Three Free Radicals, Travelogue, Scott L. Miller, Mart Soo

One of the signs that a CD is beyond categorization is when I have listened to it numerous times and I still can imagine posting a review of it on any of my three music blogs. Three Free Radicals and their album Travelogue (Improtest Records CD011) most definitely qualifies. It is a series of pieces put together by Scott L. Miller on the Kyrna Electronic Music System and Mart Soo on electric guitar and electronics.

A very distinguishing factor in this eight-work program is the acute sense of sound design that Scott and Mart bring to every excursion. I have followed Scott L. Miller in this wise happily and in tandem with Mart Soo there is a pronounced sonic sense that makes every track stunning and notable. Improvisation is an element in the creation of the music, quite apparently. And with the guitar and electronics mix you sense elements that quite arguably attach the music to Ambient Post-Psychedelic Avant, Improv and New Music-Electronic Music realms. So there are elements that have some connection to Fripp and Eno ambiances, or the free ensembles of Stockhausen, Musica Electronica Viva and in the end a significant originality and an acute fuzzy logic of means.

One feels often throughout an extraordinary binary mix of processed guitar sounds and either vividly contrasting or intermingling electronics.

The result is more spatio-tapestry oriented than formal, and that fits with the idea that the music does not fit comfortably into a rigid genre classification.

The more I listen, the more this music speaks to me. It hangs together as well as any New Music-Electronics excursion I have had the pleasure to hear this year. To my mind Scott L. Miller is a true force on the avant-ambient scene and Mart Soo makes equal sonic sense on this very attractively spacey offering. The sounds are ever golden and ever evocative.

Highly recommended no matter where you stand on present-day modern matters. Give this music a chance and you will be transported, beamed into realms you can drift within beautifully.

David Del Tredici, Child Alice

American composer David Del Tredici (b 1937) went from a Modernist to a founding Neo-Romanticist of the present-day beginning in 1980, when he won the Pulitzer Prize for the first part of Child Alice, which he completed with a second part and so put it in its final form in 1981. Soprano Courtenay Budd, conductor Gil Rose and the accomplished Boston Modern Orchestra Project give us a dramatic and rousing reading of the entire opus on their recent recording (BMOP Sound 1056).

I will admit that in my first few auditions of this fine recording I resisted the all-pervasive centrality of the sequential motif that Del Tredici returns to frequently. It seemed at first a little undistinguished. With further listens I began to appreciate more and more his variational, developmental treatment of the subject and the sheer creative power of his expressive thrust. At first too, the great strength of Courtenay Budd's performance seemed a little overwhelming. Perhaps both factors intruded into a mood I was in? I suspect this because the work and performance in time became more and more intriguing to me, and so too my mood had accommodated  itself increasingly toward the spell of the work, which turned out to be considerable. This was no mere Wonderland, but instead a complex reaction to the complexities of the Alice story origins.

To backtrack, Child Alice centers around Lewis Carroll's rowing expeditions with the young Alice Pleasance Liddell and her sisters Lorina Charlotte and Edith on summer afternoons. In the course of those excursions Lewis invented a series of tales to enthrall the young women. They later took final form in the Alice in Wonderland stories that have remained classics for us ever since they came out.

Child Alice on one level evokes the pastoral charm of summer on the water as inspiration, but then also in the inner states of the girls and their narrator. It sets up a sort of dichotomy of receptive youth versus youth-within-bittersweet-age and forms a kind of shifting mood that is neither one thing nor another.

All this forms the backdrop for the experience of the music itself, which has as its basis the text of a preface poem to one of the stories--about those rowing expeditions as the precondition of the marvelous fanciful story narratives as filtered through the glowing haze of remembrance. Each part builds around a contrasting setting of the text and includes some fascinating interludes for orchestra alone.

What stands out in the end for me is Del Tredeci's sure hand in utilizing the orchestra's many sonic resources as a sort of framing of the vocal narrative. The complexities of the mood come through especially by the way the composer makes of the orchestra an inner psychological commentary vehicle.

