John Cage, Toshio Hosokawa, Frozen Time, Dominik Susteck

Those in various winter zones out there right now can affirm that the season has been most intemperate. What better a time, then, to talk about an album entitled Frozen Time (Wergo 73682). It is Dominik Susteck in a program of most engaging high modernist organ music. We get a look at three composers and their realizations of the instrument's sonic potential. It is very much about extended techniques and sound color atmospherics in a firmly avant new music sense.

The ability of the organ to endlessly sustain is a factor in all the music. But then what organ work does not make use of this trait in some way? It is implied in the very notion of massive organ acoustics in a large space.

And so we have music by John Cage ("organ2/aslsp"). Toshio Hosokawa ("cloudscape, sen iv") and the organist himself (carillons I-III").

So what of this music? Necessary for understanding Maestro Susteck's choice of works and their interpretation is a grounding in a sense of the traditional aesthetic regarding music. Time is a special category that helps distinguish traditional Japanese from Western musical stances. For the Japanese tradition the fundamental organizing principal is the breath. The length of phrases and their movement are not about pulses in time, but rather that which can and should be articulated in one full breath as a unit. Music imitates nature in ways that surround the fundamental breath of life.

John Cage in this regard often through his Zen Buddhist outlook brings something of the Japanese aesthetic to avant Western music. Is it a sort of breath-event for him? Not precisely. The music is rather an idealized model of nature, yet also as non-intentional, is something produced by nature. It is more complex than that. Nevertheless his organ work "Organ2/aslp" makes of the music itself and its realization like a roadmap to a territory, the landscape produced by the inner state of the performer in conjunction with the open yet specific demands of the score. Aslp stands for "as slow as possible," slow being here a relational unfolding of the sounds, the roadmap being proportional to the realized performance. Music here is a spatial thing, a sound-spatial realization of the proportionality Cage sets out. Hence it is not quite temporal and hence the title of the CD Frozen Time. These ideas are too complex fully to reproduce here.

The works that follow by Toshio Hosokawa and Dominik Susteck are other ways of establishing musical spaces.

The music as sounded by Dominik Susteck involves landscapes of emanation. The traversal of course implies a temporal presence in the Kantian sense, but the element itself is not primary to the music.

It is fascinating to me how this music functions on one plane as a series of mnemonic devices for a meta-natural state of being. That only if you care to hear it that way. You can bypass it and just listen, too.

Altogether the music presents provocative sound hermetics. Each invites the listener to experience the sounds as she or he would traverse an earthen or astral territory. We take a series of trips that are as much about the music's "pointing to" as they are about the sound sequences themselves. In this way we feel a more non-Western deconcretization of time and the intrusion of natural allocations. It is not necessary to grasp all of this to appreciate the compositions. They fit by their existence into what the modernist project makes available to the organ as instrument.

For all these reasons and for the quality of the sound production itself I expect any adventuresome soul would gain as I did a point of view about modern-as-beyond-modernist-dogmatics and so too a sensual envelopment of sound art. I recommend this one!