It’s composition, but who composed it? William Walker’s The Southern Harmony and Musical Companion is an anthology of American shape note hymns, published in 1835. In 2022, Cleek Schrey and Weston Olencki performed “readings” of selections from this volume on a pair of old wooden pump organs. At first, their interpretation of The Southern Harmony and Musical Companion [Pagans] seems straightforward enough. The variegated tones of the organs and extraneous mechanical sounds serve to illuminate the austere exoticism to be found in a colonial vernacular form of serious expression. John Cage became fascinated by the subtleties of this simple, supposedly crude formalism in his study of late 18th Century American music and composed a series of works based on similar hymns. It’s impossible to hear Schrey and Olencki here without recalling Cage’s own organ suite Some of “The Harmony of Maine” (Supply Belcher); but while Cage creates something new through erasure and extension, Schrey and Olencki are apparently retaining all the right notes in the right order. The natural variation in the organs’ sounds are exploited to highlight the overtones produced by the material, as first in inconspicuous ways, before taking a sudden turn in the two renditions at the heart of this collection. Each of these much longer pieces is a lingering meditation on the hymn’s substance, elongating each tone to provoke beating frequencies and ghostly timbres. Schrey and Olencki augment these two versions with sine tones, reed organ and bowed and scraped banjo strings, using the additional sounds as reference points for how much the organ sound has transformed into something strange and uncanny.
A new recording of Martin Arnold’s music is always welcome, even when given in somewhat bittersweet circumstances. Flax [Another Timbre] is a solo piano work for Philip Thomas, drawing inspiration from Thomas’ superb interpretations of Arnold’s music and from his insightful survey of Morton Feldman’s complete works for solo piano. Sadly, ill health has prevented Thomas from performing the piece. The task has since fallen to Kerry Yong, a pianist with an overlapping repertoire and a shared inquisitive approach to new music. Yong’s approach finds the double image that often hovers in the background of Arnold’s music: his compositions are made of the slenderest elements, arranged into a light but self-supporting structure which suggests a more fully-fleshed work that will remain a spectral presence in the listener’s imagination. The music is persistently calm and alert – a connection to the jazz pianists Arnold name-checks when discussing his piece. Yong captures this mood by maintaining a relaxed almost-a-groove, taking his time without losing the pulse, yet always gently interrogating whether this attitude is justified by or at odds with the material. As for the material, Arnold has described Flax as an exploration of the higher registers of the piano, and the piece does pursue the fine line between the delicate and the brittle. When the high notes are absent, the work takes a new turn in demeanour and form. Melodies play out in small fragments like slow riffs, with almost accidental chords and occasional brief chromatic runs, the overall shape remaining unclear yet becoming more distinct as the piece progresses. In this recording, Flax clocks in at seventy-nine minutes, so Yong’s pacing becomes critical. As always, Arnold avoids stasis, preciousness, doesn’t ramble; each small part is essential. Like an experienced story-teller, Yong lets each detail fall into place with confidence that you can piece it together.
