Gavin Bryars, The Fifth Century

Like any style of music, there are Post-modern composers who write beautiful, breathtaking works and others who either are inconsistent or just do not have the talent, sad to say. Of the whole bunch Gavin Bryars to me is decidedly in the first category. His music, basically anything I've heard of his, has that special something that comes through whatever the premise. A new CD,  The Fifth Century (ECM New Series 2495) brings us two choral works that are stunning in their sonic brilliance and reaffirm my appreciation of Bryars as an important voice of today.

The album features the extraordinary vibrato-less purity of the choral ensemble The Crossing, conducted by David Nally. It is hard to imagine a better performance of these works and the ECM sound brings out the music with a heightened brightness.

The opening title work combines the Crossing with the equally appropriate sounds of the saxophone ensemble the PRISM Quartet. Bryars brings the two groups into close intersection in harmonically uncliched, always stimulating and ravishing ways. He has perfect control over the ambient and linear dimensions as he hears them. Indeed no matter how many times I listen to this work it sounds ever fresh.

The same is true but in a somewhat more intimate way on "Two Love Songs" for female choir a capella.

I come away from this music reluctantly. I want to come back to it as soon as possible. Does the awakening of nature on these fine days have something to do with it? It seems like the open hopeful choral sounds here help "improve" nature or provide it a most evocative soundtrack. I am sure whatever the season this music will give us pause, help us revel in the sensuous mysteries of existence.

Does this sound like a strong recommendation? I hope so. Because it is. Wonderful.

Grego Applegate Edwards Discusses His New Two-Volume Electro-Acoustic Work "Aurora Dreaming"

Greetings to anyone out there reading this. My third and fourth albums are now out, so I thought it might be timely to talk about them a little bit on here, since they are not going to be on the radar I suspect of any of the media channels out there as yet. Plus the objective of course is to attract listeners. So once again I am putting together a little fake interview of self-with-self.

Self: So you persist in releasing music CDs in spite of the fact that the market is glutted with indie product? Do you think you are a big deal or something?

Grego: No. Not a big deal. Far from it. In fact I am broke, little known and, at this point, my partner and I are living a life of poverty with the road ahead very unclear financially. I am the opposite of a big deal. But after a lifetime of considering music as a composer, player, listener and of course as a writer I do think I have something to contribute. So we have the two-volume electro-acoustic work just now out, Aurora Dreaming, which is available on Ruby Flower Records as Aurora Dreaming I and Aurora Dreaming II: Finale. The idea or root story behind it all is that the mythical Aurora creates the Northern Lights nightly by her special dreaming activities. Aurora Dreaming represents a full night of all that.

Self: What made you come up with Aurora Dreaming?

Grego: Since my high school days I have been interested in so-called electronic music. I did a good deal of fiddling around with tape recorders when young and it culminated in taking in a lab course at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center in 1972. Synthesizers were pretty new then. Of course there was by that time a rather sizable volume of works to be heard on record, by the French school of musique concrete with Pierre Schaeffer and his school, the "Americans" Ussachevsky, Babbit, Mimaroglu, then John Cage and his associates, and the Darmstadt folks, Stockhausen most especially, still further the synthesizer-based composers like Rudin, Wuorenin and Subotnik. I listened to and appreciated most all of it, and tried in my own way to get a widely dense and pointillistic scatter of sound. Then later I discovered Reich's early work, Oliveros and the ambiance of Fripp and Eno. By then I had stopped composing for a time. But with the new digital sound modules, synths, digital processing and editing, by the turn of this century, I began getting the elements of a studio together and experimenting with what sounds were possible. That studio is no more for the moment, but the tracks were at a stage where I could process them on PC-based digital editing software and so the later phases of production were done on a comparatively integral and modest set-up.

Self: And of course in the meantime "electronics" had become a mainstay of pop, some rock, and hip hop.

Grego: Yes. The rock element still interested me but "beats" and such I didn't see myself getting into much. I liked the cosmic expanse that some ambient psychedelia offered, and Fripp and Eno's albums had a big appeal for me. Most of all I liked the quasi-orchestral possibilities that the new digital technology offered.

