David Lang, Mac Wellman, The Difficulty of Crossing A Field

Some works are deep, complex, they defy simple explanation. They are more than what they do exactly. This is the case for the chamber theater-opera work The Difficulty of Crossing A Field (Cantaloupe 21107), with music by David Lang, libretto by Mac Wellman. It is scored for string quartet, a small chorus (in the Greek dramatic sense as well as the current musical sense) and vocal soloists, most of whom have both spoken and sung parts.

The original performance took place in 2002 with the Kronos Quartet as the instrumentalists. This recording replaces them with the Harlem Quartet, who sound quite good.

The libretto is both matter-of-fact and esoterically allegorical, surreal. It deals with a plantation in Selma, Alabama at a time presumably just before the Civil War. The plot involves the owner-slaver, a Mr. Williamson, his wife, daughter, neighbors, a judge and the 14 resident slaves.

One day Mr. Williamson disappears into thin air while walking across a field in plain site of a number of witnesses, including some of the slaves, the wife and daughter, etc. There is the plain, factual element of the disappearance, as in part reconstructed in the court hearing after the fact. But there is an ominous, symbolic, extra-reality/super-reality part of the work, a mood the music and libretto capture well. The daughter just before the incident recounts a vision she had about "right and wrong," about the "mystery of Selma, Alabama" and how Mr. Williamson needs to "talk to the horses."

The sub-human nature of slavery is brought out in part by the names each of the slaves has been given, about the "rules" on how to oversee slaves, and the slaves as outside of the workings of local society, underscored by a prohibition on slaves bearing witness in any court. There is much more to the plot than that, but you must listen to the work to get the full gist.

The disappearance of Mr. Williamson is an allegory to the end of slavery, abolition, the end of institutionalized agri-racism. And it is movingly done.

There are important spoken parts, sung parts and a key role played by the string quartet. What impresses for one thing is the dramatic and musical excellence of the player-singers. They convince in their pacing, their inflections, and in the total musicality that Lang gives to us and they execute with dramatic dedication.

There are minimalistic elements strongly present in the score, as one might expect of David Lang circa 2002, but the repetitions are put to use to establish mystery and ominousness more so than trance or mesmerization. And there are linear elements, too.

This is a haunting, moving work that stands out in the mind long after you have heard it. You should give it a close listen. The melding of libretto and music is total and powerful. And it captures a societal way of life, a system on the verge of collapse in ways that are both strong and poetic.

Very recommended!

Bang On A Can All Stars, "Big Beautiful Dark and Scary"

Whatever minimalism is in music today, or whatever word you would rather use to describe the contemporary classical music of recurring periodicity, the Bang On A Can All Stars are at the vanguard of it, at least here in and around Manhattan. So when they come up with a special 2-CD set commemorating their continued success, namely Big Beautiful Dark and Scary (Canteloupe 21074) it is rather an occasion.

There are 89 minutes of music, pieces by Wolfe, Lang, Gordon, Ziporyn, Longstreth, Nancarrow, Andriessen, Moore--the founders and others. As is the nature of the Bang On A Can folks, they take chances and seek to do new things within the forms of contemporiety, so that not every composition is going to appeal to everybody. And for me some seemed just a hair on the crude side, others were interesting, still others I found quite beautiful and moving. There are pieces that show a kind of hard rock insistency, others that go off into space in exploratory ways and yet others that have a more lyrically expressive side.

So this is an occasion where in marking it BOAC shows they do not intend to drift into a complacent stance. They aim to innovate and they succeed, most of the time.

So if you want to be in a conceptual space where things are moving along, morphing, generating the excitement of the new, this set is one place you want to dwell within.

So do not miss out on the future. Here is part of it.

David Lang, "This Was Written By Hand" for Solo Piano

David Lang has increasingly struck me as one Bang On A Can composer who is especially bent upon forging a minimalist/post-minimalizt language all his own. The solo piano opus This Was Written By Hand (Canteloupe 21073) puts that forward somewhat emphatically. The album consists of the 13-minute title cut and eight shorter "Memory Pieces."

The title cut (2003) has a very pianistic left hand-right hand split, the right hand repeating and developing a central melody line, the left hand repeating and varying a figuration accompaniment for the most part. It is lyrical, reflective and appealing in its spare but musically impactful utterance.

The "Memory Pieces" (1992-1997) have a bit more in the way of motoristic movement, sometimes marimba-istic figuration that is more typically classic minimalist. Yet it is not linear, post-African trance groove that is coming out of the figurations for the most part. For the first piece it's a matter of rolling wide-interval trills (to stretch a term) that together form an overarching melodic movement that has a slower, more majestic trajectory. The second piece calls for rapidly articulated arpeggiations that again don't have groove as the intent, but rather verticalized harmonic sequences. Piece three is a kind of largo. Piece four slows the trill idea down and makes each pulse a more fortissimo chordal block. Number five is mercurial, a kind of drumming on the piano with Lang's own sort of rudiment-like execution. Six slows things down again for some delicate interlocking sequences of expressive meditation. Seven is a whirlwind of rapid cycles of piano drumming. The final piece returns in some ways to the feeling of the first, a kind of slower series of related melodic cycles, this time in the middle range of the piano, with punctuations in the upper and lower registers.

Pianist Andrew Zolinsky realizes the parts with a restrained poeticism that seems right for these two works.

This is music that keeps my interest while playing upon the more positive emotional affects that the solo piano has often evoked from the days of Mozart onwards. It should find a good number of adherents, I would think. And it is some of David Lang's most intimate and appealing music to date.