Seattle Symphony unveiled its 2025–26 season today, the first under incoming Music Director Xian Zhang, who—not coincidentally—is in town this week to conduct The Planets: An HD Odyssey. Having yet to officially assume her new role, her influence over the Symphony’s calendar won’t be fully seen for another year. But she will be on hand for ten mainstage concert series, conducting mostly standard repertory by the likes of Mozart, Beethoven, Mahler and Rachmaninov (my prediction of more Bruckner at the Symphony may have to wait—the only Bruckner symphony on the agenda is the Fourth, conducted by guest David Danzmayr).

Zhang brings a direct, plainspoken but enthusiastic style to her interactions with audiences and musicians. Her habit of conducting mostly on the beat puts her in the minority of today’s top-flight conductors (a factor that might require some adjustment from the Symphony musicians, accustomed as they’ve been since Thomas Dausgaard’s sudden resignation in January 2022 to a succession of guest conductors that generally conduct well ahead of the beat).

The contemporary music offerings, while still lackluster compared to the bountiful Ludovic Morlot/Simon Woods/Elena Dubinets era of the 2010s, at least show signs of positive movement, with the naming of Steven Mackey as one of the season’s two “Artists in Focus”. A guitarist by trade, he’s one of the most interesting composers working in the crossover space shared with musicians like Gabriel Prokofiev and the late Steve Martland. He’ll perform his own RIOT concerto in a season-closing event alongside Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, and will also debut a new saxophone concerto written for Timothy McAllister. Also on the docket is the young Seattle transplant Gabriella Smith,  a mentee of John Adams who’ll bring more of a postminimalist sensibility to some slated collaborations with cellist Gabriel Cabezas, the other Artist in Focus.

There’ll also be a newly-commissioned violin and percussion concerto from Christopher Theofanidis, representing the neoclassical lineage of John Harbison and Joan Tower (the latter also reaching the Symphony’s mainstage for the first time ever with a new Suite fashioned from her 1991 Concerto for Orchestra), plus the inevitable portion of grandiloquent mediocrity that’s prevalent in American orchestral programming nowadays. Alas, Northwest audiences will have to look elsewhere to hear music by such late standouts as Kaija Saariaho, George Crumb and Sofia Gubaidulina, or to celebrate the centenaries of Berio, Feldman and Kurtág, the 90th birthdays of Riley and Pärt, or the 80th of Anthony Braxton (arguably the most influential living American composer who’s not a minimalist). Wayne Horvitz, Seattle’s most prominent exploratory musician, is missing on his 70th birthday, as is Bright Sheng (instead of the latter’s Lacerations or Zodiac Tales we will hear Zhang conduct Franco-Chinese composer Qigang Chen’s ambitious but saccharine Iris dévoilée for Chinese singers, instruments and orchestra).

The most striking omission, though, is Conductor Emeritus Ludovic Morlot, who after serving as something of a custodial grandparent for the Symphony following Dausgaard’s departure (including leading the past two season openers), will be taking a breather from Benaroya Hall next season to “leave space for Xian Zhang in the first season of her tenure”, as his manager told me. He’s still slated to conduct in June of this season, and will lead Carmen in May 2026 at Seattle Opera (whose orchestra is drawn largely from the Symphony’s roster). Associate Conductor Sunny Xia is returning next season, though, to help provide some day-to-day operational continuity.

Thus begins the Zhang era. After the tumult of Krishna Thiagarajan‘s just-ended seven-year reign as President and CEO—during which he guided the organization through the COVID pandemic and a period of declining arts support in the Northwest, but also chased away an internationally-recognized Music Director and a Vice President who went on to assume the Artistic Directorships of the London Philharmonic and Concertgebouw orchestras—the arrival of a steady if unglamorous leader who can cultivate the patronage of Seattle’s Asian community (demographically the most reliable supporter of classical music organizations in the US) might be the most propitious way forward for the region’s most prestigious arts institution.

Addendum: Timing the season announcement to coincide with a three-concert series featuring Zhang conducting The Planets (accompanied by projected images of the cited celestial objects, and paired with Billy Childs’ Diaspora concerto for saxophone and orchestra) proved to a spectacular success, with full houses and enthusiastic crowds greeting her arrival. The inter-movement applause heard during Holst’s sprawling masterpiece on Saturday night revealed the presence of new and infrequent audience members in the house. I spoke to several guests who professed genuine curiosity about the new Music Director, and seemed engaged by the broad but unexaggerated gestures emanating from her diminutive frame clad in baggy black concert attire. One hopes we will soon see the kind of signature strokes that characterized Morlot’s early years (such as the fondly-remembered [untitled] concerts in Benaroya Hall’s Grand Lobby that featured Symphony musicians in small ensembles performing mostly avant-garde music). But whatever ensues, it seems that Zhang can look forward to a sincere honeymoon period with her new constituents.

It was a valiant effort, and one that might work better in the studio than onstage, but there’s a reason why the coupling of harp and piano, especially with an orchestra behind them, is a rare one: barring extraordinary measures (e.g., amplification, spatial separation or having the instruments play alternately instead of together), the piano will always overpower the harp. This was the unfortunate case in Seattle Symphony’s premiere of Hanoï Songs by Benjamin Attahir, a young composer who’s shown more invention in works like Adh Dhohr (a concerto for the Renaissance-era serpent and orchestra) and Al’ Asr (just given its premiere recording by Quatuor Arod), both of which offer a more subtly-drawn extension of the Dutilleux/Dalbavie strain of post-Messiaen French orchestral writing. His new double concerto—ostensibly a sound portrait of Vietnam that vacillates between antiquity and the colonial war era—does have attractive details, including an array of percussion colors that features nine tuned gongs (four are visible in the photo below). But beyond the balance issues, its essential neoclassicism often slides into Hollywood-esque grandiloquence, a domain where the John Williams of the world will, like the piano in Hanoï Songs, inevitably overshadow the strivers.

Regardless, the Ravel and Fauré offerings in this all-French program (composers and soloists!) sounded wonderful on Saturday night. Particularly enlightening was the juxtaposition of Charles Koechlin’s competent but straightforward orchestration of his teacher Fauré’s Pelléas et Mélisande suite with Ravel’s virtuosic deployment of instrumental color in Ma mère l’Oye. His Introduction and Allegro provided an additional vehicle for the Symphony‘s longstanding and much-admired principal harpist Valerie Muzzolini (this time without competition from Jean-Yves Thibaudet’s piano). And it’s been comforting to have Ludovic Morlot back in town leading both these concerts and Seattle Opera‘s Les Troyens following the tumult of early 2025, including Trump 2.0, the sacking of the Symphony’s executive leadership, and the Southern California fires that destroyed thousands of homes, including Morlot’s. Here’s to Western art music as a soothing social unguent.

Attahir’s Adh Dhohr and Al’ Asr were featured in this concert preview from KBCS-FM’s Flotation Device program.

It’s been a somber year, with wars, conflicts, and intractable cultural and political divisions weighing on the lives and thoughts of many, including those with an investment in Western art music. I’ll endeavor to assess the situation not only musically, but also against the backdrop of a serious decline in the prestige and influence of the Anglosphere’s cultural left, particularly in the US, where its ambitions have come up hard against the judgment of the general population.

