Stacy Garrop, Mythology Symphony

Chicago-based composer Stacy Garrop is in focus on today's program of her orchestral works written between 1999 and 2013, Mythology Symphony (Cedille 90000 160). The music is quite respectably performed by the CCPA Symphony Orchestra under Alondra de la Parra and Markand Thakar. We get the title work (2007-2013) in its world premiere recording, plus "Thunderwalker" (1999) and "Shadow" (2001).

The main event is the five-movement symphony, each movement themed upon a myth involving a woman or women. The music has an eclectic advanced tonal-modern quality, with dynamic orchestration and an expansive thematic flourish. It was written in stages over six years in response to a number of commissions, each producing one or more movements. They center around the story of Medusa, Penelope in waiting for her husband Odysseus, the Sirens, the Three Sisters of Fate, and Pandora. Each movement has loosely programmatic elements and moods that correspond to the narratives involved. And so we have a spectrum of orchestral events ranging from the gentle and serene to the dynamic and turbulent. We ultimately are treated to a work of contrasts, of depth and expressive girth.

"Thunderwalker" summons and depicts in three movements a sky-dwelling thunder god "whose footsteps fall loudly upon the clouds."

"Shadow" came out of Ms. Garrop's stay with the Yaddo artist colony located in Saratoga Springs, NY. The artists and photographers and the snapshots she herself took at the site become the impetus for the work, as bits of light and color transpose into counterpoint, changing texture and intersections of sound blocks.

The program shows us a composer of promise, filled with lucid musical ideas and a sure sense of the orchestral forces at hand. The music alternates between modern and tonally expressive, while remaining consistently eventful and scintillating. The "Mythology Symphony" is the most accomplished of the three. The other two works add to our appreciation of her development and are a good listen in themselves.

Recommended.

Michael Mauldin, The Last Musicians of UR, CD Single

When something works for you musically, it emanates with a feeling of inner satisfaction. Some folks just affirm that feeling and go on. Reviewers have to ask themselves why.

The satisfaction in my case is about Michael Mauldin's The Last Musician of UR (Navona 5891), as performed by the Moravian Philharmonic under Petr Vronsky. It's a seven-minute work and the disk that results is a CD single of short duration.

There's a back story to the music. Ten years ago looters damaged the Gold Lyre of UR, said to be the oldest stringed instrument extant, while plummeting the Iraq Museum in Baghdad. Andrew Lowings, an English harpist, set about to recreate a working version.

Mauldin's orchestral work was composed with this harp in mind. He sets about imagining the last-ever harpist of UR and what he might have played, what he might have thought.

The ensuing orchestral work has, understandably, a prominent harp part which is quite lovely. The work itself is in the best sort of "tonal exotica" mode. One of the impressionists might have written it--or Hovhaness, even more so.

It's a beautiful little work. The list price on this baby is $2.99 and I think you'll find it well worth your coinage for the pleasure it brings. Mauldin did something you should hear!

Tan Dun, Concerto for Orchestra

There is something about the work of Chinese-American composer Tan Dun. If you become familiar with one or more of his works, then hear a new one, you tend to recognize the style, and it's not that of anybody else. There is gift for orchestration. Brilliant. And sound color. There is often a traditional Chinese influence, yes, but also of the world, India, Asia in general, but truly the world. There is almost a ritual quality to his music. The listening to it a kind of rite. It's his use of space, almost ceremonial. The horizontal quality of the development. Like a turtle? Yes, except no, not that the music is especially slow to get someplace. It is the way he gets there, deliberate, movements, stops, a side turn, a pause, then movement forward again, like a turtle. And the music is always about something--about the sound, about the imagery it may evoke.

These are the thoughts I have listening to his new Naxos disk, Tan Dun conducting his Concerto for Orchestra (2012) (Naxos 8.570608) along with his "Symphonic Poem on Three Notes" (2012) and "Orchestral Theatre" (1990). The Hong Kong Philharmonic is well rehearsed and extremely sympatico with this music. These are state-of-the-art performances, certainly. And the music?

All of it stands out. There is excellent use of percussion color and a masterfully original brilliance to the orchestral presence. The music embraces often some non-Western, non-classical phrasings and tonal modes, along with a very original take on modernity. The sonic and harmonic-melodic advances in music syntax made in the past 100 years are not abandoned, nor are they simply aped. Instead they are transformed according to the inner voices of the muses that Tan Dun undoubtedly hears.

So on the "Symphonic Poems on Three Notes" we get all kinds of inventive twists and turns on a very simple three note motif. "Orchestral Theatre" is very dramatic and ritual-like, yet quite exceptional in its use of the orchestral palette.

The "Concerto for Orchestra" is in four movements, and in virtuostic fashion creates four vivid sound paintings, in Tan Duns words, a creation of his own personal "orchestra of the future" which directly engages roots as it expands outward into future horizons. The music is based in part on Tan Dun's opera Marco Polo, and manages to evoke skillfully and engagingly a journey to hitherto unknown lands in geographical and personal-experiential terms. . . the timeless markets of the East, desert India, China's Forbidden City.

