Roger Reynolds, Process and Passion

Roger Reynolds has been going about his art for many decades. By now he is one of the premiere living composers in the United States today. Through recordings he is especially known for chamber orchestra and vocal works. Not much of his more intimate chamber music has become widely available.

The gap has been nicely bridged in part lately by the three-work program on the CD Passion and Process (Pogus 21032-2). The three works are "Kokora" (1992) for violin, "Focus a beam, emptied of thinking, outward. . . " (1989) for cello, and "Process and Passion" (2002) for violin and cello. Performing the demanding parts are Mark Menzies, violin, and Hugh Livingston, cello.

There are two disks in the set. The first comprises the performances in standard two-channel sound; the second disk involves a contrasting mix into six channels, which are then binaurally converted so that the listener can hear a simulated six-way presentation (though this latter mix can be experienced properly only through headphones).

This is chamber music in the fully modern zone: wide intervalic leaps, complex abstracted rhythmic landscapes, widely expanded tonality or atonality, and a virtuoso set of string articulations. Maestros Menzies and Livingston do an admirable, rather extraordinary job with their parts. This is Roger Reynolds on the turf you would expect him to occupy. He does so quite successfully with three scores that take close listenings to appreciate but come through with memorable high modernist string music in an intimate setting.

I appreciate the binaural versions but am not one to listen for any length of time with headphones (unless I am walking to music), so the expanded sound staging was slightly lost on me in my restless run-through of that disk.

The music is demanding but ultimately very satisfying. It is in every way a welcome addition to the Reynolds discography and will only further enhance his already considerable reputation. Anyone in touch with the modernist style will no doubt find in these performances a kind of manna for their modern-hungry ears.

Kenneth Gaburo, Tape Play, Ten Works for Electronic Tape

It could be said that the impact of the first two decades ('50s-'60s) of American electronic/electro-acoustic music has not been as strong as the work produced in Europe during that period. Sure, Babbit, Ussachevsky, Mimaroglu and a few other composers associated with the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center and Subotnick out of San Francisco made a strong impression in their day and continue to be admired now. True also that Edgard Varese's brief but important foray into the field and John Cage's pioneering collages and subsequent work remain important influences on the avant garde scene. But there were many composers active then that are not as well-remembered now, many worthy of our attention.

Kenneth Gaburo (1926-1993) is one. So it is especially welcome that an anthology of ten of his tape works covering the period of 1964-1992 have been issued/reissued as Tape Play (Pogus 21020-2).

Gaburo liked to mix comparatively unaltered instrumental and vocal sounds in with electronically generated ones. Most of the time he tended toward more of a "chamber" than an "orchestral" electronic palette. He had a sense of humor sometimes lacking in the electronic music of the period and a somewhat quirky sense of dramatics. All this combined served to distinguish him as somewhat untypical.

The ten works represented in the volume at hand are sequenced in more or less chronological order. The earliest works, some originally released on a Nonesuch LP at the time, have less of a virtuoso feel to them than some of the later works. They are perhaps a bit more conversational and slightly casual compared to what followed. "Fat Mille's Lament" (1965), for example, combines an altered vocal loop with clouds of rapid high-pitched glass-bell sounds, then takes a jazz orchestra snippet and modifies it by doubling for a moment, only to fade away to leave an open space that is again filled with a short reprise of the loop and cloud.

"Re-Run" (1983) uses rapid-fire melanges of single-timbred sounds. It's a good example of how later works seem a bit more developmental; they generate unified discourse from single-idea kernels much of the time, and may combine abstract spoken word dialogues with electronic soundscapes. You can hear this in "Mouth Piece II" (1992), or "Kyrie" (with Henri Chopin)(1974) and its familiar children's nonsense rhyme-song incanted in deadpanned seriousness while a mystical drone of sustained altered voices sounds in the background.

Kenneth Gaburo has a timeless presence in these works. The fact that he tended to avoid the sort of serial syntax in favor then and his attention to ambiance gives him a vibe more in common with the electro-acoustic music in vogue today than some of the more methodologically minded composers active at the time. And the music continues to hold fascination.

True, he may not be at the very pinnacle of achievement for his era. Nevertheless it is good to hear these pieces again and/or (at least for me, some) for the first time. They keep their interest and most certainly don't repeat themselves. He was ever imaginative and puckish. And perhaps easier than some composers of the day to grasp by those uninitiated in avant fare, since he tended not to seek out much in the way of strident dissonance or complex noise. Recommended, especially for the avant completist.

Di Sheyne Milnerin, Mark Glanville, Alexander Knapp

What music is for absolutely everybody? Some children's collection of songs about farm animals, perhaps, but then you have to be five and you still might not like it. And so the same might apply in different ways for Di Sheyne Milnerin (Nimbis Alliance 6191). The album comprises a recital for Mark Glanville, bass-baritone, and Alexander Knapp, accompanying on piano, of a cycle of Yiddish art songs from the 19th-20th centuries. The music parallels Schubert's Die schone Mullerin, in that both song cycles tell the story of unrequited love. There is even a Yiddish lyric version of one of the songs from Schubert's cycle.

If you know Yiddish, all the better. If you do not, there is still much to appreciate. Glanville put together and sequenced the Yiddish cycle, choosing songs of Euro-Jewish composers both relatively known and more obscure. It is art song with some more in a typically minor key-Yiddish melodic mode than others. But all have interest.

Glanville and Knapp do a spirited job with the songs and many have great appeal if you hear them a number of times. It is a boon to those interested in a genre that does not always get much attention. Others may find it less essential. I found plenty to like here.

Lorraine, Lorraine Hunt Lieberson Sings Bach

Mezzo-Soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson left us early, mid-last decade, a victim of cancer. As with any artist of her stature there is no replacing her. But at least there are her recordings.

