Douglas Boyce, The Hunt By Night, Chamber Music

 

Who is Douglas Boyce? A good way to start knowing about him is on a recent album of his chamber music, The Hunt By Night  (New Focus Recordings FCR 278). It is another great example of why New Focus Recordings is one of the best things to happen to New Music in a long time.

We get a chance to immerse ourselves in five works, all around 10 minutes or so long. They were composed between 2003 and 2020, so of course we are talking about very new things. Douglas Boyce puts a great deal of thought, imagination and detail into each of these pieces. They happily and refreshingly occupy a turf somewhere between Neo-Classical and High Modern chamber space--rhythmically vivid in a post-Stravinskian sense, tonally vast in a near atonal mode, adventuresomely scored.

The inner sleeve of the CD puts forward what Boyce is all about in such clear terms I think it right to quote it directly. That is, that "Douglas Boyce writes music exploring the historical entailments of musical-being and with the temporal poetics of performance." Well, uh, yes. He does do that. It actually makes sense once you listen carefully.

In the liner notes to this program Boyce agrees with Stravinsky in asserting that music is fundamentally anchored ontologically in time, as opposed to anchoring in sound. Music situates performers and audience in a special ritual temporality. History and the present coincide. They do so here in a specific bio-mechanical continuity we call "chamber music," in this case delicately specific in spite of the "severity" of the Modern. It encompasses for all that an historical meta-narrative as well. 

"Embodied performance" here joins with what we now experience as the digital--on the CD of course.

Of the five pieces on this recording, three feature the 6-7 member chamber gathering counter)induction. The title work "The Hunt By Night" reimagines in musical sound Paulo Uccello's 1470 painting by that name,  taking a middle path in some ways between symmetry and flatness with hunters, dogs and hunting horns set against the rigid envelopment of the forest. The music in turn reflects a poem based on the painting, the 1970 expression by one Derek Mahon. The eloquently matter-of-fact rhythmic vitality of the work vividly goes far in an elaborate substitution of temporal rituals of sound-in-motion. It is a music that is bracing, beautifully conversant in depicting the memory of image and word. It is a work of convincing, excellent fettle. The clarinet part marks the territory in a special pointedness that the rest of the instrumentation follows and expands.

Backing up to the opening "Quintet l'homme arme" we have more to immerse us, very gladly. It gives counter)induction another vivid explosion of sound that obliquely reflects the extraordinarily popular "l'homme arme" setting that composers adopted often enough during a pretty numerous number of decades after its emergence in the 15th century. Boyce's dramatic treatment of the melody puts it into dissonant territory and renders it wholly something other, which we Modernist sympathizers can only welcome as familial and pleasing to our specially formulated palettes. The contrast of movement and relative stasis in the two sections heightens the feeling of difference too and taking it all in, it is a happy listen, indeed!

The "Etude for Cello and Piano No. 1" (2017) comes into our hearing with a lively springboarding out from a quasi-bolero and then on to a heightened connectivity of rhythm contrasting with further elocutions we find most absorbing--or at least I do! Bravo to Ieva Jokubaviciute and Schuyler Slack for a fantastic performance of this one.

The "Piano Quartet No. 2" (2008) gives Trio Cavatina and violist Beth Guterman Chu a kind of thrillingly dissecting musical possibility in the tightly focused excitment of this considerably lucid outburst.

And finally we experience with pleasure the third counter)induction performance with the 2019 "Sails Knife-bright in a Seasonal Wind" which stands out for the nicely expressed initial sounding of classical guitar (Daniel Lippel) and its subsequent unwinding and unfailing development with both guitar and chamber group forging together as a whole.

It is music that should grab ahold of you decidedly after a few listens. Douglas Boyce is reassuringly and convincingly his own voice in these works. And the performances are fully up to the challenging demands he puts on all concerned. A Chamber Modern gem, it all comes to that. This one gets my highest recommendation. Give it a chance and see what happens. It is serious business. Bravo!

George Lewis, The Recombinant Trilogy

 

Anyone who follows the musical career of George Lewis should know his beginnings as an acclaimed improvising trombonist on the Avant Jazz scene--as a key AACM (Chicago's Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians) member, notably making his mark in Anthony Braxton's group and on from there. In time his immersion in Electronic and New Music gave us a composer of great stature and innovative inventiveness. 