But let’s start with some new albums…

New and monumental

• Sofia Gubaidulina: Triple Concerto for Violin, Cello and Bayan (Orfeo)
  Gubaidulina currently holds the consensus title of “most important living female composer” and—notwithstanding her longtime residence in Germany—“most important living Russian composer” as well. Her 2017 Triple Concerto, just given its premiere recording by Andrew Manze and the NDR Radiophilharmonie, duplicates the format of Beethoven’s Triple Concerto, but with the humble Russian bayan (played by Elsbeth Moser, who suggested the concept to Gubaidulina) replacing the piano. The result is a mix of folk and modernist resonances, alternately dramatic and introspective. Gubaidulina’s health has declined since she turned 90 in 2021, and we’ve heard all we’re going to hear from her. So even if her Concerto doesn’t quite match the impact of Offertorium or the St. John Passion, its premiere recording by Moser and her fellow soloists Baiba Skride and Harriet Krijgh (who also contribute a performance of the composer’s 1981 duo Rejoice!) is something to cherish.
• Kaija Saariaho: Adriana Mater (Deutsche Grammophon)
• Kaija Saariaho: Maan Varjot, Chateau de l’Âme, True Fire, Offrande (Radio France)
  The late Franco-Finnish composer is represented by two premiere recordings, most notably that of her second opera, Adriana Mater. First produced in 2006 to a French-language libretto by Amin Maalouf (a survivor of the Lebanese civil war), it recounts the story of a young woman raped by a soldier who then leaves to fight. She decides to keep the baby, telling her skeptical sister “The child is mine, not the rapist’s”. Seventeen years later her son vows vengeance on his erstwhile father, but upon tracking him down finds him blind and decrepit. Unable to finish the deed, he runs off, unsure whether he’s being cowardly or courageous. In the final scene his mother says “That man deserved to die, but you, my son, didn’t deserve to kill him. We are not avenged, but we are saved.” Saariaho’s score presents her usual blend of sonorist and impressionist sonorities, with melodic fragments emerging from a slowly-changing orchestral haze. But it’s often quite close to Sibelius as well, as in a passage from Act I whose alternation between two string chords recalls the second theme from Luonnotar. Among the featured soloists, the dark bass voice of Christopher Purves is notable as the violent father. Also remarkable is the chorus, which has no text of its own, but acknowledges the proceedings using nonsense syllables or echoes of the principals’ lines, reminiscent of the Chorus of Shadows in Harry Partch’s stage works.
  
  

  

  Also receiving its premiere recording is Offrande, a brief duet for cello and pipe organ, arranged from Saariaho’s orchestral piece Maan varjot.
• Žibuoklė Martinaitytė: Aletheia (Ondine)
  Martinaitytė, born 20 years after Saariaho, could be considered an inheritor of the latter’s stylistic line. Her album Aletheia, featuring the Latvian Radio Choir, demonstrates that it’s still possible to write compelling music for a cappella choir, using no instruments and no texts. Both the title work and Ululations (from 2023) receive their premiere recording here, reveling in their tapestry of textures, drones and extended techniques including overtone singing.
• Louis Andriessen: Tales of song and sadness (Pentatone)
  Andriessen was probably the greatest Dutch composer to come along since the 17th century. His final composition, May, was completed in 2019 just before Alzheimer’s disease ended his career. It sets a melancholy poem by Herman Gorter (translated into English) using a nostalgic style that features a prominent recorder part in its opening bars, followed by suggestions of songs remembered from an earlier time. The music is dramatic, but closer to neoclassicism than to the provocative early works like Hoketus and Workers Union that established his reputation as Europe’s most trenchant minimalist.
• John Adams: Girls of the Golden West (Nonesuch)
  Adams, who currently enjoys the second highest public profile (after Philip Glass) of any living American composer of concert music, has also strayed from his minimalist roots in recent years. His opera Girls of the Golden West will never displace Puccini’s La fanciulla del West (or Nixon in China for that matter), and its libretto, which in this premiere recording has been greatly condensed from its 2017 debut, suffers from dull lyrics and one-dimensional characters. But Adams can still ply the neoclassical trade with far more substance and color than most of his colleagues.
  
  

  

  
  
• John Corigliano: The Lord of Cries (Pentatone)
  More compelling dramatically is The Lord of Cries, first staged in 2021 by Santa Fe Opera, and only the second opera by this accomplished American neoromantic. The libretto by Corigliano’s husband Mark Adamo recounts the story of Euripides’ Bacchae using the setting and characters of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, a clever trick that deserves more approbation than has yet fallen on this work, which still awaits a second production. Its premiere audio recording features Odyssey Opera and Boston Modern Orchestra Project, and is headlined by the formidable countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo, who just assumed the general directorship of Opera Philadelphia.

• Brett Dean: Rooms of Elsinore (BIS)
• Beethoven ‘Emperor’ concerto, Brett Dean ‘A Winter’s Journey’ (Orchid Classics)
  One recent opera that has gotten its due is Brett Dean’s Hamlet, whose recent mounting by the Met was one of my Picks of 2023. Dean returns to the work in Rooms of Elsinore, an anthology of chamber and orchestral works derived from the opera, ranging from voice and guitar songs using Gertrude’s lines as lyrics, to a viola sonata performed by the composer, and a lively accordion concerto adapted from the music to the play-within-a-play The Murder of Gonzago. A separate offering from Orchid Classics features Dean’s piano concerto Gneixendorfer Musik – Eine Winterreise, written for Jonathan Biss as a companion piece to Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto.
• Bernhard Lang: Voice and Ensemble (Kairos)
  With Andriessen’s demise, Bernhard Lang may now be Europe’s leading exponent of classic minimalism. His affinity for glitch music is showcased in this triple-CD from Kairos that features several recent works, including Das Hirn (which will appeal to fans of Friedrich Dürrenmatt) and The Travel Agency is on Fire (a bellicose setting of William S. Burroughs cut-ups). Soprano Sarah Maria Sun is outstanding as always in both German and English.
• Beat Furrer: Furrer 70 (Klangforum Wien)
  Klangforum Wien honors its founder Beat Furrer for his 70th birthday with a six-CD box set featuring numerous premiere recordings, including recent concertos for violin and clarinet. Their lively and obsessive, but unpredictable, rhythms make a pleasant contrast to the preponderance of slow music in contemporary praxis. The influence of Nancarrow and late Ligeti is often felt, as in Furrer’s 2007 Piano Concerto and his 1998 piano quintet Spur which anticipates Bryn Harrison’s heterostatic Piano Quintet from 2017. At other times the affinity is with Sciarrino and Lachenmann, as in his sparse and scratchy piano trio Retour an Dich. It’s an essential item for Furrer enthusiasts, even if some of the material is unbearably hagiographic, including a booklet cataloging his personal library (impressive, but not in the same league as Umberto Eco) and a half-hour silent video that shows the seated übermensch hard at work on his new opera Das grosse Feuer.
• Toshio Hosokawa: Orchestral Works, Vol. 4 (Naxos)
  Japan’s most important living composer gets a new portrait album from Naxos whose highlights include a tone poem entitled Uzu (“whirlpool”) and the violin concerto Genesis in which the composer imagines the soloist as a human life passing from conception to death, with the orchestra representing the universe.

