Christian Wolff has now entered his tenth decade, and I Dischi di Angelica have celebrated by releaseing a concert of premieres and some of his older pieces, presented in Bologna in 2022. Wolff himself plays piano, with the addition of voice, whistle and “objects” on some pieces. He is joined by the expert Wolff interpreter, percussionist Robyn Schulkowsky, with additional percussion from Joey Baron and a local orchestra of seven electric guitars. The title work Sveglia is one of the premieres, using just the guitars. Wolff’s writing for the instrument consistently focuses on its ability to produce chiming notes with enhanced reverb and decay, retaining the delicacy of the plucked strings as much as possible. (Just a warning in case you’re jonesing for more Glenn Branca.) Sveglia does in fact have some abrupt unison moments, which serve as one of several means Wolff employs to break the continuity in what might otherwise become endless melody. Wolff’s feeling for continuity in music has always been expressed through the attitude of the performers towards the material and each other, requiring the musician to be consistently alert and receptive, alive to the changing nature of circumstances in performance. None of the ensemble pieces here use a conductor. The music, meanwhile, is in a constant state of starting over from zero, each sound new and independent. In Wolff’s mature music, this manifests itself in short, discrete melodic fragments that carry no particular momentum or direction, even before they are quickly re-set and start again from scratch. Paradoxically, it strikes the unprepared listener as suffering from an attention deficit, but the unhurried equilibrium that each piece desires is at odds with any tendency to hyperactivity. One learns to listen in the present, ready to be gratified at each moment without expecting a greater deferred payoff.
The other premiere, Roulette, brings all the musicians together, with Wolff and Schulkowsky sometimes playing amongst the guitars, while at others appearing solo or in smaller groups. This distinguishes the piece with a type of concertante form, creating a structure for itself as it progresses. The album begins with Exercise 10 from the early 1970s, arranged for piano and electric gutars. A quintessential Wolff composition, the ensemble strives to play a melodic line in unison, without overt directions on tempo or rhythm. The compositional ramifications are achieved through a process at once complex yet intuitive, attempting to find consensus on the fly. The album also ends with this piece, played in rehearsal with differences in approach and Wolff’s commentary to the musicians. The rather gentle sounds in these works are contrasted by Wolff, Schulkowsky and Baron taking a harsher approach to his classic open score from 1964, For 1, 2 or 3 People. Schulkowsky and Baron present a duo version of 2002’s Percussionist 5, which I found less compelling owing to its rapid succession of assorted timbres, making it sound much like much other concert percussion works. Schulkowsky’s performance of the solo Exercise 32 from 2011, on the other hand, is exemplary in the way it demonstrates Wolff’s musical thinking without the group activity, finding balance between the arbitrary and the intuitive, making sense of the intangibles to be found within the indifferent. Wolff also plays a few of his piano miniatures, including a valentine that could almost be a waltz.
As previously observed, Philip Corner is also ninety, so it couldn’t hurt to listen to a little more. Angelica has trotted out a selection from concerts of his choral music given in 2018. Chorus at The Corner: A Joyfull Noise features the combined forces of Coro Arcanto, Coro Per Futili Motivi, San Giorgio In Coro and Piccolo Coro Angelico conducted by Giovanna Giovannini with assistance from Silvia Tarozzi. Corner is also present. It is indeed a joyous occasion, with everything short and simple and a lot of the pieces running into each other. The singers hoe into these pieces with gusto, embracing the directness of it all. Corner’s compositions are interleaved with some takes on Italian folk songs “In Old American Style” and contrasted with 18th Century American Barnabas McKyes’ hymn Crucifixion. Giovannini’s own composition Scultura sonora is premeried here, along with several pieces written by Corner for the occasion. In fact, a lot of the tracks are tagged “world premiere”, including some pieces by Corner written as far back as 1970. I’ve still got my old qualms about the pedagogical aspect to Corner’s writing, and some of the singalongs here are a bit happy-clappy for my taste, but the significant thing about this album is the event it documents, showing a less-known facet of Corner’s music and, more importantly, singers and audience having an absolute whale of a time with Philip Corner. That Piccolo Coro Angelico is a children’s choir who sing in several pieces, including new stuff Corner wrote for them, and of course the kids are awesome. It’s telling that the longest track here is with the audience at the end, repeatedly applauding and cheering as the singers reprise pieces from the concert, under the title “An infinite encore”.
Maya Verlaak’s metamorphosis into an English eccentric continues apace. Her new album Trace from Birmingham Record Company comes without text on the cover and without explanations for any of the pieces it contains, save that they’re to do with “personal approaches in the compositional process.” Her previous collection of works, on Another Timbre’s All English Music Is Greensleeves, showed an interest in reviving the values of the British avant-garde from the late 1960s and early 70s, before it was exhausted by Maoism and Minimalism, using the personal and the homespun as the means for experimental practice instead of confirming certitudes. The more recent works and recordings on Trace show Verlaak advancing this line of thinking into new territory; specifically, that territory being the musician’s homes. Each piece was written for the performers heard here, and the act of Verlaak travelling all over between Berlin and Penrith to record them playing her music at home alludes to a wider project in which the goal is not to make a point, but to find out what may be learned. Any thoughts of cosy domesticity are quickly upended by the puzzling tasks the composer sets her musicians: not rebellious but obstinate, in an English manner. For starters, the opening piece Anticipation is the only one requiring a second musician, and thus a cross-Channel overdub of Paul Zaba singing upon Luca Pignata’s accordion, with lulling melodies that gradually tend towards drones, aided by a shruti box that comes and goes. That dreamlike grey zone between melody and stasis recurs in All English music is – with Howard, featuring none other than Howard Skempton on accordion essaying increasingly distracted derivations from the well-known tune, each successive phrase leading further away from the listener’s expectations and towards some unrecognisable form of organisation. An adaptation of this pieces is also played on harmonium by Kate Halsall: All English music is – with Kate begins with the material’s fragmentation and abstraction further advanced, producing a monologue of gruff exhortations.
