. A similar impression was made by the concert of his 2nd and 3rd string quartets by the Quatuor Bozzini in Huddersfield last November: that Frey is moving away from ideas and towards music. Frey has long been associated with the Wandelweiser collective, but his recent music has been compromising the “purity” Wandelweiser’s reverence for silence. With this supposed loss of aesthetic purity, Frey has embraced a purity of sound.

After releasing the quietly beautiful Grizzana album, Another Timbre released a CD of Philip Thomas playing Frey’s recent piano music at the end of last year. I previously wrote of his third string quartet that Frey was joining Morton Feldman as a fellow master of non-functional harmony, adapting some of the more rhetorical elements of classical and romantic music, but piecemeal, on his own terms and his own ends. In this piano music, most of it composed between 2010 and 2014, there is a similar sense of exploration, without any perceived goal, to that found in Feldman’s “middle period” before he discovered the tenuous equilibrium found in repeating patterns.

At that time, Feldman was also moving away from abstraction and responding to the need to create melodies (“big Puccini-like melodies”). An interview on the Another Timbre website shows Frey seeking a common solace in a material understanding of music, and in negotiating the paradoxes that arise when wanting to compose without disturbing the music’s material.

When composing for the piano, the notion of harmony is more prominent – although we know all the (lovely) extended techniques that have been developed for the piano, to make it sound unlike a piano. But yes, the piano remains the instrument to represent harmony…. When I write for piano, I shouldn’t rely on the piano itself, but on the composition. The piano gives single notes, dyads and chords too easily. Also, if I write consonant dyads, it could suddenly sound wrong, ironic, like a quotation rather than the real sound. In this context to compose means to build a basic confidence in the clear and restricted material that you are working with.

The shorter pieces have a meditative quality, alternating between pedal tones and chords. The longer pieces take on a resemblance to a journey through a succession of musical terrains. Sometimes progress is slow, tentative, with long periods stranded in one particular harmony or register, before unexpectedly moving on. It becomes clear that the journey is its own destination. If there is a structure underneath it all, Frey does his best to conceal or disrupt it or render it irrelevant to the listener.

The album begins with a much older piece, the brief In Memoriam Cornelius Cardew from 1993, with a tonal palette that anticipates the later works. Has Frey allowed a space for emotional expression in his new music, however abstracted? It’s interesting that when philosophy is raised in the interview, he demurs but admits that he feels “a closeness” to Deleuze and Spinoza, two Western thinkers who tried to reason without a dichotomy between mind and body.

The piano is close-miked on this CD, focussing on the grain of the instrument’s sounds. Thomas’ playing is softly-spoken but full-voiced – well suited to the quiet but indomitable character marking out a trail through an empty expanse, as in the longest piece on the album. It’s titled Pianist, Alone (2); a title which seems nakedly descriptive at first but takes on a narrative aspect after hearing it. This time, the protagonist is a little more experienced.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Jürg Frey