Howard Hersh, Angels and Watermarks

Once again, the happy happenstance of my visibility as a critic-reviewer has allowed me access to a new voice on the compositional scene that I would probably not have been exposed to otherwise. Today it is Howard Hersh and his music for piano and chamber orchestra and solo harpsichord, Angels and Watermarks (self-released).

The keyboard soloist is Brenda Tom, who sounds quite excellent in the central role here.

The "Concerto for Piano and Ten Instruments" in three movements opens the program. It has a post-romantic, post-modern piano part filled with motion and unexpected tonal twists and turns. The chamber orchestra parts surrounding the solo statements are well conceived and work together to create a very lively post-modern, post-minimal synchrony that features trading off of motival elements throughout. The piano part has real grit and the entire work has very memorable melodic dash. The performance is sturdy with Ms. Tom leading the way definitively and the chamber ensemble giving us a fine idea of the total sound at hand in the work.

From there we go to two works for solo harpsichord, "Angels and Watermarks," a five movement suite, and "Dream," the ten minute closer.

Both give us a more intimate side of the composer, music that sounds well on the harpsichord, music with neo-classic/vernacular contemporary flourish. The music is inventive and modern yet hearkens back to a time when the harpsichord was a central fixture of a musical world much as the piano was for the years of the salon and beyond.

None of this music is cliche, all sounds fresh. Maestro Hersh adds a distinctive turn to all the music heard here. He is an original and without at all taxing the listener gives us something to follow with pleasure. I look forward to more from him!

Recommended.

Harvey Sollberger, Spillville & Gilead, Red Cedar Chamber Music

Harvey Sollberger came out of Columbia with an MA in the heady days when New Music was as au courant as the space race. He co-founded the acclaimed Group for Contemporary Music with Charles Wuorinen and recorded prolifically with them. He went on to direct the La Jolla Symphony for many years. His time spent as conductor, flautist and teacher left a little room for work as a composer. His earlier works came out on CRI and I remember liking them, but I have not heard anything of his recent music. That is until now.

There's a new release by Red Cedar Chamber Music (58016) of two of Sollberger's recent works that's getting my attention. Spillville & Gilead present two somewhat lengthy chamber compositions that celebrate his love of the Midwest, "Spillville" (2006) for flute, viola and guitar, and "Perhaps Gilead" (2010) for flute, guitar, and string quartet.

The two pieces relate well to each other, both in subject matter and sonance, and are well played by the Red Cedar musicians. Both present a kind of Americana pastoralism, with reworkings of folk dance and traditional fiddle tune sounds coming into the musical picture at important points.

It's music that addresses elemental intervalic relationships, modalities and homespun melodic material in very effective ways. This Sollberger manages to do without sounding like Aaron Copland, which of course is who one first thinks of with music of this sort.

More modern tonalities weave their way in and out of "Perhaps Gilead," less so for "Spillville," but most importantly all elements come together in these compositions as an organic whole, in ways that leave a distinct impression.

This is music of high local color with a singleness of intent that shows originality and great evocative power. The two works stand together as very agreeable examples of a thoroughgoing post-modernism that Charles Ives would certainly recognize and appreciate. I think you will too.

Zack Browning, Secret Pulse

In our digital age we are increasingly exposed to "rapid-cut" visual editing in music videos, advertisements, television shows and movies. Perhaps music videos have most perfected the art as a constant. As the music plays, you get montages in rapid succession: singer close up, singer with other dancers, singer in another setting, and so forth in a constant flow of short-lived images and their momentary return.

I remember that the Smothers Brothers TV show in the late sixties, if I am not mistaken, in a popular segment played the song "Classical Gas" and showed an ultra-rapid series of topical photographic images with rapid cuts following rapid cuts. By then it was an established technique in avant-age cinematography. A prominent contemporary example: the beginning of the sitcom "The Big Bang" shows in a lightening fast series of cuts visuals representing the time from the Big Bang through to the present, stopping with the main characters at home in their apartment.

We are truly in the age of the rapid cut. But it is on the music video especially today where you see cuts that both unfold rapidly and also return to particular shots as the music unfolds.