Ives at 150

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  Ives Denk (Nonesuch)
  America’s music institutions paid scant attention to the sesquicentennial of their country’s first great composer (compare that to the Ravel at 150 hoopla that’s already underway for 2025). Fortunately a handful of dedicated individuals helped make up the slack with several notable releases, of which the most compelling features the young virtuoso Stefan Jackiw tackling Ives’ four Violin Sonatas with pianist Jeremy Denk. These relatively digestible works, all set in a familiar three movements, tend to attract lackluster performances (such as Hilary Hahn’s disappointing cycle for Deutsche Grammophon). But Jackiw and Denk find plenty of fresh nuances to savor. Ives’s violin writing can be awkward, but even the passages that usually sound ragged, like the Allegro risoluto con brio section in the first movement of Sonata No. 2, come off beautifully here, showcasing Jackiw’s flawless intonation, conveyed without using a habitual vibrato to smooth out the imperfections. The album’s second CD features a remastered version of Denk’s 2010 recording of Ives’ two piano sonatas, of which his Concord is one of the few interpretations to meet the bar set by Gilbert Kalish’s definitive 1976 rendering, also for Nonesuch.
• Charles Ives: First Piano Sonata (Albany, with John Noel Roberts)
  2024 brought us a few brand-new traversals of the Concord Sonata, but it’s John Noel Robert’s recording of the first Sonata that most captured my attention. This underheralded work would surely be included in everyone’s list of 20th century piano classics if it had only been composed by someone else. Roberts’ approach is confident but introverted, emphasizing the work’s connections to the 19th century, by contrast with the equally definitive but more percussive interpretations by William Masselos and Sara Laimon that emphasize its foreshadowing of Monk and Ustvolskaya, especially in the second scherzo.
• Charles Ives: Orchestral Works (Naxos)
  The venerable Ives scholar James Sinclair returns with a collection of chamber orchestra pieces, including the premiere recordings of several small fragments, alternate versions and incomplete works.
• Charles Ives: Choral works (2024 Remastered Version) (Columbia/Sony Classical)
• Charles Ives: The Anniversary Edition (Columbia/Sony Classical)
  Another set of reissues reclaims the Gregg Smith Singers’ anthology of Ives’ choral music, including several of his surviving sacred works (others of which were lost when Manhattan’s Central Presbyterian Church, where Ives had been the organist, relocated in 1915). Originally released on a Columbia Records LP in 1966, it boasted horrible sound quality. But for many years it was the only way to hear these works on record. Even today it’s almost the only professional recording of Ives’ remarkable Harvest Home Chorales, whose middle movement is possibly the most explicit expression of Ives’ fascination with polymeters. Happily the performances sound much better in this remastered digital edition.
  
  Of more specialized interest is the new digital reissue of The Anniversary Edition, originally put together for Ives’ centenary in 1974. The big highlight here is Vivian Perlis’s compilation of recorded reminiscences by Ives’ friends, relatives, business partners and fellow composers (including Elliott Carter and Bernard Herrmann) which she eventually transcribed for her book Charles Ives Remembered. And although the musical selections have all been recorded elsewhere, their assemblage here creates a pleasant sampling of the range and originality of this unique fount of American maverickism, free atonality, postmodern collage and polystylism.

“The future of music may not lie entirely in music itself, but rather in the way it encourages and extends, rather than limits, the aspirations and ideals of the people.” (Charles Ives)

“This music is all a part of another tomorrow. Another kind of language.” (Sun Ra)

More reissues and archival releases

• The Complete Obscure Records Collection 1975–1978 (Dialogo)
  The short-lived but high-impact label Obscure Records brought the world such classics as Gavin Bryars’ Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet, Brian Eno’s Discreet Music, and John Adams’ Christian Zeal and Activity (his first canonical work) in their premiere recordings, as well the debut album by Penguin Cafe Orchestra. Obscure’s anthology of Machine Music compositions by the English minimalist John White is also worth noting in light of his passing in early 2024, as is a recording of John Cage’s Forever and Sunsmell featuring the unaccompanied voice of Carla Bley. Though some of these albums materialized in digital form over the years, this wonderful 10-CD box set is the first complete digital release of the entire Obscure discography.
• William Masselos: The Complete RCA and Columbia Album Collection (Sony Classical)
  Masselos, whose career was cut short by Parkinson’s disease, gave the world premieres of Ives’ First Piano Sonata and Copland’s Piano Fantasy, and his recordings of those masterworks are still definitive today, especially in their newly remastered digital versions. The Copland in particular ought to be mandatory listening for anyone inclined to dismiss his career based solely on his most popular works (the Fantasy is just as sophisticated as Messiaen’s piano pieces, and far more interesting rhythmically). Brahms, Satie, Ben Weber and Paul Bowles are also represented in this attractive 7-CD box set.
• Sun Ra: Lights on a Satellite: Live at the Left Bank (Resonance)
• Sun Ra: At The Showcase: Live in Chicago 1976–1977 (Jazz Detective/Elemental Music)
• Sun Ra: Inside the Light World: Sun Ra Meets The OVC (Strut)
• Sun Ra: Strange Strings Expanded Edition (Cosmic Myth)
  Three fascinating archival releases from three different labels, plus a major reissue from a fourth label, helped keep Sun Ra’s legacy in the spotlight in 2024. The continuing activity of his Arkestra under the leadership of his indefatigable saxophonist Marshall Allen, who turned 100 in May, have also played a crucial role. Perhaps the most interesting of these albums is Lights on a Satellite, recorded at the Left Bank Jazz Society (in Baltimore, not Paris) at a live 1978 gig that’s famous for its inclusion in Robert Mugge’s documentary film Sun Ra: A Joyful Noise. This is the first time that the entire concert has been available for listening, though, thanks to the recent discovery of the complete stereo tape of the event.
  
  At The Showcase also covers the late 70s era Arkestra, and its customary “variety show” mix of swing tunes, free improvisations, and Afrofuturist songs (often delivered by two or three female vocalists/dancers performing in front of the all-male band). It comes with an attractive booklet featuring photos, articles and Marshall Allen’s personal account of meeting this most eccentric of all American mavericks for the first time in 1958.
  
  Inside the Light World is a tad less compelling if only because it dates from 1986, after Sun Ra’s heyday as an avant-gardist is usually deemed to have ended. It does have an interesting rendition of Theme of the Stargazers though, which emphasizes whole-tone scale figuration. Finally there’s the aptly-named Strange Strings, one of the most peculiar of all Sun Ra albums, a self-styled “study in ignorance” wherein his wind players are given unfamiliar string instruments to play. Cosmic Myth has given it a new expanded reissue with digital remasterings of the original mono pressings plus newly-discovered stereo versions of some of the 1965 source recordings. It makes an interesting contrast with Mauricio Kagel’s Exotica, which was recorded seven years later with European musicians.
  
  Also of interest is Outer Spaceways Incorporated: Kronos Quartet & Friends Meet Sun Ra (Red Hot Org), one of whose tracks features Marshall Allen and Laurie Anderson jamming with bassist Tony Scherr, and John Blum Quartet: Deep Space (Astral Spirits) which again features Allen on alto sax and EVI.

More from our predecessors

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  Lucia Dlugoszewski: Abyss and Caress (Col Legno)
  Klangforum Wien offers premiere recordings of several works by this quirky composer who’s long been better known among dancers than musicians (she was Erick Hawkins’ longtime music director, and eventually his wife). Her music often uses custom-built instruments (one is visible in the accompanying photo), and the title piece features trumpeter Peter Evans in a particularly demanding solo role.
• Julia Perry, Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson: American Counterpoints (Bright Shiny Things)
  The highlight here is the first recording of the astringent Symphony in One Movement for Violas and String Basses by Julia Perry (1924–1979), whose previously-recorded Short Piece For Orchestra is a similarly brief but compelling representative of uncompromising American post-serialism. Perry’s output is largely unrecorded, and admittedly uneven. But its neglect compared to Florence Price (1887–1953)—whose biography as a rediscovered African-American composer is similarly compelling, but whose music is far less original—seems emblematic of the state of institutional orchestra programming in the US.
• George Crumb Edition 21: Kronos-Kryptos (Bridge)
  The 21st and presumably final volume in Bridge Records’ Complete Crumb Edition features his last premiere recording: the percussion quintet Kronos-Kryptos, written in 2018, revised in 2020, and as it turns out, the only Crumb composition for percussion alone. I discuss it, and Crumb’s complicated legacy, in this article.

