Boring Like A Drill.

Timothy McCormack: mine but for its sublimation [Another Timbre]. (Don’t say Feldman don’t say Feldman don’t say Feldman) it’s an hour-long piece for piano with subdued dynamics that opens by obsessively interrogating a unresolved, ambiguous chord through changes in voicing and register and at first it seems a well-crafted study in tone and shading at least influenced, but more properly to say informed by… you know, that guy. As the piece progresses it takes on a greater character – independent, larger and more complex; perversely so as the musical continuity starts to break up. Pauses open up and resonances are allowed to linger until they start to become the material McCormack is working with. He understands that it’s not enough to preserve a mood through a piece’s entirety, but to sustain it in the listener’s mind by thwarting it, keeping things precarious. At several moments the music threatens to develop into something else, only to do so by falling away into near-silence. Chords are reduced to single harmonics, with sparse notes beating against the overtones. McCormack describes the work in terms of resonance, and in stages these resonances become more focused and sustained. The pianist is Jack Yarbrough, for whom the piece was written: he has a gift for coaxing prolonged sounds out of his instrument, with a pacing and a use of tonal colour that are deliberate without being calculating. Having achieved this state of otherworldliness, the piece goes further by stretching out resonance indefinitely, through the use of ebows on the strings; harmony condensed into an ominous, persistent hum. It all ends with a slow but brutal finality and I’m still knocked about by the way McCormack and Yarbrough have created a transformative piece out of chin-stroking acoustical considerations while also delivering an emotional thump.

Bryn Harrison: Towards a slowing of the past [Another Timbre]. Harrison’s latest musical labyrinth comes with a twist. This forty-minute piece is for two pianos and comes out of the gate like a doubled version of his solo piece Vessels from way back when, but all too soon it suddenly rebounds on you in a psychedelic tape reversal. As if the unadulterated form wasn’t trippy enough. Each passage starts off afresh in what seems a call-and-response of pianos and backwards-pianos, but gradually the contributions from the electronics become more pervasive and insidious. The reversed resonances wash in from beneath the live pianists, always a bit lower and a bit slower, and then they start to take a shape of their own. By the second half, the reversed passages are calling the shots, leading the pianists into darker registers, slowed to a trancelike dirge. It’s a disturbing development, making explicit the seductive danger that has been implicit in Harrison’s previous works. The pianists here are Mark Knoop and Roderick Chadwick, both veterans at Harrison’s music and adept at pulling off the nimble counterpoint needed to make it work; for this piece they convey the image of two workers industriously tackling the job at hand, only to be sobered as the technical demands give way to something more oppressive.

Ashlee Mack: green [Sawyer Editions]. I’ve been meaning to get around to the Sawyer Edition releases from early this year. Pianist Ashlee Mack plays four works by four composers, all of the quiescent school: each piece feels about the same in scope, regardless of length. Mack’s approach here highlights her interest in touch, using attentive dynamics and phrasing to say a lot, even where there could perhaps be more colour (might be down to the piano or the recording). Jeff Herriott’s piece green is passing seems made for such an interpretation, with its palette-dabs of single tones and small chords given substance as an abstraction, belying its relatively brief length. Eva-Maria Houben’s snow from 2023 is on the cusp between her just-enough and not-enough compositions, with a slow succession of single notes gaining a degree of momentum through each overlapping decay: Mack gives a nice sense of timing to lift the dry material off the page. Heard in this company, Marti Epstein’s Haven seems to owe too much to those preceding works; while it starts to add more to the mix to produce a certain expressive weight and dramatic shape, the effort is undermined by carrying on too long. The non-conformist in the pack is Ian Mikyska’s Distant bells; mist; stopping, which gets some slightly more robust dynamics and acts strangely by lapsing into periods of various ostinati. It could come across as fey if those gently reassuring moments didn’t come and go with such indifferent abruptness.

