Jürg Frey’s I Listened to the Wind Again, a 45-minute piece for soprano, clarinet, string trio and percussion, seems to trace the evolution of his compositional voice in microcosm. It was commissioned by the Louth Contemporary Music Society Festival in 2017 and the recording was commercially released late this year. This is the third piece by Frey I’ve heard of similar dimensions for soprano and small ensemble: 2004’s 24 Wörter is made of short movements, each dedicated to a single word accompanied by violin piano, while 2011’s Farblose Wolken, Glück, Wind combines soprano, trumpet, cello, percussion and tape. The latter work unfolds like a procession, a steady state of action that keeps discovering unexpected changes in its sound through its own unhurried movements.
For I Listened to the Wind Again, Frey has constructed his text from quotations from Swiss poets Gustave Roud (also the poet of Farblose Wolken, Glück, Wind) and Pierre Chappuis, adding the Tang dynasty poet Bai Juyi before finally introducing the Lebanese-U.S. poet-painter Etel Adnan. The text emerges gradually, hesitant at first, in single words before tentatively expanding into phrases. The accompanying ensemble swells in tandem with the voice, starting as faint harmonics to the soprano, occasionally little more than an unvoiced breath in moments when she falls silent. The clarinet’s distinctive tone is not heard until about ten minutes in; after twenty minutes the cello bows a slow melody in its lower register. By the halfway point both voice and instruments are sounding fully, with a slow, statuesque lyricism. Soprano Hélène Fauchère’s faint vibrato becomes more pronounced as each section reaches its own modest climax and the ensemble changes the mood from clear to clouded. The ensemble (Carol Robinson, clarinet; Nathalie Chabot, violin; Garth Knox, viola; Agnès Vesterman, cello; Sylvain Lemêtre, percussion) is ideally suited to the voice and the composer, knowing how to play quietly without being soft or frail. For much of the piece they alternate between colouring the vocal line and providing antiphonies for it; in the later stages they intertwine behind the soprano, who now sings without pauses. Frey keeps adding expressivity to his once spare music, gesturing towards but never approaching melodrama.
Cafe Oto’s extended lockdown series of recordings, Takuroku, has come to an end after about 195 releases. Amongst the last is John Tilbury’s Metalessness, his reading of Samuel Beckett’s Lessness with keyboard accompaniment. Besides Tilbury’s vast body of work as pianist in free improvisation and the New York School, he has also gained a reputation over the past decade as an interpreter of Beckett’s dramatic and prose works. Lessness gains its incantatory power through its repeated phrases and the repetition of the entire text, the second time with the order of its sentences permutated by chance. The means of making the text are of less interest than the effect they have, especially as spoken by Tilbury here. The words’ disturbingly neutral descriptions of apparent desolation provide a verbal surface for meditation, mood between elegaic, yearning and resolute. Tilbury’s clavichord provides accompaniment, its faint, thin sound at first evoking a distant memory of tinkly upright piano. (The piece’s dedication is “In memoriam William Thomson, potman, pub pianist who died of TB at 39, the grandfather I never knew.”) The clavichord’s gentle recurrence in the background conjures up new images for the text, at times agitated, at others calm but searching. At one point, the elegaic cuckoo clock from Morton Feldman’s Madame Press Died Last Week At Ninety is recalled. It appears to be a home recording, windows open, with extraneous household sounds adding a subtle discordant clatter to the keyboard; from time to time, a small bird outside chirps brightly.
Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: John Tilbury, Jürg Frey, Samuel Beckett, Takuroku
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Telematic Concerts (with Pauline Oliveros)
Tuesday 28 April 2020
In these days of self-isloation I keep getting told that teleconfernced gigs held over Zoom are becoming a thing, only to be subsequently told that they’re not really a thing because the time-lag between participants makes coordinating the music impossible. I don’t know what technology was in play for this Telematic Concert from ten years ago, but synchronisation is neither a technical nor aesthetic issue. It’s an improvised duet between sometime collaborators Pauline Oliveros in New York and Reynols guitarist Alan Courtis “piped in digitally from Buenos Aires”. The two drag out sheets of sound between them with amped-up accordion and guitar respectively, each modifying their instruments until it can be hard to distinguish one from the other. When they do play acoustically recongisable sounds – never at the same time – their signal choice of sounds is instructive. Oliveros blasts a klaxon-like drone that jars with everything around it. Courtis’ feedback howls like Robert Fripp locked in a death-plunge with a Balrog. Whenever the situation threatens to settle into an ambient exchange, one goads the other into something more aggressive and sinister. Towards the end, both musicians suddenly crank up short, high pitched bursts until they create a chillingly evocative soundscape reminiscent of a dockside battening down for bad weather.
I think Spleen Coffin still has this on preorder for next month, coronavirus willing. I got sent a download which fades out halfway through to change LP sides, though it’s clearly a single piece.