As if to represent that in purely musical form, Zack Browning in his Secret Pulse (Innova 817) gives us a chamber music that partakes of minimalizt recurrence but alters the mesmerizing trance inducement of sameness by cutting rapidly from contrasting section to contrasting section. No doubt it is a difficult music to play effectively in an ensemble, since every musician must be continually aware of the need to move from short section to short section in ways that give the series of cuts an a-to-b continuity, to construct a conversational syntax smoothly delivered, as it were. They do that and very well too on the CD at hand.

In all there are five works presented on the disk, in varied instrumental combinations: the flute, viola and piano trio in "Hakka Fusion" (2009); flute, cello, violin and electronics in "Secret Pulse" (2004); a String Quartet (2008); a percussion ensemble in "Flying Tones" (2010); and a chamber ensemble in "Moon Thrust" (2009). All the music demonstrates well Zack Browning's minimal-and-cut approach. It is more a somewhat overwrought excitement that is generated in the music than a linear-logical narrative horizontality. It is a music of our time, where the internet, cell phones and any manner of other media occur with their constant cuts along with our multi-tasking tours of daily duty in work and leisure. All that would be superfluous if the music did not convince as music. It does.

The performers do an excellent job putting the sense into the disparate parts, bringing out the composer's long-form musical structure for the assemblage of recurrences and quickly contrasting new "occurrency." If Morton Feldman's later music felt like a leisurely scan of the patterns of a Persian rug, Zack Browning's music is like a rapid traversal of landscape changes in a low-flying jet.

The results make for fascinating listening.

Neil Thornock, "No Stopping, Standing, or Parking:" Music for Saxophones

There is no stopping new music. Leaving aside the question of who would want to do that, if we look for it, it is everywhere. It may not get much media coverage. It may not be listened to by millions of teaming throngs of admirers, but it continues on day-after-day, year-after-year, its creators making a living at it in some way if they are to continue, hoping for a time when their music is recognized, or perhaps basking in the limited sort of recognition available to them in the contemporary world.

Today we take a look at another such composer and another such group of performers--all going at it with conviction and perhaps some courage. I speak of Utah composer Neil Thornock and a group of performers that includes the United States Coast Guard Saxophone Quartet (didn't know they had one!). The album is called No Stopping, Standing or Parking (Navona 5861). It's six of Thornock's works, all involving at least one saxophone. There is a piece for solo soprano sax, one for flute and alto, one for alto and harpsichord, one for alto, tenor and piano and two for sax quartet.

Thornock has a tendency to write music that moves along (so the title of the album is quite appropriate) in ways that have to do with the interlocking motion of Balanese Gamelan, certain forms of avant jazz and rock, and minimalism (though here the repetition factor does not play a prominent role in the music and mostly is only present for a moment as a soon-to-be varied or developed motif). Now that movement does not apply especially to the slower movements and passages that are peppered here and there throughout the program. But it does serve to encapsulate the Thornock musical personality on display.

What his music does often do is develop developmental music dialogs that get punctuated by short tutti phrases of a rather emphatic nature. Sometimes there are longer emphatic interactions as well, especially in the pieces for sax quartet.

It is music that is in its own way "in the air." There's a hectic pace of life in much of the post-industrial/industrial world we are in, and art in this case imitates life. That is not to say that Thornock's music is not original. It is. It's driving. It's exhilarating. It charges forth. And it's very well played on this disk.

Recommended.

Craig Madden Morris, "Dreams:" Modern Chamber Music

There are times when music may not be ultra-advanced catagorically yet be so captivating that one doesn't care. The composer Craig Madden Morris and his chamber music on the album Dreams (Ravello 7813) gives us such a time.

There is lyricism, formal heft, the beautifully played parts (for example Christine Kwak's violin performances are quite lovely) and an idiomatic craftsmanship/inspiration that makes it all a joy to hear.

The piano reduction version of Morris' "Violin Concerto" is a perfect example of this. A ravishing violin presence, an intimate, harmonically early modern-later romantic context played sensitively by Eduard Laurel on piano, all facets come together for a work that brings beauty into your world, one note at a time.

The same is true of the other works presented here: solo piano on "Dream Songs" and "Tropical Dances," cello and piano on "Cello Rhapsody." All serve to map out Morris's most definite stylistic parameters, and all bring a timelessness into play that does not always apply to those working along more-or-less traditional lines. I would love to hear the orchestral versions of the several piano reductions but for now this is something to appreciate repeatedly and happily.