Orlando Jacinto Garcia, String Quartets 1-3, Amernet String Quartet

 

Cuban-American composer Orlando Jacinto Garcia writes music that aims to suspend time. This according to the liner notes on the recent offering String Quartets 1-3 (Metier msv28613). The Amernet String Quartet perform all three quartets with care, precision, and understanding. And time becomes relative with close listening, or at least that was my experience.

Garcia was born in Cuba, 1954 and migrated to the USA in 1961. His compositions have received a number of awards and world-wide performance coverage.

The aural feeling of suspension in time (at least in terms of these quartets) often comes about by a very gradual unfolding of content, a deliberation that plays out bit-by-bit in each case, by repetition that involves less of a developmental processual element (as one might hear often enough in the music of Steve Reich) but instead changes and interchanges sectional elements that further the work in a temporal suspension, even if there might be rapidly expressed elements at times.

The music at its best settles into a complexly varied phrasing that repeats without haste and in the end without the least feeling of urgency. The music says its say and one finds at the end a connectivity that invites one to contemplation, non-insistently.

There are times when the music unravels like a Persian Carpet--like later Morton Feldman, where patterns repeat and then contrast with other patterns and the connectivity is a natural contiguity, a "this comes next to that" apparentness . Yet as you listen it does not sound like there is a Feldman imitation, just an affinity. And his syntax has a personal originality that sets it apart from other composers in general.

And with the repetition the term Minimalism comes to mind. Of course repetition is nothing new. As in Rock, Blues, African, European folk, some Classical, etc., to repeat is to groove sometimes, to trance, to take pleasure in the thing restated. The sort of repetition Feldman and Garcia are up to does not look for groove much, certainly, and the slowness of the unfolding brings timelessness which perhaps is the opposite of groove? 

Listening here from the second to, say,  the infinite rehearing of a motif, one does not find oneself driven into the connectedness as a somatic ecstacy. It all suspends rather than re-sends. And that is fine because no music need to conform to all other related musics of course. To not groove is to allow other music to do that, and to contrast the listening self with another place to be.

If you live with this music for awhile like I have you may well find it a special thing, serious and expressive, thoughtful and in its own way a step ahead. It is sincere, intimate and a musical world unto itself, happily. Recommended.

James Dashow, Songs from a Spiral Tree, The Vocal Works, High Modern Classics

 

Maybe like me you do not know a lot about composer James Dashow. The current two-CD set will help set you straight.. It is titled Songs from the Spiral Tree: The Vocal Works (Ravello RR8046 2-CDs).

This is all-hands-on-deck High Modern song grouping, five in all, that come out of the tradition of Schoenberg, Webern, Boulez and beyond. Dashow also studied the music of Dallapiccola at some length, and that influence is no doubt also in there as a general factor. 

There is a pronouncedly rangy, full throated, acrobatic vocal style and a thoughtful instrumental and/or electronic accompaniment, all mind expanding, carefully and masterfully crafted with a sure hand. He was one of the very first to work with computer music and some of the songs feature some very imaginative and skillfully executed computer electronic parts, a high point of the program, surely. 

The poetic song texts include some of our finest Modernists--with Theodore Roethke featured on "Songs for a Spiral Tree," John Ashberry on "Second Voyage" and "Ashberry Setting," and John Berryman on "Some Dream Songs." Text and music match nicely, perfectly even.

The performances are excellent, with some beautiful singing from Constance Beavon, Lisa Pierce, Sonia Visentin, Joan Logue and George Shirley. The instrumental parts for flute (Lauren Weiss or Jayn Rosenfeld), harp (Lucia Bova), piano (James Winn, Aldo Orveito, or Giancarlo Simonacci) and violin (Mario Buffa) are excellently played and beautifully written.

Anyone who loves the vocal arts and High Modernism will find this one very good to hear, I would think. Bravo James Dashow!

Sustain, Vol. 2: Solo Piano and Chamber Works, A Modern Anthology

The more disparate and numerous the musical items an anthology contains, the harder it is to write about it in some ways. Yet if the music speaks one must cast some light on it all. The Navona label periodically produces anthologies of new Modern music in various genres and with various configurations, various themes. Here today is such a one and it qualifies as something nicely adding to our appreciation of the Contemporary, so I am glad to write about it.

So then here is one that has gotten my attention. It is Sustain, Vol. 2: Solo Piano and Chamber Works (Navona NV6345). All the music tends to be in the realm of the Modern, the Tonal, the rather Neo-Classical often enough, sometimes with a slight touch of Neo-Romanticism but ever veering off on original paths, productive tangents in the miniaturist mode.

Within the totality the objective of this program is to present "piano works in solo, duo and trio settings." So we get nine works for solo piano, one for violin and piano, one for tenor sax and piano and a trio for violin, cello and piano. The ever passing parade of subtly singular works makes for fascinating listening. 