Self: So what does that mean?

Grego: Digital technology allows you to layer and fine tune, to "orchestrate" the sound to a much greater degree than when I was back with some elemental analog means at ages 14 to 18. Plus I am not entirely sure back then that I had a coherent vision of what I was after. If something came out sounding right, I went with it. I tried things and they were either interesting or less so. But there wasn't a lot of reworking or editing. partly because I didn't have access to sophisticated equipment for any length of time, plus I was not thinking as conceptually as I might have. Now I can go through composing stages in much greater detail. Plus after years of listening to all kinds of music, I am more focused in what I want to do. So essentially the entire Aurora sequence developed over several years of time. I built up more or less complex layers of sound using synthesizers, very electric guitars, bass, percussion, drums, natural sounds, voice and a tiny bit of sampled things, the latter exclusively on the first couple of movements. Once I had obtained a mix of the various elements, and that in itself was quite involved with many attempts...anyway once I was happy with the various balances I subjected the master mixes to further modifications. Ultimately I was after a highly ambient series of gradually changing sound plateauxs, with sections representing Aurora drifting off to sleep, her first dreams of the night, and then on to some very deep (and sonically dense) late night dreams, climaxing just before the dawn, when Venus (the Morning Star) appears and then the creeping sleep-quiet comes on--in response to the first rays of dawn. Without the digital multi-track platform I never would have been able to tune the sound in the ways that I did. I am happy that the result is dynamic and pretty cosmic, and that the textural aspect is quite colorful, I hope.

Self: Well, so maybe folks will find it interesting then?

Grego: I hope so! It's more about slowness than speed, more continuous than rapidly scattered, more harmonic than melodic, blocks of density with varying degrees of note clusters laced with noise, not static but except in a few sections not conventionally pulsating. The two volumes taken together represent one evening of Aurora and her sky painting, her slumbers and heaven-embracing dreams.

Self: So what kind of music is it?

Grego: I don't know except that it has something to do with the electricity of rock, sometimes a bit of the openness of improv, but in all that a sort of continuity of electro-acoustic poetics. There is most definitely some of the immediacy of the highly electric psychedelic ambiance such as I've been exposed to from the days of Hendrix on, yet more long-formed and so having some relation to new-music classical. As I went through the various stages of building up the music I was never exactly sure until towards the last stages where precisely it was going, though there was a general vision. I did not set out to follow any special style-set so much as I went with my intuitions building up, tearing down, rebuilding, transforming until I began to see where it was all headed.

Self: Where do you see this fitting in as far as your future music is concerned?

Grego: I think it is a pause point for me. Unless there is an opportunity to create thick washes of live instruments playing in real time I think I've taken this sound as far as I would like it to go. Upcoming releases are going to be more pulsating and directional than this. We'll see after I get the rest of this music out what sort of live music possibilities develop. Meanwhile I hope people will go the little extra and get this set, the second volume which is priced at $9 to encourage more folks to take a chance. I hope there will be lots of listeners and that they open themselves up to where the music can take them. There is a real journey there sonically. This is not designed to make me money, but to give people an experience.

Self: OK, then. Here is a link to the Amazon site and Volume 2's ordering info. From there it is easy enough to call up the first volume info as well.

Copy and paste this url into your browser: http://www.amazon.com/Aurora-Dreaming-Grego-Applegate-Edwards/dp/B011SV466S/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1438107712&sr=8-1&keywords=grego+applegate+Edwards

Triple Point, Phase/Transitions, Pauline Oliveros, Doug Van Nort, Jonas Braasch

The rise of live electronics with instrumentalists in the new music world is very much with us today. This can be confirmed by the many releases devoted to such performance practices. A very good example is today's 3-CD set, Triple Point and their Phase/Transitions (Pogus 21078-2), recorded in New York State between 2008-2012. The essential lineup is that of Pauline Oliveros, on V-Accordion, an electronically enhanced version of the instrument that produces what the liners call "physically-modelled acoustics", Doug Van Nort on the Granular-feedback Expanded Instrumentation System (GREIS) and electronics, and Jonas Braasch on soprano sax.