In the two longer compostions, Whispers finds Kate Ledger at home in York with her piano, but before you hear the keyboard Verlaak’s score first instructs her to gasp a high note and blow into the microphone. It’s the beginning of a meticulous series of exercises requiring Ledger to execute precise moments of extreme pianistic brevity, with mandated singing and breathing on cue, while pitted against electronic bleeps that imply both tuning-fork stringency and smartphone intrusions. Ledger manages it all very cleanly, threading some semblance of melody out of substances that are much drier and more discrete than they first appear. Meanwhile in Antwerp, trombonist Thomas Moore peforms Mutations, a wonderfully baffling work where the notes he plays rise and fall according to some unexplained process that may or may not involve the analog synth bloops that regularly surface throughout the piece and/or the litany of spoken pairs of near-homonyms, alternate pronunciations and false cognates that are rattled off in the background. It’s both simple and dense, the most satisfying yet of her linguistic puzzles to blur word, speech and music. Each piece here, really, functions in the same way as an unsolveable riddle, with a type of intellect that prefers the senses over philosophy. Incidentally, the title track is a brief portrait of Joseph Kudirka at home in Berlin, humming while turning out clotted chords on a music box. It all leaves me looking forward to the next instalment of Verlaak’s music, so long as the Proms commissioners are kept frightened away.
Frank Denyer is English but you couldn’t tell this from listening to his music. He’s created a sound-world so utterly his own that it could plausibly come from any one place or time as another – something frequently said with less accuracy about Xenakis – given how little it seems to rely on any observable cultural tradition. Another Timbre has built up an invaluable edition of Denyer’s music over the years, most recently documenting two major works, the complete Melodies cycle and the immense The Fish that became the Sun. Their new release Screens compiles five more pieces, composed across a span of nearly fifty years. They’re performed by the Octandre Ensemble, who have championed Denyer’s music over the years, including a memorable concert in 2018 which included some of the works presented here. Denyer’s music is intimate and confronting; if it shocks, then it does so through a naked emotional frankness stripped of all rhetorical devices, whether symbolbic or signifying. Another Timbre’s recording emphasises this with a wide dynamic range that still never gets loud except in relation to the extreme tenderness with which Octandre plays. A vast panoply of instruments and objects are used here to create sounds that seem at once natural yet unimaginable. That timbral ingenuity is at the forefront of the two Unison pieces from the early 1970s heard here, with additional voices from Joshua Ballance and Juliet Fraser. Fraser also sings on Screens and 2021’s Five Views of the Path, with a yielding humanity that adds greater poignancy to parts which could easily treated as just another instrument in the ensemble. Fraser and Octandre premiered Screens at that 2018 concert, with Denyer here repeating his spoken interlude. In Five Views of the Path and in 1990s Broken Music, percussive sounds predominate amongst the ensemble, yet Denyer and the Ensemble make the eclectic timbres cohere melodic and harmonious, even when pitch is absent.
Think I’m the wrong type of person to be listening to these records, so assume the following comes from a grumpy old man who has fallen out of touch with the times. It’s these two new releases from People Places Records, each the work of a solo string player. Problematica is cellist India Gailey’s follow up to 2022’s to you through, this time exclusively made of works commissioned for her. Gailey also sings on a number of pieces, in a close-miked untrained voice with a slight catch that imparts wistful disingenuousness. The use of electronics, such as reverb, multitracking, more reverb, sampling, or just an extra touch of reverb, appear on each track. The songs (as that’s pretty much what they are) veer towards watered-down pop music, matched with the fashionable school of poetry that places a selection of overloaded words with as little supporting syntax as possible to deflect from the poet’s precarity of thought. Welcome relief from all the slipperiness comes in Joseph Glaser’s Joinery, an undulating mesh of quietly brittle cello sounds, where the electronics expand upon the acoustical rather than glaze them and Gailey’s sweet singing adds an unsettling touch, preventing the listener from settling into a fixed perspective for once. Another bright spot is Fjóla Evans’s Universal Veil, which uses multitracking to create more textural interest than simply thickening things out and gives Gailey foreground melodies with something to say beyond providing a vehicle for technological effects.
Violinist and composer Leslie Ting has put together a curious collection of pieces under the title What Brings You In. It’s all part of some larger project apparently to do with therapy, but throughout the accompanying booklet the role therapy plays in this record is couched in vague enough terms to ironically suggest it’s avoiding self-interrogation on the subject. There is a somewhat loose, free-ranging feel for exploration in some pieces, particularly Ting’s improvisation with percussionist Germaine Liu and Rose Bolton’s composition for violin and electronics Beholding. The latter piece starts modern-electroacoustically enough and tries on a few conventional tropes but by the end of it, as Ting pirouettes about on some lively little descending sequences, you realise you’ve been kept guessing the whole time. Why the album opens with Ting and Liu playing a small excerpt from Linda Catlin Smith’s sprawling Dirt Road is a mystery, even as the composer herself is brought into the conversation in the booklet about the record’s conceptual foundation. All I can get from it is that music is therapeutic, which… well, yeah. We’re also informed that the sound of sand is “intimate” – a more contentious proposition. Liu’s improvisation with a heavily amplified sandbox really does sound cool, and about as confessional as Xenakis. It’s a fondly accepted thought that art can make the personal relatable, yet here it paradoxically conforms to people greatest suspicion about therapy, that it makes common experience the exclusive property of the individual.
