Month: June 2021

Ambient, CD Review, File Under?

Matt Evans – touchless (CD Review)

Matt Evans

Touchless

Whatever’s Clever Records

 

“touchless questions the phenomenology of touch, reaching to transcend the boundaries of the physical to embody touch while remaining touchless.” – Matt Evans

 

In 2019, Matt Evans lost his partner, the sculptor and eco-feminist artist Devra Freelander. He commemorates both grief and the light that came into his life as a result of their relationship on the recording touchless. Synthesizers, field recordings, piano, and additional acoustic instruments provided by guest musicians come together to create beguiling textures. 

 

Two piano pieces bookend the recording, Arcto 2 and Arcto 1. Artco 2, which begins the recording, consists mostly of muted chords in reasonably predictable patterns, only to go sideways at the end and venture into significant chromaticism. Arcto 1 repeats a middle register drone against which a repeating chordal ostinato and water sounds contend. 

 

Two other pieces that form a pair are “Solar Silhouette” and “Fluorescent Sunrise,” made of drones with extensive harmonics. The former is girded by octaves in bass and treble; rising glissandos populate the latter, perhaps as a slight programmatic evocation of sunrise.  

 

The title track is the most elaborate, with a harmonic series reinforced by Tristan Kasten-Krause’s double bass and, in multiple registers, David Lackner’s tenor saxophone. Overlaid with dissonant sustained tones, the piece serves as an eloquent statement on loss, in which unresolved tensions coexist with spectral harmony. A coda of trills adds a sense of belated keening, which cuts off suddenly; the inference is clear.

 

A modal canon, played on the piano, alongside sustained tones from violin, played by Elori Saxi, are the main components of “Firn.” The canons begin to operate in phase as Saxi plays in successively higher registers. Partway through, Kasten-Krause adds low register octaves to the proceedings, which reach a significant level of syncopation. Gradually, the music returns to being in sync. The reference to early minimalism by Steve Reich is clear, but Evans is also concerned with creating a version of ambiance that pushes the genre’s envelope in terms of expressivity. touchless is touching. 

 

  • Christian Carey

 

by Christian Carey
CD Review, Contemporary Classical, File Under?, Percussion

Caroline Shaw and Sō Percussion (CD Review)

Caroline Shaw

Sō Percussion, Dawn Upshaw, and Gilbert Kalish

The Narrow Sea

Nonesuch CD/DL

 

Caroline Shaw and So Percussion

Let the Soil Play its Simple Part

Nonesuch CD/DL

 

 

The last live performance I saw before the pandemic hit New York was Caroline Shaw with Sō Percussion at Miller Theatre, which I wrote about for Musical America. It was Shaw’s debut as a solo vocalist (she has performed as an ensemble member in Roomful for Teeth for several years). Hearing these pieces again reminds me of the joy of concert life before the pandemic. I am glad to revisit them.

 

Two Nonesuch releases document the material she presented at Miller, one featuring Shaw as vocalist and the other the soprano Dawn Upshaw. Upshaw is joined by her longtime collaborator the pianist Gilbert Kalish.

 

The title piece on The Narrow Sea finds Shaw reworking spirituals from the 19th century collection Music from the Sacred Harp. The centerpiece is “Poor Wayfarin’ Stranger,” with a different tune to the timeless words. The instrumentation that accompanies the five parts of the piece is imaginative, including synthesizers, poured water, flower pots and the piano played like a dulcimer. Kalish and Sō Percussion collaborate well, particularly on the ghostly introduction to Part Three, which depicts shades of Henry Cowell. Upshaw sings with fluid legato and declaims the Sacred Harp texts vividly and emotively.

 

“Taxidermy” is an additional piece for Sō Percussion, who once again add flower pots to a considerable arsenal of percussion instruments. Steel pan and a hailstorm of chiming attacks swell and recede and are succeeded by layers of pitched percussion. A simple chord progression played by mallet instruments is elaborated by steel pan and a canon of spoken word is followed by the chord progression returning to serve as coda.

 

Let the Soil Play its Simple Part is a more collaborative venture, in which Shaw and Sō Percussion spent three days in a recording studio together creating an eclectic work, both textually and musically. It begins with “To the Sky,” in which Shaw’s voice is synthetically manipulated and set against mallet filigrees and Jason Treuting’s syncopated drumming. “Other Song” was originally part of an orchestra piece that Shaw composed to celebrate Sarah Bareilles. Here it becomes a banquet of battery, with the Sō Percussion players bringing, as Shaw puts it,”all of their toys to the table.”

 

Four of the pieces on the recording are duets. The title track is a duet between Shaw and steel pan specialist Josh Quillen. It features Shaw’s characteristic free-floating chordal writing alongside stream-of-consciousness lyrics. “The Flood is Following Me” is a setting of James Joyce that is groove forward with Shaw’s voice blending with keyboard harmonies and synth bass. It may be the first musical depiction of James Joyce with a hook. Joyce makes a reappearance on “A Veil Upon the Waves.”