The music consists of a number of shorter segments of improvisation. Van Nort uses GREIS to take the original instrument signal feed and transform it, making a commentary on what is being played or transforming the musical input into entirely different terms (e.g., adding to the soundscape). For a number of segments the machine improvisation system known as FILTER performs in tandem with the trio. Some other segments feature Chris Chafe on celletto, performing remotely over the internet from Canada.

The three CDs cover a wide range of moods and sounds, all in the more-or-less "new music" zone, which is to say that timbre manipulation and contrasts play out in real time in an improvisatory context. Braasch's soprano is nearly always to be heard in its pure acoustic state along with its transformation by Van Nort. Ms. Oliveros' accordion sometimes can be heard clearly in its pristine form. Much of the time the sounds are electronically altered in varying degrees so that it sometimes sounds much more like keyed electronics. The electronics of Van Nort can be heard at times as a third instrumental element. At other times they mesh with Ms. Oliveros' sound transformations to create a kind of electronic-orchestral commingling.

What captivates in most of these trio improvisations in the sheer inventiveness of the sonic designs. Some segments flow with long-toned sounds played out against more eventful noted-ness from the soprano, accordion, electronics, or all in various combinations. Other segments are more-or-less pure give-and-take contrapuntal interactions.

Three CDs of such music is a great deal to absorb. It takes time and "deep listening" to completely assimilate. I can't say I am quite there yet. But I can say that this music has moments that stun in the best way. There are mellow segments and others somewhat abrasive. But they do not repeat themselves. Avant jazz, new music and electronic music converge on Triple Point. And the three artists in the process become one creative music-making being.

It no doubt is music of some importance for the avant scene today. It carries on the premises of the seminal live electronics-acoustics outfits from the first days of such possibilities and makes something wholly unique and fascinating out of it all.

Sonic adventurers will most definitely gravitate towards this set. Recommended for all those who dare go beyond the ordinary.

Robin Hayward, Nouveau Saxhorn Nouveau Basse, Elegy to a Failed Instrument

One composer's drone is another composer's melodic center. It depends on context. Music which uses long continuous tones and hearkens back in some way to classical Indian music tends to use the long tones as an anchor to something that either does or is expected to occur overtop, even if that "something" never quite comes to bear on the music. On the other hand Robin Hayward's Nouveau Saxhorn Nouveau Basse (Pogus 21077-2) uses long tones in a different way.

The album at hand today contains three pieces. Each uses long tones on the microtonal tuba, an instrument Robin Hayward conceived of using six valves, allowing for standard plus microtonal soundings. He plays the instrument on all three works.

"Plateau Square" utilizes the instrument with a four-speaker sound system. Each speaker reproduces sound aspects in an individual plateau of pitch relationships. I wont attempt to explain it; indeed I am not entirely clear what is meant in the liner notes. Suffice to say that long tones correlated in pitch to a particular plateau are the basis for the work.

"Travel Stain" combines long tones on the microtonal tuba plus a guitar part realized by Seth Josel. The guitar notes, mostly plucked harmonics, accentuate the long tones. There is an elaborate hexagonal notation with tone sequences that the instrumentalists explore one-by-one.

"Nouveau Saxhorn Nouveau Basse" returns to solo microtonal tuba. Subtitled "Elegy for a Failed Instrument", it centers around a horn invented by Adolpho Sax, with six valves that were configured to avoid the need for the instrumentalist to combine multiple valve stops. All tones were produced by depressing one valve at a time. It never caught on. Hayward combines his microtonal tuba (which also uses six valves but in different ways, including combinations) with a seven-speaker sound system. To honor the memory of the instrument Hayward conceives of a tuning-note sequence that utilizes long notes produced by only one valve at a time, with six speakers each devoted to the notes played by depressing a particular valve. The seventh speaker is located backstage and represents the bell of the saxhorn. What counts is the sound of the notes and their overtone development as the tones interact with the aural playing space. The piece creates eerie harmonies via a system of multiple trackings that gives the work an acoustic-electric ambiance and fullness.

