CD Review, Classical Music, Composers, Twentieth Century Composer

LuLo: The Restless – Rued Langgaard reimagined

Painful footsteps are behind me
Here you stand so clear and far
Through the willows all I see
is a lonely burning star
–Thor Lange, “Sun at Rest”

Cellist Kirstine Elise Pedersen and bassist Mathæus Bech, a.k.a. LuLo, came together through a shared fascination with the singular, often-misunderstood Danish composer Rued Langgaard (1893–1952). Their approach to his music is both reverent and daring. Rather than treating the scores as sacred artifacts, they dismantled them lovingly, listening closely to recordings, transcribing passages by ear, and distilling sprawling works—from piano pieces to string quartets and symphonies—down to a page or less of melody and harmony. From there, they rebuilt them intuitively, as if they were fragments of folk music handed down orally rather than concert works locked behind museum glass.

The resulting album is inseparable from its physical form: a book-object accompanied by archival photographs and artistic images by Bech, along with notes that gesture toward the times, places, and emotional climates that shaped Langgaard’s life.

Said life haunts the music at every turn. A prodigy who performed his first concert at 11 and saw his first symphony performed by the Berlin Philharmonic to great acclaim, Langgaard soon found himself at odds with the musical establishment. His eccentricity and refusal to remain stylistically obedient—shifting from late Romanticism into something more abrasive, prophetic, even anarchic—left him increasingly isolated. Colleagues mocked him; institutions ignored him. Out of seeming desperation, he wrote oblique instructions like “repeat for all eternity” or “repeat with a crescendo until either the piano or your fingers break.” Of the roughly 400 works he composed, only a tenth were performed during his lifetime, often at his own expense. Eventually, weary of his complaints, the cultural elite arranged for him to be quietly exiled to a post as a church organist at the far end of the country. Langgaard accepted, despite knowing full well the intention behind the offer. He died largely forgotten, his music surfacing again only in the present century, like a message in a bottle.

LuLo’s interpretations capture this sense of restless compression with the utmost attention to detail. The album opens in a state of delicate agitation with pieces like “Cowbells in the Pine Forest,” where fluttering textures suggest jangling metal or distant movement before a melody emerges with the pale light of rural dawn. This deeply illustrative quality recurs throughout the record, pastoral on the surface but threaded with unease.

Tensions between gratitude and suspicion run through original compositions like Bech’s “Thankful” and “Waltz for Rued,” the latter inspired by Langgaard’s Andante Religioso for violin and organ (BVN407). These pieces glisten briefly, like dew left as an offering, yet they never lose contact with an underlying darkness. Joy here is fragile, provisional, always shadowed by the knowledge of what followed.

The folk impulse comes into sharper focus on tracks such as “Swedish,” where droning textures give way to a melody both exuberant and tense. Gorgeous dissonances and a sense of forlorn joy suggest music shaped by communal memory rather than personal triumph. That same feeling carries into “Sun at Rest” (BVN 136). Originally for string quartet and soprano, this iteration features Kira Martini’s voice moving with gentle inevitability through a melancholy landscape without ever becoming merely bucolic.

Elsewhere, motion takes over. “God’s Will” is reduced from its originally massive scoring to a pulsing, cinematic drive that advances with locomotive persistence, while “Passing Train,” Pedersen’s response to the second movement of String Quartet No. 2 (BVN145), leans fully into programmatic imagery. Rhythm becomes destiny, propulsion its own kind of meaning. Even the cosmic unrest of “Music of the Spheres” (BVN 128), with its theological visions of Antichrist and salvation, feels grounded here, less apocalyptic spectacle than ceaseless spiritual pressure pushing through space and time.

Some of the album’s most revelatory moments arise through extreme condensation. LuLo’s reimagining of material from String Quartet No. 3 (BVN183) strips the work down to its nervous system, revealing a surprising jazz-inflected modernity. Elastic phrasing and rhythmic instability expose Langgaard not as an anachronism, but as a composer perpetually out of joint with his own era. Pieces like “Ixion” (from Symphony No. 11, BVN303) dance cautiously, never fully leaving the ground, their instability suggesting sandcastles built with full knowledge of the tide.

As the album darkens, disquiet gives way to exhaustion. “Eventually Mad” (BVN371) and “The Restless Wind” (BVN149) feel vast and elegiac, drifting like unanswered prayers. This sense of terminal weariness reaches its quiet apex in “Tired,” again featuring Martini, whose voice moves rhythmically through a landscape of ashen flowers. It is a song not just of rest from labor, but from life itself.

By the time The Restless draws to a close, the title feels less like a description of nervous energy or creative compulsion and more like a metaphysical condition. Langgaard’s life suggests what happens when faith, imagination, and sensitivity collide with institutional indifference, when vision outpaces comprehension. LuLo does not attempt to resolve this tension or redeem it with posthumous triumph. Instead, the musicians sit with it, listening carefully.

In doing so, the album poses a quiet but unsettling question: What does it mean to be heard, and when does listening finally arrive too late? We are given no answers, only the sense that music, even when ignored or misunderstood, continues to move forward, carried by those willing to approach it as something living. In that persistence lies both consolation and sorrow, as a lonely burning star glimpsed through the willows, still shining long after the footsteps have faded.

by Tyran Grillo
CD Review, Contemporary Classical, File Under?

Ukho Ensemble Plays Grisey (LP Review)

 

Gérard Grisey – Vortex Temporum

Ukho Ensemble Kyiv, Luigi Gaggero, conductor

Self-released LP

 

Composer Gérard Grisey (1946-1998) employed methods that often involved magnifying seemingly small details into overarching concepts. This is particularly true of spectrographic measurements taken of single pitches, such as the low E on a trombone, which revealed a series of overtones that he would use to craft harmonic systems for a number of pieces. This spectral approach, also employed by Tristan Murail, Hugues Dufourt, James Tenney, and others, was an important feature of French music, and later that in other countries, from the 1970s onward. In the piece Vortex Temporum (1995), another element is put under the magnifying glass, a flute arpeggio taken from Daphnis et Chloé (1912) by Maurice Ravel (1875-1927). The result is a hyperintensive investigation of, as the title suggests, circular motion through time. Scored for a Pierrot ensemble – flute, clarinet, violin, viola, cello, and piano – the piece does not leave Grisey with as many of the nuances of color that a full orchestra would, but he nevertheless manages to explore myriad timbral deployments. 

