Is this drone? No, it’s not; but it’s slow and sombre throughout. Lugubrious, even. That fits, as the seven pieces that make up Sarah Davachi’s cycle The Head As Form’d In The Crier’s Choir [Late Music] all relate to and draw inspiration from the Orpheus myth. The theme of grief – of the solemn, stoic kind – is ever present, as each piece in succession rolls out at the same slow pace and low register, for a litle over ninety minutes in total. The immediate distinction to be made between each work is in its timbre, but the bourdon of the pipe organ is a defining characteristic throughout. Davachi has recorded her performances on four church organs, heard either solo, in combination or with other instruments; besides multitracking, she uses other analog electronics and tape effects. With time, each piece gains its unique identity in its harmonic and textural construction, with pieces alternating between monody and antiphony, even at one point venturing a sepulchral introit melody on synthesiser. When other instruments are added (ranging from viola da gamba to trombone) they serve to expand upon the organ’s tone rather than seek to introduce contrast. One work is entirely electronic and introduces sounds that are more translucent and less weighted down; it’s preceded by a quintet for wind instruments in which Davachi is absent as a performer (the musicians here are Rebecca Lane, Sam Dunscombe, Michiko Ogawa, M.O. Abbott and Weston Olencki). There’s been a recent trend of musicians assaying various organs in a kind of field survey, but this is the first set of pieces I’ve heard where the organs are a means to an end, with each composition having been thoroughly and solidly constructed, unencumbered by any documentary obligation that might have distracted from the overall artistic goal. This is why each piece and the entire cycle can be appreciated with each fresh hearing, as first impressions give way to admiration for the craft, which in turn reveals more artstic depth, despite Davachi having set herself the narrowest of ranges in which to work.
Clara de Asís and Rebecca Lane had worked on their piece Distances Bending [Discreet Editions] for a couple of years or maybe more by the time of the recording heard here – it’s “their long-term project, which takes different forms in specific contexts and configurations in their exploration of harmonic and time proportions”. The version heard here was recorded in Berlin in May 2023 and besides de Asís on synthesizer and Lane on quarter-tone flutes, they’re joined by Sarah Saviet on violin and Deborah Walker on cello. The pacing makes the Davachi album sound brisk, as the four musicians create a music of severe austerity, adding and removing each note with great deliberation. For the listener, it comes across as a prolonged meditative action, with each small, slow step coming from inner immobility rather than tentative fragility. Even when all four are playing, they consciously produce a sound that is consciously thin, favouring closer harmonies and melodic stasis. Flute, cello harmonics and a pure synth patch yield very small differences in timbre, with only the characteristic rasp and edge of Saviet’s bowing providing obvious colouration. It’ll take at least one hearing with patience and undivided attention for the music’s purpose to make an impression on you, but once you’ve got it you’ll probably keep getting it on later listenings in less strenous circumstances.
Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Clara de Asís, Rebecca Lane, Sarah Davachi
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3 by 3, 1 by 3, 1 by 2.
Thursday 13 April 2023
There are some new Jürg Frey albums about on Elsewhere and Another Timbre but I’ll get to them later. Circles, Reeds, and Memories (Elsewhere) documents a concert in Limburg late last year by the trio of Germaine Sijstermans, Koen Nutters and Reinier van Houdt, playing one of their compositions each. I’ve discussed other pieces by all three individually, so here we get to compare their styles more directly. Even while there are strong resemblences, you can detect Sijstermans’ disciplined approach, Nutters’ slow accumulation from the smallest array of pure sounds, van Houdt’s tendency to narrative and slowly developing drama. The trio play clarinets, harmonium, small organ, all blending in ways which I’m sure we’re used to now, although Nutters seems to give Sijstermans more prominent work to do on the clarinet than in her own pieces. The new wrinkle here is the presence of ‘objects’ and tape recordings which rumble underneath the otherwise smooth surface to produce interesting blemishes; or it may be the presence of an audience in the chapel. Neat twenty-minute chunks to sample each composer’s work.
Is he rambling? Giovanni Di Domenico, I mean. The album’s credited to the trio of Domenico, Silvia Tarozzi and Emmanuel Holterbach, but Domenico gets composition credit and, more crucially, “later completed” the work with editing and more of his piano in post-production work. L’Occhio Del Vedere (Elsewhere) is a one-hour piece for microtonal piano, frame drum and piano with the scale, dynamic and interplay of instruments that all resemble late Feldman, but the impetus here favours performance over composition. The harmonic language is similar too, with the piece beginning with an ascending piano scale echoing Feldman’s Piano and String Quartet and Tarozzi’s piquantly tuned violin recalling his propensity for pointedly enharmonic notation. Those resemblences end as the piece tends to drift from one idea to another, a more relatable wandering than Feldman’s formal decisiveness. There are moments when that relatability becomes a weakness, with passages that seem to go nowhere but are too forgiving to command your attention. The real kicker is Holterbach’s large frame drum, which softly hums and throbs behind the violin and piano duet, producing strangely oscillating subharmonics that push everything back into the uncanny again.
Biliana Voutchkova and Sarah Davachi are definitely not rambling in their Slow Poem for Stiebler (Another Timbre), a tribute to the composer Ernstalbrecht Stiebler. Back in 2020 Another Timbre released an album of Voutchkova performing Stiebler, including his violin solo Für Biliana. This duet by Voutchkova and Davachi combines violin, voice and reed organ to stretch short moments from Stiebler’s composition into long, long held sonorities that let harmonies and overtones float around inside each extended phrase. It’s a fittingly odd way to address Stiebler, as his late work such as Für Biliana has seen him moving away from the intensely examined harmonic stasis of his best known pieces, even venturing into florid but creaky improvisation. Voutchkova and Davachi capture both the improvisation and the stasis – even as their piece is notated it expects great flexibility from the performers – with music that is equal parts meditative and analytical.