It all just reminded me how much Oliveros’ presence is still missed today. A few years back I dischi di Angelica released another of her improv collaborations, but I’ve only heard it just now. We should be grateful for whatever we can get and, considering that Nessuno teams her up with Roscoe Mitchell, John Tilbury and Wadada Leo Smith, people should probably have gotten into this on the names alone. It’s a live set in Bologna from 2011, two large-scale pieces with a snappy encore. As with Courtis, all the players here know that sometimes it’s better not to play. There are moments when it starts to drift into something lugubriously spacey – a perpetual standby when keeping Jazz at arms-length – but the music constantly redeems and renews itself, with each member of the quartet deftly pushing anomalous sounds back and forth in an uneasy equilibrium; although, like this sentence, it seems more of a personal challenge than artistic necessity to sustain the structure for so long. It never gets outrageous, but it remains reassuringly strange throughout.
Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Alan Courtis, John Tilbury, Pauline Oliveros, Roscoe Mitchell, Wadada Leo Smith
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New music that stays new
Monday 23 January 2017
I need to talk about some recent releases on Simon Reynell’s Another Timbre label because I’ve got a small stack of them here and still more are due to come out in February already. There are over a hundred of these things now, all sharing a distinct aesthetic and sensibility while still exploring fresh terrain – last year’s albums of Jürg Frey’s guitar music and Linda Catlin Smith’s Dirt Road are good examples of this fresh growth. The music ranges from composed to improvised, and sometimes from somewhere in between, with composers and musicians from Britain and abroad, both familiar and new.
The hundredth CD has a little bit of everything. Seaside was recorded over two days at the pianist John Tilbury’s house, with the Palestinian oud player Dirar Kalash and composer John Lely on electronics. Group improvisations alternate with solo works by Lely and Christian Wolff. Instead of piano, Tilbury plays the clavichord; a very quiet instrument which is played unamplified throughout these recordings. Besides its delicacy, the sound is strange and exotic, aided by Tilbury making use of pitch bends and unusual intonations. The solo adaptations of two cyclical pieces Wolff wrote for Tilbury back in 1969-70 have a crystalline beauty. Kalash’s oud blends well with the clavichord, while Lely’s electronics are so discreet as to merge with the ambient sounds in and around the house. The group pieces effectively capture a moment, a place, but are less satisfying as coherent musical works. To my ears, at least; I have a problem with improvisation in general. My patience is tested.
I’m more comfortable talking about the two discs dedicated to composers, Dante Boon and Giuliano d’Angiolini. It’s fascinating to compare the two albums, particularly as each composer talks about their use of indeterminate means of organising their music. Both cite the influence of the “New York School” of composers who introduced indeterminacy to their music in the 1950s, with both of them placing particular emphasis on John Cage’s last compositions in the 1980s and early 1990s. The disruptive anarchy of the Fifties and Sixties avant-garde didn’t die away; a tradition emerged and evolved from it. It was largely unnoticed in the world of Serious Music, preoccupied as it was with certainties, whether proffered by Pierre Boulez or Philip Glass.
Cage found a peace between his philosophy and overtly “beautiful” music. Some twenty years later, Boon has assimilated Cage’s ideas well enough to be confident of using them for what he describes as “classical, romantic European art”. His album Clarinet (& Piano) features Jürg Frey as the soloist on all three works (Boon accompanies on piano on two). I’ve mentioned before how, as a composer, Frey has transcended the philosophical purity of his earlier Wandelweiser pieces to make music that more directly affects senses and sentiment without pandering to the listener. This trait becomes clear in his playing of music by others, too (and Boon discusses in more detail on the CD’s website). Boon’s music floats in that ambiguous realm of mood inhabited by Morton Feldman’s late music and similar works at the more introspective end of minimal music. The indeterminate composition makes both musicians work together, outside of externally imposed measures of time. Like late Cage, it’s simultaneously looser (as in more open to potential disruption, less claustrophobic) yet more impersonal (as in the way that nature is impersonal). It shows those works from the late 1980s were not an endpoint.
Giuliano d’Angiolini also speaks of his admiration for Cage and Feldman, and laments that indeterminacy “has been to some extent pushed to the margins, ignored or misunderstood. Too often art is artificial, and too often the artist tries to surprise us or force an emotion upon us. Indeterminacy or chance put a brake on our will.” His CD Cantilena presents works for piano, string quartet, mixed ensemble and multi-tracked flutes. d’Angiolini describes the pieces as “simple compositional machines” but the simplicity of the materials (gamuts of notes, scales) and transparency of the few rules used to perform them yield a restrained lyricism that flows through the entire disc. The slow-motion single notes of the piano piece Finale contrast with the succession of frail chords in the highest register in Allegretto 94.6. The string quartet (suoni della neve e del gelo) employs Cage’s flexible time-brackets to create a distinctive piece of short phrases and isolated sounds.
With both of these composers there’s an emphasis on producing subtle music from the simplest material, organised by simple methods to produce combinations that are complex – in affect if not in surface texture. Great reliance is placed on the performers to interpret the notation, but not in ways that requires subjective inspiration. In all this they show a lot in common with the musical thinking of Christian Wolff – another former footnote to critics of Serious Music who has recently re-emerged as a guiding spirit in the present time.