Perhaps the most enigmatic section of the piece is a radical revision of ABBA’s “Lay All Your Love on Me,” just a small section of the middle of the song for Shaw and a marimba playing a chorale-like progression, with a gradual accumulation of Sō Percussion members joining around the instrument to build out an ostinato. “Cast the Bells in Sand” features both an IDM ambience and elaborate drumming from Treuting. Treuting and Shaw duet on “Long Ago We Counted,” which features nonsense syllables instead of conventional text.

 

A poem by Anne Carson is the text for “A Gradual Dazzle,” with thrumming bass drum and a vibraphone outlining subtle harmony that underscores some of Shaw’s most chromatic singing. The final song, “Some Bright Morning,” is a duet with Eric Cha-Beach, who mostly plays a single note but finds numerous textures to animate it.  Shaw plays with the lyrics from another gospel standard, “I’ll Fly Away,” rendering the result in gentle melismas.

 

Both of these recordings display abundant imagination and felicitous collaborations. Recommended.

 

-Christian Carey

 

 

 

 

by Christian Carey
CD Review, Contemporary Classical

John Luther Adams – Arctic Dreams

Cold Blue Music has released a new CD by John Luther Adams titled Arctic Dreams. Scored for four vocalists and four strings, the seven movements on this album also incorporate layers of digital delay that add a richness to the texture. The result is a warm ethereal ambiance throughout the album. Adams writes in the liner notes that “The sung text is a series of ‘Arctic Litanies,’ composed of the names of Arctic places, plants, birds, weather, and seasons, in the languages of the Iñupiat and Gwich’in peoples of Alaska.” The album is dedicated to the late Barry Lopez, a long-time friend of Adams, and the music, characteristically, is heavily influenced by nature and the Arctic tundra. John Luther Adams is a Pulitzer Prize and Grammy Award-winning composer whose experiences in rural Alaska have been a decisive influence on his music throughout a long and distinguished career.

The string music of Arctic Dreams reaches back to the Festival of Alaska Native Arts where it was first heard in 1993 as part of Adam’s composition Earth and the Great Weather. Choral music was added to this in 2000. Arctic Dreams represents a re-balancing of these forces so that it has become a completely new piece. The harmonies for all the works on the album are derived from the first seven odd-numbered harmonics above the low D in the double bass. The tones are played on open strings and there is extensive re-tuning of the instruments so that only the natural harmonics are heard throughout.

The first track of Arctic Dreams is The Place Where You Go to Listen, and this is also the title of a John Luther Adams sound installation located in the Museum of the North in Fairbanks, Alaska. The installation is driven by the weather, time of day, phases of the moon, earthquake activity and other geophysical data gathered in real time. This is then used to select the sound components of the installation in the moment. The portrayal of natural phenomena also seems to be the basis for this track – it as if we are watching a sunrise on the tundra. The movement begins with a deep chord in the lower strings followed by voices singing a single syllable. The sustained low chords provide a warm and welcoming feel, yet there is gravitas present also. Some dissonance in the upper voices add a sense of mystery, and the tones seem to be reaching upward with a sunny, optimistic feel. The voices are attended by high, silvery sounds that add a glittery polish, like looking into the Arctic sun on a clear morning.

John Luther Adams does not write music that simply describes nature, rather, nature inhabits his music. We hear nature speaking to us directly and the most consistently surprising thing is how accepting nature is after all we have done to harm the planet. Pointed Mountains Scattered All Around, track 2, exemplifies this with foundational bass tones combined with lighter voices to make a lovely sound, climbing higher in pitch as our gaze looks upward at the mountain peaks. The music could be angry or forbidding, but there is a hospitable feeling conveyed instead. The bass line ambles down, descending from the heights, settling with the voices as they fade at the finish.

Very different emotions are conveyed by The Circle of Suns and Moons, track 3. This is spare and mysterious music with a chilling, almost alien presence. The high strings seem to twinkle in the night as voices climb very high to create a sense of distance and remoteness. This is less organic than the other pieces, but more evocative of a cold clear night in the company of the moon and the stars. The Circle of Winds, track 4, is just that, a flurry of short stringendo strokes in the low strings and a dense rising and falling in the layered texture that is reminiscent of a whirlwind. The disconnected runs of strings form an amazing aural construct. The color lightens as warm voices creep in, sustained and ethereal – completely different from the power of the opening. The feeling is now optimistic and bright, like a blue sky after a storm. The whirlwind sounds return, then recede at the finish.

River With No Willows, track 5, features lovely harmonies in the voices and what sounds like a jangle of bells in the accompaniment that create a sense of calm and meditation. All the sounds here are delicate and beautiful. The One That Stays In Winter, track 6, is a wonderfully abstract sounding of bird calls created by the voices and strings. Flocks of different birds are heard gathering deep in the wilderness and the sounds increase – the birds clearly own this place. The final track, Where the Waves Splash, Hitting Again and Again, is the shortest piece at just under 2 minutes. This consists of a series soft vocal whispers that evoke the waves of an ocean. It is as if we are standing on the edge of a wide beach, just barely able to hear the distant surf.