A new one has surfaced, with her singing Bach's cantata Mein Herze schwimmt im Blut, BWV 199, live in 2003 with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra under Jeffrey Kahane. The CD is simply titled Lorraine (Yarlung 96298).

What to say? Lorraine sounds unearthly, the Bach cantata is very moving and beautiful, the oboe de amore part nicely played by Allan Vogel, the viola solo likewise by Roland Kato. It is toward the end of Lorraine's life, in effect a kind of goodbye, though I don't imagine she was thinking of us here in 2013 as she sung. But here we are anyway.

The orchestra does an extraordinarily quicktime version of the Brandenberg No. 4 by way of introduction. It's taken at a faster clip than I've ever heard and as a result Margaret Batjer's solo violin part is a pyrotechnical feat of large proportions. It's exhilarating and a testament to the spirit and accuracy of the orchestra.

But the disk belongs in the end to Lorraine. Her artistry is ravishing.

Iva Bittova

Someone like Iva Bittova is beyond category. She is not easily pigeonholed. In a search-engine-land medium where categorization is the first criteria, she does not easily fit. For her latest album, titled simply Iva Bittova (ECM B0018081-02), I decided to include her in the modern classical blog, because her music has compositional structure.

The album is the first under her own name. On the surface it is a simple matter. Iva sings, accompanied or unaccompanied by her violin and kalimba playing. The pieces have folk purity yet come across as contemporary music. Partly that has to do with how the vocals and violin interact and what is going on with them musically, of course.

It is the sort of spatially resonant music that ECM and Manfred Eicher love to place in a sound stage, and indeed the music glows in that classic ECM manner.

The strains of her native Moravia and the Slovak folk tradition in general most definitely have an important place as foundations for Iva's music. Yet her own sense of concertizing gives it a different life. The "Fragments I-XII" title is modest. In a way this is a concerted piece for Iva alone. An interrelated twelve-part soliloquy from Iva to you.

Lovely, very personal, and very direct. You want something with plenty of room in it and filled with a folksy earthiness yet also an inherent musical structuration (is that a word?)? You'll find it here. Very comfortably.

Ann Southam, 5, Eve Egoyan

Canadian composer Ann Southam passed away in November 2010. Five completed piano pieces were found in her home in manuscript. It is these works that form the subject of the new CD 5 (Centrediscs 19113). Pianist Eve Egoyan gives us her sympathetic readings of the works, which are "Returnings II in B flat," "Returnings in A flat," and three untitled works, in G, A flat and B flat, respectively.

The works are similar, as I understand it, to the Returnings pieces published in her lifetime.

Each one is of a piece, at a leisurely pace, legato, unfolding slowly and hypnotically. They are of a mesmerizing minimalist sort. A chord, a note in the bass and several notes in the mid-range, for example, alternate slowly; perhaps several additional chords are introduced later. Each work proceeds in a similar manner for around 15 minutes.

Every piece is a distinct part of the overall set, like Carl Andre's tile works were each a part of a series, yet differed slightly.

It is a minimalism genetically related to Satie and Cage but ultimately all Southam's own. The music whiles its way into your life in a sort of impressionistic manner, like the babbling of a nearby brook.

I took to the works right away and find them continually welcome in my listening life thus far. Southam is like no other and that these are in effect her goodbye to us on this earth is quite affecting.

Highly recommended.

Brian Chase, Drums & Drones (CD/DVD Set)

Like conceptual art and modern image art, the best avant garde works of music may not only provide a sound world of unusual dimensions and provenance, they also may make you think. Like a Zen rock garden, there are often a finite set of elements, perhaps in various states of transformation, and your experience of them is heightened by reflection on what you are hearing. The actual hearing, you may become aware, is a process, not at all-together synchronic singularity.

John Cage was a master of making you expand how you approached your sensuous world in this way. Dogs barking, ambient room noise, or any matter of elements Cage manipulated usually had a conceptual component that was more than it might initially appear.

Brian Chase and his work, as heard in Drums and Drones (Pogus 21070-2), has that about it. There are ten segments that flow together as different aspects of the overall matrix. Chase, drummer for the Yeah-Yeah-Yeahs, close-miked various drums tuned to specific pitches and then processed those tones through a computer and a set of loudspeakers.

The idea is to emphasize the sound and its segments of the overtone series through filtering (to explore just intonation in part) then to further subject those sounds when desired to transformations by causing and manipulating feedback drones that occur as the drum head interacts with the loudspeakers.

Each segment is its own sound universe, the drum being a carrier of percussive and sustained tone here but not as much of rhythm. The first disk is a CD containing the sound works only; the second disk is a DVD with the 10 segments augmented by corresponding abstract animations by Ursula Scherrer and Eric Z.

In the end you are led into contemplation of the sound of drums and the nature of that sound, what it is in microcosm and what it may be transformed into with electronic manipulation.

A single tone-sound with its overtone series is always a universe unto itself. The pieces expand our awareness of this inner world as they also provide a kind of fulcrum for meditation on the nature of sound. Or at least that's what I ended up experiencing.

The animations have a sameness-in-change that perfectly synchronizes with the sound-music. I found the color visuals a refreshing change after a number of studies in black and white. They certainly transfer in visual terms the ideation of the music.

The music takes some getting into and how much you like it may depend on how deeply you have delved into minimal avant garde and the abstract sound sculptures of works that have come before. Some may find it less "interesting" than what they are used to. Give the sound time to unfold and hear these segments a number of times and you will probably (like me) fall into the spell that the sounds cast over the sympathetic ear.

It's either remarkable or boring, depending on how much you put into it. So of course is a Zen rock garden. Brian Chase has created something unexpected, no matter how it affects you. That is far from easy in these times.