So also the Neo-Romanticism we experience in the work is not entirely a return to an earlier way of composing. It is filtered and fractured by the experience of modernity both in musical language terms as well as the complications of living within a modern world with all that entails. So the "through the looking glass" element is not just of Carroll recalling happier summer days past, it is also perhaps Del Tredici's experienced and bitter-sweet view of a tonality that cannot but exist in a post-purity of how we cannot quite recapture a pre-post-wars, pre-Freudian innocence about life and the music within it, about the stories we tell children.

My impressions may be slightly fanciful themselves. Child Alice in its expressive potencies invites such feelings. The strength of the work stems from its all-but-simple simplicity, its inability to return to an earlier state in all its pristineness, its existence in a sort of musical recapture from memory as one recalls childhood through the lens of maturity.

So at the last Child Alice derives its power from the loss of its subject. It exists on the happy surfaces of the water as well as the ambiguous depths of lost experience within recall. And in that way the music succeeds beautifully by its charmingly faded, outmoded yet wayward return. The music has power and depth that hit me only in time. Performances are near ideal. Any serious listener should find much to contemplate and appreciate if she-he gives this music a chance to work its way within the listening self, you.

Michael Kurek, The Sea Knows

Anyone who loves the harp no doubt knows and loves its use in modern Impressionist classics, where it can create an ambiance that we continue to embrace. Living composer Michael Kubek has absorbed that sound and made of it something contemporary-tonal on his CD The Sea Knows (Navona 6111).

A collection of five Kurek works, the album includes harp on three of the five. It is not the primary focus of the music per se, though indeed an ambient beauty and liquidity associated with the harp is an ongoing feature of the program throughout.

Ever lyrical without precisely straying into the blatently Neo-Romantic, Kurek gives to us five evocative works, each varying the mood in part by contrasting instrumentation and in part by thematic rhapsodic variational thrust.

There is a descriptive plasticity to the three chamber works centered around the harp, played nicely by Rita Costanzi or Soledad Yaya. "Moon Canticle" for harp alone implies a night sky in its affective presence. "Serenade for Violincello and Harp" and "Sonata for Viola and Harp" flesh out the ambiance with longer formed pensive lyricism.

"Savannah Shadows" for violin, viola and cello concentrated on string sonance for extended moodiness. The title work "The Sea Knows" caps off the program with an ambitious and somewhat more spicey rhapsodism for a full string orchestra (Vanderbilt Strings under Robin Fountain) and solo cello (Ovidu Marinescu, who also is on the Serenade). It is here we can especially hear Kurek's professed affinity with Rachmaninoff, Sibelius, Vaughan WIlliams and the like without detecting any imitation per se.

In all this is an descriptively ambient program that is modern in its overall thrust, yet affectively tonal in its vocabulary and eloquence. It will please a larger audience, perhaps, than one might ordinarily be attracted to New Music, yet it is involved and musical enough to keep the more demanding listener satisfied. Bravo.

George Lewis, Assemblage, Ensemble Dal Niente

Some of the greatest jazz luminaries turned at times to so-called classical, long-form ideas. James P. Johnson and Duke Ellington come immediately to mind. In the improvised world of avant jazz since 1960 distinctions can become blurred, as I have addressed through many examples on my Gapplegate Music Blog, on my Gapplegate Guitar and Bass Blog, and at times on these pages. "The Skies of America" by Ornette Coleman of course stands out as a milestone of such confluences. There are some very important trends on the purely improvisational front as well. I speak of those things in greater depth in other posts.

Regardless of the many ways to look at and hear music of a modern sort, one thing stands clear in my mind. That is, that composer-trombonist George Lewis has been making some extraordinary New Music over the years. He is a marvel, an innovative and lucid composer of great importance.

Last February 27th I reviewed his fine album "The Will to Adorn." I return today to take a look at another set of his compositions, Assemblage (New World 80792-2), featuring the talented chamber Ensemble Dal Niente.

The avant jazz of the present era is many things. One of the aspects is its vocabulary of phrasing, of sound color, of playing and silence. Undoubtedly a key to it is the extension of the Afro-American musical vocabulary inherent in traditional forms. Yet it is true also that there is chalk-talk venn diagrammatic commonalities between its vocabulary and that of classical avant high modernism. If you asked George Lewis himself I have no doubt he would (and does) have much to say in this regard about his music in whatever form it takes. His modern classical compositional stance does create common ground between Afro-jazz expression and long-form new music of high modern provenance.