The excellent voices on Arctic Dreams are supplied by Synergy Vocals from the UK, who have performed works by composers such as Steve Reich, David Lang, John Adams and Arvo Pärt, among others. The string players, similarly distinguished, are Robin Lorentz, violin, Ron Lawrence, viola, Michael Finckel, cello and Robert Black, double bass. All of the performances on this album are perfectly in touch with the spirit of the music. The processing, mixing and mastering, so integral to the realization of this album, was ably executed by Nathaniel Reichman.

All of the tracks on Arctic Dreams bring us into close association with Arctic nature. The music is always reflective and seems to be telling us that nature will eventually prevail, despite our rebellion against it. We are living in a state of grace with nature and must adapt to it rather than seek to conquer it. Arctic Dreams affirms the constancy and primacy of the environmental perspective that has always been present in the music of John Luther Adams.

Arctic Dreams is available directly from Cold Blue Music, Amazon Music and other retail outlets.

by Paul Muller
CD Review, Contemporary Classical, File Under?

“Blue” Gene Tyranny Boxed Set (CD Review)

“Blue” Gene Tyranny

Degrees of Freedom Found

Unseen Worlds

6XCD boxed set/digital

 

Composer and pianist “Blue” Gene Tyranny passed away in December 2020 of complications due to diabetes. The boxed set Degrees of Freedom Found, a generous six-CD compilation of tracks from 1963-2019, was already in the works and contains liner notes by Tyranny. Thus, it is an endorsed release rather than a posthumous archival grab. 

 

He was associated with a number of prominent musicians, Robert Ashley, Carla Bley, Bill Dixon, and Iggy Pop, whom he joined on an early tour of the Stooges. Most viewed him as a generous collaborator. Ashley, in particular, afforded Tyranny a considerable amount of freedom in crafting the music he played in the opera “Perfect Lives (Private Parts),” in which he enacted the role of Buddy, the world’s greatest piano player.

 

Like Tyranny’s talents, the boxed set is eclectic in makeup and it is curated roughly by category rather than chronology. The set begins with selections that highlight the extraordinary pianist he was, with a warm touch yet fluid dexterity. The stylistic incorporations of the music, even within a single work, is wide-ranging throughout. Thus, one can be in the midst of listening to a minimalist-inspired piece and suddenly swerve through blues or honky tonk pianism. His detractors took this to be undisciplined and digressive, but appreciators knew better that the amalgamations the pieces underwent were intrinsic to their design.

 

If one dipped into a later disc first, they might get the impression that Tyranny was more interested in synthesizers, chamber orchestra, jazz, or theatrical vocal works than solo piano: all are here. The performance dates range from 1963, when the composer was still in Ann Arbor, to later presentations in Montana, Massachusetts at Jacob’s Pillow, Philadelphia, and a number in New York, which became his longtime base of operations, culminating with a valedictory piece featuring winds from 2019, titled “The Forecaster Hopes.”

 

Some of the included works are aphoristic, the length of pop songs. Often the most evocative all too quickly vanish. One piece, “Meditation” for trio and chamber orchestra, is spliced together (seamlessly) between two performances thirty years apart. There are also large-scale pieces, such as Tyranny’s epic monodrama “The Driver’s Son,” the half-hour long piano work “We All Watch the Sun and the Moon (for a Moment of Insight), and “Barn Fever,” a substantial synthesizer piece with a rollicking groove and fiendishly fleet soloing. 

 

Degrees of Freedom Found is a substantial amount of music, but a deep dive into Tyranny’s work is amply rewarding.

 

-Christian Carey

 

by Christian Carey
Contemporary Classical, Festivals, File Under?

Princeton Festival’s Dreaming/Undreaming (Video)

This past weekend, Kosmologia Interdisciplinary Ensemble premiered a multimedia work, Dreaming/Undreaming, at the Princeton Festival. The piece combines dance, video art, and piano music by J.S. Bach and the ensemble’s artistic director Carmen-Helena Téllez. Here is the trailer.

When I learned that it was inspired by two short stories of Jorge Luis Borges, “The Library of Babel” and “The Aleph,” the project piqued my interest. The juxtaposition of Bach with Téllez’s more atmospheric compositions is an intriguing way to underscore the work’s two sources. The two strands of identity allow dancer Alexa Capareda to create two “characters” with distinct movement identities. Pianist Natasha Stojanovska plays assuredly. Her Bach is “old school” in terms of tempo and rubato, but convincing when set alongside the video. Performance footage and images of libraries, architecture, and labyrinthine series of staircases also make the Borges connection clear.

After enduring so many performance videos in the pandemic of dubious quality, it is refreshing to see what Kosmologia’s team has put together, a visually appealing multidisciplinary work that entertains across its several domains.

by Christian Carey
CD Review, Contemporary Classical, Experimental Music, File Under?

Sergio Merce, “En lugar de pensar” (CD Review)

Sergio Merce

En lugar de pensar (Instead of thinking)

Wandelweiser CD

 

“The name of the album is about this feeling that I have. I believe that playing music is a non-cerebral thought form; thought in the sense of being a channel to see, to reveal, a channel that opens through intuition, observation and attention but not through thinking.”