It’s taken me a while to get a handle on Jakob Heinemann’s compositions; not that I found it difficult to like, but it’s hard to get a bead on what exactly he’s doing on these two albums. It’s better not to think about that in too much depth, as the sense of each piece seems to come down to Heinemann’s personal taste. There’s at least a vague allusion to autobiography in some of the pieces, but nothing overt enough to read the music as a narrative, making his idiosyncratic approach to mixing instruments with field recordings hard to pin down. Resonant Ocean came out in 2022, collecting four relatively short works. The common theme is place and location, either in the real world as heard through field recordings, or in the abstracted space of the harmonic series. Heinemann proceeds to mix them up, interleaving two solo tape collages with works for small chamber groups. The music acts in response to pitch content from the tapes, only for the recording location to change and answer in counterpoint. This happens both within pieces and between them, across the album. In the collages, Heinemann plays autoharp and double bass alternately against sine tones and field recordings that cut in and out with no obvious motivation. A mournful string trio in harmonic intonation acts as an interlude. The concluding, title work uses bowed double bass, possibly with low sine tones again, to create uncanny electroacoustic sounds from flute and trumpet. The reflectiveness of the structure to these activities, and the undemonstrative nature of Heinemann’s ensemble writing, can’t help but seem melancholy, albeit without becoming emotive. In this way they function, faintly but indelibly, in a manner reminscent of landscapes.
Having warned against analysis, I nevertheless began to think there were some more complex ideas struggling beneath the surface in those four pieces on Resonant Ocean. A year later, Heinemann released Opacity, a large-scale suite for flute, clarinet and cello, with the composer on bass with sundry objects and field recordings. This work was the product of a year of Heinemann playing with the musicians on the recording (Molly Jones, Jeff Kimmel and Ishmael Ali). The close collaboration with the performers, and the creation of a more complex work in multiple sections, consolidates the impressions of the previous album. The latent intellectual restlessness comes forward with greater clarity, even as the harmonic and textural language remains subdued. When ideas about music are jostling around without resolution, it’s better that Opacity makes its complications part of the subject for the listener to grapple with. Hearing it isn’t difficult; understanding it is another matter. Within the various sections of this work, ambient sounds flit in and out of the sound mix behind the musicians, then brief interpolations focus on improvisational percussive sounds. When the ensemble resumes, they’re never quite the same as before, with pitched sounds falling away to tapping and rustling that mimics the field recordings. It took a while to notice that the recordings themselves are as constructed as the musical material, adding another dimension to the quiet conundrum of what we really hear when we think “real” or “artificial”.
Like a bad dream, you wake from it and it fades, only to resume as soon as you relax. You can’t remember the details, it’s all a vague wash of disturbing impressions, far in the back of your consciousness. I assume xenopraxis will take this summary of his In A Sedimental Mood in the complimentary way it’s intended. He cites Satie’s furniture music as an inspiration (said music functioning as much obstacle as background), but it also recalls the pointed directionlessness and discontinuities of Christian Wolff’s later work, with a strong dose of Brian Eno’s Unwelcome Jazz from the Nineties. There’s also tangential connection to Edlritch Priest, which tracks.
In A Sedimental Mood somehow contrives to spin out some seventy-odd minutes of music that is not quite ignorable but also not quite interesting. The lazy cocktail-bar atmosphere of piano and hi-hat is denatured by rambling, self-centred keyboards, including an out-of-tune Fender Rhodes and Hammond organ perpetually at odds with each other, and a crummy MIDI guitar. It soon fades out, but then starts over just as before, only different. Everything tastes bad and the servings are too small. Each little section seems to fade out quicker than the last, but there are so many of them and the timing is just so that it’s impossible to keep track. There is structure, but without form, leaving any attempts at deeper listening confounded by trying to find any greater distinction between one congealed lump of seemingly arbitrary noodling and another, with the growing suspicion that the details are irrelevant even as they sustain the work’s duration. Any theorising about a continual present is both reinforced and thwarted by the repeated fade-out and resets; it exploits deficiency of attention to create a work of near intolerable duration. As a work of perversity, and of questioning values of significance and perception, it is high art.
(Coming back to it, I realise it also reminds me of the music made by Australian artist Phil Edwards. Often working as part of a group of improvising artists with variable musical experience, the spontaneity and lack of goals, as heard in free improvisation, is tamed by a language of conventional instruments and techniques and an approach that tries to be popular, yet remains alien and unknowable exactly because of its refusal to be perceived as something entirely new.)
I feel like I’m rating different grades of sandpaper when writing listening notes on these. They’re all deliberately awkward music made from digital electronic synthesis and/or processing. Andreja Andric’s two Pocket Electronic Symphonies (Are-Verlag) use filtered and reprocessed noise as their sonic basis, with each piece performed by the composer using a combined variable sound generator and score coded into a javascript app loaded onto a smartphone. Conceptually, it’s irresistable: a lightweight and accessible source and interface without needing to rely on additional material stuff. Andric’s method resolves issues of live performance and those of determining form and structure through the use of the generated score, nudging the audio software beyond being little more than a noisy toy of a type often encountered in this genre. If the smartphone’s audio output is attenuated, Andric makes up for it with some dense and complex sounds. This complexity means it tends to the harsh side, but each piece carries its own compositional concerns well enough and makes a decent job of differentiating between passages with contrasting tones and textures. The two performances here were made some three years apart, inviting comparisons in approach while suggesting the basic setup could be expanded in different ways.
Release numbers four and six from Party Perfect!!! continue in the same vein of the label’s other releases with a maximum of noise and minimum of compromise (I’m guessing as I haven’t heard two or five). Ryu Hankil’s Envelope Demon is a lengthy, scratchy suite for digital synthesis, rolling back and forth over small bursts of sound that are subjected to various intensities of strangulation. It’s a piece worked on over several years but, even as it has reached a heightened state of refinement, some of the initial excitement may have been lost. With many unique electronic setups, their ingenuity is offset by inherent limitations in their premise, and so they end up with realisations where it seems as though every possible option has been worked out until the premise is exhausted; the question is thus rasied as to whether what we’ve heard is in fact a musical composition. I don’t know if that’s the case with Envelope Demon but after forty minutes it feels like it, something Andric’s Symphonies manage to avoid. Michael Speers’ four short pieces For David Stockard, on the other hand, suggest boundless invention concentrated into a very precise form. Very different from his earlier Green Spot Nectar of the Gods, the pieces exploit his canny observation of the similarities between percussion and electronics. It’s an area which still seems to be insufficiently explored, how these sound sources share common attributes of timbral and harmonic complexity as well as indeterminacy. Speers focuses on the roles of contact, friction and touch and how they influence each other in different media. Part Perfect No. 6 consists only of Stefan Maier’s piece Nervous Systems, which is unsual compared to his previous release and the PP label in general in making some concessions to the listener, with sounds given more gentle attacks and everything wrapped in a soothing cloak of reverb. Without the edginess it can’t help but be slightly disappointing, as the basic materials come across as much the same. Perhaps I’m disappointed this particular release doesn’t come with a zine or recipes.
