Boring Like A Drill.

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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It’s a fitting title. I dischi di Angelica seem to have been on hiatus for a few years but returned with some new releases in 2019. The label, dedicated to recordings of live gigs from the AngelicA Festival in Bologna, has put out a succession of eclectic and surprising discs, the latest of which is an absolute pearler. aaangelicaaa may 10th. 2015 captures a gig on said date by the Zipangu Ensemble, a small orchestra of string instruments playing one half-hour piece each by Charlemagne Palestine and Cassandra Miller. That may seem an odd pairing at first (although Palestine must be used to it) but both share a trait of messing with your head, big time. Palestine does it overtly, while Miller is more insidious.

Strummmmminggg for Stringggggsss N Thingggggsss is a reworking of of Palestine’s venerable Strumming Music from the early 70s. If you’re familiar with the string ensemble version of the piece included on the Sub Rosa reissue Strumming Music then you will not be fully prepared for this. Palestine begins solo, keening in falsetto over rubbed glasses; the strings come in lower pitched, with cellos and basses augmenting the violins. The heavier texture, with Palestine’s singing, creates a rich, complex drone that swells and heaves and, just as it seems to be dying away, is joined by prolonged rolls on a pair of tubular bells. There’s a manic energy in the sound and the gesture from the orchestra that matches Palestine’s solo performances.

Miller’s piece, A Large House, was written for string orchestra and is played here by a smaller ensemble. A bass drum rolls underneath the strings as they play a slow, descending glissando. The orchestra slides down, and down, and further down. Then they keep descending. An endless Shepard tone made rough and ragged by the strings, it simultaneously falls, collapses and sinks. When you think it can’t go any further, it just ploughs on remorselessly. Listening through it is like being caught in one of those looping panic dreams that never resolve, with that giddy sense of dread and perverse exhilaration. It has the psychoacoustic trippiness of the best drone while acting as an aural Rorschach blot for the listener’s subconscious. Cranked up loud, it is a face-melting experience.

The live recording sounds great; my only niggle is that the applause is left in at the end of each piece, when it could have been set aside as separate tracks.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Cassandra Miller, Charlemagne Palestine
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(Continued from Part 1, here.)

I’ve already said eclectic, haven’t I? The thrid night began with a Bulgarian folk ritual, performed by the Mogila Kukeri Group: enactments of peasant life encircled by animal-headed creatures swathed in dozens of cowbells. The look and sound of these costumes was overpowering, the bells loud enough to drown out even the bagpipes. There was an emphasis in their movements in establishing boundaries, defining a space and direct representation of common activities. It was the closest the festival came to the heart of its theme of witchcraft. With the departing Bulgarians still fading away into the distance, the space was given over to Fluxus, with the combined forces of Musarc and An Assembly performing Alison Knowles’ Work for Wounded Furniture, segueing into La Monte Young’s Poem for Chairs, Tables, Benches, etc. Again, common objects and simple actions were presented plain, with Knowles giving us inadvertent theatre and music through establishing a new frame of reference for observing the partial destruction and ineffectual repair of household objects, while Young gives a new focus to unintentional sound, and to the inherent theatricality of making music. The musicians regrouped in the wings for Heleen van Haegenborgh’s new piece Material Affordance, which awkwardly tried to make sense out of its mix of antiphonal singing and half-blowing over recorders before suddenly setting off on a march to nowhere across the space and out again.

More striking was another LCMF commission, Alwynne Pritchard’s piece for pianist Zubin Kanga, Heart of Glass. Kanga fearlessly carried out this piece on, in and around the piano while confined to tuxedo and stilettos, deftly performing complex musical gestures in an apparent fugue state. Pritchard’s audio score dictates the the pianist, attempting to approximate a state of hypnosis. There were accompanying videos as well, which I could never get a good look at. The premise of the piece required a certain suspension of disbelief but I suspect would still be an effective piece of music without the theatrical element, due to the obscutiry of the sounds and the amorphous, dream logic behind them. The following night, Kanga premeried Michael Finnissy’s Hammerklavier, another LCMF commission. Again combining piano with video, Finnissy’s typically brilliant and incisive discourse on Sviatoslav Richter and Beethoven was paired with Adam de la Cour’s film collage of Richter in concert and vintage gay erotica. The alchemical connections between these elements were stronger for being palpable even as they resist (or are forbidden from) being addressed in words, even as the cultural references are as opaque to me as Bulgarian folk rituals.