 

Argentinian composer Sergio Merce frequently records at home, but the results aren’t rough hewn as a result. Employing a microtonal saxophone of his own design, synthesizer, and an electronic wind instrument, Merce creates music that encompasses drones, layered sine waves, complex overtones, and periods of silence. The first piece, “Forma Circular” is an enclosed shape. It repeats twice on the recording. Often, a single interval is isolated for a period of time, to be followed by silence and then a more complex, microtonal sonority. An additive process of building from a simple interval to a stack of harmony is another common approach in the piece. Partway through, pitched pulsations animate the soundscape, moving the proceedings from a prevailing feeling of stillness to a mid-tempo presentation. Even when it is absent at the beginning of the second pass through the form, a subliminal urgency is still felt. 

 

In “Forma Continua,” straight tone intervals are morphed with microtonal beating. Single sine tones act as interludes between each wave of distressed dissonances. Merce prioritizes seconds among the intervals, but nearly each one gets to take a turn at being central to the music. Silence plays less of a role than sustain in this piece, with one attack beginning while another sustained chord is held. At times the instruments are recognizable as distinct entities. At other points in the piece their textures overlap, creating beautiful blurred sounds. Merce’s hand-fashioned instruments and home recording practices are in service of sophisticated music-making. 

 

-Christian Carey

 

by Christian Carey
Contemporary Classical, File Under?, Opera

Chaya Czernowin – Heart Chamber (DVD Review)

Photo: Michael Trippel

Chaya Czernowin

Heart Chamber

Naxos DVD

Patrizia Ciofi, soprano; Dietrich Henschel, baritone; Noa Frenkel, contralto; Terry Wey, countertenor; Frauke Aulbert, vocal artist 

Deutsche Oper Berlin, Johannes Kalitzke, conductor

 

Chaya Czernowin’s opera Heart Chamber deals with the emotional journey involved in navigating a relationship. It does so with large-scale forces; in addition to vocal soloists, a substantial orchestra, a chorus and chamber ensemble placed on the sides of the stage, and surround electronics. Because this is a love story that is not without its travails, and the interior lives and subconscious feelings and fears of the characters are so potent, the use of all of these resources seems fitting. 

 

The involved couple, played by soprano Patrizia Ciofi and baritone Dietrich Henschel, are paired with two additional singers, Ciofo with alto Noa Frenkel and Henchel with countertenor Terry Wey. They serve as reflections of the deep unconscious of the protagonists, sometimes revealing hidden truths that contradict what is overtly stated. Czernowin crafted the libretto, which is non-linear in its narrative but touches on many essential themes: courtship, commitment, conflict, and parenting among them. The viewer is often invited to see the distortions of memory playing a formative dramatic role. The meeting scene, which takes place on a staircase where Ciofi drops a jar of honey and Henschel retrieves it for her, is replayed a number of times with variations, suggesting that memories are pliable and renewable dependent on a person’s current mindset. 

 

All four of the soloists display superb control, detailed musicality, and considerable acting abilities. Vocalization moves from hushed whispers to full-throated cries, with glissandos prominent in the declamation. When the vocalists are enacting the plot, Czernowin likens the sections to close-ups in a film. The electronics incorporate vocal samples, which allows for elaborations of the singing that at times take on a prismatic cast, particularly when coupled with additional layers of singing from the chorus. Some of these can be quite delicate breath and mouth noises. The opera’s dream sequences all feature interactions between the singers and chorus, some of the best music in Heart Chamber.

Photo: Michael Trippel

The relationship between the chamber group – the Ensemble Nikel – and the Deutsche Oper Berlin is similarly multifaceted, sometimes cooperative and at others acting independently. Bassist Uli Fussenegger joins Ensemble Nikel and serves a featured role; the weight of the double bass is used in what Czernowin calls “sound floods/surges,” and it often announces and depicts pivotal dramatic sequences. Different fractals of the ensemble play “Forest” segments. Conductor Johannes Kalitzke has been set a formidable task, and he rises to the occasion, eliciting a detailed and vivid rendering from the performers. The production values of the DVD are strong, capturing arresting visuals and many vantage points of the performers that allow for the viewer to get a sense of the enveloping live experience. Heart Chamber is a potent work ripe for additional productions. 

 

-Christian Carey

 

by Christian Carey
Awards, Contemporary Classical, File Under?

Tania León is awarded the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in Music

Congratulations to Tania León for being awarded the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in Music for her work Stride. The piece was commissioned and premiered by the New York Philharmonic as part of its Project 19 initiative, which marked the centenary of the 19th amendment with nineteen commissions from female composers. The Oregon Symphony shared in the commissioning of Stride.

Below is a rehearsal of Stride. You can hear the whole thing by heading over to NYPhil+ (paywall).