 

A subtext that surely did not escape the notice of the piece’s intended audience is the fragmentation of the source material, in a sense the disassembling of a work firmly ensconced in the repertoire. Just as, in their day, the impressionists threw down a gauntlet and challenged the musical establishment, and Boulez and other members of the avant-garde did similarly with their elders, so Grisey and the other spectralists were interested in a radical reassessment of how music was to be ascertained. 

 

Ukho Ensemble Kyiv take a deconstructive approach of their own, providing a charged, intense, and incisive rendition of Vortex Temporum. Any reference to impressionism, besides the notes and gesture of the borrowed quote, is removed from consideration. This is faithful to the score and Grisey’s musical aesthetic. Interesting to note, too, that the Pierrot ensemble signifies a connection to modernism; from Schoenberg to the present day it has been a go-to scoring for countless post-tonal composers. 

 

While there are places in the outer movements that are quite forceful, there are also segments, such as the denouement of the first movement into the opening of the second, with a number of glissandos, where the music seems to liquefy. But a sense of conflict is never far away, as the muted clusters in the piano that support this passage suggest, and eventually the oasis of the middle movement is supplanted by intensity, led by nervous microtones and multiphonics and a crescendo of the piano’s dissonant verticals that is doubled by other members of the group. The strings also respond in kind to the clarinet’s effects, and the resultant music builds in amplitude to a hushed cadenza of descending slides, followed by a return to the first movement’s assertiveness in the final one. 

 

This third large section expands upon the way that the Ravel quote is addressed, via fragmentation, augmentation, and interpolations of the effects that sound in the second movement. The sense of reverberation is enlarged as well, and many phrases echo instead of having clean offsets. Then, a pizzicato strings passage moves to the fore. It could be seen as a bit of sly commentary on the second movement of Ravel’s string quartet, which contains a plethora of plucked notes. This is then juxtaposed with ever more frenetic arpeggiations and glissandos, overblown wind notes, and penetrating sustained pitches. All of this underscores temporal morphing, and it is made manifest that the title serves as both a reference point and a remit for the composition. Several sections of quietude are each in turn cast aside in favor of ever more intricate sonic whirlwinds. An eventual unwinding once again stretches out the material, with explosive interruptions keeping the intensity level at a peak. Hushed moments then crosscut with vicious attacks and fluctuating lines, and a long tremolando creates a dynamic hairpin. What ensues in its wake is reflective, with breathy woodwinds, sustained strings, and a tolling repeated note from inside the piano in a decrescendo to silence.

 

Vortex Temporum is a late piece in Grisey’s catalog. He died in 1998, at age 52, of a brain aneurysm. It fulfils a number of the objectives he set out to explore, both from technical and philosophical vantage points. Luigi Gaggero leads the Ukho Ensemble in a superb rendition of the piece. It is one of my favorite recordings of 2025.

 

  • Christian Carey 

 

by Christian Carey
Contemporary Classical

Four New Releases on New Amsterdam Records

Zeelie Brown, the apocalypse is not the end but the unveiling (NWAM202)

Essvus, What Ails You (NWAM201)

Ruby Colley & EXAUDI, Hello Halo (NWAM200)

Travis Laplante & JACK Quartet, String Quartets (NWAM199)

Based on the evidence provided by this exciting quartet of recent releases, the sails on New Amsterdam Records’ windmill rotate with ever-increasing productivity, invention and creativity these days.

The two most recent recordings, the apocalypse is not the end but the unveiling by cellist and multimedia artist Zeelie Brown and What Ails You by Essvus, deal directly with social, political, and personal issues.

Part of NewAm’s new series of composer’s lab releases, Brown’s debut album offers timely and sobering reflections on the politics of race in American history. As stated in the opening track “let go, let god,” also featuring Sierra Leonean-American singer and composer YATTA, “this album is a prayer for anybody looking at injustice and just needing the inspiration to stand up and fight.”

Brown’s arresting yet compelling concept album speaks to these matters with clarity, compassion, conviction and some urgency. In “gossamer,” Brown’s voice is placed in passionate counterpoint to floating, silky-sounding chords, while in the anti-capitalist diatribe “i pray for this country,” electronically generated beeps intersect with a soulful Bill Withers-style harmonic sequence on piano.

Two instrumental interludes foreground Brown’s skills as cellist—the first a soaring, freewheeling improvisation, the second modelled on a descending Chopin-like lament bass. A similar chaconne-type sequence on piano echoes through the empty corridors of “in the waters between life and death,” whose lyric is located in the queer clubs of the 1980’s during the AIDS pandemic, and with the plight of its shattered and slighted communities.

Powered by restless African-inspired rhythms and pulses (as heard in “mbele”), perhaps it’s inevitable that comparisons will be drawn with contemporary cellists such as Sheku Kanneh-Mason, Abel Selacoe, and Vincent Ségal, who have likewise interrogated the chequered histories of their own cultural backgrounds in relation to race and political history. Nevertheless, Brown’s corporeal music emanates powerfully from within, inseparable from its (or their) own body and the physicality of sound.

This sense of self-presence manifests itself just as powerfully in Brown’s vocal extemporizations, where swooping falsetto lines carry within them a striking authenticity. Brown’s falsetto is the antithesis of false-etto, its unique sound a mix of vocal styles and gestures—Nina Simone (who is quoted in “in the waters”), Sylvester, Earth, Wind & Fire’s Philip Bailey, Jimmy Somerville of The Communards, and Anohni (previously Antony and the Johnsons), spring to mind.

In comparison, the nine-track What Ails You by Essvus (aka Gen Morigami) projects more raw and edgy qualities. Brown’s polyrhythmic Latin-American percussion patterns are replaced with industrial metallic noises, pounding found objects, clanging alarm bells, and Hüsker Dü-type screaming guitars, as heard on the opening track “Inner Violence.” The album comes across as a drawn-out primal scream—Edvard Munch in freeze-frame slow-motion—which is hardly surprising given that What Ails You is the result of Essvus’s struggles with mental health and familial estrangement.

