Julia Wolfe, Steel Hammer

The US folk song "John Henry" captures something about industrial America in its formative stages. Everybody has heard it, I assume, at least once if not more often as they grew up. As a children's song it may not have as clear a message as it did for adults who first heard it long ago, particularly in the days when it was widely performed, when mechanization was replacing individual human labor. The heroic struggle between John Henry's superhuman steel-hammer driving versus the automated, mechanized steam version still has the power to move us. There is something universal in the story. And today computers perhaps have become what steam drills and mechanical hammers once were.

As with all folk songs transmitted orally there developed variants in the text. He is said in one version to be from Georgia, another Tennessee, he was short, he was tall, he was black, he was white, etc.

Bang On A Can composer Julia Wolfe has gathered the variants and written a piece around them for the vocal Trio Medieval and the Bang On A Can All Stars instrumental ensemble, a sextet of electric guitar, cello, clarinet, piano, bass and drums. The work, Steel Hammer (Cantaloupe 21099), is out on CD and I have been listening to it.

I have mixed reactions on this one. The singing of the variants can be long and drawn out minimalist style or can be rapidly executed in movements that have more density and speed. The variants, face it, aren't all that interesting as musical text. Does it matter if the hammer was nine pounds or twenty? And even if it does do we need a lengthy passage on the singing of it, the various weights?

The second issue I have is with the melodic motives. There are some intervals and harmonies that can be interesting when repeated and varied in certain ways, especially where rhythm is a factor. Others require a great deal of situational brilliance to transcend their ordinariness, particularly when there is little rhythmic movement. Wolfe's score contains some very interesting moments and others that are banal, perhaps deliberately, but not all that interesting (to me) nonetheless.

The most effective parts have train or hammer periodicity and/or incorporate folk elements (such as old-style banjo) into the movement. And those work just fine.

I generally like Julia Wolfe's music. This one had ups and downs for me.

David Lang, Death Speaks

In the realm of the "memento mori" paintings, Nico in her classic dark period, and Medieval-Rennaissance art song comes David Lang's Death Speaks (Canteloupe). It is a several part meditation on death inspired by Schubert's "Death and the Maiden," though Lang's opus sounds nothing like it.

The small instrumental chamber ensemble of electric guitar, violin and keyboard-piano (and bass drum) weaves a langorous web of post-modernist cyclic motifs while Shara Worden (joined toward the end by Owen Pallett, who also plays violin on the recording) sings a lovely set of poetic lyrics on Death personified and the goodbyes to life that have resonance with such early music composers as Giullame Dufay. It is hauntingly painful, lovely and dark.

A second work, "Depart," concludes the program with suspended, wordless long-toned vocals and multiple cello parts. It drones and motives recur with mystic insistence.

In short this is David Lang at his best. It is gloriously dark music, and a clear step away from anything predictable in the new music scene. It occupies its own space like a tropical island surrounded by sea. Lang is essential today, and this is a key work.

Michael Gordon, David Lang, Julia Wolfe, Shelter

Most all important composers through time experience breakthroughs in the course of their output. It is rarely a matter of a long continuations production in a stylistic equilibrium. It is especially exciting when the breakthrough happens as you are hearing the music unfold, piece-by-piece, in real time.

The Bang-on-a-Can composers Michael Gordon, David Lang and Julia Wolfe may well have broken through in their collaborative composition Shelter, which has just come out on CD (Cantaloupe 21083).

It has a probing, insightful libretto by Deborah Artman. The work is performed with energy and care by Ensemble Signal under Brad Lubman with Martha Cluver, Mellissa Hughes and Caroline Shaw as the vocal soloists.

The theme of the piece is the home, as conceived through time, as culminating in the American house. There are vocal refrains that describe a sort of evolution of attitudes one takes on entering a home in various cultures and periods. The libretto goes on in successive movements to enumerate the materials needed to build a typical house today, the evolution and de-volution of life on the porch, the impermanence of a dwelling over time, and some impressionistic imagery that relates to it all as experience.

There is an apocalyptic feel to it. As in any good libretto that has a modern bent, it is in the context of the music that it all comes together, as sung lines in a musical universe that gives it totalized wholeness, if the work is to be effective. In this case it is definitely so.

And so to the music: it is a captivating mix of modern, post-minimal, even rock-edged sounds with the three voices entering at critical points. Ensemble Signal is a 17-member chamber orchestra providing the instrumental parts.

The electric guitar and bass have much to do with the metallic jolt one experiences at key points, but the score is quite a bit more than just jolt. There are contrasting sections of modern turbulence, expressive forward motion, suspended mysterioso qualities, some minimalist cycling of motifs at times and more else.

Taken together as a total package it is triumphant, a work of significant depth, expressive power and singular form. The performance is exciting, the music essential, a sometimes disturbingly poignant impression of edginess, of suburban existence at the edge of its current possibility.

Maestros Gordon, Lang and Wolfe have created one of their most interesting works, ever. It may indeed define the downtown classical zeitgeist for many years to come. In any event it is an important work to hear for anyone who wants to keep up with the newest new music and where it may be going.