Max Giteck Duykers, Folding Music, Ensemble IPSE

Ensemble IPSE plays the music of Max Giteck Duykers (b. 1972) in six compositions on the album Folding Music (New World Music 80811-2). The music takes its additive and subtractive basis from what the liners refer to as the Pierrot Lunaire Sextet, or in other words the instrumentation paradigmatically used in the Schoenberg song cycle Pierrot Lunaire, to accompany the sprechstimme speaking-singing soprano on the 1912 composition. That instrumentation consists of flute/piccolo, clarinet/bass clarinet, violin/viola, cello and piano. Many chamber works that followed in Pierrot's wake had this basic instrumentation, sometimes with the addition of a percussionist or two.

The title composition Folding Music (2017) has the basic instrumentation plus a percussionist. Ensemble IPSE are further utilized for another five compositions making use of various possibilities contained within the sextet, so "Scatterloop" (2016) is for violin and piano, "The Way In" (2015) for soprano, cello and piano, "Twilight for Adored and Breathless Moments" (2007) for the Pierrot Sextet plus a single percussionist, "Arborescence" (2010, 2018) for piano solo, and finally "Dark Body" (2015) for a quartet of flute, violin, cello and piano.

All the music is finely wrought in a sort of melodically alive New Music-cum-High-Modern-Postmodernism distinguished by Duykers' highly inventive musical imagination. The variety of instrumental chamber configurations helps allow Duykers' to reinvent himself nicely with each chamber gem.

I will not run down the program with a blow-by-blow description of each work. I do recommend you listen to the album and appreciate the fine musicianship of the Ensemble IPSE members and the highly interesting music of Duykers. Bravo!