Morton Feldman and Tobias Hume: Intermissions [Sawyer Editions]. I got instinctive prejudice against anything overtly “curated” so when I see an album that proposes a “dialogue” between Feldman’s early piano pieces and Hume’s pieces for viol circa 1600 I reflexively start cueing up individual tracks. The album begins with a silent track (30 seconds) and ends with one (60 seconds), with several other silent tracks in between. There are other pauses, at the start and end of tracks, too. Guy Vandromme’s interpretations of Feldman are nicely modern while still trying to be as small as possible; not timid, just not making a big deal of it, while keeping enough of the old capital-M modernist brittleness. Luciana Elizondo plays Hume on a viola da gamba and it all sounds fine to a rube like me. I don’t think we need to hear repeat performances of certain pieces, which are presumably sequenced in for the sake of continuity. As a whole, it passes along as a series of sporadic but consistent objections to the silence, which seems too mild an objective.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Bryn Harrison, Eva-Maria Houben, Ian Mikyska, Jeff Herriott, Marti Epstein, Morton Feldman, Timothy McCormack, Tobias Hume
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Rodney Sharman: Known and Unknown (Redshift). My exposure to Sharman’s music is small and spotty: when describing his works for voice and guitar performed by the Paramorph Collective I lumped them in with that album’s predominant vein of “gentle quirks”. Known and Unknown brings together a selection of his piano pieces, performed by Rachel Kiyo Iwaasa. It helps to expand general awareness of the composer’s wide-ranging output, if only to a certain extent. The scattering of miniatures and compact pieces suggests, not entirely accurately, a preference for the small-scale. The short works range from affectionate pastiches, each with their own personal insight or mischievous twist, to bracing abstractions. The three sets of Opera Transcriptions are revealing, as the ‘transcriptions’ range in attitude from dreamy to acerbic; the third set ends with the pianist narrating a disturbing reminiscence of Claude Vivier. Gay identity is a recurring theme in Sharman’s music: the Vivier episode is echoed later in the larger piece The Garden, an overt and explicit “pocket opera” for vocalising pianist. Beside the inventions upon opera and Sondheim, it’s fitting there’s also a brief celebration of Michael Finnissy’s 50th. Iwaasa’s own queerness informs her collaborations with Sharman, with her interpretations matching his wit and also, in the case of The Garden, compounding it by effectively playing it in drag. The other substantial work is the title piece, commissioned by Iwaasa as a memorial to her mother; built out of descending chords, the forthright harmonies in sombre arrangements leave Sharman as a still slightly enigmatic character.

Sasha Elina: Different Songs. Vol 1 (self-released). Elina sings songs at home in her room, with faint outside noises sometimes intruding. The songs are small, sung in a small way. Eva-Maria Houben’s My Sweet Love and Seamus Cater’s Early Riser are without accompaniment, Elina’s voice up close and high-pitched, without vibrato or steady control of pitch, in the manner used by indie pop singers to convey earnestness. I’m predisposed to dislike people singing as though they are smaller and weaker than they really are and at some points it feels too affected, recalling the songs used in TV advertising by phone companies in the 2000s to convince you they were harmless. The accompaniments for the other songs were recorded remotely, merged in the recording: Tim Parkinson plays piano on the two Tomás Cabado songs, each very brief and reduced to the most essential elements without becoming simplistic. These work because there’s no room for Elina’s singing to be misinterpreted as cute, making the sweetness both strong and strange. Cabado in turn provides spare electric guitar for Johan Lindvall’s Five songs for voice and guitar, with each note and word placed with consideration and caution to create a cycle in microcosm that’s affecting without ever resolving its mood. Moment by moment, these pieces can reward microscopic attention and I expect that’s the intention behind the album, but with nine songs in just over twenty minutes, it comes across as being so slight that it’s trying to disappear completely.

Alfredo Costa Monteiro: Suspension pour une perte (Dissipatio). I’ve previously heard Monteiro in duet with Ferran Fages, performing with “resonant objects” and electronics. His solo work Suspension pour une perte employs this technique with a vengeance, taking a recording of a “broken piano” and treating it with gobs of reverb enhanced with electric organ seasonings. It’s a stark, solemn work that starts with deep, sonorous blows on the piano frame and carries on in a single-minded essay of abrupt, dark blocks of sound. The struck sounds give way to ominous rumbling in the low strings, fading into clusters of organ drones. Silence also plays a critical role, both between sounds and in letting each stroke of black ink reveal its inner colours, making a composition that never retreats into goth ambience while supporting itself as a musical structure for nearly forty minutes.

