Scott L. Miller, Ghost Layers, TAK Plays Miller

According to my records, this is the fourth review article I have written on the music of Scott L. Miller (see the Gapplegate Music Review, 2015, and this blog, 2017 and 2018). His music lays out well to my ears. So now I am back with a new one to talk about, Ghost Layers, TAK Plays Miller (New Focus Recordings FCR253).

First a bit on the TAK Ensemble, who distinguish themselves markedly on this chamber program. It is ordinarily a quintet. For this program the four founding members hold sway--Laura Cocks (flute), Marina Kifferstein (violin), Charlotte Mundy (voice) and Ellery Trafford (percussion), augmented at various points in the program by Meghan Burke on cello, Tristan McKay on piano, and Joshua Rubin on clarinet. Collectively they tackle this advanced and difficult-to-play music with ease, with dash and even a heroically dynamic demeanor. TAK happily specialize in the Contemporary of yesterday and today through commissions, collaborations and dedicated New Music concertizing. A listen or two will no doubt convince you that they are near-ideal proponents of the music at hand, stars in today's Modern firmament.

So what, then, of that music? There are some five Miller chamber compositions featured, four of which combine instruments with electronic sound. The works exhibit Scott Miller's "eco-systemic" approach, where the music takes on something analogous to the function of ecosystems. This has to do with found environmental sounds, their analysis and then the establishment of paradigms within the musical structure of a given work.

So for example the opening work "Accretion" (2015) for flute, violin, clarinet/bass clarinet, cello, percussion and electronic sound has its initial basis in the composer's field recordings of waterfalls and ice floes, both subjected to spectral analysis which then provides data that figures in the instrumental and electronic components of the composition.

In the end what matters is that each work feels as a kind of natural organic entity where timbral choices and the interlaying of sounds have a feeling of inevitability without providing the listener with an obvious expected result acoustically or syntactically. Everything has an element of surprise yet gives the satisfaction of rich textural presence.

I will not try to run down each piece individually because the deep complexities and emergent form seem at this juncture better heard than subject to more words. The instrumental-electronic interfaces have a remarkable quality born out of the frisson of an exceptional collective grasp on the part of performers, electronic sounds that have a built-in logic and poetics in their interactive presence with acoustic instrumental sounds, and a totality that convinces, comes across as genuinely new, and makes for increasingly absorbing hearing the more one repeats the program.

All praise is due Scott Miller and TAK and company. This is a chamber program anyone with an interest in the latest Modernities should not miss. Outstanding music.

Karin Haussmann, Works for Ensemble, E-MEX Ensemble, Christoph Maria Wagner

German composer Karin Haussmann (b. 1962) has as her starting point the creation of sound in its new music essence. Works for Ensemble (Coviello Contemporary Deutschlandfunk COV 91410) gives us a nicely varied assortment of five of her recent works as played with detailed attention by the E-MEX Ensemble under Christoph Maria Wagner.

These new works have flow, much attention to timbres and spatial unfolding within a realm of high-modernist abstraction, but without especially showing a standard pointillistic influence via Darmstadt and the serialists. The compositions generally unfold theatrically and evocatively without having detailed literary analogs. Haussmann creates abstractions that convey meaning without relying heavily on extra-musical thematics, though often based on one or more coloristic, gestural or conditional principles as starting points. But make no mistake, there is nothing cold or clinical about them.

The opening work on the CD, "Two Movements for Piano and Ensemble" (2008) makes use of jagged figures in the piano while the ensemble has moments where it "breathes", sounds continuous figures in a kind of breath-like flow. In the second movement the ensemble moves away from responding to the piano and more to articulating varied forms of periodicity while the piano widens its role to a mysterious series of clusters and utterances, all metaphoric of how a balance wheel functions in a mechanical clock. The music has a magical quality.

"a fuoco lento" (2009) premiered at a culinary event, hence the literal meaning of the work's title, "at a low flame". Haussmann conceived of the work as initially limited like a kind of entree made of a few key elements, ingredients as it were. The note b-flat, the bowed and striking of metallic objects by the percussionist, both are are key elements that the composition works around.

The solo organ work "con flessibilita" concerns itself with the various sound resources, the various manuals and the two Venetian swells available to the organist. Haussmann successfully gives the organ a flexible tone-color quality which makes of the organ a more permeable, plastic color-wheel of sorts.

"Four Movements for Cello, Accordion and Ensemble" (2010-2011) works further with the ideas developed in "Two Movements". The sound capabilities of the cello and accordion were chosen to create contrasts that the ensemble reacts against. The soloists take on the role of "recoloring" the music through exerting influences, as the composer says, which brings the ensemble into a kind of timbre-oriented dialog. So we have clusters in the accordion, for example, versus sustained multiphonic tones in the cello, and so forth.

"Quartet" (2000) finishes off the program with trumpet, flute. cello and piano sounding, in the composers words, as a single instrument. Haussmann experimented with trumpeter Marco Blaauw in creating "disaltered chords", richly harmonic, rough multiphonics that tend to beat with variable periodicity. The quartet gives a four-instrument analog of the disaltered chordal sound.

All these various concepts put into play by the composer results in some striking music, high-modernist yet freshly concocted into striking sound color worlds that make the music particularly contemporary, of our time.

It is music that will be appreciated by the adventurous modernist. Time spent acclimating oneself to the new worlds of sound pay off with a very rewarding experience.