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  Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji: Toccata Terza (Brilliant Classics, with Abel Sánchez-Aguilera)
• Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji: Opus clavicembalisticum (Passacaille, with Daan Vandewalle)
  One of the most eccentric (and irascible) of all 20th century composers—comparable to Nancarrow in his isolation, if not his influence—Sorabji continues to receive premiere recordings of his long, dense and complicated piano works. The latest selection to see the light of day is the third of his four Toccatas, whose manuscript was rediscovered in 2019 in a private collection. Sorabji’s formal model was Bach (the multi-movement harpsichord toccatas, not the more famous works for pipe organ), but the harmonic language of this two-hour piece is closer to Scriabin. Also of note is Daan Vandewalle’s new recording of Opus clavicembalisticum, made famous by its persistent listing in Guinness Book of World Records as the “longest non-repetitious piano composition” ever written. In reality it’s not even Sorabji’s longest piano piece (his Sequentia Cyclica super Dies Irae lasts 8½ hours), but Opus clavicembalisticum remains his best known work, and one of the very few Sorabji compositions that’s been recorded multiple times. Give it a listen and decide for yourself whether it’s the work of a crank or a visionary.
• Pehr Henrik Nordgren: Streams (Alba)
  Although little-known outside Scandinavia, Nordgren (1944–2008) might be the most intriguing Finnish composer between Sibelius and Saariaho. This album features the premiere recording of his Chamber Symphony from 1995, which, like most of his music, combines post-serial and folk-inflected styles. Nordgren was born in the Swedish-speaking Åland Islands, and instead of attending the Sibelius Academy like most Finnish composers, he left to study composition in Japan, where he met his wife. Upon his return he eschewed the capital Helsinki in favor of the small northern town of Kaustinen. His Chamber Symphony begins with drums and woodwinds imitating the sound of a gagaku orchestra, and ends with a chorale-like passage, seemingly epitomizing the unique, multicultural biography of this intriguing composer.

Newer voices

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  Kate Soper: The Hunt (New Focus)
• Kate Soper: The Romance of the Rose (New Focus)
  Wet Ink Ensemble may be the most potent composer-led new music ensemble in North America, and its house vocalist, Kate Soper, might be our most important younger exponent of new music theater. Two major releases showcase her interest in ancient texts: The Hunt and The Romance of the Rose are both based on Medieval sources, with the former adapting the Lady and the Unicorn tapestries into an hour-long work for three female singers who accompany themselves on violin and ukulele while portraying virgins hired by a king to lure a unicorn into a trap. The Romance is a longer work (perhaps too long) based on the 13th century Roman de la Rose that recounts a dream vision wherein a Lover (who is female in Soper’s version) is beguiled first by the image of a rose reflected in a fountain, and subsequently by visits from Lady Reason, Shame (played by Soper), and the God of Love, accompanied respectively by a vocal harmonizer, a heavy-metal guitar and the instrumentalists of Wet Ink Ensemble. As usual, Soper deploys a range of vocal deliveries spanning unaccompanied dialog, spoken text with musical underscoring, and more conventionally declaimed or sung lyrics.
• Gabriel Prokofiev: Pastoral 21 (Signum)
  Prokofiev enjoys lurking in the border regions where Western art music intersects with dance music and other popular genres. His latest album features Pastoral Reflections, a new meditation on Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony for string sextet and synthesizer, and Breaking Screens, an exercise in disco-meets-modernism.
• Gabriela Ortiz: Revolución diamantina (Platoon)
  A breakthrough album for this Mexican composer, who’s just turned 60, featuring Gustavo Dudamel and the Los Angeles Philharmonic performing three colorful orchestral works, including the violin concerto Altar de cuerda, and a ballet score for chorus and orchestra written to commemorate Mexico’s 2019 glitter revolution.
• Gabriel Vicéns: Mural (Stradivarius)
  Vicéns’ music paints a barren but gripping soundscape that emphasizes sparse, disconnected chords. Vicéns was a competitive bicyclist for a while, and there’s a certain subdued relentlessness to his music that seems to channels that same kind of energy.

Old meets New

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  Timothy Cooper, Ensemble 1604: Shadows That in Darkness Dwell (The Night With…)
  Dowland’s Flow My Tears is the springboard for recirculation and improvisation on Baroque-era and modern digital instruments in this interesting album from composer Timothy Cooper and the UK-based Ensemble 1604 (named for the year in which Dowland’s music was published).
• Brian Andrew Inglis: To Byzantium and Beyond (Kairos)
  The humble recorder has seldom been embraced as a solo vehicle for experimental music, with Berio’s Gesti (1966) standing as a lone beacon in a barren contemporary landscape. The London-based composer Brian Andrew Inglis goes a long way toward rectifying this with an album of exploratory works for unaccompanied recorder that exploit such extended techniques as glissandos, multiphonics and singing while playing.
• Ekmeles: We Live the Opposite Daring (New Focus)
  James Weeks’ Primo Libro expresses the old meets new philosophy quite vividly with a succession of 16 short madrigals written in 31-division equal temperament (derived from “quarter-comma meantone, a temperament commonly used in the Renaissance and early Baroque”), performed by the New York-based vocal sextet Ekmeles in their new album that also showcases works by Zosha Di Castri and Hannah Kendall.
• Daron Hagen with Duo Yumeno: Heike Quinto (Naxos)
  New meets old meets East meets West in this setting of a medieval Japanese epic that chronicles the fall of a powerful but arrogant imperial family, performed by a pair of Japanese musicians who play koto and cello while singing the text in a manner that’s suggestive of the 13th century itinerant monks who would have been its original raconteurs. And was the case with Weeks, Hagen’s work additionally reflects the influence of the great Italian madrigalists, as suggested by its title.

Braxton meets post-Braxton

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  Anthony Braxton: 10 Comp (Lorraine) 2022 (New Braxton House)
• Anthony Braxton: Sax QT (Lorraine) 2022 (I Dischi di Angelica)
• Ferry Good Company: Selected Works of Anthony Braxton (Don’t Look Back)
  Saxophonist Sam Newsome recently opined that improvised music uniquely “offers a space where creative minds can come together without being defined by race, gender or political affiliations”. And notwithstanding the roots of 1960s free jazz in African-American culture and activism, its most original thinkers have often been heterodox in both their musical and their social thinking. Sun Ra is an obvious, and previously noted example, while Anthony Braxton—a South Side avant-gardist and AACM veteran who spent decades in academia, and is arguably the most influential living American composer who’s not a minimalist—has also been a sharp critic of contemporary identity politics. Whatever the factors, the fires of musical innovation in the US have always burned brightest outside its academies and institutions, with improvised music remaining its most reliable crucible of new ideas.
  
  Braxton’s two latest releases document his newfangled Lorraine composition method that combines written melodies (which resemble conventional jazz tunes) with graphic symbols and other directions to guide the associated improvisations. One of the most prominent novelties here (for Braxton anyway) is the use of computer-generated sounds that respond to the human musicians. It’s like having an automated Greek Choir in the ensemble. Both albums were recorded live in Europe with a variety of trios and quartets that feature saxophones, trumpet, accordion and voice—but no drums or bass. To the uninitiated, the music might seem long and meandering, which could make the Lithuanian ensemble Ferry Good Company’s new offering a better introductory album. Among other things it sports a rendition of Braxton’s famous “parade music” Composition No. 58 that debuted on his Creative Orchestra Music 1976 album.
• Josh Modney: Ascending Primes (Pyroclastic)
  Spectralism meets the experimental big-band traditions of Sun Ra and Michael Mantler (with an emphasis on Braxtonian rhythmic disjunction) in this ambitious project by the violinist and Executive Director of Wet Ink Ensemble. As suggested by its title, Ascending Primes is a suite of improvisational works whose ensemble sizes, movement numbers and tuning systems are all based on prime numbers in the sequence 1-3-5-7-11. Trumpeter Nate Wooley, pianist Cory Smythe and drummer Kate Gentile are among the musicians from the greater Braxton orbit that are featured in the proceedings.