There is a common problem to so much “magical” or transformative art, in that it makes grand claims for itself beyond art that are hard to sustain. I’m not sure what Bhanu and Rohini Kapil’s One or the other is not enough was supposed to be about; all I got was a muddled lecture about metaphysics and theosophists over a small pile of stuff. Almost inevitably, more audience participation was requested. Shamans are a pushy lot, it seems. There were films, too, which I can’t comment on much other than this bemused Anglophone observer was reminded of the existence of that curious sub-genre of postwar European artists who were still bravely socking it to the same 1905-Bolshevik pasteboard gallery of priests and generals as late as the turn of this century.

The theme of “eavesdropping” on Thursday night incorporated Rowland Hill’s performance of Vito Acconci’s Seedbed (“a recreation of”, according to the programme). The change in gender wasn’t so much the confounding element as the change in form: a performance for an audience, heard but not seen. The interpersonal dynamic here was the same as a particularly uncomfortable standup comedy gig. Louis D’Heudieres’ Laughter Studies 6 provided actual comedy with its noble but doomed attempts to alternately describe and/or imitate a stop-start series of unheard sounds played to members of An Assembly through headphones; art is mediated experience, and all mediation is distortion.

I’ll give Cerith Wyn Evans’ …. )( the benefit of the doubt as it was described as a “precum teaser” for a much larger commission for the 2020 LCMF. The hieratic, slow-paced performance on piano and gongs was betrayed by a perfunctory and non-committal ending, so let’s hope it’s a fragment of a work in progress. The set by duo O YAMA O (Rie Nakajima and Keiko Yamamoto) was a disappointment, considering Nakajima’s captivating and inventive interpretation of Alvin Lucier’s Chambers this summer. Maybe it was the vast space of Ambika P3, or one of us was having an off night, but the duo’s small sounds came across as inert and trivial.

Finally, there was the chance to hear Cassandra Miller’s incredible Duet for Cello and Orchestra played live. For this performance the soloist was Anton Lukoszevieze, with an orchestra conducted by Jack Sheen. I’ve raved about this music before, so I’ll just compare this interpretation to the Tectonics recording: here was more grit and grain in the cello’s stasis, with a more rough-hewn phrasing in the orchestra’s tangled melodies. This brought out more of the folk-inspired aspect of Miller’s music, as heard in other of her pieces. The piece remarkably maintains an inner calm, even as the interweaving of the orchestral parts pushes the piece to the brink of chaos (think Cage’s unbridled simultaneity instead of Ligeti’s intricacy). The poignancy of the closing cadenza was felt all the more in the faint, exhausted rasp of the cello’s harmonic soliloquy.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Alison Knowles, Alwynne Pritchard, Cassandra Miller, La Monte Young, Louis D’Heudieres, Michael Finnissy
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I’ve been waiting a year for the next batch of releases from All That Dust. The first bit of great news is that one of the new CDs is dedicated to Cassandra Miller’s works for voice. Last year’s pair of Miller albums on Another Timbre took a great step in addressing the need for her music to be more commercially available and this addition gives us some important details of the bigger picture of her music, casting her work into a different light.

Songs about Singing focuses on the voice, particularly the soprano Juliet Fraser, one of the co-founders of All That Dust. Two of the four works on the disc were premiered by her, the results of a continuing close collaboration. I was lucky enough to hear the premieres of one, plus another of these pieces at Kammer Klang a couple of years ago, where they left an indelible impression. I may as well quote my impression of Traveller Song pretty much in full:

Traveller Song, in which the Plus-Minus Ensemble accompanied a tape of ragged, keening voices. Again, it seemed to be a documentation of some vocal ritual, with Western musical tropes laid on top. She’s from Canada, it must be something indigenous so I guess we better put up with those scratchy voices. But the ensemble – first just piano four hands, then clarinet, violin and cello, finally just an accordion – were playing some sort of game. At times deferentially minimal, then fulsomely mournful, astringently avant-garde and then, at inopportune moments, flamboyantly romantic. It just seemed to keep going, trying out different costumes and poses. By the end, I didn’t know if it was amazing or terrible.