All told this is music that creates its own space. And you do not need to understand fully or even partly the theoretical underpinnings that went into the works to appreciate the sonorities that are produced.

In the end there is an aural poetics at play. Hayward has his own kind of rigor which we can appreciate for its existence--and then set aside and appreciate the music in its full utterance. It's haunting and moving music!

Lewis Spratlan, Jenny Kallick, John Downey, Architect, A Chamber Opera

When something is as interesting, as good, as contemporary, as unexpected as Architect (Navona 5905), you don't just rattle out a few lines and expect to do it justice. But you cannot write a book about it, either, at least not now.

So let me begin, and try to give the work its due. It's a chamber opera, a collaboration between Lewis Spratlan, who wrote the vocal and chamber group sequences, and John Downey and Jenny Kallick, who wrote the electroacoustic music sequences. Ms. Kallick also wrote the libretto. Mark Lane Swanson is the music director for the performance here recorded.

There is an audio CD with the entire opera; there is a DVD that includes that performance and provides visual still/video images that greatly enhance the narrative experience, along with the libretto as subtitles (if desired).

The inspiration for the opera was the architect Louis I. Kahn (1902-1974), a major figure who created buildings that took advantage of light and location-landscape. But the narrative thread of Architect centers around a mytho-poetic vision of the origin of the centrality of ritual space as embodied in buildings that captured light and ritual fire. And how they have centerpoints of human wonder and the celebration of existence. Iconic figures of the Trickster, the Creator-Spirit, the Universal Woman, the Architect, the Engineer have important singing roles. The libretto emphasizes mystical poetic declamations about the struggle to appropriate fire from the gods, the making of buildings as part of human-cosmic self-actualization. That's my take on the overall thrust of the story. It's heady and very resonant with the music (and vice-versa).

A collaborative opera with three composers is unusual, of course, but Architect does not have a cobbled or pastiched feeling to it. On the contrary the chamber music/singing segments and the electro-acoustic segments meld together as the expression of a unified and dramatic libretto story-line so that you do not get and feeling of partition.

The music is modern contemporary and extraordinary. Spratlan's chamber orchestra/vocal parts work quite well and have expressive clout. The electroacoustics from Downey and Kallick heighten the experience artfully.

Video images on the DVD add another dimension: buildings in ruins, natural settings, stunning architectural structures, everything works together to create depth and mystery. You go away from this opera with a feeling of wonder. What is light to us? Fire? Why have we erected monumental architectural structures for so many countless centuries? What is it to be a brilliant architect and why are they heroic, almost god-like figures in our various civilizations?

The performances are very good. Singing first-rate; instrumental parts played with spirit and care. Architect is a meditational monument in itself. It is a living, modern archetype, an opera of great depth, beauty, expressivity, fully of our time and yet somehow timeless. It could be counted as a major achievement of our era some day. In the meantime all with an interest in creative concert developments must hear this!

Alexander Berne & the Abandoned Orchestra, Self Referentials, Vols. 1 & 2

Some music hangs together so distinctly, yet is composed of such unexpected elements, that one can imagine oneself in another world with the music being what the inhabitants have worked out over a long period of time, an imaginary ethnic music, an imaginary classical music.

That's the feeling I get listening to Alexander Berne & the Abandoned Orchestra's Self-Referentials, Vols. 1 & 2 (Innova 838).

In his latest 2-CD set Alexander Berne creates music that lays out so organically yet is so unexpected yet evocative that it sounds like another world produced it.

Self Referentials is a series of interrelated soundscapes that so skillfully interweave their various elements, electronically enhanced and straightforward instrumental and vocal sound colors that have pulse and trajectory and come in and out of the total sound in such striking ways, one has to commend Maestro Berne for his composition-assembly-mix in technical as well as musical terms.