Most importantly he carves out his own personal expressions on this shifting turf with great brilliance, I would say. This is nowhere more true than on the four Lewis compositions featured on this program.

In all of it the elemental musical gestures of bowing, drumming (percussing), blowing, plucking, in togetherness or alone, with spaces of tacit presence, and the infinity of confluences are very much the building blocks used to constructing the music itself. How could it not be so? Yet it is George Lewis' expressive joining together of the elements that sets him apart yet makes him an integral part too of the music of right now.

So the album's program of chamber works for the ensembles of six, seven, nine or two instrumentalists presents itself to us in ways that bring us a new and personal take on what can be. If there are key centers they are not so crucial as is the full unfolding of a universe of organized sound color and the testificatory push of each work.

Each of the pieces makes its way forward as a distinct entity. Thanks to the inventive fullness of the Lewis expression we have a special world of sound for "Mnemosis" (2012) for flute, clarinet, violin, viola, cello, piano, percussion; "Hexis" (2013) for flute, clarinet, violin, cello, piano, percussion; "The Mangle of Practice" (2014) for violin and piano; and "Assemblage" (2013) for flute, clarinet, saxophone, violin, viola, cello, harp, piano, percussion. Each has an organic being that stands alongside the others as a unique realization of the Lewis imagination.

The performances are outstanding, or at least impress me as fully living and excitingly fluid. I suspect Maestro Lewis was satisfied with the realizations, which at this point is what matters.

For us, the listener, there is much to hear and absorb. Each new immersion in the program reveals a fuller universe of sound, a greater understanding and appreciation of what is there.

Assemblage reaffirms the true stature and importance of George Lewis the modern-day composer. Those who expect New Music to BE new will gravitate happily to this release. It is very much a music of TODAY and excellent fare that all should listen to carefully and ultimately, if you are like me, joyfully!

Dominick Argento, The Andree Expedition

The song cycle has become somewhat rarified on the New Music front. There do not seem to be so many of them compared to earlier epics. This is no place to speculate on the reasons right now.

There are notable exceptions. The song cycles of US composer Dominick Argento (b. 1927) are one. We hear two on The Andree Expedition (Naxos 8.559828), the title cycle plus "From the Diary of Virginia Woolf." Music takes over when speech can go no further, believes Argento, and both of these cycles demonstrate that idea well. They extend the meaning of the texts in ways that speech alone cannot, shading them in pastels and hard-edged outlines, underscoring in music what the words suggest, creating the atmosphere, giving a deeper setting for the story as it unfolds.

The music in this Naxos edition is performed quite capably by baritone Brian Mulligan and pianist Timothy Long. The pianist is very sensitively attuned to the ever-present commentary and sometimes the dimensional contrast his accompanying role calls for. Mulligan has a highly dramatic approach, which fares especially well in the softer, more reflective sections. When he is at forte and especially above that his is a rather hard sonance. It takes some getting used to. The music warrants it in its extraordinary depictions.

In the end though we come for Argento's music.

And we get it in all its impactful drama. "The Andree Expedition" (1982) is based on diaries and letters surrounding the tragic balloon expedition to the North Pole in 1897. "From the Diary of Virginia Woolf" (1974) culls eight entries as the vocal text, filled with self-confessional candor. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1975.

The title work consists of 13 songs that relate one to another. The human struggle against daunting odds forms the core of the music and text. A sample from one of the participant's accounts: "It is indeed a wonderful journey through the night. I am cold but will not wake the two sleepers. They need rest. If any of them should succumb it might be because I had tired them out." It is a bleak account of a bleak disaster. The music reflects regret and dilemma in a modern expressionist way. It has a presence that shows Argento's flair for the possibilities of vocal declamation, drawing out the implications and setting them squarely into the music. The singer personifies each of the three balloonists and so gives us a sort of trifold narrative of the unfolding disaster.