Tonight I pulled up the programme for the concert for the first time and holy guacamole if the whole thing isn’t a headtrip that would do Kagel proud. The voices are Miller’s own, singing along to Sicilian folk-music without being able to hear herself, then attempting to accompany herself. She describes it as an attempt “to explore my own bodily impulses related to melody” and admits it sounds like “quasi-shamanistic keening” but the whole work is a tour de force in the creative potency of cultural transmission and reproduction. More than any simple cross-pollination from an “exotic” culture, the act of transmission itself is a necessarily distorting process; in which imitation becomes a transformative act that creates something strange and new.

The new recording, again with the Plus-Minus Ensemble, benefits from the cleaner acoustic conditions of a studio over a crowded bar in Dalston. The listener’s more sober surroundings and the performers’ greater familiarity make the piece seem more confident and accomplished in the adoption of its various guises. It may sound a little more disingenuous now and more of a pose (but then I’d forgotten that I invoked Kagel in my first write-up) but those themes and issues raised by the first hearing are now more focused; more importantly, the emotional content of the ensemble accompaniment is also clearer, more powerful and coherent, even as it plays upon the listener’s consciousness with its contradictions. The simple sentimentality, so pervasive in other found-voice-swathed-in-strings compositions, is affectionately and cruelly lampooned.

For the remaining pieces, the voice is presented live by Juliet Fraser. Tracery: Hardanger and Tracery: Lazy, Rocking are part of a continuing project between Fraser and Miller, where the singer is accompanied by tapes of herself. Hearing Tracery: Hardanger live, I commented that “if there was a process, it seemed to be part of a meditative rite.” It is, indeed, a type of ‘automatic singing’ in which Fraser “performs a body scan meditation whilst listening on headphones and (perhaps) responding vocally to a piece of source material.” The multiple takes add another layer of complexity to this feedback loop. In recording, more attention can be paid to the harmonising, drones, microtones and inadvertent canons that emerge from the weave of vocies. Fraser’s voice has the right mix of vulnerability and resilience to call up an equally complex array of potential meanings and interpretations from the listener.

The thing I hadn’t picked up before is that both Tracery works, like Traveller Song, are made out of other music. The reflexive title of the disc starts to make sense. Hardanger, unsurprisingly, uses Hardanger fiddle tunes as the ‘input’ for the vocalising feedback process, while Lazy, Rocking takes a movement from the late Ben Johnston’s Eighth String Quartet. This unusual form of musical quotation underpins a lot of Miller’s music, but wasn’t so evident on the Another Timbre discs except for the string quartet About Bach. The use of quotation and of cultural transmission through distortion of a pre-existing model comes here through direct experience, subjectively interpreted through the act of singing itself, whether by the performer in the Tracery project or the composer in Traveller Song.

The oldest work in this album, Bel Canto from 2010, takes a similar approach. Fraser is joined by the Plus-Minus Ensemble, playing as two distinct trios, each independently playing in response to the soprano as she adopts the vocal affectations of Maria Callas. She swoops and sighs, and each little group of instruments sighs and swoons in sympathy. The sliding tones are falling, seemingly always falling, in a presentation that is both mournful and noble – in ways that the singer may not have expected. (To hear the piece in this way is to acknowledge that Fraser is playing Callas as a character, or a type, adding another layer of meaning to the musical texture.) As a composition, it works simultaneously as a clear-eyed exercise in analysis and as a study in pathos, in the same way that Berio’s Rendering presents such a troubling double image; but again, the emphasis here is placed on the interpretation over the message. Understanding can reveal so much, without ever explaining.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Cassandra Miller
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Everyone else has been raving about these two new Cassandra Miller CDs and I need to get in on it too. Like many others, I’ve been waiting for the second half of Another Timbre’s Canadian Composer Series to drop since the accompanying booklet came out with the first batch of discs in May last year. The booklet’s promised titles have now been delivered in full, including several fresh recordings from the first half of 2018. I’ve spent the long weekend playing these five CDs over and over, purely for enjoyment.

