Mark Nowakowski, Blood, Forgotten, String Quartets, Emily Ondracek-Peterson, Voxare String Quartet

To use a compound descent-location identity marker for a composer is usually to say that the music has more about it than perhaps a single wide neighborhood belongingness would indicate. So in the case of Mark Nowakowski (b. 1978) he is designated Polish-American on the CD at hand today. It happens to be apt because the chamber music program on Blood, Forgotten (Naxos 8.559821) has a thematic element directed toward the Polish homeland and its three centuries of upheaval and instability. The suffering of the people in the hands of political adversaries centers the musical dramatics.

A strong dirge-like grief is present in various ways throughout. Modern traces of Penderecki and Gorecki are forebears in the programmatic and often emotional intensity of these. The music is for small string groupings. The title work (2005) is for electronics and Emily Ondracek-Peterson on violin. The Voxare String Quartet are the principals on the other works: "String Quartet No. 1 'Songs of Forgiveness'" (2010), "String Quartet No. 2 'Grandfather Songs'" (2011) and "A Usnijze mi, usnij (Lullaby: Sleep for me, sleep)" (2012).

The "Blood, Forgotten" work is a heartbreaking, haunting combination of sorrowfully expressive violin and eerie electronics. The violin has doubled and tripled lines in the electronic track and there are other gestural electronic punctuations.

Nowakowski's First Quartet has some of the more energetic music of the four. There is much to hear in the agitated section, and then the dirgely slow blocks of stark, open chords make for a distinct lamenting mood that we hear often enough in most of this music.The blocks can resolve into the related slow speech of a four-way counterpoint, too. And it all works together.

Think of Barber's famous "Adagio" and Gorecki's most popular symphony (No. 3), then add some of the dramatic depictive expressivity of earlier Penderecki, mix it all up and then include Nowakowski's very original way and that may help give you an idea of how the music sounds. Deep down all of this relates obliquely to Beethoven's "Funeral March" from Eroica. And also the regret of Beethoven late quartets at times. And so there are strands of belonging to a continuum of sad expressions. Yet this is Nowakowski. Make no mistake.

It all fits together as pieces of a larger style-puzzle that is moving and irrepressible. This music demands you enter into it on its own terms. If you do there is singularity and undeniable modern musicality. It is the opposite of Webern. There is no short hot potato pointillism, but instead a long, sprawling,  endless block of anguish transcended by the beauty of how the music lays out.

The continually blowing wind of new music to hear requires that we point our aeolian wind harp in the direction of the oncoming blasts. We then must listen and see how it resonates with our receptive "strings." Any new music requires this, and ideally we must let it blow into our harp-like heads a number of times before we grasp what it IS. That is the case with these rather deep Nowakowski musing laments. It is good. The performances are excellent. The music special. Listen.