I've covered gladly his music on my music blogs from the beginning of my blog posting some 14 years ago. (Type his name in the search box here and also on my Gapplegate Music Review and my Gapplegate Guitar and Bass Review. Before that I covered his releases on Cadence.) 

I am glad to return with another interesting disk of his music, The Recombinant Trilogy (New Focus Recordings FCR 284). It is a further and effectively moving step toward realizing, refining and redefining the performance combination of live instrumentalists and live electronics. As the liner notes inform us, the live instrumental signal is subjected in real time to put forward "interactive digital delays, spatialization and timbre transformation" that remake the acoustic sounds of each instrument "into multiple digitally created sonic personalities that follow diverse yet intersecting spatial tragectories."

It is a matter of three pieces for virtuoso instrumentalist and electro-acoustic transforming operations Lewis appropriately and helpfully calls "recombinant electronics." 

We begin the program with "Emergent" (2014), for the flute of Claire Chase and the electronic manipulation of Levy Lorenzo. The resultant music is infinitely flexible, plastic, singularly filled with human gesture yet as a magically charmed extension of the acoustic material world.

This is followed by "Not Alone" (2014-5) for Seth Parker Woods who plays cello and applies recombinant electronics to the signal himself. There is a great deal of spontaneously emergent cello in itself, a wonder to hear, but then a continual enveloping and burgeoning outward into something fascinatingly other.

Finally there is "Seismologic" 2017 for Dana Jessen on bassoon and Eli Stine on recombinant electronics. The very nature of the acoustics of the bassoon drives understandably the final electronic mélange in ways that unleash a more earthy, almost undergrounded deepness, and then a gradually rising up of emergency urgency. And in the end the synchrony and then the dis-synchrony of acoustic and electronic intertwinings stand out as the culmination of the three-pronged voyaging we travel through with interest and fascination.

In the end we get a convincing chamber tapestry of human gestural aesthetics which partake of the beautifully novel but does so with a conversational periodicity that reaffirms the personal quality of live music making while it expands the palette of possibilities for a great wealth of intention and artistry. Molto bravo. There is great spirit to these three works and so much to explore and appreciate. Recommended strongly.

Eric Craven, Pieces for Pianists Volume One, Mary Dullea

 

Life is short, art is long. Old words but they still ring true. Ars longa, vita brevis. And on a day like today the longness of art asserts itself in spite of how short existence might be. That is because for me it is a matter of enjoying the music of a composer I have missed until now. Eric Craven reminds us that art is long because he makes music that helps lengthen it all. I have been enjoying his album of piano music that has come out recently. It is the Volume One of his Pieces for Pianists (Metier msv 28601), written between 2017 and 2019 and very nicely performed by Mary Dullea.

This volume includes the first 25 pieces, miniatures short and very much alive with character. So in this case "art is short," but there's a bunch of it so it gets long eventually! The music is tonal, playful in ways that remind slightly of Satie without owing the least bit to him in any obvious way. The pieces revel in, if I might say this, the sheer pleasure of their sounding. It is not a music that challenges so much as it affirms itself in its singing of itself pianistically. And that owes a great deal to the pianist as well as the composer.

The CDs liners tell us that this music is as much concerned as anything with the microscience implied in the miniature, the musical equivalent to sub-atomic science. Then too the composer wants in this "to encourage and excite both a honing of technique and a quickening of the impulse toward interpretation." Hence the title we should note is "Pieces for Pianists" as much as for piano! And happily the pianist rises to the challenge and gives us the kind of poetic, interpretive readings that Maestro Craven no doubt appreciates.

As listener, we hear this and other dimensions as well, or at least I do, appreciatively. So for me there are moments that seem to refer back to old Music Hall and Jazz elements but as if through a lens, refracted. Other pieces have a reference to playfully "practicing" the piano, only not so much just in the doing as in remembering such a thing. There are elements of humor, of reflection, of reflexively evoking time well spent with the piano in days past, earlier years, formative times. So in the doing is the remembrance of the doing.