Ultimately what counts is the narrative quality of the music and its striking overall affect. It is the sort of music that beckons you to turn the many intriguing twists and turns in the musical unfolding into a wordless story, a journey in a soundscape that is filled with so many interrelated sound events that it literally carries you away.

Alexander Berne composes music that is new in very original terms, yet sounds like it could be a thousand years old. It's sound poetry of a high sort, apparently a product of our world. That is very good news. You should hear this, most definitely.

Jorg Widmann, Elegie

Jorg Widmann is a present-day composer with expansive concepts and an orchestral mastery of the panoramic-modern virtually unmatched by any living composer. I know that may be a lot to say of someone but I feel convinced of that after listening a number of times to a new disk devoted to his music, Elegie (ECM New Series 2110 476 3309).

The disk contains two major orchestral works and one for clarinet and piano. Christoph Poppen conducts the Deutsche Radio Philharmonic for the Messe fur grosches Orchester and the Elegie fur Klarinette und Orchester. The composer himself plays clarinet on the latter and joins his instrument with Heinz Holliger's piano for the chamber Funf Bruchstucke.

The Messe follows in general outline what a Mass might be for choir and orchestra (sometimes down to the words the choir would ordinarily sing), only conceives of the entire work instrumentally. It is a massive dramatic symphonic work that very deftly engages the assemblage of instruments with an acute sense of sound color and affect. It is a four-dimensional work, performed and recorded with the very high standards one comes to expect in the New Series. It is music that has a very expanded harmonic sense and uses that and orchestrational brilliance to achieve a memorable result.

The Funf Bruchstucke explore clarinet-piano sonorities in miniature with five very brief segments that show another side to Widmann's lucid sense of aural poetics.

Finally the Elegie joins Widmann's clarinet with the orchestra for another masterful work of expressive color. The clarinet part makes its sober but very avant virtuoso presence felt via a very musical use of extended sounds from harmonic double stops to quarter tones. The orchestra responds with some extraordinary timbres and atmospheric eloquence.

Widmann shows on Elegie that he is one of the composers of brilliance today. He extends the wide open avant-guard sound-color tradition into the present day with his own extraordinarily creative scores. These are wonderful to hear. Any student of high modernism should take this music to heart. And modernist aficionados in general will find this CD essential listening.

Gian Luigi Diana, Cristalli Sonori

Gian Luigi Diana was an integral member of the electro-acoustic offerings Laghima and Blurboxer that I covered last month.We take another look at his music today with the solo album Cristalli Sonori (Setola Di Maiale SM 1890).

As with the previous recordings we have electro-acoustic music devoid of cliche, in the form of the unexpected. Again, it's in the realm of spontaneous composition and combines Gian's well-thought-through sound universes with real-time acoustic instruments: Patrick Holmes on clarinet, Porra-Boy, flutes and slide guitar, Lisa Dowling, double bass, and Bojan Z. on sax and clarinet, each entering for a segment or two.

This is soundscaping without a lot of sustain or drone and more concerned with sonic events that follow one upon another in a kind of narrative flow. The early work of AMM, MEV and Il Gruppo sometimes comes to mind, but as precursors more than as models.

It's avant music of a singular cast and will appeal to the patient follower of new sounds. You must let the sequences unfold in time and you will find a rewarding experience in the offing when you do.

The Eleanor Hovda Collection

If like me, you have somehow managed largely to miss the music of Eleanor Hovda (1940-2009) you are in for a nice surprise. Innova has amassed a four-CD collection of her music, The Eleanor Hovda Collection (Innova 808), and it is a revelation.

Ms. Hovda has a sense of musical space that at times is a bit East Asian. Like some Chinese, Japanese and Korean traditional classical music, the sound and its wrapping in musically reverberant silence can be integral to the effect. Her attention to the dramatics of sound production also has some Asian qualities. For her, the impact of the music need not reside in the dual contrast quiet/loud, though that can be part of her dynamic. Intensity of sound color versus a more "grey" quiescence, musically italicized articulation version a more everyday "Roman" ordinariness of sound, a more vertical than a horizontal orientation to the sound events, in the sense that there are a series of inter-related occurrences more than a linear narrative, these are a few of the things that set her apart.