What’s the dividing line between ‘art’ and ‘pop’ with this stuff? Why am I pigeonholing the next two as the latter as opposed to the former? Not because it’s all short stuff; definitely not because it could be considered remotely popular. Perhaps because there are discernible remnants of ‘deconstructed’ popular idioms, but then these pieces have reached such an advanced stage of disassembly that it’s a moot point. It’s probably the attitude behind it, as the motivation shifts from technical considerations to affective consequences. A glimmer of demotic, late romantic transcendentalism still peeps through, faint but as recognisable as in a love ballad or movie soundtrack. GAŁGAŁ describes his Ich schwöre ich hab Angst (Abstand) in terms of ideas – freedom, individualism and vision. The eleven short tracks are constructed from edits of live improvisations with samplers and synthesis, and they start out feeling suitably scrappy and spontaneous but after a while settle into something more consistent and serious. I kept waiting for a change in direction to recapture that open-ended impression from the start, but once a certain type of anti-groove locks in GAŁGAŁ stays put. Reincanto / Real Bwoy (Artetetra) on the other hand keeps hopping back and forth between ideas as a way of preserving momentum. It’s a split release (it’s also available on cassette so I guess the concept stil makes sense) between Kinked and Señor Service respectively, apparently dealing with storytelling and ritual-type stuff. I’m hearing a nice little set of hyperactive sonic globs pulled from various corners of the electronic repetoire and repurposed into bite-sized morsels. The lack of consistency and continuity becomes their strength, appealing in the manner of kinetic junk scupltures with commensurate irreverence and insolence. Their purposeful refusal to groove just makes them seem even more arty. To tell them apart, Kinked works mostly with noise while Señor Service throws in mass media and kiddie sounds.
Someone expected me to listen to fourteen hours of music by a composer I didn’t like. It’s not that I disliked Philip Corner’s music as such; just that I found it easy to admire it philosophically while never wanting to listen to it. What I’d happened to hear, together with all the praise I’d read, imbued it with a medicinal quality, a stern but necessary purgative for conventional aesthetics, and about as palatable. It wasn’t helped by a number of enthusiasts who dodged the nuances in his thinking to seize upon the bleedin’ obvious (“Yeah dude but have you ever like really listened to a saucepan?”) It all seemed to pursue asceticism as its own reward. This is all wrong of course but listening to the music had never seemed to help; I always felt like I needed to read something before I could get it.
Philip Corner turned ninety last year and the Oregon ensemble Extradition had spent the preceding year or so working up a fitting tribute by performing and recording as much of his music as they could, including a series of concerts in early 2023. They also collected performances of his pieces by friends and associates wherever they could, with all of it gathered together on Extradition Plays Philip Corner. There’s fourteen hours of it. Really, given Corner’s stature and what with still being active at ninety, anything less would be an insult but still, fourteen hours. There are sixty-one performances collected here, of compositions ranging from the late 1950s to the present. The idea of an endurance test fit perfectly with my preconceived caricature of the composer, so I resolved to plough through the whole thing and try to find some points of differentiation, at least.
The ordering is not chronological, but it does begin with the oldest piece here. 2-Part Monologues No. 1 presents two instruments cast as melody and drone, played here by Lee Elderton on clarinet and Collin Oldham on cello respectively. The stasis in the cello holds the unfolding melody in permanent suspense, creating a parallax movement of its own. It sounds very clean and contemporary, while having been composed in 1957. The piece situates Corner at the earliest flowerings of what were to become dominant shaping ideas for new music in the latter half of the century: minimalism, indeterminacy, improvisation, rethinking of tonality and simplicity. The fourteen hours of music demonstrates that Corner has been across all of these ideas for many years, combined with an awareness of the interaction between sound, performer and environment. What’s most striking about the pieces where nature and the environment are at the forefront, is the way Corner balances a respectful approach to the subject while still subjecting it to compositional rigor. No mindless nature worship or ecological superstition here: Loren Chasse’s superb interpretation of the 1999 piece Ear Here with Musician plays with the sounds made by stones and paper alongside a shallow creek, where the actions of human and nature are often indistinguishable. Conversely, works like Presence from 1995 are performed entirely by ensemble, with Extradition using small objects and Corner’s score of durations and continuities to create a complex of sounds reminiscent of a bog at dusk. Acoustic, electronic, manufactured and natural keep blurring into each other throughout this set, for fourteen hours.
Everything Extradition presents sounds much deeper and richer to me than the thin sonic gruel I have been dosed with in previous Corner recordings. The five concerts at the start are a bit rough around the edges in audio quality but serve beautifully as a live document. The remaining thirty-nine pieces by Extradition and others are at least as good, but what matters as much as capturing the sound is the quality of sounds that Corner has inspired in these musicians. Denis Sorokin’s guitar rendition of Lingering Random Chords (after William Faulkner) digs into his instrument’s peculiarities of attack and decay, while Skin Champions takes a Serge modular synthesizer through an abrupt realisation of the text score Continue. When I said there are fourteen hours of this, I should specify that it totals fourteen hours, eleven minutes and twelve seconds. Corner’s wry approach to more conventional music theory appears throughout, from the ruthlessly severe The Art of No-Art series to the strict but free (or free but strict) Just Another 12-Tone Piece. In the latter, Extradition make a complex ensemble composition out of Corner’s instruction that each performer play a 12-tone row, of a type and in a manner of their own choosing. By contrast The Art of No-Art is a vast cycle of compositions made of a single pitch and its octaves. There are hundreds of these things, twelve of which appear throughout the fourteen hours, and they sound both rigorously minimal and expressively pointillistic at once, maintaining momementum despite the lack of harmonic or melodic movement through the tension of the opposing tendencies in their musical language. Extradition et al. play some of these simultaneously, creating new textures and potential counterpoints.