• 

  Philip Zoubek Trio Extended: MIRAGE (Boomslang)
  In a similar rhythmic space as Gentile and Modney is Philip Zoubek and his Cologne-based ensemble that has helped that city become a hotbed of post-Braxton/Zorn/Zappa-style structured improvisation, building on the avant-garde credentials it inherited from the likes of Stockhausen, Musikfabrik and the WDR Studio for Electronic Music. Many of the musicians featured in MIRAGE also appear on Scott Field’s Sand album, which was one of my picks for 2023.
• Nicole Mitchell, Alexander Hawkins: At Earth School (Astral Spirits)
• Anna Webber, Matt Mitchell: Capacious Aeration (Tzadik)
  Two imaginative releases that successfully wrench the flute/piano duet combination away from the hackneyed realm of Prokofiev and Poulenc.
• Sylvie Courvoisier: To Be Other-Wise (Intakt)
• Matthew Shipp: The Data (RogueArt)
  A pair of New York-based pianists chime in with new solo offerings. The Swiss-born Courvoisier has been a prolific recording artist for nearly 20 years, but To Be Other-Wise is only her second solo outing, featuring both prepared and conventional piano improvisations that evince the influence of Messiaen, Cage, Nancarrow and Cecil Taylor. Shipp, by contrast, stays straight on the keys for most of his new double-CD. Taylor figures as an influence here too, along with McCoy Tyner and his penchant for mixed-fourth chords. But there’s also a good dose of Charles Ives in Shipp’s playing, especially in Track #11 which combines the rhythms of popular music with the dissonant harmonies of modernism.

More improv from Downtown and elsewhere

• 

  Wadada Leo Smith, Amina Claudine Myers: Central Park’s Mosaic of Reservoir, Lake, Paths and Gardens (Red Hook)
  Braxton’s fellow AACM members Smith and Myers celebrate their recent 80th birthdays with a duet album from which the track Conservatory Gardens is a worthy sampling.
• Adam Rudolph, Tyshawn Sorey: Archaisms (Meta/Yeros7/Defkaz)
  Rudolph specializes in hand drums while Sorey uses a conventional jazz set. The counterpoint makes for a compelling CD #1, while a second disc features a quartet, with percussionists Sae Hashimoto, Russell Greenberg and Levy Lorenzo joining Rudolph while Sorey conducts using his autoschediasms technique adapted from Butch Morris’s conduction and Braxton’s Language Music methods.
• Wayne Horvitz, Bill Frisell: Live Forever, Vol. 3: Frankfurt, Knitting Factory 1989–1990 (Other Room)
  One of the most intriguing non-Sun Ra archival releases of the year features two veterans of the Downtown New York improv scene. Both played in John Zorn’s Naked City band during the time these tracks were recorded (Horvitz on keyboards, Frisell on guitar), and both would soon settle in the Northwest (where Horvitz remains). There’s plenty of good and exploratory music captured here, including a poignant rendering of a tune from Nino Rota’s soundtrack to Juliet of the Spirits.

• 

  Bill Frisell, Kit Downes, Andrew Cyrille: Breaking the Shell (Red Hook)
  It’s nice to see Frisell return to his exploratory roots after building his career with more conventional jazz material. This recording features a unique grouping with Frisell joining Cecil Taylor’s longtime drummer Andrew Cyrille while the eclectic British keyboardist Kit Downes plays on the pipe organ of Manhattan’s St. Luke in the Fields.
• Fred Frith: A Miscellany of Mishaps (Bandcamp)
  This unusual compilation of out of print, esoteric and previously unreleased items from the world’s leading avant-guitarist includes a characteristic solo track called Yui’s Workout (previously available only on a rare benefit album for a particular rural North Carolina middle school) and Snakes and Ladders, a decidedly un-characteristical postminimalist composition written for the Bang on a Can All-Stars in 2009.
• Brandon Seabrook: Object of Unknown Function (Pyroclastic)
  The young Brandon Seabrook does for the banjo what Frith has done for the guitar in this new album that features a variety of rhythmically lively multilayered solo tracks.
• Ben Goldberg, Todd Sickafoose, Scott Amendola: Here to There (Secret Hatch)
  Thelonious Monk tributes are a common thing, but this trio of clarinet, bass and drums takes an unusual approach, focusing on the bridge sections of famous Monk tunes and using the material for motivic, not chord-based, improvisation. The opening track, an adaptation of In Walked Bud, is a good example, using the rising fifth from Monk’s original as the basis for an extended downtempo fantasy.
• Horse Lords: As It Happened: Horse Lords Live (RVNG)
• Spinifex: Undrilling the Hole (TryTone)
  Two new albums from two veteran bands with a similar approach to glitchy avant-rock, off-kilter rhythms, and instrumentations that feature saxophones added to a standard power trio. Spinifex is based in Amsterdam, while the members of Horse Lords originally coalesced in Baltimore (but are dispersed across the Atlantic).
• WASNT: Wasnt (Bandcamp)
  The debut album of this Seattle-based downtempo band features Julie Baldridge’s mournful violin solos, reminiscent of violist Mat Maneri. Speaking of which…
• Lucian Ban, Mat Maneri: Transylvanian Dance (ECM)
  One of the most unusual albums of the year features pianist ban and violist Maneri (with his drawn-out solos that emphasize double stops and a slow, wide vibrato) recorded live in the Transylvania region of Eastern Europe where Ban was born and where Bartók made his groundbreaking recordings of folk music in the 1920s—recordings that these two New York-based musicians use as the starting point for their nostalgic and often mournful improvisations. One of  Bartók’s Edison cylinders, transcribed below, became the first of his famous Romanian Folk Dances. Its soaring melody can just barely be discerned in the second track of this album.

Drones and darkness

• 

  Phill Niblock: Looking for Daniel (Unsounds)
• Phill Niblock: V&LSG (XI)
  The late and beloved Phill Niblock (1933–2024), the godfather of drone minimalism and a lynchpin of New York’s musical avant-garde who produced hundreds of concerts at his SoHo loft space, is represented by his late composition Biliana, which features what might be his most beautiful drone of all, conveyed by the multitracked voice and violin of its dedicatee Biliana Voutchkova. Also notable is V&LSG, featuring the unusual combination of Loré Lixenberg on multitracked voice and Guy De Bièvre on lap steel guitar.
• Éliane Radigue: OCCAM IX, Laetitia Sonami: A Song for Two Mothers (Black Truffle)
  Radigue is often viewed as a European counterpart to Niblock, but favoring thick drones of indefinite pitch to Niblock’s intense microtones. Following a succession of epic works created on an Arp 2500, Radigue turned to acoustic instruments at the turn of the 21st century, so this new work conceived for Sonami’s custom-designed Spring Spyre (featuring a large metal ring on which are mounted three long springs and three audio pickups) is something of a throwback for her. It’s paired with Sonami’s own solo piece for her new instrument.
• Jürg Frey with Quatuor Bozzini: String Quartet No. 4 (Collection QB)
  Yet another flavor of minimalism is represented by this Swiss composer and co-founder of the Wandelweiser collective, whose work combines the influence of drone music with the sparse landscapes of Feldman. His new multi-movement quartet is traversed by Canada’s leading string quartet specializing in experimental music.

