Boring Like A Drill.

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.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Chihiro Ono, Denis Sorokin, Eldritch Priest, Finlay Clark
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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.

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

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Kory Reeder, Matt Sargent, Noah Jenkins
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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.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Cassandra Miller, Laurence Crane, Linda Catlin Smith, Terry Riley
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