By now you’re probably figured out that I’ve been won over. Just to keep my newfound enthusiasm in check, I’ll note that getting somewhere around the halfway point a few of those dry presentations of acoustic phenomena without context do appear. They are admittedly very nicely presented. One of these is 1982’s Boiling Water – water here boiled by Ricardo Arias – so now I know that Ahti & Ahti, Akama & d’incise were all about forty years late but at least they did something with it. Some pieces, such as An Agreed-Upon Mood Mode “for ensemble with discussion” conflate the thing and the idea about the thing in the same detrimental manner. Before these moments come along, your overall impression will presumably be how everything has been surprisingly good to listen to. There is, after all, fourteen damn hours of this stuff so everyone’s experience will vary. I’ve barely scratched the surface here but hopefully it tells you enough about the variety to be found here, all of which goes towards giving you a much more detailed and complete portrait of Corner as a composer.
With all the diversity in approach, it’s striking how Corner’s various methods are used to achieve consistent ends. Themes weave their way through the collection, of collage (with or without recordings), awareness of multiplicity and uniqueness (through permutation and improvisation), examination of what makes us individuals (compared to another, an object, natural forces). Each new side to his work remembers the others. Where some of Corner’s scores can seem vague or insubstantial at first, the performances by Extradition and their associates show how even his broadest statements are always made with consciousness of specific outcomes, even as those outcomes are undetermined. The score for 2006’s Ultimate Improvisation, performed here by Matt Hannafin, consists of the line “Like nothing else, like never before.” There’s a substantial booklet that provides further details and context for each of the works presented. It’s rare for a celebration of an artist’s work to be also a forceful work of advocacy; Extradition have achieved both in spades. Fourteen fucking hours. I am in awe.
Ah yeah I’ve heard some new music this year. It was Apartment House again at Cafe Oto again, this time premiering four new works. Apparently it was part of some larger project with an interdisciplinary curatorial agenda but I forget what it was. There was a new string quartet by Eldritch Priest. I had his weird-ass guitar piece Omphaloskepsis sitting in my listening pile for over a year and a collection of earlier chamber pieces even longer, but the new work Dust Breeding took things in a different direction from those pieces and their lop-sided, angular melodic lines. Heavy emphasis on harmonics throughout, with their high, sweet intimations of just intonation adding a further tantalising element to the expectation that sooner or later the loose, almost-looping patterns between the instruments may mesh into something unified and coherent. The piece functions like a complex knot, slackened to the point where you can’t tell if grabbing one end will pull it tight or unravel it completely. I believe Apartment House is recording some Eldritch Priest this year.
Of the other pieces, like oil it glistens multicolours by Finlay Clark, whose work I knew nothing about, mixed together disparate elements on strings and keyboard with field recordings and electronics in that bold, eclectic way without any evident over-arching principle, reminiscent of experimental video editing. Later in the piece some distressed electronic beats accompany the musicians but these are wisely used as another weapon in the music’s resistance to easy comprehension, just as I was starting to worry the piece would end in a bathetic attempt at being popular, or worse, cool. Denis Sorokin’s Arbor is a pleasantly bittersweet movement of quiet contemplation, shedding light on his work as a guitarist who has performed works by the likes of Michael Pisaro-Liu. His ensemble writing is finely judged, although I found the work a little too pleasant and was waiting for something to disturb its untroubled surface. The final work was by violinist/violist Chihiro Ono, sometime Apartment House participant herself. If I remember right, Rabbit Hole – alive. emove. 108. is her first proper composition, with the small ensemble playing alongside recordings of nature in various states of domestication. It’s a fairly open score and with the field recordings the performance had an amiably bucolic affect to its rambling form, as minor incidents came and went. Aided by the group’s playing and their talent for finding substance in the ephemeral, the work’s contents had an elusive, ungraspable quality that anchored the work with a fundamental seriousness and made it hard to assign any obvious influence or comparison to Ono’s compositional style.
There was a lot of excited chatter around when Quatuor Bozzini gave the UK premiere of Jürg Frey’s Fourth String Quartet in Huddersfield in November. For those of us who missed it, the Bozzinis’ recording of String Quartet No. 4 from last May is now commerically available. Composed over a couple of years, its gestation proceeds from that of his String Trio, recently recorded by Apartment House. Like the trio, the quartet is a large work, made all the more imposing in substance through consisting of five movements instead of one elongated span. Frey’s longer works have often taken on the form of a journey, with episodes, incidents and detours, but with this quartet the sense of movement has been sublimated while the questioning aspects remain.
In a way not readily apparent before, Frey lets a curious lop-sidedness define this composition from the outset and then tries to find a balance between the incongruous forces at play. The overall structure even suggests this, with the fifth movement taking up a little over half of the quartet’s hour-plus duration. His early tendency towards silence and his later one towards romanticism are set against each other throughout the piece. The opening movement even falls into two halves, when the reduced heart rate of the slow-breathing chorale that begins the work suddenly drops into a period of whispered, near-pitchless bowing. For the rest of the piece, you’re left wondering if a similar gap in the sound will re-open. Subsequent movements contrast moments of prolonged stillness with more classically-motivated interplay between the instruments, albeit in Frey’s characteristic manner of distilling such passages to their most essential, in slow motion. The second movement takes fragile gestures from unaccompanied and builds them into something articulate and expressive, while the third begins with a more assertive chorale before dissolving into brooding, introspective solos. That long final movement consolidates the preceding tendencies into a coherent statement, but without resolving any of the contradictions, finding it to be achievement enough to give expression to the complexities inherent to the composition. Heard in isolation, the movement could be taken as a self-sufficient and eloquent work in its own right, but what we’ve heard before exposes us to the tensions that animate the music.