Ben Zucker: ( )hole complex (per/formance/eration) (Sawyer Editions). This one really pissed me off at first, not just because of the title. A soprano sax/clarinet duo named Garden Unit (Cameron Roberts and Julia Ansolabahere respectively) play this Zucker composition that wibbles on for damn near an hour, with no particular goal and no particular rush to get there. The two smallish voices trade timbres and hesitantly noodle for short periods of time before getting distracted and trying something else. Nothing seems to stick; they stop, and try again. Sometimes they boldly launch into a cringey jazz riff then immediately check themselves, attempts at minimalist quiescence quickly run out of puff. Their attitude is unreadable, as to whether they’re freezing up in panic, noble in their stoic forbearance, or just plain oblivious. A month later I came back to it to explain exactly why it sucks, only to immediately become intrigued. The piece is a bravura study in entropy and decline, exhausting all momentum yet somehow sustaining itself without resources through perpetual stalling, an endless dwindling away that never seems to hit bottom. It fearlessly shits down the blithe charade that music comes naturally and makes everything about the artform seem all but impossible: it can’t go on, it goes on.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Alfredo Costa Monteiro, Ben Zucker, Eva-Maria Houben, Johan Lindvall, Rodney Sharman, Sasha Elina, Seamus Cater, Tomás Cabado
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Violinist Maya Bennardo has just released an album of two pieces for solo instrument, titled four strings. This is all new to me, except that I have heard other works by Eva-Maria Houben. The first piece, Duk med broderi och bordets kant, is by Kristofer Svensson and centres on a bright but wistful theme which is teased apart by Bennardo in various ways. The complete melody can only be inferred as the pattern is repeatedly broken up with gaps, or pauses, or through time being prolonged or momentarily suspended. It’s a playful act of analytical scrutiny, taking something that hints at a whole and deconstructing it into redolent fragments, each of which may be taken as sufficient in itself.

Bennardo’s playing is alert to the possibilities contained within such brief moments, a point which becomes even more important in the titular work by Eva-Maria Houben. Houben’s music reflects a kind of obsessive care over each sound, even when the sound may be particularly unprepossessing. This can sometimes be offputting to the casual listener, or even not so casual, as you wonder what she may have heard in them in the first place. Bennardo presents Houben’s four strings in a generous interpretation, balancing its stringent emphasis on high pitches and its allowances for free sounds and improvisation. Within the score’s constraints, she presents each note in a unique way, taking the slenderest of material to build a substantial piece of light and shade, from silence and sound.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Eva-Maria Houben, Kristofer Svensson
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What a strange piece! What I’ve heard of Eva-Maria Houben’s music tends to fall into either of two categories: static, dispassionate music that becomes oddly affecting by its very remoteness, or static, dispassionate music that refuses any sympathetic connection with the listener. together on the way is neither: a collaboration with the GBSR Duo that’s built on the premise of suspense, in which the processes of time are suspended even as you are aware of time’s passing. At least, that’s how it comes out in this live recording of the piece in Huddersfield. I suspect the piece may take on a slightly different character each time it’s played, as a continuing collaboration between the three musicians. (Sadly I couldn’t make the London performance last weekend.) The piece is an extension of Houben’s previous work with pianist Siwan Rhys, A peaceful, silent place, premiered at LCMF in late 2019: a work of inner calm and patients that ranged from subdued to almost imperceptible. For together on the way, Houben’s organ playing and Rhys’ piano is joined by GBSR partner George Barton on percussion and while the pacing and textures are similar, the newer work sounds like an inversion of the previous performer dynamics. Houben maintains a steady drone throughout, too soft but too rigid for the listener to believe that it can stay the same. Barton and Rhys add brief, isolated interventions that provoke but never disrupt the stasis, leaving the listener perpetually waiting for a change that may never come. It’s unexpectedly dramatic, even ominous, if you allow it to be. You wonder, between the three of them, when they will allow the impasse to break, either change or drop away, or whether they can keep up the suspension of the faintest of sounds indefinitely.