 

by Christian Carey
CD Review, Contemporary Classical, File Under?, Piano

Ian Pace Plays Ferneyhough and Yeats (CD Review)

Brian Ferneyhough

Complete Piano Music 

Ian Pace, piano (Ben Smith, piano on Sonata for Two Pianos)

Metier CD

 

Marc Yeats

The Anatomy of Melancholy

Ian Pace, piano

Prima Facie CD

 

Ian Pace is one of the finest interpreters of complex contemporary music currently active. Two recent recordings of music by British composers of exquisitely intricate scores – Brian Ferneyhough and Marc Yeats – serve to further cement his reputation as the go-to artist for this repertoire. 

 

Brian Ferneyhough studied with Klaus Huber and others, but a great deal of his early work in the 1960s consisted of autodidactical pieces. Invention, Epigrams, Three Pieces, and Sonata for Two Pianos all date from 1965-’67 and fall into this framework. Apart from the sonata, they are aphoristic creations, dealing with the surface textures of total serialists Boulez and Stockhausen but with a more intuitive approach to construction. Joined by Ben Smith, Pace underscores the vivid dynamic contrasts and registral stratification of Sonata for Two Pianos. 

 

By 1980, Ferneyhough’s reputation had been enhanced from prodigious emerging talent to that of one of Europe’s pivotal figures. The New Complexity tag was coined for his work and that of a few other composers (Michael Finnissy, Chris Dench, and James Dillon prominent among them). However dubious and reductive any stylistic pigeonhole may be, Ferneyhough has created scores of exacting technical difficulty and interpretative requirements. A watershed work in this regard is 1981’s Lemma-Icon-Epigram, which Pace first performed while a student at the Juilliard School in the early 1990s and has presented many times since. Ferneyhough has suggested that the sixteenth century poetic form the Emblema provided a formal design for the work, with references between the movements culminating in the hyper-distillation of its Epigram. 

 

Three excerpts from Shadow (Opus contra naturam) are reconfigured from the opera Shadowtime. In his note, Ferneyhough suggests a Liberace or Joker styled performance, one that allows for the piece’s abundant virtuosity and periodic vocalizations to take on a kind of macabre lightness.

 

Quirl is Ferneyhough’s most intricate piano score to date, with a self-similar rhythmic structure based on fractal geometry from which are deployed gestures within gestures in a whorl of activity (hence the title). There is also a renewed interest in linear counterpoint reflective of the composer’s exploration over the past two decades of Renaissance music. El Rey de Calabria (2019) provides a brief recapitulation of Ferneyhough’s early style. The piece is an affectionate remembrance of his family’s three-legged cat.

 

Pace’s program essay on Ferneyhough’s piano music acknowledges the difficulties of realizing its notation while strenuously rebutting the notion that it is impossible to play accurately or perversely written to look more complex than will actually be realized. The pianist underscores the increasing number of performers who convincingly present  Ferneyhough’s music. He suggests that his own journey with the scores has been an evolving one, with the current recordings a snapshot of his understanding of their rich details. 

 

Marc Yeats specializes in polymetric composition, using multiple meters in an asynchronous fashion in pieces for large ensemble and layering polyrhythmic designs in solo works. Yeats takes the polyrhythmic investigations of Elliott Carter and Conlon Nancarrow and puts them on steroids. His piano pieces are in single movement design, ranging from 10 to 18 minutes in duration. Dense and detailed, dynamic extremes, formidable technical challenges, and mercurial gestures with sharp turns in demeanor make Yeats’s music a daunting prospect for performers. 

 

However, Pace supplies powerful and extraordinarily detailed renderings, once again making the case for the playability and interpretive potential of tremendously complex music. Each piece is distinctive. Particularly memorable are the whipsnap contrasts of Enûma Eliš, the delicate and rhythmically supple lines in Ouroboros, and the layered structure of the title work. Yeats has a strongly individual voice, and he effectively ups the ante on complexity. 

 

-Christian Carey

 

by Christian Carey
Contemporary Classical

Open Intervals: An Interview with Composer Matthew Bennett

(All photos by Brian Smale)

Composer and holistic sound artist Matthew Bennett has created some of the most intuitively experienced sonorities that you might never have thought to trace to their origins. As the former director of the Sound + Sensory Design Program at Microsoft, where he was still employed at the time of this interview, he endeavored to render the Microsoft soundscape as a community of audible signatures. His innovations transformed Windows into a tactile user experience in which vibration became substantive. Since then, he has established Acoustic Ecology to expand his aural vision to the tech industry at large. He and his music can be found at songofsilence.org, where he continues to document his transcendent path through the audible world.

As for said music, it not only leaves room for listeners to sit down, close their eyes, and feel; it also seems to take on new qualities as the circumstances of its engagement change over time. What might at first sound like a lullaby can just as easily slip into elegy without so much as a change of arpeggiation. If “songs without words” can be said to constitute a genre, then here we find “soundtracks without films,” each as vulnerable to the movements of our internal cameras as is technology is to our touch and regard. It’s only natural, then, that Bennett should shift his professional focus from user interface to interfacial use—in other words, giving voice to the internal relationships of physiological engagement with reality as we know it, while also taking care of health with products like delta 8 pen and more.