This is a troubled work, where Frey has stripped away more of the artifice that has previously constrained his expressive tendencies behind a facade of impassive observation. It shows us more of a composer wrestling with imbalances and contradictions, in turn requiring the listener’s involvement far beyond what would have once been assumed as little more than contemplation of an impeccable surface. Quatuor Bozzini excel at revealing these difficulties without drawing attention to their own labour. They excel at distinguishing between the finest gradations of dark and light, infusing greater colours into a work with such an attenuated range of dynamics. In their performances of older repertoire, I’ve always been struck at how they find a timeless element in the music. For Frey’s latest quartet, their ear is attuned to Schubert and Webern.
There’s a new batch of five recordings on Kory Reeder’s Sawyer Editions imprint, this time including one by Reeder himself. I’ve only heard one other piece by Reeder, the 70-minute Codex Vivere on Another Timbre, which I recall mildly disparaging in a passing comment as “polite”. Something like that, anyway; I remember feeling that it was at pains to be too accommodating to the listener. Snow, composed last year for a quartet of violin, cello, piano and percussion, is a different matter. Using the same basic approach but in a more pointed fashion, Snow makes a virtue of its reticence by lulling the listener with simple, repeated patterns threaded through other ephemeral material, but always pulling them away before they can establish themselves clearly. Those patterns, with the familiar hushed dynamics, inevitably recall late Feldman, but the repeating figures are too simple to be invested with any greater significance and, if Reeder is consciously referring to Feldman then he draws upon those moments when a passage is about to exhaust itself. In pacing and phrasing, the music is constantly about to fade into silence and stasis, turning something simple into a much deeper and elusive experience. Reeder himself leads the small ensemble on piano, with all four speaking as low and distant as they possibly can. It’s also been released on cassette, yet even as a download the piece falls into two parts exactly fifteen minutes long.
Matt Sargent’s Illuminations is a set of three gentle electroacoustic works which could almost be considered ambient were it not for the subtle manipulations beneath the surface. Taken from a longer cycle of works titled Illuminations, the three pieces are made from electronic, algorithmic processes built around live musicians. Sargent’s scores are animated, with notes fading in and out over each other, creating slow loops for the performer to play, using opacity as a guide to dynamics. In turn, their notes are sifted out by a software patch that selects certain tones to be extended and harmonised. The independent routines work together to create something that sounds alive and spontaneous, even as it maintains an overall undisturbed consistency. Slow, erratic melodies unfold against a backdrop of refreshing harmonics. It reminded me a bit of some of David Behrman’s recent interactive electroacoustic works, using novel ideas without needing to show them off. The bright timbres of the instruments used here offset the softness of the playing: the first track a duet for pianist Michael Jones on vibraphone and Shaoai Ashley Zhang on piano, the following two solos for Trevor Saint on glockenspiel and Taylor Long on vibraphone. All play with a critical senstivity to touch.
By way of contrast, the two pieces Noah Jenkins has made with trombonist Riley Leitch present yet another way of listening. Without Persistent Environments is up-front loud and proud, immersing you in the sound rather than coaxing you in. For the first twenty minutes Leitch rings the changes on a small gamut of pitches in Without persistent environments the sense of confusion and flux might only worsen, multitracked so that the notes clash and coincide with unpredictable regularity. Jenkins recorded Leitch in various locations around Chicago, adding acoustic and ambient colouration that is at first imperceptible but soon becomes a complicating force. For the following hour, Leith plays long tones in just intonation into a live looping system for Rotations Placement : Providence Everywhere, creating an implacable, complex drone of dense chords and overtones. The pitches and the brass combine to make something wonderfully agressive, that snarls and buzzes like a La Monte Young piece. It’s best played loud, in the manner of the late, lamented Phill Niblock. My only complaint is that it fades out at the end instead of dumping you cold.
Evidently, I missed a few great gigs in Ireland last year. Fortunately, the Louth Contemporary Music Society has preserved them. Folks’ Music documents three works commissioned by them, each one extraordinary in their own way. The first piece presented here is almost powerful enough to overwhelm the two that follow: Cassandra Miller’s The City, Full of People is a work for unaccompanied mixed chorus teems with life, with individual voices cascading over each other in repeated figures that seem to blend into each other, creating a vocal labyrinth. The piece builds upon her previous work made from her privately singing along to other music, multiplied and expanded. The basic approach is similar to her earlier a capella composition Guide, but here that piece’s wild and woolly nature has been tamed into something more controlled and potent than unalloyed catharsis. The structure here is simple but ingenious, falling into three sections: the first launching out at full tilt before resolving to an end with extreme slowness, the second building from nothing to recapture the force of the beginning, followed by a coda which condenses the music’s essence into a final moment for contemplation. There’s also skill in knowing when to stop.
The performance by Chamber Choir Ireland (directed by Paul Hiller) is a model of clarity and strength, using directness instead of dramatics to gain the listener’s undivided attention. They also premiered Linda Catlin Smith’s Folio, a work which feels more conventional in this company but further illustrates Smith’s skill in making works of subtle complexity while appearing simple to the point of naivety on initial hearing. The texts are selections from Emily Dickinson, which seems like a natural fit, words and setting each frank while keeping full grasp of the meaning elusive. Between these two choral works comes Laurence Crane’s String Quartet No. 2, played by the Esposito Quartet. Crane shares with Smith the ability to speak plainly while remaining cryptic. It comes out more strongly in his longer works such as this one, as one clear statement follows another without resolution. The Quartet seems more tightly structured than many of Crane’s previous pieces on this scale, the impression of wandering replaced by an implied relationship between the handful of distinct phrases juxtaposed here, each reduced to the most slender of elements so that they seem to defy elaboration. Esposito plays with obstinate authority to assert this music has a greater and more troubling presence than most of the fashionably subdued and tonal.