The hopefully wonderful thing about it all is that it works, that the music evokes with a bright, vivacious charm that does not try and revive some previous musical world as it takes the memory of it and makes of it a contemporary.commentary, so to speak.

In the end we have 25 miniature gems as much fun to hear as they no doubt are to play. It most certainly makes me want to hear Volume Two as soon as it comes out. Craven writes for the pianist with the care and consideration that all-but-ensures that the performances will be all one might hope for in the hands of a piano master. And so bravo Mary Dullea for coming though with infinite care and zeal. And of course bravo Eric Craven. This one is a lot of fun. Do not miss it. Hurrah!

 

Sam Hayden, Becomings, Works for Solo Piano, Ian Pace

Music is like life. You may think you know a lot about it, but then the future has things in store and you cannot quite know what. With music (and with life) that can be a good thing of course. So I try and maintain an open stance, to be ready for whatever comes.

Today's offering is one of those happy surprises one can experience. It is a two-CD set covering the piano music of Sam Hayden, as played extraordinarily well by Ian Pace. Becomings (Metier 2-CD msv 28611) covers the title work as disk one and three shorter works on disk two. It all has the adventuresome sort of High Modernism dash that situates pianist and instrument on a heroic and dynamic series of journeys that keep the listener challenged and well rewarded with exciting fare. It comprises to date Hayden's complete works for solo piano and as such the first recordings of same.

The stylistic territory occupied by this music has a deliberate, free spontaneity feeling, Expressionist but also open-cosmic, in a varied a-rhythmic attack that perhaps owes something or overlaps at any rate to the later improvisations of the great Cecil Taylor--it is deliberately irregular and not overtly periodistic for the most part and does not deliberately stress a key center most of the time. It sometimes also recalls some of John Cage's star chart works--for its complexity, its vastly expansive, counter-intuitive set of possibilities that then become logically conversational as a musical language, happily.

The final work in the set, "Piano Moves," for amplified piano,  has a jagged, ragged, primally dissonant, mesmerizing  insistency that marks it off as singular. To get maximum effect one should let the music take over your situation for its 24 minutes. 

"Becomings (Das Werden)" bring us seven sections and a very motionful a-rhythmic atonality that has a virtuoso level of unexpected yet especially continual  morphing that Ian Pace handles with high artistry and sensitivity.

The remaining two works on disk two, a short "Fragment (After Losses)" and the longer "...still time..." have more of the open unpredictability in motion as we hear on the title work. "Still time" has a hushed quietude that unwinds in a nicely post-Feldman poetic way. Then it breaks out with more energetic and expressive loudness before leaving more quiet rumination to contemplate.

This set will appeal to all pianistically oriented Modernists out there. Hayden is the genuine article and I hope we can hear more of his music in future releases. Good show!

A    

Astor Piazzolla, La Pasion, Tango-Etudes for Violin Solo, Kinga Augustyn

 

Some music combined with some performances seem perfectly right. And when you come across such things it is a confirmation that the world may be upside down in many respects yet music somehow makes it right even if only for a brief time, i.e., not an entire evening or such, just as long as the music is meant to last.

That is the case with a short album I've been enjoying recently. It is performed wonderfully well by violinist Kinga Augustyn. Type her name in the search box above for some other reviews I've done of her albums, some just a few days ago.

In is something very nice by Astor Piazzolla, namely La Pasion, Tango-Etudes for Violin Solo (Centaur). What's rather remarkable about these six etudes is how they manage to partake of a Tango atmosphere-adventure yet they often spin away from any very overt expression of the continual rhythmic insistence a regular Tango would need to have to be danceable. Instead they sometimes weave themselves in and out of such considerations via rubato and fractional structural-segmental pauses that put the music in a different place. And in so doing Piazzolla and Kinga suspend dance time as we might conceive of it and instead fall nicely into violin solo unaccompanied virtuoso expressions in which one recognizes readily a Piazzolla elan, something that sets him apart from virtually any other composer.

Much of this "halfway-here, halfway-there" quality works especially well in the way that Ms. Augustyn straddles the "Tango/not Tango" qualities of the writing. It is a pairings of composer and performer that stands out, that seems ever-fresh no matter how many times one listens. 

So I do recommend this one heartily. Kinga comes through again.