The latest Magnus Granberg release reunites him with Skogen, here as an ensemble of seven musicians recorded last June. How Lonely Sits the City? wends its way around Granberg’s prepared piano, joined by harp, tuned and untuned percussion and amplified objects. A pair of violins complete the ensemble. The predominance of plucked and struck instruments here gives the piece the sparsest texture I’ve yet heard in Granberg’s compositions, even more so than in his quartet Nattens skogar. Allowing for finer shades of dark and light, it’s a cold and spiky piece, with soft but short sounds played in denuded textures. Occasional bursts of electronic noise add to the alienating experience. While recorded in summer, the piece sounds empty and wintry, largely it seems as an effect of Covid; a reflection on the world shutting down and doors closing for musicians everywhere. Interestingly, the piece also began as a quartet, but while Granberg added parts for a larger ensemble, the prevailing mood remained small and sparse, with each musician adding to the overall work as sparingly as possible, making each individual sound count.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Eva-Maria Houben, Magnus Granberg
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Flubbed last year but saw all of the latest London Contemporary Music Festival. Curators Igor Toronyi-Lalic and Jack Sheen put together the most ambitious programme yet – six gigs over nine days, with bold, eclectic programming and newly-commissioned large-scale works. The theme of “Witchy Methodologies” implied that it might demand the punter to buy into a ragbag of mismatched and demotic metaphysical woo. This was thankfully avoided, although each of the first two nights did feature performers who expected the audience to join in. The blurb that promised “rituals and reenchantment, doubling and transformation, gossip and eavesdropping, hauntologies and orreries, mysticism and technomancy” etc. was interpreted broadmindedly enough to make a varied, compelling programme, setting very different works into a new context. Questions over the nature of transformation and meaning ran through each evening in music that ranged from musical table-rapping to Fluxus.

It all began this year with a performance of Ligeti’s Poème symphonique, repurposed here as a kind of initiation rite. As a bold but seemingly empty gesture, it served as a threshold to the unknown. Its soundworld was echoed later in the evening by Fritz Hauser’s Schraffur, which began with Hauser alone in the middle of the vast space of Ambika P3 scraping a notched drumstick and then multiplied throughout the audience, with performers using different resonant surfaces at hand to create an enveloping cicada-like din.

The rest of the gig was all voices, with the group Musarc giving beautifully realised performances, unexpectedly matching Poulenc’s Un soir de Neige against new commissions by Joseph Kohlmaier and Lina Lapelytė. The two premieres made simple use out of call-and-responde and convergence in a way that felt tentative and underdeveloped, making both somewhat disappointing in their lack of adventurousness. By contrast, Jennifer Walshe’s The White Noisery was a powerfully sustained celebration cum laceration of pop culture, tradition and social movements. A slightly older work (2013), it received its first UK performance here and gave a rare occasion to hear Walshe’s music without the commanding presence of the composer herself. Musarc was fully up meeting the same level of manic intensity and sudden mood swings, in a piece where the usual ironic postmodern collage of cultural references is turned in upon itself, depicting a world where all experience is mediated. It was a sign of things to come, later in the festival.

The first Sunday was a quieter night: “On Hauntology” was appropriately given over to the past. Susan Hiller’s video Belshazzar’s Feast feels quaint now, while Rosemary Brown’s little piano pieces have taken on a new currency. Brown gained notoriety in the Sixties for her musical medium schtick, channelling the spirits of Chopin and Liszt to transcribe new compositions they dictated to her. As observed by Nicolas Slonimsky, the old masters’ talents had been “fatally affected by their protracted states of death”, but he also saw that she was a musically gifted woman who had been denied the opportunities to develop her talent. Strangely, her use of stable tonality, gentle arpeggiation and modest scale means that her music fits right in with what would now be classified as “modern composition”. The Brown was interleaved with short improvisations by veteran vocalist Maggie Nicols, who continued the theme of confused groping for the past.