The most intense tracks mesh gritty rhythms with manipulated vocal gestures and phrases, as heard on the unbalanced and disorientated, Sonic Youth-like “To Not Think.” Treated vocal interjections also underpin the sound-collage-heavy “Warmth,” its percussive wall-of-sound and sped-up speech utterances suggesting the influence of experimental rock duo Battles. Dystopian drum and bass patterns rattle through the rhythmic rubble of “Moldsporing” and “Every Hope, A Dream, A Prayer,” while “Counterfactuals” sets off as a Joy Division homage before spiralling into space-age The Doors, trippy disco, and glitchy musique concrete.

Despite the tangle of seemingly incompatible styles and influences, the end result makes marvellous sense, albeit in a twisted, contorted way.

There are quieter moments, too, such as in “Anaesthetic Midnight”—whose sounds appear to have been fed through a giant reverb wormhole—or the dreamy opening to “Hell and High Water.” During these moments, Essvus almost flirts with beauty. In What Ails You, one is left not so much with a ‘Law of Diminishing Returns’ but instead a ‘Law of Increasing Returns’: the more one listens to the album, the more one is struck by the detail buried inside its strange, solipsistic sound world.

A far gentler world engulfs Ruby Colley’s six-track EP Hello Halo. The talented, versatile composer, violinist and sound artist teams up with the excellent Exaudi vocal ensemble to present a suite that explores the intersection between contemporary music and health and wellbeing. The idea behind Hello Halo came from Colley’s experiences of growing up with her brother, Paul, who is neurodivergent and non-speaking. Despite Paul’s inability to communicate via ‘everyday’ language, Colley recorded the rich range of sounds and gestures her brother makes, using his voice and other sonic fragments to provide a vocal map for the music.

The result works both on a purely musical and programmatic (i.e., extra-musical) level—musical in the way in which Colley marries her brother’s vocal gestures with extended vocal and string techniques, and ‘programmatic’ because the suite operates effectively as a kind of “day in the life” of Ruby and Paul.

Given the self-imposed limitations (six voices, solo violin, soundtrack), Hello Halo is surprisingly varied in scope. “What Is It” is almost madrigal-like, the two “Duets” more fragmentary and collage-like, “Echoes” blending hocket-like textures with a quote from “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” and the alphabet-inspired “Cosmology” more earthy and folk-like.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the influence of Meredith Monk, Joan La Barbara, and Caroline Shaw comes across at various points—such as in the layered entries and stacked harmonies in the title track. Nevertheless, the use of such techniques in the context of the “non-verbal” world in which Paul inhabits yields a unique and different outcome. It’s as if Colley’s music has scraped away at the grain of the voice to capture the character of the person that lies behind it. If ever we needed reassurance that music is the perfect vehicle for communication beyond language and words, here it is.

‘Quartet’ takes on added significance in the last of the four releases surveyed: Travis Laplante’s String Quartets 1 & 2, performed by JACK Quartet.

I had previously listened to, and enjoyed, Human—Laplante’s 2019 album of solo saxophone improvisations—but it hadn’t fully prepared me for his two string quartets. Both contain lyrical qualities, in addition to microtonality, yet these elements are more subtle and integrated in the quartets.

Folklike and wistful, String Quartet No. 1 begins with a kind of pure resonance of the string quartet sound. Subtle use of microtonality gives way to flowing ostinato patterns, suggesting Philip Glass and Michael Nyman’s string quartets but with the added heft of a late Beethoven opus. Part 1 ends with a surge towards a series of flickering, pulsing open fifths.

These buildups are aided by Laplante’s treatment of the quartet as a homogenous physical force. These moments often appear to contain the seeds of their own destruction, collapsing from within. This happens in Part 2 of the String Quartet No. 1, where the process of atrophy ends in a valedictory-style duet between the two violins.

In certain respects, String Quartet No. 2 follows a similar recipe, but the musical outcome is quite different. It opens with the grace, tenderness and beauty of a marriage ceremony, but soon enough the mood changes into something more unsettling. The first violin struggles to extricate itself from the prevailing atmosphere, causing a rift within the ensemble. As in the String Quartet No. 1, the middle section of Part 1 is more free-flowing, ostinato-heavy. Eventually it breaks free via a passage that sounds like neo-microtonal Bartok.

Part 2 begins with a Partita-like passage for solo viola, before being joined by the rest of the quartet. Subtitled “the spirit takes flight after death,” the final section exudes a similar transcendental spirit to the ending of the first quartet, offering a glimmer of hope amidst doubt and uncertainty. Laplante’s aesthetic may be partly grounded in theoretical and conceptual writings on resonances, alternate tunings, and microtonality, but this is not ‘paper music.’ His music has been imagined into being as sonic reality.

As expected, JACK Quartet apply themselves with the same level of interpretative understanding, nuance, accuracy, precision, dedication, and distinction to Laplante’s music as they would, say, a Ligeti or Lachenmann quartet. Laplante’s music draws in the listener, commanding attention and reflection.

Which leads us back to that famous windmill logo again. Established in 2008 by composers Judd Greenstein, Sarah Kirkland Snider, and William Brittelle, NewAm may not be exactly ‘new’ anymore, but the label is still blazing a trail in those fluid cross genre intersections between experimental and alternative rock, post-classical, post-minimal, and everything-in-between. Powered by the winds of change and innovation, NewAm’s mission has always been to transcend traditional and outdated genre distinctions, offering a home to music that’s stubbornly “outside” and unclassifiable … and new music is all the better because of it.

by Pwyll ap Siôn
Books, Chamber Music, Composers, File Under?, Strings, Twentieth Century Composer

A Book on Elliott Carter’s String Quartet No. 1

Elliott Carter’s String Quartet No. 1, by Laura Emmery, Cambridge Elements, Music Since 1945, Cambridge University Press. 

 

Laura Emmery has done a great deal of analytical research on the music of Elliott Carter, and her book on his string quartets is a valuable resource for anyone interested in learning how he composes. Emmery’s latest publication is part of Cambridge University Press’s Elements series, one of several slender and specific books that each deal with a particular topic. Here, it is Elliott Carter’s String Quartet No. 1, which was composed in 1950-’51 and is widely regarded as a watershed work in the composer’s output, as well as a key example of High Modernism. Rather than focus on technical elements of the music, Emmery looks at the genesis and reception history of the piece. Biographical myths that, with the help of sympathetic people in Carter’s circle, have persisted are called into question. The co-opting by American government officials of homegrown modernist music to use as soft power in Europe is also given considerable attention. 