On the same date Chamber Choir Ireland were signing in Dublin, a concert took place in Dundalk: fiddler Zoë Conway led a band of traditional Irish musicians in a rendition of Terry Riley’s In C. Yeah yeah, you say, that old chestnut again; sure it’s good for a bit of fun but do we need to hear yet another gimmick version of it? Well in the first place, In C is always worth hearing done well and this version is a cracker. Secondly, “a bit of fun” with an Irish band is always going to brighten your evening immeasurably. Thirdly, this is In C Irish, a new version developed with Riley’s imprimatur to accommodate the musicians’ background in improvisation with the notated particles that make up the score. With the insistent pulse, the instruments work together a treat; the most striking difference here is the way the musicians give each other room to foreground certain elements as solos, adding new interpretations to the music throughout while never letting the momentum droop. It reminds you that the piece is about communal music making, above demonstrating theoretical questions over indeterminacy and open form. Given the piece’s celebratory atmosphere it feels fitting when the band end the piece in a glorious free-for-all that feels in keeping with the spirit of the work. Two trad encores top off the evening. Éamonn Quinn, director of the Louth society, cautioned me that “maybe it is only for Irish folk.” He was wrong.
There’s always something horrible about Fluxus anthologies. They inevitably end up less than the sum of their parts; a motley collection of dusty, mismatched relics from a brief moment of excitement sixty years ago. As pure audio, shorn of performance context, they frequently make for very dry listening, made worse by a threadbare jokeyness that in retrospect sounds self-satisfied. If that wasn’t bad enough, the listener then starts to grouse that some of the selections aren’t Fluxusy enough. It’s a terrible position to be in and it may well be part of the point, given the Fluxus tendency to rub one’s nose in tedium, but in this current age of podcasts the concept of an information wasteland is now a daily reality and too many Fluxus pieces which attempted to problematise the situation somehow seem left behind, more quaint than prophetic.
Having said all that, the Sub Rosa anthology Stolen Symphony: Fluxus & Neofluxus, Part 1 manages to justify itself through describing the organic process by which this set of pieces grew into its present state, through members of the Opening Performance Orchestra in Ostrava meeting and being introduced to an ever-widening circle of Fluxus and Fluxus-adjacent artists. While attempting to be comprehensive, it nevertheless excuses its omissions and eccentricities through the personal artistic connections that went into making it. A number of the composers wrote new pieces for the occasion and who can turn that down? Several pieces by Milan Knížák appear, albeit in excerpts; apart from these there appear to be no other examples of the dreaded excerptitis. Most of the pieces are short: thirty pieces in a little over 150 minutes, of which only eleven exceed five minutes and, of those, just two stretch past ten minutes into the twenty-plus range.
One of the long tracks is by the Opening Performance Orchestra themselves. These regular collaborators with Knížák produce the title work, a typically dense collage of indiscriminately pillaged sounds that’s more immediately enjoyable than their Cage-inspired Chess Show because of its casual messiness. Speaking of John Cage, the anthology gets off to a bad start by listing his 0’00” as track 0 with a timing of 0’00”, accompanied in the booklet by a badly cropped reproduction of the score and a commentary by Petr Kotík indicating that he really doesn’t get what the piece is about. Apart from this stumble, the booklet is mostly above average with 72 pages of supporting essays and memoirs, while the album immediately lifts with some strikingly lively performances, perhaps uncharacterisically so in the case of Agnese Toniutti’s piano interpretation of La Monte Young’s Composition 1960 #15 to Richard Huelsenbeck. Werner Durand provides overdubbed winds on a pair of Henning Christiansen’s feral folk compositions from mid 1980s. Examples of early 1960s “action pieces” by the frequently overlooked Fluxus Musicians Giuseppe Chiari are presented by cellist Deborah Walker and pianist Luciano Chessa. This is all starting to seem better than I first thought it was.
Playful, even whimsical pieces are interleaved with occasional moments of stark rigidity, which thus regain some potency as a disruptive, reorientating experience. The overall looseness is a welcome contrast to the stuffiness which can befall preserved Fluxus. Part of this is due to the studied disregard for assigning everything to a strict period of history, as here early 60s works by Young, Chiari, Yasunao Tone and others are mixed in amongst new pieces by Philip Corner and Bengt af Klintberg, as well as pieces from in between such as Toniutti’s restless performance of Dick Higgins’ hyperactive Emmett William’s Ear from 1977. Toniutti and Miroslav Beinhauer each play a piano piece by Fluxus mainstay Mieko Shiomi, but these are charming later works from 1990 and 2009, respectively. Terry Riley is represented by the austere Ear Piece from 1962 and a new piece for broken piano, written in his more characteristically insouciant style. The broken piano appears elsewhere, as another instigation behind this whole collection.
There are items of sound poetry and extended vocal works which seem to fall outside of the Fluxus remit (Sten Hanson? Dieter Schnebel?), besides some but not all of the usual suspects. Pianist Nicolas Horvath has the funniest track, striking an F-sharp over B precisely once as his sole contribution to this volume. Several pieces are culled from Toniutti’s album of Philip Corner compositions, including a suitably jagged solo rendition of the recent Small Pieces of a Fluxus Reality. I’ll have more stuff about Corner in the new year – a whole lot more. While the musicians and editors try their best to qualify and expand upon the label, this collection really does work rather well if you ignore the selling point of the F-word and treat Fluxus more as they do, an element of obscure influence over a somewhat neglected body of music created over many years into the present.
Haven’t been writing much lately because I keep listening. Each time I listen changes what I want to say. The Canadian Redshift Music Society has released a new set of chamber pieces and solos by Linda Catlin Smith, performed by the Thin Edge New Music Collective. I’ve discussed Smith’s music a number of times before, but Dark Flower is the first album not made by musicians in Apartment House on the Another Timbre imprint. There’s not much duplication of pieces here: a revised version of Wanderer comes across in darker hues in Thin Edge’s interpretation than the Apartment House version, and the pieces which are new to me also contain shadows in the playing and recording. This doesn’t obscure Smith’s music so much as throw it into a more dramatic relief, pushing the emotional implications a little further while adding emphasis to the interplay and alternation between the instruments’ voices. The tenderness in Smith’s writing comes to the forefront in pieces like the Duo for 2 Cellos from 2015, played with haunting beauty here by Amahl Arulanandam and Dobrochna Zubek; the romantic angle given to all the works here are tempered by the sombre edge in the Collective’s playing, as well as Smith’s language, which is too harmonically direct to allow for indulgences and restrained by the use of counterpoint and a preference for the Mosaic over the Long Line.