I added that last bit because I could have written up the lot after just one listening; each one of them leaves an extraordinarily vivid impression in the mind. I’ll get around to discussing all of them in the next few days but right now I need to mention the two I had been most looking forward to, dedicated to music by Cassandra Miller. I’ve been alternately baffled and knocked out but always charmed by her music, so here’s the chance to get some on record. O Zomer! includes the title piece and violin solo For Mira, both of which were played at the Cafe Oto gig a couple of weeks ago. The same musicians play here on the CD and so the performances are equally excellent – better, I should say, as the playing conditions would have been preferable. As with Mira Benjamin on For Mira, dedicatee Philip Thomas plays the piano piece Philip the Wanderer with expected authority. Any wandering in the piece is typically incongruous and beguiling: a slow rising up from the depths, followed by a declamatory pealing of bells and ending on a single, repeating scale ascending in the higher registers. At one point, the page turner starts to whistle in descant (here, the whistler is violinst Clemens Merkel from the Quatuor Bozzini). I could wonder why all this happens but it’s simply delightful as-is.

The disc includes the BBC’s recording of the monumental Duet for Cello and Orchestra, from its world premiere in 2015 at the Tectonics Festival in Glasgow. This was my introduction to Miller’s music and hearing it again in retrospect has only magnified its achievement. Cellist Charles Curtis with Ilan Volkov conducting the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra are superbly matched for this piece, an aural frieze that juxtaposes an almost immobile cello with rolling fanfares from the orchestra, like an inverted antiphony. As time passes, the orchestra is subdued by the cello and in turn subsumes it; only at the end does the soloist emerge for a brief, enigmatic statement, half whispered. The transcendentalism of Ives and Ruggles looms beneath the surface, that of a mystery that cannot be contained in words.

The second disc, Just So, consists of string quartets played by the Quatuor Bozzini. The major work here, About Bach, is a fitting companion to the Duet for Cello and Orchestra: viola and cello play in the manner of baroque viols, a chorale that crosses over itself again and again until it finally exhausted. Against this, the violins play endlessly rising harmonics in the stratosphere, ethereal and remote. The effect is sublime at first and then strangely affecting as the elegaic implications of the music embed themselves in the consciousness, the harmonics continuing unperturbed by the cadences below. Miller talks about this piece being shaped by Bach transcriptions, Jewish music and computer glitches, bringing order out of the messy circumstances of life. Quatuor Bozzini make the fiendish technical requirements of playing this piece with finesse all but invisible.

The other pieces contain elements of the folkloric, to varying degrees. Warblework names its four movements after species of birds, mixing up the mimetic, programmatic and impressionistic in an idiosyncratic way that deftly avoids the Scylla and Charybdis of Messiaen and John Luther Adams. The disc is topped and tailed by two brief works, the smart and sweet almost-a-solo Just So which sounds like a folksong transcription, and the more serene and sonorous Leaving which is, in fact, a transcription. It’s been worth the wait.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Cassandra Miller
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They were promised, and they delivered. It takes one hell of a strong programme to get me to bear an August evening inside Cafe Oto so of course I went to the Canadian Composers Series Concert last Monday. The first series produced some of the best gig moments from last year, launching the first half of Another Timbre’s series of ten CDs. Those first five releases were particularly strong and presented Canada as something of a hot spot for an intriguing group of contemporary composers. The long-awaited second half of the series has now finally dropped.