Opera on the screen

• Bronius Kutavičius: Lokys (The Bear) (Klaipėda State Music Theatre, OperaVision)
  With North America’s largest opera companies turning in a lackluster year on their mainstages, and with the Met inexplicably choosing to stream Jeanine Tesori’s justly-panned Grounded instead of either Golijov’s Ainadamar or John Adams’ new Anthony and Cleopatra, it was left to European companies to make up the slack. One of the most revelatory recent productions was this opera by Bronius Kutavičius (1932–2021) which recounts a tale of 19th century Lithuanian forest life and bestiality, set in a modernist idiom built from dissonant orchestral riffs overlaid by parlando voice lines. It’s like a darker, atonal Janáček that offers an alternative to the spiritual minimalist lineage pursued by other late Soviet composers whose spiritualty was of a more conventional Christian variety. Kutavičius’s interest in paganism aligns him with a young Stravinsky (who famously quoted a Lithuanian folk melody in The Rite of Spring). Some of the highlights of Lokys include several allusions to folk music (as at 36:00) and a passage where the orchestra’s wind players toot on ocarinas. The opera was composed in 2000, and an audio recording was released two years later by Ondine. But this is the first production professionally recorded on screen, captured live in October 2022 in Klaipėda on the Lithuanian coast.

• Alexander Raskatov: Animal Farm (Wiener Staatsoper, Ö1)
  Now that Gubaidulina’s composing days have sadly ended, Alexander Raskatov seems to have granted the consensus title of “most important active Russian composer”. His latest opera—an unnervingly prescient adaptation of Animal Farm—is sung in English (slightly updated from Orwell’s 1940s prose), a decision that had profound effects on the music’s construction. “Working on Animal Farm I found a method of using mostly short scalpel-like phrases, [with] hocketing between the ensembles.” Raskatov also employs onomatopoeia (e.g., vocal imitations of horse whinnying), but the dominant influence is Stravinsky at his most modernist, particularly the rustic Les Noces and the orientalist Nightengale, as evinced in Animal Farm by the distortion-mirror folk elements that characterize the first solo passage for the coloratura equine Mollie (whose role is more prominent here than in the novella). At other times the pastiche of Schnittke asserts its influence, as in Squealer’s Second Act appearance as a downscale crooner. A co-commission between Dutch National Opera (which premiered the work in 2023) and Vienna State Opera (which streamed it the next year), Animal Farm‘s references to Soviet and Putinist Russia are quite clear. An interesting directorial choice was to have the performers who portray animals wear masks, but remove them when their characters become more “human”.

• Peter Eötvös: Valuska (Hungarian State Opera)
  One last Eastern European entry is worth noting: the 13th and final opera (and the only one set in his native Hungarian) by the late Peter Eötvös. As a numbers opera with intervening spoken dialog, it can get tedious for non-Hungarian speakers. And it’s not as compelling as Eötvös’s Angels in America or his kabuki adaptation of Three Sisters. But it still delivers the composer’s idiomatic whimsy flecked with dark humor. Its eclectic music includes allusions to Tchaikovsky and the ritual orchestra of Tibetan Buddhism.

In print

• 

  Philip Freeman: In the Brewing Luminous: The Life & Music of Cecil Taylor (Wolke Verlag)
  The first book-length biography of one of America’s most innovative musicians is something of a specialty read: Taylor’s life story isn’t as fascinating as Sun Ra or Miles Davis, and Freeman isn’t as gifted a raconteur as John Szwed or Quincy Troupe. But fans of Taylor’s music will find this an essential volume, tracing his career, influences, and—to an extent anyway—his personal life. Freeman downplays the oft-claimed importance of Messiaen in Taylor’s development, sympathizing with critics who consider the connection between Taylor’s atonality and European postserialism “superficial”. Freeman does concede that during Taylor’s time at New England Conservatory, Messiaen visited Boston for the premiere of Turangalîla and a performance of the Quartet for the End of Time that featured one of Taylor’s professors on cello. An interesting connection that Freeman does make is with Richard Twardzik, an obscure New England pianist whose playing combined Bud Powell, Erroll Garner and Schoenberg.
  
  Freeman confirms what’s long been known in private about Taylor’s sexuality, revealing that although Taylor was rarely open about his homosexuality, he understood his attraction to men from an early age (leading to an estrangement from his father). Taylor’s use of cocaine to help fuel his hyperactive marathon solo sessions is also acknowledged. Freeman portrays his subject as socially awkward, sacrificing almost everything for his music, and William Parker is quoted about Taylor’s seeming lack of empathy. But there’s otherwise relatively little insight into what made up the personality of such a complex, driven man. I could have also used more detail about Taylor’s aesthetic philosophy, including his Afrocentric view of musical structure in relation to the human body. But the dutiful chronicling of recording and performance dates and personnel will be useful to aficionados, and there’s no denying the importance of Freeman’s effort in furthering our understanding of this controversial and enigmatic musician.
• Joonas Sildre: Between Two Sounds: Arvo Pärt’s Journey to His Musical Language (Plough)
  First published in 2018 in Estonian, and now available in its first English-language edition, this unusual book is stunning if only for the sheer audacity of producing a “lives of the great composers”-style graphic novel about a late 20th century post-Soviet musician, a cartoon book in the style of Maus or Persepolis that traces the biography of spiritual minimalism’s most commercially successful representative. Pärt’s life story, like Taylor’s, revolves around overcoming challenges, but is not unique among Eastern European composers who languished (or worse) in the repressive environment of the Soviet bloc. But the imaginative visual milieu with stylized staffs and noteheads is a nice touch. And the reading experience is pleasant and fast-paced. An especially touching moment is Pärt’s prophetic boyhood memory of hearing Estonian radio’s music broadcasts played over a loudspeaker in a nearby market square. “Occasionally, the wind carries fragments of melody to Arvo’s backyard. It brings with it a sense of longing…”

Prospectus

I write this amid a season of gloom for the American left, as it faces a prospect that some of us have been dreading (and warning about) for several years: the coalescence of a multiethnic right-wing coalition founded on economic populism and social conservatism that attracted the votes of ½ of Latino men, ¼ of black men, and an alarming percentage of voters under 30 by acknowledging that in contemporary American society, class is as potent a cultural and political determinant as fixed identity. Progressives, hobbled by their abandonment of classical liberalism a decade ago in favor of left-identitarianism, have failed to grasp this, while simultaneously and unwittingly encouraging a resurgence of white nationalism.

It’s not just the political left that’s collapsed though. The cultural left in the US—the sector involved in the arts, sciences, humanities, media and academia—has become more reviled by, and isolated from, the broader population than at any time since the 1930s, if not longer. Reversing this estrangement will requiring repudiating—or at least tuning out—the voices and ideology that have led us over the cliff.

This needn’t require cancelling anyone, or dumbing down the cultivated arts. A few years ago, during the flap in the band and music ed communities over “Keiko Yamada” (who turned out to be the pen name of composer Larry Clark), I ventured to the publisher’s Web site to familiarize myself with “her” music. It was uniformly dull and derivative, relying on clichés like black-key scales to sound “oriental”. Yet I found no evidence that the outraged voices on social media had objected to the poor quality of the music when they thought it was being written by a Japanese woman. The unfortunate lesson of DEI is that so long as a preoccupation with fixed identity overwhelms everything else, then we’ll keep getting Keiko Yamadas, Jessica Krugs and Yi-Fen Chous, along with the earnest mediocrity whose elevation has caused our arts institutions to falter. Returning to a more generative, liberal philosophy will encourage our most innovative, challenging and affirmational voices—fancy Julia Perry at the Symphony instead of Florence Price, an Anthony Braxton commission instead of Carlos Simon, or Adriana Mater streamed in HD instead of Grounded.

But if artistic excellence and cultural standing don’t provide enough motivation to change courses, there are always the election results of November 5 to think about. And the trajectory of a nation’s cultural health often portends its social prognosis as well.