As Bennett elaborates below, mysticality is one facet of his polyhedron, as amorphous as it is precise. Thus, what might seem to be a dichotomy reveals its cohesion through geometry. In the same way that moods and even health are deeply affected by densities, volumes, and wavelengths of sound, so are his examinations designed with the intent to let intention go of its own volition.You can also try out delta-8 vape carts from OCN to get rid off stress and to maintain physical and mental well being. And so, let us orient ourselves in alignment with our inner voices and join the thought life of a composer who understands that silence, however illusory to grasp in human terms, is the Alpha and the Omega.

Tyran Grillo: What is your earliest sonic memory and how do you think it shaped (if at all) your approach to sound today?

Matthew Bennett: I have a very early memory of sitting in my family’s dining room, at an upright piano that my mother purchased before she married my father. I was three or four years old and was enjoying just pushing keys and making sounds, as children do. At some point, I was playing two white keys simultaneously, one with each hand, and discovered a sound that I loved more than anything in the world. A perfect fifth! I remember specifically that it was the notes E and B (above middle C).

Of course, I didn’t know anything about note and interval names then. I just knew that I loved that sound. I kept playing it over and over. I remember feeling that the sound was somehow green, which is an association I still have with those notes. That was the beginning of my personal relationship with that special interval.

A couple of years later, after we’d moved to a different house, I remember sitting at the same piano, playing parallel fourths and fifths. I was now big enough to operate the sustain pedal and I had fun holding it down, letting the strings vibrate and resonate across the soundboard to create a whole world of sound.

Looking back now, I can see that those perfect intervals have felt like important friends for my whole life. I still love to feel their sound and resonance, and I still love the idea of creating a whole world from them.

After my parents died about seven years ago, I realized I had lost touch with this beauty. I felt the strong need to refocus my musical work to be more consistent with those early experiences of joy and resonance, and the sheer love of sound and vibration that I had as a young child. This was a turning point for me. I had lost both of my parents within a year, and all music seemed utterly meaningless. Certainly, I felt the music I was making at that time had no reason to exist.

I had to go through a long personal process of clarifying what was meaningful and what kind of music (if any) I wanted to spend the rest of my life creating. I remembered my early experience and joy with the open intervals, and to some extent, they guided me back to Gregorian chant. I slowly began to build a language based on principles and music that did feel meaningful.

This also meant reconsidering my relationship to several non-Western classical music cultures I had studied in graduate school (as a student of ethnomusicology), especially Indian raga, Persian Radif, and Indonesian gamelan. More specifically, European chant led me to reexamine historical styles that I had studied years earlier, especially organum and early polyphony, which have become important to my ways of thinking and working.

I slowly began to build a new kind of personal musical language and practice, with an aesthetic system that has turned out to be very consistent with my earliest experiences of musical beauty. This is not a conscious process, and has taken years.

It was about six years before I even had something that I could share, and it is all still very much work in progress. During that time, I didn’t even know if I would ever have music to share again. But that didn’t matter to me. I needed to go through this process to save my own life and to understand my relationship with the world.

TG: In light of your “green” perfect fifth, I’m wondering if you have any synesthetic associations with sound in general, and whether those associations shape how you choose to create sonic environments for software applications that people will be using on a daily basis. Does this compel you to seek an “organic” sound? Is there a more accurate word for you to describe it?

MB: Since childhood, I’ve had consistent associations of color and texture (tactility) with specific musical intervals, especially my favorite ones. But I think everyone has a certain amount of synesthesia. Some people can become more consciously aware of it than others. There’s a common idea that our senses are separate, but it’s not so simple. They interact and overlap and affect each other. We actually experience our senses as an interrelated web of perception. The amazing thing about music is that it lets us tune in to the flow of these interior sensory perceptions while connecting that to the exterior world. No theory or special knowledge is required—this happens intuitively!

I understand sound as touch-from-a-distance, physical vibration that literally connects our interior experience to the outside world, and to other people and their interior experience. Sound permeates boundaries, which gives it a special immersive quality. This affects how I compose music, and also how I design sound for technology and digital experiences.

Sound helps connect the digital and physical worlds. And the soundscape created by the billions of devices around the world affects how people feel, how they interact, how they process information. I think of the global soundscape of technology as a system, an audio ecology. Because our sounds impact so many people, we have an ethical responsibility to make the system healthy and functional. You can click here to know more about it. But, this also means we need to get rid of annoying audio, sonic clutter, and noise pollution. It’s not just bad aesthetically; it’s bad for people’s mental and physical health (the World Health Organization has actually confirmed this). It’s one way that technology can be a source of cultural and sensory disruption; we feel it in our bodies. A more holistic approach to designing our audio ecology can help heal this rupture.

A healthy audio ecology needs a more dynamic range. We need quieter sounds, and more silence (e.g., time to reflect for a moment instead of being constantly rushed by the next alarm). Quiet sounds are often felt more than they are heard. They’re more effective in communicating information and essential for creating more beautiful and functional digital experiences.