 

A native New Yorker, Carter traveled south to compose the first quartet, staying in the Sonoran Desert in Arizona while on a Guggenheim Fellowship. But, as Emmery notes, it was hardly a monk-like existence, with Carter spending time with other artists, particularly visual artists, He traveled to Mexico to visit with the expat composer Conlon Nancarrow, whose sophisticated proportional deployment of rhythm encouraged Carter’s approach to polyrhythms and metric modulation in his own music. He even used a brief quotation from Nancarrow’s work in the quartet, as a tip of the hat. Emmery points out that this was hardly like the solitary  creation myth that some of Carter’s supporters have portrayed.

 

In the 1950s, the composer Nicolas Nabokov was instrumental in promoting Carter’s music in Europe. At the time, Nabokov was Secretary General of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, or CCF, which was backed by the CIA and aided in the presentation of American concert music. Today many people think of modernist music, if they think of it at all, as confrontational and its presentation, at best, discounting of audience reception. The US government promoted all kinds of American concert music, not just modernism, but composers like Carter were thought to represent the sophistication of Western music in the face of the hypernationalist jingoism of Eastern Bloc creators. For instance Shostakovich came in for particular criticism from Nabokov for caving in to Stalin and altering his compositional approach. Another facet to the European entanglements of Carter’s String Quartet No. 1 is its winning of, and subsequent disqualification from, a string quartet composition competition in Liege, Belgium. It is a knotty tale, and Emmery does an excellent job disentangling its various threads. 

 

How much Carter abetted the soft power stratagems is called into question. Emmery acknowledges that it is likely that the composer had some understanding of the reasons that his music was flourishing in part due to this type of promotion, but he didn’t do anything to prevent it from being used for political ends. That said, she doesn’t suggest that he was an activist for the Cold War cause either. 

 

Carter may have taken until his forties to develop his distinctive mature style, but he  continued to compose until after age 100. The premiere of String Quartet No. 1 proved to be the launchpad for Carter’s career ascent. Having dealt comprehensively with the musical elements of the quartet already, Emmery’s explication of extramusical factors that helped to support both its genesis and reception history is eloquent and clearly rendered. This book will likely be an eye-opener for anyone wanting to learn more about the crafting of Carter’s persona and modern music’s Cold War backstory. 

 

-Christian Carey



by Christian Carey
CD Review, Composers, Contemporary Classical, File Under?, Piano, Twentieth Century Composer

Pierre Boulez Played by Ralph van Raat (CD Review)

Pierre Boulez Piano Works, Ralph van Raat (Naxos)

 

The Pierre Boulez centennial year has seen a number of important concerts, publications, and recordings devoted to his music. Boulez (1925-2016) wrote three piano sonatas, which are considered important both in his catalog and in the avant-garde repertory. Contemporary music specialists tend to gravitate towards these totemic compositions – Idil Biret has recorded them for Naxos – but there are several other works for piano by Boulez, and they too are worthy of attention. Ralph van Raat has previously recorded for Naxos two selections by him, the early pieces Prelude, Toccata, and Scherzo and Douze Notations (both composed in 1945), the latter of which underwent expansions of some of its movements into pieces for orchestra. 

 

Thème et variations pour la main gauche (“Theme and Variations for the Left Hand,” also from 1945) was written for Bernard Flavigny. Each of the variations is of a different character, and the virtuosity required to play them is substantial. Instead of the pointillism and counterpoint of Webern, who would soon become Boulez’s preferred composer among the early exponents of 12-tone music, the somewhat classicized deployment of the theme gives the piece a Schoenbergian cast. 3 Psalmodies, yet another piece from the watershed year 1945, owes a debt to Messiaen for its avian filigrees and additive rhythms. Compared to Boulez’s other early pieces, the psalmodies are expansive, adding up to nearly a half hour of music. 

 

There are also two pieces from later in Boulez’s career. Fragment d’ une ébauche (1987), lives up to its title, being an aphoristic yet dense occasional piece, written in honor of Jean-Marie Lehn’s winning of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Lehn was a colleague of Boulez at the Collége de France, where the composer gave a series of lectures from 1975-1995. 

 

The final piece on this CD, Incises (2001) is well-wrought  and substantial in its own right, but it was  taken as the starting point for a more elaborate ensemble composition, sur Incises. Indeed, the processes undertaken in the composition of Incises serve as a lynchpin for the materials deployed throughout many of Boulez’s later pieces. Rather than tone rows, intricate manipulation of pitch material based on hexachords (six-note collections) yields a variety of colorful gestures, many based on sonorous verticals, elaborate runs, and trills. 

 

This is a particularly revealing recording that has been prepared with consummate care. Biret’s renditions of Boulez’s piano sonatas do Naxos proud, but a second installment of the pieces by van Raat would be a welcome addition to their catalog.

 

  • Christian Carey 

 

by Christian Carey
Contemporary Classical

Meredith Monk in review

The acclaimed singer, minimalist and intermedia artist gets a new documentary and a new record

Billy Shebar: Monk in Pieces (2025, 110th Street Films, 95 minutes)

Meredith Monk has long attracted the attention of journalists and filmmakers intrigued by her synthesis of minimalism, vocalism and theater, and by a personality whose conversational informality masks the stoic tenacity that’s propelled one of the most iconic careers of any avant-garde performing artist. Monk in Pieces, premiered in February 2025 and currently making the rounds of indie movie houses, is the latest and most biographically-oriented entry in a line of Monk documentaries whose predecessors include Peter Greenaway’s 1983 portrait for BBC 4 (which remains a useful guide to her earliest and most experimental works) and Babeth VanLoo’s 2009 Inner Voice (which emphasizes Monk’s engagement with Buddhism, a topic that receives only glancing attention in Monk in Pieces).