Photo collage: Žibuoklė Martinaitytė by Lina Aiduke, Charles Ives in 1913, Biliana Voutchkova and Phill Niblock at Silent Green Berlin in 2023, Toshio Hosokawa by Kaz Ishikawa, Sofia Gubaidulina by Mario Wezel, Wayne Horvitz and Bill Frisell via Other Room Music, Julia Perry via the Rider University Libraries Julia A. Perry Collection, Lucia Dlugoszewski via Col Legno, Sun Ra by Robert Mugge, Kate Soper as Shame in The Romance of the Rose, Wadada Leo Smith by Tom Beetz, Duo Yumeno (Hikaru Tamaki and Yoko Reikano Kimura) by Kasia Idzkowska, Kaikhosru Sorabji by Joan Muspratt, Anthony Braxton and Brandon Seabrook via Brandon Seabrook, Adriana Mater in Paris 2006 by François Fogel, Gabriel Prokofiev by Nathan Gallagher, Sylvie Courvoisier by Véronique Hoegger, George Crumb by Rob Starobin, Between Two Sounds: Arvo Pärt’s Journey to His Musical Language by Joonas Sildre, Gabriela Ortiz by Mara Arteaga.

The career trajectory of Elena Dubinets continues to soar upwards. The current Artistic Director of London Philharmonic Orchestra is now headed to the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra next season to assume its Artistic Directorship. She will help to steady the tiller of one of the world’s most storied orchestras that has nevertheless seen some recent upheaval, lacking an Artistic Director since Ulrike Niehoff’s sudden departure last year, and a Chief Conductor since the sacking of the scandal-ridden Daniele Gatti in 2018. Her term will presumably overlap with the formal start of Klaus Mäkalä’s Chief Conductorship in 2027 (at a mere 28 years old, Mäkalä is the Concertgebouw’s chief conductor designate, and in a particularly eyebrow-raising move he recently announced that he would also assume the Music Directorship of Chicago Symphony Orchestra starting that same year).

Born in Moscow in 1969, Dubinets (pronounced “doo-bin-YETS”), grew up in the Soviet Union, earned her PhD from Moscow Conservatory, then emigrated to the US in 1996 when her husband accepted a software engineering position at Microsoft. She quickly rose in the Northwest music community, joining Seattle Chamber Players as a programmer in 2001, then joining Seattle Symphony in 2003 where she became Vice President for Artistic Planning during the final years of Gerard Schwarz’s long tenure as Music Director. She retained the position through the legendary Ludovic Morlot/Simon Woods era from 2011 to 2018 during which the Symphony reached a zenith in its international standing, driven largely by its new music initiatives, including the [untitled] series of concerts in the Grand Lobby of Benaroya Hall that often featured Symphony musicians performing contemporary chamber and electroacoustic works, plus numerous high-profile commissions and premieres of full orchestra works by Elliott Carter, Valentin Silvestrov and John Luther Adams among others.

After the departure of Morlot and Woods, Dubinets found herself unwanted by the Symphony’s new and more parsimonious leadership team, whereupon she decamped to the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, thence to the London Philharmonic Orchestra, where she serves as the co-equal of the orchestra’s Chief Executive David Burke. Since the LPO retains a Principal Conductor (currently Edward Gardner) instead of a Music Director, Dubinets enjoys complete autonomy over the orchestra’s programming, a role that she has clearly relished after many years spent managing the intricate politics of US orchestras. Her projects in London have included a much-acclaimed production of Heiner Goebbels’ A House of Call and a high-profile US tour with violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja.

Dubinets is also the author of Russian Composers Abroad: How they left, stayed, returned, published by Indiana University Press in 2021. Those of us with fond memories of her time in the Pacific Northwest wish her well with this exciting appointment.

Untuxed, a series of informal, intermission-less Friday-night concerts, returned to Seattle Symphony last night in the hands of its inaugurator, Ludovic Morlot, the Symphony’s former Music Director and current Conductor Emeritus. The program consisted solely of Shostakovich’s wartime Eighth Symphony (1943), a massive piece that can betray a deficient ensemble, with its multitude of lengthy and exposed solos for woodwinds, cello and violin (whose associations with death and funeral music in European are readily embraced by its composer), and by the perennial balance challenges posed by Shostakovich, whose legacy is littered with the corpses of performances that conveyed only two dynamic levels: with brass and without brass.

The Eighth is also a piece that has languished in the shadow of its neighbors, including the epic Fourth Symphony (banished before its premiere in 1936, and still unheard at the time the Eighth was composed, suggesting that Shostakovich might have intended the latter as a substitute for the former), the popular Fifth (whose first movement is echoed by its counterpart in the Eighth with its broad tempo and dotted rhythms that are interrupted midway through by a rough march), the Sixth (whose long, slow first movement is followed by two faster, shorter ones), and the martial Seventh and autobiographical Tenth. No. 8, in fact, had only been mounted once before by Seattle Symphony: in 1985 conducted by the composer’s son Maxim.

For all these reasons, Morlot’s selection of the Eighth to anchor the season’s first subscription week (whose full-length Thursday and Saturday concerts additionally featured Boulez and Ravel) was an audacious one, especially coming right after the ensemble’s summer layoff, and requiring part-time players to to cover the additional flute, bassoon and percussion parts plus a fortified complement of low strings).Happily, the musicians were more than ready for the task. The sparse audience attending the huge onstage forces experienced the full expressive and dynamic range set out by the composer, starting with the somber main theme of the opening Adagio, presented by the first violins with minimal vibrato in contrast to the lusher tone used for the more extroverted second theme. The piercing climax that came ten minutes later was the loudest unamplified sonority I can recall hearing at Benaroya Hall since Bluebeard’s Castle in 2012, and its subsidence into the prolonged English horn solo that concludes the movement was handled exquisitely by the Symphony’s longtime specialist Stefan Farkas (who received the first soloist’s bow afterwards).The mechanistic viola melody that launches the second of the work’s two scherzos is the one excerpt from the Eighth that regularly gets quoted in popular media—usually in connection with wartime Russia. Its rendition Friday night was aptly militant but not muddled. The clattering climax that concludes this movement was another high point, with the drums’ brutal at the forefront, but not enough to drown out the dotted figures in the remaining instruments, whose subsidence from fff to pp as the fourth movement’s passacaglia theme emerges was another transition whose dynamic subtlety is often lost in less careful hands.The success continued in the closing Allegretto, which requires virtuosity from many instruments (including the bass clarinet), plus enough interpretive restraint to convey the slightest touch of optimism at the work’s C major conclusion (Mariss Jansons calls it “a small light at the end of a very long tunnel” that’s possibly just an illusion).

Shostakovich has always been one of the 20th century’s most controversial and contradictory composers. Haunted by censorship and the threat of imprisonment (or worse), his music was championed by Britten and Bernstein, and praised by Rudolf Barshai for “leaving its blood on the stage”, but also dismissed as “bad Mahler” and “battleship grey” by Boulez and Robin Holloway. Whatever one’s feelings about it, though, it’s impossible to survey the landscape of late- and post-Soviet music—Schnittke, Silvestrov, Ustvolskaya, Pärt, Gubaidulina, etc.—without recognizing its inexorable connection to Shostakovich. Unlike Prokofiev, who was arguably a greater composer, but a historical dead-end who left no stylistic heirs, Shostakovich articulated a world view that managed to embody the experience and expression of multiple generations of Eastern European composers.