To single out a few solo piano pieces that stay in the mind, even if they all do, there is the bluesy, jazz inflected strength of Sarah Wallin-Huff's "The Reluctant Carnie," and John A. Carollo's articulate, explosively animated and weighty "Piano Etude No. 6," Kenneth Kuhn's "Of What Might Have Been" for violin and piano  has a sharply defined Neo-Classical verve and Jim Puckett's "Nocturne" for tenor sax and piano gives is a reflective lyricism that stands up and demands to be heard. The finale is "Bewildered Soliloquies," a high voltage trio by Santiago Kodela. 

It all reminds us that we live in a world where the music keeps springing forth no matter now the world fares otherwise.

So too we get a wealth of other possibilities of a very worthy sort on the additional solo piano works by the likes of Karen A. Tarlow, Chen-Hsin Su, John Craven, Gordon Monahan, Bill Sherril, plus two by Ron Nagorcka.

Edgard Varese once famously exclaimed that "the present-day composer refuses to die!" This anthology is proof, if you need any, that it still is very much the case. There is much to explore here. Any piano music acolyte will find this a boon I am of little doubt. Kudos.

Sid Richardson, Borne by a Wind

 

Some composers create music as they might breathe. The music follows upon itself in a natural flow, like conversation idealized into a musical transform. That's the feeling I get listening to Sid Richardson on his recent Borne by a Wind (New Focus Recordings FCR285).

It in part centers around the poetry of Nathaniel Mackey, a kind of Post-Beat brilliance well suited to getting articulated around a musical incubation, so to speak. The five movement "Red Wind" defines that, in recitation of Mackey fleshed out further by soprano Melissa Hughes and the Deviant Septet (with wind, contrabass and percussion to take on Jazz or New Music inflections alternately) giving shape and form to the poetic imagery. It all proceeds in ways that channel Jazz and New Music,  to further everything and make it make a kind of perfect aural sense, poetic, meaningful Jazz-Classical Modern elements and a touch of World, all wrapped into one. 

I've heard "Red Wind" a bunch of times so far and it keeps making more and more of an impression on me, so that is a happy thing. Rounding out the program are three additional chamber gems--"There is no sleep so deep" for solo piano, "LUNE" for solo violin, and "Astrolabe" for the six instrumentalists of the Da Capo Chamber Players. All three pieces further deepen our appreciation of the advanced, eloquent and limber contemporary inventiveness of Richardson. 

The piano piece is in the Ultra-Modern performative mode, beautifully done by Conrad Tao. "LUNE" gets concentrated soundings by Lilit Hartunian. It is meditative, open, empty and full at the same time, redolent with motivic insistence without taking on the mesmeric periodicity that old-school Minimalism typically worked towards.

"Astrolab" does for sextet what "LUNE" did for solo violin--it unwraps a kind of unified musical idea only in more complex and multivoiced ways that unveil variational endlessnesses.

As is usually the case these blog words are not meant to provide a definitive analog to the sounds so much as pique curiosity and suggest the directionality of an album. So that. On the basis of this Borne by a Wind program Sid Richardson is an important voice on the New Music scene today. The entire program combines sound color and eloquent linings ever. Highly recommended.

James Caldwell, Pocket Music, Concrete Miniatures 1998-2020

 

Early Electronic and Musique Concrete flourished of course in part by the complexity and novelty of the aural colors the artists painstakingly built up out of transformations and generations of heretofore unheard of possibilities. With the advent of synthesizers in some ways the music was akin to the idea in organ music--that there were preset "stops" and composing became in part a matter of the building of form within the available sound parameters. This is a gross simplification but true in the broadest senses.

With the recent album Pocket Music:Concrete Miniatures 1998-2020 (Neuma 135), James Caldwell  gives us in a fascinating series of very short to mid-length miniatures a revived sense of possibility in transforming acoustic sounds to timbral openings onto newly regenerative sonic universes. The infinite number of transformations possible for any given soundset gives us tantalizing pause. Like abstraction in painting there is sometimes a tangential referential relation from original to re-composed, so that you feel in a new place, an OTHER place.

And too there is a kind of performative relation to original sound transformations. Landscapes are seemingly organically congealing though each element has been aesthetically transformed with the kind of inventiveness that may remind us of the old musique concrete works of Pierre Schaefer and the others of the Euro-French School in the '50s and early '60s. On the other hand the composer draws us in to the idea of a alternate lineage down from Xenakis, Mimaroglu, Gaburo. What matters is that what he views as a rootedness I too hear in this album. And if I listen again, sure I hear those influences in essence too.