Neutron and Meredith Monk in Monk in Pieces

What’s most notable about Monk in Pieces is that it shows its subject, 82 years old at the time of its release, preparing for the inevitable final chapter of her life, whose trajectory is traced in a broad (though not strictly chronological) arc, divided into a dozen-odd chapters each centered (as the title implies) on a single major work. Helping to underscore the theme of mortality is Monk’s pet tortoise Neutron, given to her as a gift by Ping Chong in 1978 and the inspiration for her 1983 album Turtle Dreams. We hear Monk conversing with Neutron (“Do you even know who I am…who’s fed you 42 years? It’s like, what does turtle consciousness tell me?”), and nursing her through an ultimately fatal illness that leads into the film’s final and most touching scene in which Monk is shown by herself contentedly eating a simple supper in the kitchen of the Tribeca loft she’s occupied since 1972.1 Afterwards she cleans the table, the ritual poignantly accompanied by one of her earliest songs, Do You Be?, first recorded on her 1970 debut album Key (though the version used in the film is a later one from the eponymous 1987 album).

Ping Chong and Meredith Monk in 1982

It’s Chong who contributes the film’s most candid and insightful commentary. Four years Monk’s junior, he was her student at NYU in 1970, and later her lover and company member. To the accompaniment of Madwoman’s Vision, he recounts how Monk suggested that they have children together. “I went, ‘Uh, I don’t think so! Artists shouldn’t have kids because the art comes first'”. The tension between family and art turns out to be a recurring theme in Monk’s life. Chong eventually left Monk after a decade to focus on his own art (“I wanted to be a director, and I kept giving her direction when she didn’t want it”). And he attributes much of Monk’s career motivation to the strained relationship she had with her mother, the swing singer Audrey Marsh. (“I think a lot of Meredith’s anger comes from not being valued by her mother. She just wasn’t there for her. And also she had to fight to be accepted in the performing arts world. In a way it’s a fight to survive. Pain is where art comes from, it has to come out of need. EM Forster stopped writing when he found his lover—he was too happy!”).

Monk seems to concur with Chong’s assessment. As Marsh sings These Things You Left Me (she enjoyed great success as a young woman singing jingles for radio commercials before becoming another expendable industry castoff), Monk relates: “She wasn’t home a lot. I was dragged around from job to job when I was a little kid, like going through a meatgrinder. I saw her pain of the conflict between being a mother and being an artist, and that both of them were not 100% satisfying. I vowed that that would never happen to me, and that I wanted to do my own work and make my own path.”

Monk is more circumspect when discussing the other major love interest of her life, the Dutch choreographer Mieke van Hoek, who like Chong was Monk’s student before becoming her partner of two decades. She’s seen only in still photos and silent vignettes, and it was her sudden death of cancer in 2002 that inspired Monk’s Impermanence. But though Monk concedes that “I learned more from [her death] than from anything [else] that ever happened to me—I wasn’t the same person after that”, she declines to tell us just what she learned or how she changed. In contrast to Chong, Monk is a person who only reveal her vulnerabilities through her art.

Meredith Monk and Björk at the Guggenheim Museum by Gerry Visco

The remainder of the film is constructed from a montage of mementos, reflections, performance footage, excerpts from Monk’s dream journals (accompanied by cutout animations by Paul Barritt), and testimonials by colleagues and collaborators, some of them archival (including Merce Cunningham, who died in 2009), others shot specifically for the film (such as New Sounds host John Schaefer). The eccentric Icelandic popular singer Björk makes an appearance on behalf of the younger generation, recounting the impression made by Monk’s 1981 Dolmen Music album when she heard it on her boyfriend’s record player at the age of 16. As the soundtrack dissolves from Monk’s recording of the track Gotham Lullaby to Björk’s own 1999 cover, the uninhibited Icelander—apparently harboring a dim view of lower Manhattan—opines “her loft that she’s lived in for half a century is an oasis in a toxic environment, and I feel that Gotham Lullaby represents that as well”.

In another vignette Monk describes the strabismus (eye misalignment) that plagued her as a child. “I wasn’t able to see out of both eyes simultaneously”, so her mother took her to Dalcroze eurhythmics from ages 3–7 to help with the integration of body and rhythm. Monk approvingly cites Dalcroze’s assertion that “all musical ideas come from the body”. (“Ding! I think that’s where I’m coming from.”). And on other occasions she’s credited Dalcroze with “influencing everything I’ve done. It’s why dance and movement and film are so integral to my music. It’s why I see music so visually”—a key to one of the fundamental differences between her approach and the more formal and abstracted patterns of the classic minimalists.

Meredith Monk in Peter Greenaway: Four American Composers

Monk In Pieces is very much an in-house affair. It was co-produced by longtime Monk ensemble member Katie Geissinger, whose husband, Billy Shebar, directed it. And as might be expected, it occasionally drifts into hagiography, most notably in the montages of bad reviews and—in the case of Atlas (1991)—snarky communications with Monk’s collaborators at Houston Grand Opera, all serving to invoke the time-honored fable of the misunderstood genius who’s ultimately vindicated. Chong also picks up this trope (“Critics were saying that what she was doing was nonsensical, was crazy, was not serious.”), and it’s true that Monk was the target of harsh invective from the notoriously snobbish Clive Barnes during the 1970s. But other critics were more supportive, including Barnes’ New York Times colleague Anna Kisselgoff, who praised the 1969 premiere of Juice at the Guggenheim Museum. Notwithstanding her detractors, it was the modern dance community, already largely dominated by women, that took Monk seriously well before she’d established much credibility with musicians. Ironically by the mid-1980s those attitudes had largely flipped, with composers reacting favorably to the long forms and newfound sophistication of Dolmen Music (compared to the more embryonic Key and Our Lady of Late), while dancers were more inclined to dismiss her choreography as amateurish (“Her movements haven’t evolved, they’re just doing shuffle steps in unison” was one New York choreographer’s complaint).

Meredith Monk and Don Preston in Uncle Meat

I would have preferred to hear less from the celebrity talking heads (including an original Talking Head, David Berne) and more insight into Monk’s early years, especially her time in Los Angeles in the late 1960s when she belonged to Frank Zappa’s extended circle (she appears as the ”Red Face Girl” in Zappa’s film Uncle Meat, and her housemate and music director was Mothers of Invention keyboardist Don Preston, who is still alive and lucid in his 90s). I’d also be interested to know why, despite having been in fairly close proximity to the Bay Area origins of classic minimalism, Monk has seldom embraced La Monte Young, Marian Zazeela, Stimmung, or the triumvirate of Riley, Reich and Glass as formative influences. But whatever might appear on one’s list of omissions, it’s still gratifying to revisit many of the now-obscure source materials that did make it into Monk in Pieces, including Phill Niblock’s original film documentation of Juice.