In my music, and in my work with technology, I’m interested in the ways sound and silence shape time and structure feeling. In music, this happens through listening in a traditional linear way. But the soundscape of technology is a massive, fluid, interactive, non-linear composition distributed across billions of devices and people (our major technology platforms are also the biggest sound delivery platforms in history). I want to do what I can to make the global soundscape of technology more beautiful. From my perspective, this is all about small, quiet moments of sound.

TG: Can you tell me about both your earliest and most recent musical (or sonic) influences?

MB: My earliest specific musical influence was probably Warner Brothers cartoons. Not the main parts of those soundtracks composed by Carl Stalling, but specifically the short episodes where the musicians imitated music of other cultures—Chinese, Native

American, African, etc. Of course, these were horrible musical and racial stereotypes. But at the age of four or five, when I was just becoming aware of the musical cultures around me, these were my first exposure to worlds of sound that felt interesting and beautiful. I would go to the piano and try to imitate them. I eventually studied ethnomusicology.

Starting 20 years ago, but especially throughout the last decade, an important influence for me has been the musical language of Arvo Pärt, specifically the tintinnabuli system he created in the 1970s. I consider Pärt to be one of my most important teachers (through his music and ideas; unfortunately, I haven’t met him in person). His language builds on plainchant and organum, two bodies of music I consider part of my foundation. I’ve also been deeply influenced by Pärt’s concepts of musical and ritual time, which have their own important antecedents.

The main part of my practice has been to learn this musical language and to ground it in the body, to internalize it as a fluid framework for composition and improvisation. I hope that, eventually, I might be able to contribute to the tintinnabuli language in some small way. Arvo Pärt created tintinnabuli over 40 years ago, and he is still the only composer working with it. Film composers sometimes evoke his sound, but I’m surprised there aren’t more composers and improvisers who want to engage seriously with this musical system and its innovations. I am a musician who is working with the tintinnabuli language, but for me, it’s more like prayer. I don’t consider myself to be a very good composer, in the professional sense (it was liberating to realize this).

My goal is to create living form with sound, so patterns in the natural world are also an important inspiration. I am constantly amazed by organic form and by the way nature generates beautiful, rich (even complex) results from a few simple rules. I think what I’m always trying to get at is a generative grammar of natural form (to borrow a concept from linguistics and structural anthropology). For me, that means learning the grammar and deep structure of the tintinnabuli language to the point where I can compose and improvise fluently within it, similar to the way an Indian classical musician might approach a raga.

TG: Have you ever looked deeply at cymatics? Either way, does an awareness of vibration, frequency, etc. factor into your work?

MB: I haven’t looked deeply into cymatics, but I’m very interested in the sensory experiences of sound as vibration, resonance, and silence.

For me, the experience of sound is deeply connected to our sense of touch. We don’t just hear sound; we feel its vibrations through our whole body. Sound is resonating, haptic energy. In a real sense, music makes it possible for us to “feel” time. Music gives time tactility and texture. We are immersed in vibration, resonance, and the flow of time. Through the intensity of sound, we get to experience the joyful feeling of unfolding in time, and share it with others. Creating a shared, immersive, sensory time world is one of the things music is really good at.

Understanding sound as physical energy (and as psychological and emotional energy) has changed how I listen and how I make music. I approach composition more like sensory design, as a way to orchestrate the flow of sound, silence, time, touch, and gesture to create specific shapes of feeling that I want to live in and can be shared.

TG: How did you become involved with Microsoft and what has it meant for you to be part of such a ubiquitous platform?

MB: My first involvement with Microsoft was in 2008, creating sounds for Windows 7. After that, I returned to my regular music work. I didn’t give it more thought until they offered me a permanent position creating sounds for mobile devices. I almost said no, because the sound of most devices at the time was ugly, annoying, or both. But there were a few exceptions that made me realize it might be possible to create something more beautiful. Back then, this was just an intuition. But as the world of technology grew, I was fortunate to have the necessary support to develop new ways of thinking about sound design for digital experiences, and to create the Sound + Sensory Design Program at Microsoft.

The scale of Windows is both humbling and inspiring. With well over a billion devices (and counting), those sounds are heard hundreds of millions of times globally each day. Though each sound is very short (one or two seconds at most), they account for millions of hours of sound heard around the world daily. The Windows platform creates its own soundscape, which also integrates with many different cultural soundscapes around the world. Ultimately, those sounds become a part of people’s lives and their personal soundscape. (This is a big responsibility!) Because environmental sound impacts mental and physical wellbeing, there are actually public health aspects to designing sounds for Windows. Poorly designed sound creates anxiety. We have an ethical responsibility to minimize annoying audio and noise pollution.

I am trying to create a seamless and immersive acoustic ecology for technology. I want sounds that are felt more than they’re heard. I want sounds that ground us in the digital world and help heal the sensory disruptions of technology. And I want to design silence. Sometimes this means literal silence or removing sounds. But it also means creating a sonic language that contains silence and resonance within it. I imagine our environmental sounds as tiny pools of time that rise up to meet users (listeners) in the moment, supporting a rhythm of little moments of presence and reflection. In that way, our sounds are a bit like poetry. Of course, they also have to be functional! But the beauty here is no mere ornament, it’s part of the structure and function (and truth) of the sound.