But on another level the music comes out of the idea of the encapsulating title, Pocket Music. The idea is that the sound sources can well be thought of as things that can comfortably fit in a pocket, so a rubber band or wrapper that once contained fruit, a set of keys, a pencil, ping-pong balls and more besides. It all locates the music in a casual everyday place, perhaps also at home, a place where from the world of everyday objects one may induce a set of sounds, a subset of the homespun world of sound possibilities--a Mikrokosmos  kind of miniature interrelatedness, along with a making special of the everyday. .Underneath it all is a unique conceptualism that helps distinguish this music as of a particular piece, a common source, the ready-to-hand of the most mundane of objects, yet because so everyday yet so transformed there is a kind of intimate joining of art and life.

And so there are in the grouping together of given miniatures a kind of feeling of difference and sameness for contemplation, with never a dull moment but continual movement in the best ways.

Anyone who loves classic Electronic and Electro-Acoustic Music will feel very much at home with this album. For those so rooted it will remind you perhaps why you were attracted to the new sounds in the first place? It did that to me. Definitely recommended.

Robert Moran, Buddha Goes to Bayreuth

 

I last posted on the music of Robert Moran in 2011, a review of his Trinity Requiem for 9-11 victims (type his name in the search box for that). Now here we are some ten years later and the world is a different place of course yet  Robert Moran's music straddles the passing time, literally. He returns in full force with his impressive opus Buddha Goes to Bayreuth (Nauma 136).

The work clocks in at a little over an hour, filled with expressive ambition for a massed forces of Stefan Gorgner as countertenor, the two choirs of the KammerChor KlangsCala Salzburg and the dual string orchestras of the Stuttgarter Kammerorchester, all under conductor Rupert Huber. What we hear was well recorded live at the Salzburg Cathedral in 2014.

The premise for the music is elaborate and resonant. It was initially commissioned in 2011. Part One was added three years later to make it an evening's worth of music in the extraordinarily resonant Salzburg Cathedral. 

Wagner wanted to write an opera about the life of Buddha but didn't. Buddha Goes to Bayreuth in effect imagines it, or perhaps more properly to say he ere-imagines it  The work features among other things chordal blocks that are derived from Parsifal. Some Tibetan Mantras are also part of the raw ingredients. The end result is original and absorbing, quite cosmic in a special space-time expressivity.

It is a long ethereal stretch of massive suspensions and holdings perfectly matched for the substantially lengthy natural echo of the cathedral. There is grit in the harmonic pointedness of the score and a good hour of contemplative sounds that have a feeling of timeless endlessness. There is an unmistakable present-day currency continually rolling along in our hearing experience. It is a beautiful sprawl that in a way uses the cathedral acoustics as an instrument with a deliberate sounding of length and depth. One must hear this to fathom it all. Words are not sufficient.

It brings you to an aural space that somehow straddles East and West, today and long ago yesterdays. It is something to experience in depth and the opening effect of the hearing grows as you listen again. Definitely recommended for the New Music vocal music adept, or for that matter anyone who seeks the new.

Robert Honstein, Middle Ground, Music for Solo Violin and Electronics, Kate Stenberg

 

The music of Robert Honstein has not crossed my listening path all that much (but I've appreciated what I've heard on a couple of anthologies. Type his name in the search box above for those.) Today we consider an EP program devoted solely to his music, Middle Ground  (OM 2030) for solo violin and electronic manipulation, played nicely by Kate Stenberg.  There is a film that goes with the music but I have not seen it as yet. The sound work in itself attracts one's attention in very good ways either way, at any rate.

The music divides into three interrelated movements. The violin sounds out from a sonic stage that is a little bit echo-wet a la ECM. The middle section seems to have a subtly slight digital delay.

The first part "Too Far" starts the music out with a quiet mystery--somehow not unrelated to some of the thoughtful, introspective chamber sounds we have heard most definitively from the great Arvo Paert yet Honstein is singingly original in its own right. The signal splits so that the violin answers self duet-style in lyrically radical tonality, with a diatonic sweetness that does not cloy.

"Too Close" has a bit of digital delay and/or multiple tracking and produces a steady-state New Music fiddling that holds its own in minor mode that sounds almost ethnic in a post-Modernity kind of way. It pleases me greatly and holds my attention. Perhaps you too would feel that way? It is music easy to like yet not at all predictable.

The finale, "Bridging the Gap" peacefully unwinds around diatonic lower and higher register call-and-answer passages that spellbind without assertively calling attention to themselves.

The music has its say then fades off into quiet. It is not easy to present a musical front that is simple yet not the least bit banal. Robert Honstein's music and Kate Stenberg's focused and subtle violin performance execution pull together to create a markedly deep impression, a special sort of simplicity that refreshes as it expresses. 

Well done! I recommend this for the seekers of what one might call Tone-Mystery Modernism. Nice.