Coming on the heels of Monk in Pieces is Cellular Songs, Monk’s latest release for the ECM label, extending a storied discography that commenced with Dolmen Music, and which now encompasses 13 albums, of which the first twelve were repackaged and given an new and expanded accompanying booklet in the 2022 compilation Meredith Monk: The Recordings, cherishingly assembled by ECM for her 80th birthday (it was one of my picks for that year). Cellular Songs features Monk’s all-female vocal ensemble in a medley of mostly unaccompanied songs (with piano, simple percussion instruments or hambone-style body percussion making the occasional appearance). Only one of the songs (Happy Woman) has a text. In the aforementioned Peter Greenaway documentary Monk proclaims “I don’t really have contempt for the word. I have contempt when the word is used as the glue of something, which has happened in theater and a lot of film”). Indeed, it’s Monk’s avoidance of texts that has helped keep her often joyful music from running aground on the shoals of sentimentality.

Cellular Songs by Julieta Cervantes

The titular reference of Cellular Songs is to biological cells (“the fundamental unit of life”), not to mobile phones. And the music is subdued but affirmational. In Monk in Pieces, the composer says “In the 80s I was doing apocalyptic pieces [e.g., Quarry and Book of Days], and then I started thinking about how maybe offering an alternative was more useful”. With Monk’s still-capable but undeniably aging voice in the forefront, and with the sparse texture conjuring the sound world of her early recordings more than her recent excursions with larger forces (e.g., Songs of Ascension), it reads like a bookend to Dolmen Music—a gentle lullaby for the faithful from the twilight of her career.

Meredith Monk: Astronaut Anthem (from Do You Be)

When assessing the oeuvre and legacy of Meredith Monk, there’s a sum-of-the-parts factor that Philip Glass alludes to in Monk in Pieces: “The thing about Meredith is, she was a self-contained theater company. She among all of us was the uniquely gifted one [as a performer]”. Monk’s talent as a singer, including a three-octave range and command of ululations and other extended techniques, is undeniable. And by emphasizing the voice she stands apart from the classic minimalists, including Glass, who tended to treat singers as part of a larger instrumental group. In other respects, though, she’s often been accused of dilettantism—a jill of all trades, but not a master composer, choreographer or dramatist. In some ways her reception has been similar to Alwin Nikolais’, who began as a musician, learned the theatrical crafts of lighting and costuming, and ultimately became known primarily as a choreographer and teacher, but was seldom cited as an exemplar by specialists in any of those fields. It was rather the totality of his futuristic visual and auditory spectacles that drove his influence and reputation.

Interestingly, one of Monk’s key teachers at Sarah Lawrence College was a Nikolais alum (Beverly Schmidt Blossom). And like Nikolais, her greatest impression may ultimately be felt in the domain of new music theater, an area where she’s remained a bona fide avant-gardist, eschewing text-centric storytelling and the trappings of traditional opera that Glass retreated to after Einstein on the Beach in favor of wordless, non-linear forms, often in service to female-centered narratives.

Meredith Monk in Education of the Girlchild via The House Foundation for the Arts

Speaking about Education of the Girlchild (1973), whose plot—such as it is—proceeds in reverse chronological order, Monk said: “I don’t really feel that by nature I’m a political artist. The piece has six women characters. Usually you’ll see men-bonded groups like The Seven Samurai or the Knights of the Round Table. You don’t usually see six strong women who are not angry women but are just fulfilled women as the main heroes of an artwork”.2 Whatever one thinks of Monk’s simple, ambient-adjacent music, it’s hard not to be impressed by her corpus of aesthetically radical multimedia works that manage to avoid the clichés of both strident militantism and New Age sentimentality.

Toward the end of Monk in Pieces, Monk embraces a sentiment expressed earlier by Ping Chong: “Doing the work is still meaningful. The other stuff just falls away. Maybe this whole thing is a way that I created something to affirm that I exist.” There may or may not be anything genuinely new in the film or in Cellular Songs, but both do justice to a career that’s remarkable for its meaning, resilience, and impact.

Meredith Monk, Philip Glass and Conlon Nancarrow at Djerassi in 1992 by John Fago

[1] a six-story L-shaped building on West Broadway that also once housed Roulette Intermedium
[2] recounted in Sidsel Mundal’s 1994 film Meredith Monk

by Michael Schell
Concerts, Contemporary Classical, File Under?, New York

Pierre-Laurent Aimard at the 92nd Street Y

Composer George Benjamin.

Pierre-Laurent Aimard in Recital

92nd Street Y

November 19, 2025

Published in Sequenza 21

 

NEW YORK – Pianist Pierre-Laurant Aimard has had a long and fruitful collaboration with the composer George Benjamin. Aimard’s recital program this past Wednesday at the 92nd Street Y was conceived and built around two of Benjamin’s pieces, Shadowlines, a group of six canons for solo piano, and Divisions, a new four-hand piece on which the composer joined him for this New York premiere. 

 

The other programmed works were meant to complement the Benjamin pieces and proved to be strong foils for them. Nikolai Obukhov (1892-1954), a Russian who, during the Bolshevik Revolution, resettled in Paris, is an esoteric and intriguing figure. He created an alternate version of music notation, developed decidedly different methodologies for total chromaticism, and engaged in a kind of mystical masochism: he used his own blood to correct compositions, mirroring artistic travails to the sufferings of Christ. Eccentricities aside, Obukhov’s Révélation (1915), performed with great intensity by Aimard, is highly engaging, a tantalizing glimpse of an underserved oeuvre.

 

Aimard is regarded as one of the most eloquent interpreters of the music of Pierre Boulez (1925-2016). Indeed, he was heard just last month performing selections from Douze Notations (1945) with the New York Philharmonic. Here he played the composer’s Piano Sonata No. 1 (1946), another prodigious piece from the nascency of the postwar avant-garde. Unlike the second sonata, in which Boulez suggested he “blew up the form,” this piece keeps a toehold in the tradition of the genre, all the while testing its limits with post-tonal formations and elliptical phrasing. It is, like all the other works on the program, considerably demanding. 