Julien Palomo, S'Eteindre (Penderecki, Pendant La Fin Du Monde)

 

I have come to appreciate the music of Julien Palomo over the years as a New Music Electrician of true stature. During this Pandemic he has finished off a very ambitious, 11 part Electronic Music work S'Eteindre (Penderecki, Pendant La Fin Du Mond)  (Mutant Sounds, Bandcamp DL). It lasts many hours and so does not especially lend itself to a single-sitting hearing in general but that is the case with very long works. I found it quite worthwhile to listen to it all a few parts at a time.

The end of the great composer Penderecki and the continuing end of the world come together in this rather apocalyptic reverse paean to some extraordinarily difficult times. 

Each part has its own identity and substantiality; lasting from around 20 minutes to under an hour. Julien puts it all together with a dense orchestrational electronic wash of multiple synths, often with long, but not obviously droning sustains that ebb and flow in complexity and contrast as underpinning to foreground musical-noise events that have a discursive variability that is faster moving, that are evolving events often contrasting with the bedrock of the slower moving constants.

The more I listen to all this the more I feel like I belong in this musical maze. It is important work, advanced, endlessly stimulating, a great sound companion for your moment of repose. Listen!

Lavena, In Your Hands, New Cello Music By Peacocke, Montgomery, Shaw, Hearne, Dessner and Adashi

 

One way the new can surprise is when it does something so well one rehears what is possible. That's very true of cellist Lavena's debut solo album In Your Hands (Bright Shiny Things BSTC-0145). It is a most remarkable program of New Music for unaccompanied cello and then two additional works for cello and another instrument.

What first struck this listener about it all is not so much that the music is tonal, though that is true. It struck me how much the music takes care to bring out elemental cello resonances and sound colors by taking advantage idiomatically of standard cello tuning, the possibility of open strings and very resonant multiple stops, figurations that very much bring out the special qualities of effective cello string soundings and of course cello bowing, to unveil richly expressive archaic and vibrant cello acoustics.

It is especially true of the unaccompanied works.  The opening, a debut recording of "Amygdala" by Gemma Peacocke pits solo cello against an electronic backdrop for a beautifully emergent cello sonance that has a primality that does not quite drone but pairs multiple stops in long beautifully sustained melodics.

The premiere of the three movement Jessie Montgomery work "Duo for Violin and Cello" combines an intricate intertwining of William Herzog's violin with Lavena's cello for soaring arpeggios on combined string sequences and pizzicato adventures followed by a striking chorale-like interlocking with blocks of shifting sustains leading to an intense rhapsodic cello soaring atop the violin's continuous multiple-stop sustains. The lyric blocks further develop. Then the final movement gives us an exciting series of presto arpeggiations, ingenious shifts and shades very well played. Exhilarating music this is.

Caroline Shaw's solo cello "in manus tuas" follows with striking double stopped. two voiced exceptionalities. Lavena is called upon to blend her voice with the cello part and it sounds very good indeed. The work is beautifully based on a motet by Thomas Tallis.

Ted Hearne's "Furtive Movements" pairs cello with percussion (Jeff Stern) for a remarkable series of rhythmically vibrant and sonically complex expressions in four short movements. The interplay defies description in the best manner and the sound colors juxtapose in uncanny ways. That brings lots of smiles of appreciation, or at least that is the case for me! A virtuosi tour de force for sure.

Bryce Desner's "Tuusula" in its premier recording begins with some attractively dynamic fanfare sorts of figures and continues with some beautiful sequences played brilliantly well by Lavena.

The finale "my heart comes undone" was written for Lavena by her husband Judah Adashi, based on the Bjork song "Unravel" and more generally also on stylistic elements of Arvo Part. It gives us a fitting end to a marvelously fresh album.

I am favorably reminded at times of the string styles of Medieval and Renaissance Europe. But then also too of the string work of John Cale on Nico's Marble Index album from the 1960s and also Berio's string accompaniment to "Black is the Color" on his wonderful Folk Songs suite. It is Archaic Modern in that way and I love the sound.

And then it is more besides, a new take on the Contemporary Modern as a whole and undoubtedly of interest to anyone who wants to keep current and looks for something very musical as well as very new. Highly recommended.