High point of the evening was a new commission by Eva-Maria Houben. A peaceful, silent place is a lengthy work for positive organ and piano. Houben played organ, sat across the hall from pianist Siwan Rhys, who had previously played Rosemary Brown. Houben’s organ pieces can range from subdued to almost imperceptible, and here she blended this restrained gamut of dynamics into a subtle, ever-changing palette of tones and textures. The tone of the organ became particularly mysterious, sounding muted, half-stopped and breathless. The cavernous space became part of the instrument, as Houben’s playing sought out different resonances and overtones, creating new harmonics out of the air. At times it was hard to tell if she was just very soft or completely silent, letting the ambience reverberate. Rhys played piano with infinite patience, an occasional high chord in close harmony that rippled through the sustained organ tones, stirring up new emergent sounds, gently pushing the air a little more.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Eva-Maria Houben, Jennifer Walshe
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A warm Tuesday night in London and Eva-Maria Houben is playing piano at Cafe Oto. She’s chosen to play three short sets, so people can enjoy the outside air, a drink and a chat, and refresh their focus on the music. Her music is typically slow and quiet, with a virtuosic use of silence. Such pieces can be very long, but not tonight. Two of the works are being played in public for the first time; one of them, Dandelion, is a loose collection of pages. Houben explains that it could go on “for hours” but tonight she’s selected just three pages to play.

Alex Ross, in the latest issue of the New Yorker, gives a good description of challenges and pleasures the new listener finds when discovering the Wandelweiser collective.

Eva-Maria Houben, a mainstay of the group, has written, “Music may exist ‘between’: between appearance and disappearance, between sound and silence, as something ‘nearly nothing.’”

He also observes the group’s “slightly cultish atmosphere” but this has started to fall away in recent years, as individual voices from within the group have become more recognisable. At Oto, Houben gives a short introduction to each piece, enthusiastically describing her inspirations. These sources are surprisingly diverse, as is her music.

She begins with another premiere, Tiefe – Depth for Piano. It’s a consummate study in decay and resonance. Isolated notes are struck and released immediately, held a short time and allowed to die away, sometimes being cut off, sometimes allowed to fade. Throughout the evening, there’s little use of the sustain pedal to colour, or cover, the frequent silences. Rather like Jürg Frey’s guitar music (another Wandelweiser composer), she sets the piano’s sounds within the surrounding silence and not against it.

Dandelion draws on prose inspiration rather than fixed notation, with the instrument’s strings mostly plucked by hand. For her Sonata for Piano No. 10 she explains how she was intrigued by Enescu’s talent for producing bell-like sonorities in his piano chords. The dedicatee for each movement is a very unWandelweiserish composer: Mussorgsky, Enescu, Schumann, Liszt, Messiaen. The semblance of each composer is evident in each movement’s set of tolling chords.

For all the emphasis on silence when describing this type of music, Houben gives particular attention to the piano’s capability for producing harmonic resonances and overtones (she refers to them as “partials”, suggesting a wish to complicate the instrument’s harmonic characteristics even further). In another work, the score is four pages of three lines each, single tones on a single stave in the treble. The piece ends with a long, steady drumming on a dense cluster of notes in the bass. The resonating strings produce a halo of high notes whistling over the top. No need for this low chord to be written down or on the music stand.

I still can’t get my head around this composer. The first pieces I heard seemed too bald – dependent on a theory, underdeveloped. Then I heard pieces which seemed much more warm-blooded to me. Others had a hint of veering into New Age meditation or whimsy, still others embrace tintinnabulation not unlike Arvo Pärt. Tonight, the music ranges from finely nuanced (Tiefe, Dandelion) to obsessively single-minded, as in the Sonata and another piece made entirely of single notes in groups of three, stacked end to end. Far removed from the sacerdotal austerity of Wandelweiser’s image, this is living, messy, human music.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Eva-Maria Houben
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