Another piece by Smith appears on the Redshift album All we’re made of is borrowed by Paramorph Collective. Thought and Desire is a work of recurring phrases for a pianist who is also required to sing near the end, played and sung here with disarming simplicity by Kim Farris-Manning. Unlike Thin Edge, this collective is a bare minimum of two, the other half being An-Laurence Higgins who adds voice and guitar to the keyboards. The album, for the most part, continues in a vein of gentle quirks, with two quiet pieces by Rodney Sharman overbalanced by a large chunk of time given over to Margot George’s Fruiting Bodies, a droney processional for bombastic electric guitar and majestically synthesised organ that lands somewhere between Harold Budd and Hans Zimmer. It’s hard to tell how seriously we should take its Hollywood grandisoity, elongated either to submlimation or absurdity. Same goes for the shorter interleaving works composed by Paramorph themselves, in which earnestness is marred by overripe theatrics but then played off in a coda as just the two of them being goofy.
Some music starts out as one thing and ends up another, some music appears to be about one thing when it’s really about something else. Then, there’s Ian Power’s Ave Maria: Variations on a Theme by Giacinto Scelsi (Carrier), a piece whose title belies the complex switches in perspective on its subject matter, beyond an act of homage or an essay in style. The piece, written in 2009, was recorded last year by pianist Anne Rainwater. Scelsi’s prayer is one of a set of three he composed in 1972, a typically austere work of repeated phrases initialy written for solo voice. Rainwater is indeed obliged to sing a rendition of Scelsi’s original piece at the start, while accompanying herself in unison on the keyboard. The idea of ritual as a task, and its associated demands, is already established here, with a secluded, unpolished recording that draws out the imperfections in her voice and her instrument, with the soft creak and thud of the piano’s hammers. The subsequent variations play on the obsessive side of Scelsi’s art, with the piano alone repeating the prayer in harmonisations that get thrown against an insistently reiterated high pitch, before condensing into loud clusters of sound echoed by forceful use of the pedal on the lower strings. The strangest variation is not marked as a variation at all, but as an Interlude that suddenly wrenches the composition into a different focus. The pianist is required to repeat the theme, but to press the keys silently. Background becomes foreground in a breathless negative space, substance made of incidental noise, with the added jeopardy of sounding a note by mistake: any such mistake must then be repeated thirty-six times. The interlude becomes a fraught hiatus in the music. Scelsi always demanded an inner calm for his music, presumably to heard it as well as play it, and this pairs with the experience that even his finest music can be a bit of a chore. In Power’s version, penitence and apprehension is shared by performer and audience. Even with frailties mercilessly exposed, Rainwater’s playing remains both strong and dutiful in equal measure.
It’s telling that after repeated listenings to Adam Zuckerman’s STARPERMEABLE (Nueni) I still flip back and forth between thinking he’s too precious and he’s too sincere. A composition for “at least three musicians and processed field recording playback”, it makes no effort towards momentum, direction or movement. Each of its eighteen short sections are made of delicate and languorous melodies slowly overlapping to produce clouds of sound that veil the internal movement of pitch, so that its changes require closer attention. Each of these moments is separated by silence, confounding attempts to find continuity or coherence. The musicians frequently hum together, adding both to their serenity and our distance from them. The field recordings are noticeable only by the absence of the musicians: there are three interludes of six minutes each, making nearly half the piece’s entire length, where the only sound is that of the open air at almost imperceptible volume. Contradictions abound: it’s both too natural and too contrived, both seeking to inspire interest by actively repelling it. It starts to resemble Scelsi in that way it needs a mind at peace to be receptive to it, but whether for contemplation as an idea or as a phenomenon remains a mystery. The musicians do play very prettily though, while it lasts.
Another Apartment House gig at Cafe Oto, bringing out stuff it’s hard to imagine getting heard anywhere else. Anton Lukoszevieze began with a cello solo before being joined by the rest of his ensemble. The solo was Heiligenschein by Erkki Veltheim, which was reminiscent of a potted, all-acoustic version of his Ganzfeld Experiment, a heavily-bowed block of thick overtones that buzzed and hovered. Not sure when it was composed, but it conveyed his recent interest in cognition and parapsychology. The Tenney piece was an equally concise piece, of course carrying his own interest in gestalt cognitive theory. Timbres #1 is an unpublished score from the late 1960s, a pointillistic vignette with clever permutations between each instrument, but everything on a single pitch throughout; a kind of extreme klangfarbenmelodie, reduced and compressed flat into one dimension for our ears to hear in three. Between these was a larger work by Pluto Bell, Saint-Girons for small ensemble with field recordings. I previously had no knowledge of this composer, but kind of liked the grey late-cubist approach to combining natural and musical sounds on first listen, with the latter fragmented and ephemeral as though torn and scattered through the indistinct landscape, working to alienate the sounds that might otherwise be more recognisable.
The second half of the concert was taken up by the premiere of Derek Baron’s The Game of Letters, a suite for ensemble in seven movements written for Apartment House. I’ve previously heard Baron’s Fourteen Latches of Heaven and Earth, a gratifyingly challenging collection on Takuroku, and so expected another aesthetic confrontation. Which I pretty much got, inasmuch as The Game of Letters confounded expectations by being confrontingly homogeneous. The musicians moved in almost unison back and forth over meandering modal-type melodic fragments without any pressing urgency. It had that blank, affectless quality admired by John Cage, heard elsewhere in pieces like Arthur Russell’s Tower of Meaning. Baron’s writing here seemed to locate the musicians somewhere between mediaeval folksong and classical antiquity, as the impassive material gave rise to inadvertent counterpoint when things were allowed to slip out of phase. I’m not sure if the piano only came in towards the end of the piece, or if I just hadn’t noticed it in all the monophony.