Whether it's a matter of a single conventional instrument, an ensemble, an electroacoustic or electronically generated sound source, or a combination of any of these elements, her singular attention to sound sculpturing and the nature of that attention mark her as very much in her own musical world. It's as if you take some of the sheer sensual sound extensions of Crumb's and Cage's piano works and make that a basis, a starting point to go somewhere very much your own. She seems to do that. She also does not in her music draw brackets around "electroacoustic" and "conventional" sound production. She approaches both from a kind of uniformly personal stylistic perspective. All become Hovda.

The four CDs of the set include so much music of interest that I don't think I can easily highlight the high points without over-encumbering this review with too many details. Suffice to say that there is some startlingly singular music generated throughout. It is one vast soundscape in some ways, each piece a part of a larger whole which encompasses all. And that whole reveals a composer we need to hear with concentration.

I believe that The Eleanor Hovda Collection is destined to join the ranks of the most important releases of this decade in the "New Music"/"Avant Classical" categories. It contains some remarkable music. It should go a long way in establishing Ms. Hovda as one of the more important sound artists/composers of our era.

Andrea Centazzo, The Heart of Wax

Andrea Centazzo the composer continues to unfold before my ears as I listen to his minimalist opus The Heart of Wax (Ictus 301), a 12-part dance suite for a large chamber ensemble, string quartet and soloists.

This is an infectiously rhythmic and melodically memorable set of contrapuntal movements, inflected at times by rock, jazz and world elements, following out of similar mallet-wind-string ensemble works by Reich, yet bearing palpably the recognizable imprint of Andrea Centazzo's own originality.

For minimalism to work, there must be inventive scoring. Nothing can be more dreary to my mind than a minimalism of uninspired and uninteresting motifs and/or one-dimensional instrumentation. Thankfully that is not the case with Centazzo's work in the style in general and in Heart of Wax especially.

There is much to occupy the actively listening ear on this one. It's a refreshing hybrid that operates on a high plane throughout. Give it a listen.

Aaron Novik, "Floating World Vol. 1," New Music-Prog-Song Suite

There is a "serious" cabaret music style that goes from Kurt Weill to Carla Bley and others. Aaron Novik's Floating World, Vol. 1 (Porto Franco PFR 021) fits in there somewhere. It's a suite of songs for female vocalist--mostly Carla Kihlstedt or Katy Stephan--along with a cabaret-rock-old-time styled chamber group.

The lyrics have to do with everyday life and/or whimsical-philosophical takes on modernity.

It sometimes veers a little to the side of "cute" and that you need to get past if you are to appreciate the very musical side of it all. It's not in an operatic vocal style but (like Weill and Bley) a vernacular one. And the music toys with theatre and vernacular while it transcends that with an original take on where to place it all.

This may not get enough attention, I fear, but it is quite different and needs to be heard.

Alexander Berne and The Abandoned Orchestra, Flickers of Mime/Death of Memes

After years away from music, reedman/ composer Alexander Berne got the call in his being to go into the studio and put down music that had in whatever way gestated within him for more than a decade. The product of many hours of layering sound carefully and doubtless arriving at a combined "orchestration" meticulously as he painted tone colors on a digital canvas, the result is a remarkable 2-CD set, Flicker of Mime-Death of Memes (Innova 804). It's a battery of standard, altered or radically modified wind instruments along with prepared piano, wine glass, vacuum cleaner, lap steel guitar and so forth--that he uses to build up startling ambiances and resonant, ever-shifting space-drone transformations.

It has a primal quality, as he makes note of in the accompanying liners, but it also is extraordinarily sophisticated in its use of transformed sounds--not through electronic filtering but through careful layering and mixing over time. It's a sound-color tour de force, at once mystic and concrete, an orchestra of odd provenance creating otherworldly sounds.

It's rather remarkable, very listenable and pretty much like nothing else in its poetic, sound-sculpting consistency. One of the most original extended soundscapes I've heard.