In the end we have some exceptional orchestral music, brilliantly performed. Tan Dun is a marvel. He shows himself, his music well to us on this enchanted disk. Hear this one, by all means!

Paradigms: New Sounds for the Modern Orchestra

We live in a time in the arts that cannot yet be captured by one word. It is most certainly "the period after" what came before, but what is that? It is only to say that it is today, not yesterday. Is that necessarily a bad thing? In the field of new music one thing positive about it is that there is no "cultural police" dictating what one must create, no special "out" or "in" group. Oh I suppose you could single out loosely grouped coteries with certain stylistic affinities: high modernists, post-modernists, minimalists, those that create music that could be termed neo-early, neo-classical, or neo-romantic, and of course the avant garde lives on, and so forth, but no one group dominates. What it means to the listener is that there is a wide variety of styles in play in the music being created right now. That's probably healthy and it certainly gives the music lover much to choose from.

With that in mind we look at the new anthology Paradigms: New Sounds for the Modern Orchestra (Navona 5880). Here we have six recent compositions, convincingly played by the Slovak Radio Symphony under Robert Black, and the Moravian Philharmonic under Petr Vronsky, respectively.

There are composers attached to these works that you might not have heard of: Warren Gooch, Rain Worthington, Howard Quilling, Allen Brings, Paula Diehl, and Joseph Koykkar. Yet they are a talented bunch, each providing a work that shows mastery of craft and creative spark.

If you were to try and label the music, it is primarily post- and neo- with some shades of modernism thrown in for good measure. All of the works make convincing statements, make good use of the orchestra as an instrument of color and contrast, and sound contemporary.

The musical as a whole typifies an aspect of the contemporary orchestral scene and does it with some very good, very listenable new music.

Jason Kao Hwang, Spontaneous River: "Symphony of Souls"

Jason Kao Hwang is not afraid to do something new. Improvising violinist, composer, conductor, he's formed Spontaneous River, an orchestra of improvising artists. There are currently 38 string players. Jason on solo violin plus 14 violinists, including Sarah Bernstein; five violists; five cellists, including Daniel Levin and Tomas Ulrich; six contrabassists, including Michael Bisio and Ken Filiano; seven guitarists, including Dom Minasi and James Keepnews; plus Andrew Drury at the drums, making a total of 39 instrumentalists. The point is that these are some of the most actively interesting and accomplished string improvisers on the New York scene.

They join together to play Maestro Hwang's 11 movement composition Symphony of Souls (Mulatta 022). I am deliberately posting this review on my modern classical site because I think it's important that this work be heard by new jazz improv conoisseurs but also those who follow and appreciate contemporary classical works from the present day. I believe that both groups with their overlaps can well appreciate what is going on in this music, given repeated listens and concentrated attention.

What then of the music? It has composed modern orchestral sections; it has some flat-out ultra-modern jazz orchestralities, it has opportunities for the collective aggregate of musicians to improvise together freely in various combinations, and it has passages where the written and the improvised work together in contrasting and synthesizing ways.

The sum total musical impression the work makes in this recording is of a free adventure, a virtually limitless but conceptually consistent exploration of the various possibilities such an ensemble presents. There are open improvisational sections where the entrances and exits and the nature of those musically are guided by Hwang's conductions. The personal stamp of the improvisers' styles are an important part of the sound. Since I am quite familiar with some of these players I can recognize their improvisatory input. But even those I am not that familiar with help tailor the total sound for a rather unprecedented result. This piece performed by another group of improvisors would have the same sign posts but the results in the way the signposts are made to sound and the manner of the collective improvised sections would undoubedly sound different. From performance to performance even with the same group there would be variations in the total effect. And that's good!

There are cadenza-like improvisations from Jason Hwang, atmospheric string writing of tonal clusters and chorale-like blocks of sound that float as if in space, rhythmically driven ostinatoes, bluesy lines with various improvisations coming into play, complex color-texture sound events with particular improvisers soloing over them, pure improvisatory excursions with a great deal of atmospheric ambiance, rocking density, lovely cacaphonies of multi-expressions in a free zone, tutti motives that emerge from primal chaos, quiet passages of great beauty, pizzicato deluges of cascading pitches, smaller groupings of various improvisers providing a moment of interesting contrast, moments when drummer Andrew Drury shines forth, suspending soundclouds of complexely textured tones. . . .

In short this is complex, engaging music that covers much ground. It fills the interstices between new improvisatory music, modern jazz and avant orchestral-compositional practices. And it does so in ways that enthrall, excite, agitate and make tranquil, intrigue and overwhelm, and open up passages to new soundworlds.

It is the sort of music that takes time to assimilate and appreciate. It is, I believe, a milestone in the improvisatory-compositional nexuses we see coming together in this new century. The exceptional talents and sensitivities of Spontaneous River make that so, as does the imaginative and executional excellence of Jason Kao Hwang. Let there be more of this! In the meantime, do not miss this music if you want to have a feeling for, and appreciation of what's going on in the current decade!