TG: Do you feel that music has always been in some sense technological? Do you see the body as technological?

MB: I think one of the things that makes music so powerful is that it is a technology with a whole dimension of feeling attached.

At one level, a work song is a practical technology to organize collaborative labor. Choreographing the movement of agricultural work in time makes the work more efficient and productive. At the same time, there can be powerful social and emotional dimensions to singing together.

I think the “embodied” nature of music makes it a special kind of technology—one we can feel in our bodies (and hearts). Music can also be a spiritual technology. It’s often used as a way to encode, preserve, and transmit sacred information, but also as a framework or medium for religious and spiritual experience. Music is a powerful technology for shaping (and sharing) time and feeling. This means it’s connected to everything.

From a musical perspective, our bodies are important instruments. We are organic material that vibrates and resonates. Arvo Pärt says that the soul is the most important musical instrument. How do we tune our soul?

TG: How would you define your own spiritual connection to, and awareness of, music? Do you connect it to any particular tradition or faith or do you see it as a universal given of the human experience?

MB: I think music is an important way to tune our soul and to feel our connection to others, to history, and to elemental aspects of the universe. For me, the ideas of prayer and chant have been very important, especially the special worlds of music connected with psalms (tehillim) and the Jewish tradition of nusach chant, which is essentially a process of turning language and intention into music. The breath of this process is at the heart of my practice. I’m not necessarily talking about the literal words of the psalms, but the music of them—the ways of intoning, heightened speech that turns into song, the primal rhythms and contours of language—and especially the quality of intention (kavana), the ritual states of mind and heart.

TG: Are there any avenues of music, composition, and/or creative practice that you would like to explore more deeply and how do you hope they might enrich your life and the lives of others?

MB: I hope to continue becoming a better student of silence and to improve my ability to listen deeply. For me, that means continuing to work with the tintinnabuli language created by Arvo Pärt. I’ve spent years learning to improvise using that language. Moving forward, I hope to share more of that work and integrate it into my larger catalog.

I want to keep exploring ways that a musical language based on plainchant and early polyphony can be physical and kinetic (and contemporary). That’s one thing I’m trying to accomplish with my pulse-based pieces (the Gradual Music, and others). These extended pieces are teaching me about new ways of listening. The shape of time is different. Once I tune into these time worlds, I never want to leave!

I think we can always learn more about silence and listening. No matter how deeply we go, we always have to start from scratch in the next moment.

TG: Who did you used to listen to but don’t anymore? Who do you listen to now? Who have you never listened to but would like to?

MB: This is a surprisingly difficult question to answer. My listening has always been all over the place. Sometimes I listen to everything, other times I can’t stand to listen to anything. The amount of time I spend listening to something isn’t necessarily an indication of how important it is to me. Sometimes I’m not listening to something because I need to be thinking about it a lot. Listening to music, in the traditional sense, has been important to me, of course. It can also be distracting. I often find myself intentionally “not listening.” Sometimes, I need silence in order to really listen.

TG: Who have been some of your greatest teachers, whether those under whom you studied directly or those who have unwittingly taught you from afar just by virtue of you knowing their work, philosophy, or creations?

MB: I’ve learned from so many wonderful artists and teachers that I don’t know where to start. I’ve also been strongly influenced by several different music cultures. I see my work more as a dialogue with various traditions than as being influenced by specific people.

I think our earliest teachers are especially important, and I’m grateful that I was able to connect with good teachers when I was very young. My best teachers haven’t always been musicians or composers. Sometimes a poet or a producer has had more impact on my work. I don’t like to list specific names because that can become a deceptive shorthand or label for an artist’s work. For each person we can name, there are many we can’t who have influenced us as much or more. My most important teachers aren’t individuals but collective traditions.

TG: On that last note, do you see yourself creating or contributing to a certain tradition?

MB: I know that the answer is yes, but being at the center, I don’t have the proper perspective to say which one(s). That is not my job. While my work sits at the confluence of several streams, it’s always been my goal that whatever I create be not simply a superficial combination of “stuff I like.” There’s a lot of that in the music world now, and it can be delightful, but collections of multiple influences rarely coalesce into a truly organic language.

That has been my goal. How does plainchant relate to raga? How can improvisation integrate with composition and more specifically with tintinnabuli and various traditions of chant? How might the tintinnabuli process grow roots that connect with similar structures in gamelan music? These are the kinds of questions at the center of my practice.

The answers I had 15 years ago were very different than the answers I have now. To paraphrase Rilke, you have to hold the questions and live your way into the answers. That’s a slow process; it takes decades.

TG: Speaking of changing over time, if you could visit your younger self, what would you say to yourself?

MB: To my younger self: Focus on being immersed in all the musical and creative traditions you love. Go as deep as you can with each one. Don’t worry about how to actively combine them. Just listen and wait. I’d also let younger me know that this process is going to take a lot longer than you think but that it’s worth it. If you think about it as building the foundation for your life’s work, you’ll make different choices.

by Tyran Grillo