The Virginia Woolf diary cycle has a slightly different slant, as Ms. Wolfe's inner and outer life come into conflict and create various mood pieces and a creative struggle to harness it all somehow. It complements the expedition song cycle well.

In all we get nearly 80 minutes of Argento song drama at its most distinctive. It is at times VERY expressive, and so not exactly light fare to put on as background. Perhaps that is inevitable by nature of the subject matter alone. The music demands your attention, then rewards it. For a modest Naxos investment one gets a provocative introduction to Argento's modern take on the song cycle. That is something very illuminating and moving. All modern song students will get real substance here.

Listen.

Yuuko Shiokawa, Andras Schiff, Bach, Busoni, Beethoven

Fine  chamber works played with the ultimate artistry? It is like an excellent vintage of wine. If you know what you seek, you get it at the first taste, so with violinist Yuuko Shiokawa and pianist Andras Schiff in their new recording of Bach, Busoni, Beethoven (ECM New Series 2510). At the first listen you know right away that you are in the presence of exceptional music making.

And there is no letup, regardless of how many times you listen. The first reason for that is an unusual and worthy mix of works: Bach's Sonata No. 3 in E major for Violin and Keyboard, Ferruccio Busoni (1866-1924) and his Sonata No. 2 in e minor for violin and piano, and Beethoven's Sonata No. 10 in G major for Violin and Piano. The big surprise perhaps is the excellence of the Busoni, reminding us that he was no slouch, not at all. It is a fine work that fits in well with the sublimity of the Bach and the heroic inventiveness of the Beethoven.

And the performances are exceptional without exception. Shiokawa plays it all with a sweetness and light and Schiff responds with equally inspired pianism. The Bach gives notice that there indeed can be a reflective and subtle reading of the beautiful lines of Bach at his finest. There is plenty of mindful feeling in all the performances, but also a kind of transcendence, so that you grasp the feeling yet also join in on the musical journey to ever more subtle concordances.

It is a remarkable disc. The music sings away without fail. The compositions are brilliant, each in their own way; the performances as musically profound as you could ask for. This makes a fabulous holiday gift for yourself or someone you care about! Phenomenal.

Trevor Babb, Warmth, including Steve Reich, Electric Counterpoint, etc.

The idea of new music works for multiple overdubbed electric guitars has surely been in the air a long time. Some of Fripp and Eno's works for guitar and delay in the '70s gave us striking guitar-orchestral density and beauty. The real-time breakthrough of such music for formally articulated multi-guitars can be traced back to Steve Reich's "Electronic Counterpoint," written for 12 prerecorded electric guitars and 2 bass guitars plus live guitar in 1987 and first recorded by Pat Metheny. From there followed other works. Guitarist Trevor Babb performs his own version of the Reich and other guitar ensemble pieces on the recent CD Warmth (Innova 972).

The Reich as done is different enough from the Metheny version that it stands alongside, as good or better. That is saying a great deal. Either version reminds us how vintage Reich is superlative, so much ahead of some of the more uninspired minimalism that existed and exists alongside his music as to be altogether other. Some of the imitators are like schmutz in search of a mince meat pie to give them life. Reich is the pie itself, fashioned and cooked to a golden brown, perfect for what it is meant to be.The music stands out now as it did then. Babb gives it that extra new twist and we are back into it like the years have not passed.

And the virtue of having a really vibrant version of the Reich alongside other multiple guitar pieces illuminates those works and gives the Reich another context.

So we are treated to five other new music compositions for multiple electrics, each one different from the other as they are to the Reich. So that driving counterpoint of the Reich contrasts with sustained guitar new music chorales and ruminative or exploratory guitar richness.

We get good things to experience with Paul Kereke's "Trail," David Lang's "Warmth" for two guitars, James Tenney's "Septet," Trevor Babb's own "Grimace" and Carl Testa's "Slope 2."

It is in the end a program any electric guitarist of a progressive sort should eat up, and their friends, too, of course. (No, not eat up their friends, I hope. The music!) Yet it is also New Music worthy of the name--something people who ordinarily do not associate with electric guitar sounds, or not modern classical applications of it, will find stimulating and worthwhile. Hear it, do.