Two of the new discs are dedicated to Cassandra Miller, now resident in London. I’ve been hanging for these CDs to come out because Miller has a particular knack for messing with parts of my head that most other composers don’t reach. The Oto set was topped and tailed with her O Zomer!, a piece which perfectly illustrates what I’m talking about. A single, harmonic note is passed back and forth between cello and contrabass, over a muted vibraphone. It’s beautifully balanced, superbly judged, and then it all swerves into an unhinged whaling on piano, crotales and blaring trumpet. It stops, eventually. Crazy. For Mira is a brief but substantial work for solo violin which morphs back and forth between Bach partita and Handanger fiddle tune; it was played by its dedicatee, the Canadian Mira Benjamin. The musicians had the impertinence to start on time and so I missed the other solo turn, when Canadian clarinettist Heather Roche played Alex Jang’s momentary encounters (5) outside the venue.

Together with musicians from Apartment House and conductor Jack Sheen, they played four chamber works by Linda Catlin Smith, including Blackwing, a world premiere not listed in the advance publicity. I’ve praised Smith’s music on several previous occasions but I need to point out her ability to keep surprising me with pieces such as Stare at the River, where piano, trumpet, double bass and percussion evoke cool jazz before solidifying into a stately procession.

Another great part of the night was getting to hear two more composers with whom I’m not at all familiar. I’ve heard one short piece by Alex Jang, which suggested a similarity with other composers in this series: a use of traditional forms and harmony, repurposed into something new and – not so much strange, as uncanny. His longer piece played at Oto, distributed tourism, was quite different from this, with more diffuse sounds and an obscure structure that put the listeners on much less certain ground. The ambiguousness of its sound was more pronounced by being the longest piece played on the night.

There was also a sense of certainties breaking up into suggestive but nebulous sounds in the other premiere of the night, the appropriately named Shadow Worlds by Lance Austin Olsen. I’m completely unfamiliar with Olsen’s work other than as a painter, including the covers of several CDs in this series. The combination of trumpet, cello, double bass and percussion approached sound in a different way, skirting between sound as material (for harmony, for timbre) and sound as subject unlike any of the other composers in the series. I’m looking forward to listening through the new CDs and reporting back after further investigation.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Alex Jang, Cassandra Miller, Lance Austin Olsen, Linda Catlin Smith
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Went to the latest Kammer Klang gig a couple of weeks ago. It was recorded by the BBC and is on their website for the next month. Which is good, because I need to hear it again.

For me, the big event of the night was two world premieres by the Canadian composer Cassandra Miller. I’ve heard only a few pieces by her – including a dizzying performance of her choral piece Guide by Exaudi last year – and liked it all a lot. There are times when you discover an artist and you need to hear more; more of that good thing that won you in the first place. Then there are artists whose work you find yourself exploring like an unknown island, kept in suspense over what you might encounter next.

In Tracery: Hardanger, singer Juliet Fraser sang against a recording of herself, doubling and approximating microtonal drones, one breath at a time. If there was a process, it seemed to be part of a meditative rite. This was followed by Traveller Song, in which the Plus-Minus Ensemble accompanied a tape of ragged, keening voices. Again, it seemed to be a documentation of some vocal ritual, with Western musical tropes laid on top. She’s from Canada, it must be something indigenous so I guess we better put up with those scratchy voices. But the ensemble – first just piano four hands, then clarinet, violin and cello, finally just an accordion – were playing some sort of game. At times deferentially minimal, then fulsomely mournful, astringently avant-garde and then, at inopportune moments, flamboyantly romantic. It just seemed to keep going, trying out different costumes and poses. By the end, I didn’t know if it was amazing or terrible.

Tonight I pulled up the programme for the concert for the first time and holy guacamole if the whole thing isn’t a headtrip that would do Kagel proud. The voices are Miller’s own, singing along to Sicilian folk-music without being able to hear herself, then attempting to accompany herself. She describes it as an attempt “to explore my own bodily impulses related to melody” and admits it sounds like “quasi-shamanistic keening” but the whole work is a tour de force in the creative potency of cultural transmission and reproduction. More than any simple cross-pollination from an “exotic” culture, the act of transmission itself is a necessarily distorting process; in which imitation becomes a transformative act that creates something strange and new.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Cassandra Miller
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