Aimard and Benjamin.

Like Boulez, Benjamin studied with Olivier Messiaen, and the two were also connected by collaborations in performance. Shadowlines may not entirely blow up classical tradition – it is, after all, composed of a half dozen canons – but Benjamin shares with Boulez an affinity for post-tonal writing and herculean virtuosity. And like the Notations, each section takes on an entirely different character, with mercurial shifts of register, gesture, and density. 

 

The second half featured Le Tombeau de Couperin (1919) by Maurice Ravel (1875-1937). The Couperin in question, in a line of distinguished composers, is François (1668-1733), whose elegant suites formed a template for Ravel’s own tombeau, this one commemorating friends of the composer who had been killed in World War I. If listeners might reasonably expect the piece to have a mournful cast, they are likely to be surprised by the ebullience of much of it. Most of the movements of Le Tombeau de Couperin have been orchestrated, and in the piano version one can hear the vivid colorations that may have helped to inspire their being recast for larger forces. 

 

Divisions was finished just this year, and when crafting the work Benjamin clearly had his collaboration onstage with Aimard in mind. Four-hands music has a choreographic element to it: how do two pairs of paws operate without overcrowding among 88 keys? Is there enough “elbow room?” Benjamin writes parts that take risks in this regard, with the primo (right side) player occasionally reaching over an active secondo (left side) player to add a bass note to the proceedings. Similarly, the secondo invades primo territory for alto register countermelodies and widely dispersed harmonies. In Divisions, one can hear affinities to all of the other pieces on the program – kudos for curating – with use of dissonance alongside counterpoint, dance-like rhythms alongside angular gestures – in a mélange of materials. Benjamin and Aimard have been touring this program to a number of cities. One hopes this serves double duty as rehearsals for a forthcoming recording.

 

-Christian Carey

 

by Christian Carey
Contemporary Classical

Gaia-24. Opera del Mondo (Lesya Ukrainka National Academic Theatre, Kyiv), November 27, 2025

Can art be created during a time of war and conflict? Is it even required when a country is besieged by bombs, ballistic missiles and drone attacks, its borders pushed back by the constant assaults of a belligerent invading army? Should we make time for theatre, dance, music, and song when a far more real, deadly drama is unfolding in a theatre of war on one’s doorstep?

These questions are never far from the people of Ukraine. With the country locked in a bloody battle with Russia—three months shy of its grim four-year anniversary—it would be easy for Ukrainians to question the point and purpose of artistic expression in such times.

For me, these realities were laid bare within hours of arriving in Kyiv. After the ten-hour night train from the Polish city of Przemyśl, my first evening was spent mostly underground in a bomb shelter deep inside Hotel Ukraine, while Shahed drones and Iskander, Kalibr and Kinzhal rockets rained down on the city. Although I never felt in any imminent danger, descending several flights of stairs to the urgent wail of air-raid sirens was both intimidating and terrifying.

I had arrived a few days before the much-anticipated performance of Opera Aperta’s Gaia-24. Opera del Mondo at the Lesya Ukrainka National Academic Theatre on 27 November. Described by its composers and musical directors Roman Grygoriv and Illia Razumeiko as a contemporary geohistorical opera—and produced by Olga Diatel, Volodymyr Burkovets and Yuliia Parysh—Gaia-24 premiered in Kyiv in May 2024. It toured several European cities before being staged again in Berlin, Kyiv and Zaporizhzhia in 2025, and received the Classical:NEXT Innovation Award in May 2025.

I had to see it. But that meant travelling into a war zone.

People still smile in Kyiv. One can almost be fooled into thinking life is normal. With over a thousand years of architectural history, ancient and modern sit side by side. It feels like any East European city, yet war hovers over conversations like a dark cloud. Scratch the surface and Ukraine reveals a country weighed down by tragedy, sorrow, conflict and suffering.

I was in Kyiv only four nights. I shudder to think what it must be like to live under such anxiety and stress for more than 1,000 days—over three and a half years since Russia’s full-scale invasion.

In such circumstances, art becomes even more vital. Its messages feel more urgent. As W. B. Yeats once said, “we sing amid our uncertainty.” And in Ukraine, they must sing.

Gaia-24 is a child of its time. Its main catalyst was the Russian army’s decision in June 2023 to blow up the dam holding the Kakhovka reservoir—an act of cowardly ecocide that caused an environmental catastrophe. Within days, eighteen billion cubic metres of water had vanished into the Black Sea, and the Kakhovka Sea simply disappeared off the map.

In three acts and almost two hours, Gaia-24 builds toward this terrible moment. Act III quotes the Latin Agnus Dei over videos of parched earth and the now-iconic image of an old upright piano swept away by the floods (the image was actually taken on Khortytsia Island in Zaporizhzhia).

Acts I and II place these images in a wider frame, though the opera offers no linear narrative. Subtitled “Songs of Mother Earth,” Act I unfolds in front of the proscenium arch and along the gallery spaces—at one point, three dancers even climb over the seated audience. Drawing on Sephardic, Crimean Tatar and Ukrainian folk and dance cultures, with hints of other traditions—perhaps an Argentinian tango or a touch of Parisian salon music—Act I is Dionysian and energetic, a celebration of life and its connection with nature.

Act II turns darker. Subtitled “Cabaret Metastasis,” it opens with slip-sliding slow-motion Xenakis, disjointed cellos giving way to metallic percussion and acousmatic noise. A Bulgarian folk melody sung in close harmony by three female voices is punctuated by random piano clusters. Disembodied fragments of Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire and Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater intrude, cut through by pulsing generator sounds.

The opera’s full Dionysian spirit erupts in the chaotic Act III (“Dance for Mother Earth”), where thrash metal shifts abruptly into bubblegum Europop, and nineteenth-century operetta quotations lead to a hilarious spoof of American rapper Cardi B, one of the opera’s many highlights. As the work spirals further out of control, an epilogue returns it to its folk roots with a rousing version of the Ukrainian song Ой у неділю (“Oh on a Sunday”).

Vivid, visceral, engrossingly eclectic and utterly compelling, Gaia-24 is many things, but above all it stands as a passionate cry against the destructive forces of evil and cruelty. Gripping, urgent and unmissable, it serves as an extraordinary artistic statement in a time of war. When presented in this way, art remains a deep and vital form of human expression and communication: an opera the world should see.

by Pwyll ap Siôn
Contemporary Classical

Teresa Virginia Salis, Adam Gołębiewski, Anna Jędrzejewska & Kamil Kowalski, R2

Wesoła Immersive New Media Art Center, Krakow, November 22, 2025

One cannot draw too many conclusions from the evidence of one concert, of course, but from the rich wealth and diverse array of live electronics, multimedia, sound design and improvisation presented at Wesoła Immersive New Media Art Center in Krakow on November 22, 2025, it appears that the Polish new music scene is undergoing something of a creative resurgence.

In the presence of a packed and enthusiastic audience, Teresa Virginia Salis’s Natural Paths, for alto flute, electronics and video, took the listener out of the performance space and deep into the natural world. I was fortunate enough to catch a presentation by Salis earlier in the day at the Krzysztof Penderecki Academy of Music on Listening Soundscapes. The Sardinia-born musician talked at length about an aesthetic approach rooted in residual spaces and sonic environments, where sound mapping, bioacoustics, and ecological memory intermingle and coalesce.

Salis originally trained as a flautist, and one can see how the instrument’s associations with nature, wind, breath, and pulse has led the composer to explore soundscapes that often go unnoticed, but which nevertheless exert their own haunting, living presence and beauty. As Gilles Clément’s concept of the ‘third landscape’ suggests, such sounds resonate with the undetermined fragments of a planetary garden. Salis cites Barry Truax, Hildegard Westerkamp, Max Neuhaus and Ryoichi Kurokawa (among several other names) as influences, but her evocative and alluring soundscapes inhabit unique qualities of their own. Natural Paths made me want to hear more from the Italian composer, which is always a positive litmus test for musical durability.

A very different kind of immersive experience belonged to percussionist Adam Gołębiewski’s live extemporisations. On one level, his thirty-minute Untitled, for drums, objects, and electronics, was an assault on the senses: viscerality cranked to the max. Gołębiewski’s Jackson Pollock-esque sweeping and circling hand-cymbal movements across the diameter of an upturned bass drum generated a series of loud cloud-like sound masses, evoking Helmut Lachenmann’s instrumental musique concrète style. Some in the audience struggled to cope with the sonic bombardment, shielding their ears during much of the performance.

Grappling with the raw physicality of sound, Gołębiewski’s performance practice was striking and original, suggesting comparisons with a latter-day Han Bennink. During a short intermission that followed Gołębiewski’s piece, I quizzed the percussionist about his frame of reference. He paused, signposted me to an interview he gave with Claire Biddles in The Quietus earlier this year, and uttered one name: Xenakis. Perhaps the key to the new music of today can be found in Pléïades, then…

With Gołębiewski’s large-scale sweeping gestures still ringing in my ears, Anna Jędrzejewska’s Talkativeness of Trees, for live electronics, inhabited a very different world: tiny timbral fragments placed underneath a sonic microscope. Kamil Kowalski’s accompanying video did much to guide the listener’s gaze in similar ways. Its impact was gently subversive. Perhaps the devil is in the detail after all.

The evening ended with Krakow-based R2 (Kuba Rutkowsi on drums and Redink Thomas on live electronics), whose music seemed to take the patterns and pulses of electronic dance music and feed it through something akin to an interplanetary recycling cyberpunk machine, resulting in something that sounded strange yet familiar.

I didn’t stay on for the Audio Art Festival’s closing afterparty at 11pm. The concert itself had overrun and it was getting late. Walking back to the hotel as the snow fell steadily on Krakow’s picturesque buildings and quiet cobbled streets, I reflected further on today’s new music scene in Poland. With rock musicians such as Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood and Manic Street Preachers’ James Dean Bradfield acknowledging the influence of composers such as Lutosławski, Penderecki and Bogusław Schaeffer, perhaps now is the time to look forward to new generations living and working in Poland who push musical boundaries. Having been established for over thirty years, the Audio Art Festival under the guidance and leadership of composer, sound artist, performer and mentor Marek Chołoniewski, remains at the centre of new music innovations in this country. It will be interesting to see how things develop during the next few years and decades.

by Pwyll ap Siôn
Classical Music, Commissions, Concert review, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, jazz, Lincoln Center, New York, Orchestras, Premieres

NY Philharmonic Revels in a Rainbow of Colors

Violinist Nicola Benedetti performed Wynton Marsalis’s Violin Concerto with the New York Philharmonic on November 13-16, 2025 (credit Jake Turney)

An expansive palette of colors was on display at the New York Philharmonic concert at David Geffen Hall on Friday. David Robertson shone a light on the performers and the scores, exposing nuances of hues, pastels, brights and brilliance.

The entire program – Igor Stravinsky’s Petrushka, the Violin Concerto by Wyton Marsalis and the world premiere of a new work by Caroline Mallonee – focused on color and mood. I had high hopes in particular for this performance of Petrushka, to erase my memory of a flaccid reading of the work a couple of years ago. The Philharmonic redeemed themselves, as Robertson elicited a vivid performance that was cinematic in its expression. The work exploits every section of the orchestra, so much so that it is practically a concerto for orchestra.

Lakeside Game by Mallonee also evoked rich visual images. The work was co-commissioned by the Philharmonic, as part of its impressively large commissioning effort Project 19. Mallonee’s inspiration was her childhood memories of walks along Lake Michigan, with the sound of skipping stones and imagery of shimmering sun-dappled water. The music was a montage of scenes on a carefree summer day, and more than once was reminiscent of Samuel Barber’s bucolic composition Knoxville: Summer of 1915.

The great musical polymath Wynton Marsalis wrote Concerto in D for Violin and Orchestra in 2015 for Nicola Benedetti (the two wed this year). It’s a tour de force for both soloist and orchestra, a display of virtuosity for the entire 45 minutes of the four movement work. Benedetti was completely at home with the artistry, varied techniques and technical demands that the score called for. A mix of jazz and classical genres, the music boasted a shifting kaleidoscope of styles. From the first moment of the piece to the last, everyone on stage looked like they were having a ball.

by Gail Wein