Seattle Symphony has had a long affinity for Shostakovich, extending back to Gerard Schwarz’s lengthy tenure as Music Director. The presence of several orchestra members who grew up in the Soviet Union surely helps as well. In that sense it’s fitting for his music to accompany the resumption of the Untuxed series following a 2½ year absence brought on by post-COVID consolidation and the executive turmoil that reached a head with the acrimonious departure of Thomas Dausgaard as Music Director in January 2022, leaving a gap that will finally be filled by Xian Zhang’s arrival in Fall 2024. It’s a testament to the caliber of its musicians and the leadership of its section principals that the artistic standards of the Symphony have remained so high despite the organization’s offstage issues.

There was a time when the death of a composer as prominent and long-lived as George Crumb would engender a stream of monumental obituaries and career surveys of a kind that serious music writers once aspired to. That so little in this vein has materialized since Crumb’s February 2022 demise at the age of 92 might be a reflection of the dilapidated state of North American music criticism. But it could also mean that his professional eulogies had already been written decades earlier. Among contemporary composers, only Stockhausen seems to have traced a more dramatic arc of reputational soaring and sinking than Crumb, whose distinctive chamber and piano works defined large swathes of the musical avant-garde during the 60s and 70s, but who shortly thereafter found himself dismissed as a faded has-been. By 1997, Kyle Gann had compared him to Roy Harris for the precipitous rise and fall of his professional standing.

But as Stockhausen eventually showed, attempts to close the narrative of a still-living artist are subject to revision. And a pair of posthumous events—the premiere recording of his late percussion quintet Kronos-Kryptos (the last of his canonical works to be commercially recorded), and an intriguing retrospective program called Spotlight: George Crumb, presented in Seattle and Olympia by Emerald City Music—have provided the means and the opportunity to construct a more authoritative epilogue to his protracted resumé.

Origins and heyday

In the 2019 profile film Vox Hominis, screened as part of the Spotlight events, Crumb recalls the impact of the 1950s “Bartók explosion” on his musical development, the beginning of an influence that lurks in the tritone-based pitch structures of many Crumb compositions, occasionally bursting into the open in the “night music” passages that dominate the first of his Four Nocturnes (1964) and the ending of Music for a Summer Evening (1974). The sparseness of Webern, the chords and rhythms of Messiaen, the under-the-lid piano techniques of Henry Cowell, and the delicate nostalgia of Ives revealed in his song Serenity are other obvious influences on the trademark Crumb style.

One of his more underacknowledged sources seems to be Berio—in particular the middle movement of Circles (1960), notable for its textural transparency, its soprano part that alternately sings, intones and whispers the texts by E. E. Cummings, and the elaborate percussion writing that includes a meticulously-specified instrumental layout which requires its players to pirouette to perform the piece. Crumb duplicated the manner and instrumentation of Circles—substituting Lorca for Cummings and a piano/celesta for Berio’s harp—in Night Music I (1963), the first of his compositions that sounds thoroughly like Crumb.

Night Music I established the template for such later works as Ancient Voices of Children (1970), Vox Balaenae (1971) and Night of the Four Moons (1969), of which the latter was included in Spotlight: George Crumb as the embodiment of his “classic” period, a compendium of stylistic fingerprints that include its chamber setting (an updated Pierrot ensemble of female voice, alto flute/piccolo, banjo, electric cello and percussion), and its reliance on extended techniques (e.g., whispering into the flute, playing the banjo with a plastic rod) and percussion instruments (including kabuki blocks, Tibetan prayer stones, an mbira, and several auxiliary instruments played by the singer). Berio’s concept of theatricalized performance has now evolved into a ritual presentation in which the performers (save the “immobile” cellist) end the piece by gradually exiting the stage in the manner of Haydn’s Farewell Symphony as they play a lullaby inspired by Mahler’s Der Abschied.

The texts again come from Lorca, chosen for their pertinence to a lunar theme (the work was composed during the Apollo 11 flight). Emerald City Music’s traversal remained faithful to the composer’s meticulous performance directions. Notable was soprano Charlotte Mundy’s insistence on emphasizing the text’s sensual side during the Huye, Luna, Luna, Luna! movement (whereas Jan DeGaetani in her reference recording of the work makes it more playful), and Jordon Dodson’s sensitive banjo playing, which conveyed fragility on an instrument that’s not always noted for delicacy. All five musicians embraced Crumb’s cherishing treatment of every word and phrase as the originator of its own integral musical world, demonstrating what Eric Salzman called a “suspension of the sense of passing time in order to contemplate eternal things”.

Crumb’s style is largely defined by the soft, slow and sparse sound world—offset by brief, elegant musical gestures—of works like Night of the Four Moons. But there’s one major exception within his oeuvre: Black Angels, Thirteen Images from the Dark Land, composed in 1970 for electric string quartet. Described by its composer as “a parable on our troubled contemporary world” (whose milieu included the Vietnam War), its reputation for shrieking dissonance was bolstered by its use in the soundtrack to The Exorcist and its many performances by the Kronos Quartet that emphasized its loudest, most aggressive characteristics, the ritualized shouting and amplified distortion resonating with young audiences attuned to Jimi Hendrix and heavy metal.

In reality, though, Black Angels is only consistently loud during the first six of its roughly 18 minutes. That the remainder of the work (including the celebrated Death and the Maiden quotations and the neo-Medieval Sarabanda de la Muerte Oscura) dwells in a gentler, more typically Crumb-like ambience was emphasized in the JACK Quartet‘s comparatively subdued reading at Spotlight: George Crumb, which eschewed the Kronos’ contact mikes and guitar amps in favor of DPA microphones fed through the house sound system. This made the timbral and dynamic shifts less jarring than in most performances, the visceral effect dialed down to emphasize such subtleties as the recurring Dies Irae citations and the motific connections between the Sarabanda and the thimble tremolos in the work’s concluding Threnody. Cellist Jay Campbell explained, “it’s nice to hear the notes”, and the only lingering regret was the propensity for the auxiliary percussion (the performers play maracas, bowed goblets and a tam-tam alongside their regular instruments) to overwhelm the lightly-amplified strings.

Among composers of Crumb’s generation, only Ligeti in his Second String Quartet (1968) exerted a comparable impact on the subsequent development of the string quartet medium. Black Angels was a direct model for such works as Tan Dun’s Ghost Opera, and the godfather of much of the new music shepherded by the Kronos Quartet and likeminded groups over the past half-century. Even Stockhausen in his notorious Helicopter String Quartet (1995) hearkens back to the ritualized counting (always to seven!) in Black Angels. As postmodernism defined an extreme new range between noise music and the near silence of Feldman and Cage, Crumb in Black Angels demonstrates an ability to dwell on both ends of the continuum in a stylistic space that’s gestural but unique, and not totally dependent on a post-Webernian aesthetic.

A succession of major works followed Black Angels into the 70s, including the Makrokosmos I and II collections that established Crumb as one of the most influential composers of postwar piano music. They’ve remained in the instrument’s modern repertory, admired for their organic incorporation of extended techniques, and their evocation of Christian and mythological themes through the use of pastiche and musical quotation, conveyed in the composer’s familiar handwritten scores that hearken back to the decorative notations of the Ars Subtilior era (Crumb’s father had been a professional music copyist).

Ebb and flow

Within a few years, though, Crumb’s star had begun to fade. The 1977 premiere of his much-anticipated Star-Child, written for Pierre Boulez and the New York Philharmonic, seems to have been a turning point. It’s a colorful piece, but Crumb clearly struggles to translate the subtle gestures of his chamber works to a vast ensemble that comprises an orchestra, bell-ringers and two spatially-dispersed choirs. The result is uncomfortably derivative both of Crumb’s earlier works and of Charles Ives’ Central Park in the Dark, and it waited more than two decades for its first recording, breaking a string of annual album releases from Nonesuch and Columbia records that kept Crumb’s name in circulation among modern music enthusiasts. (Both those high-profile labels would substantially curtail their commitment to contemporary music as the CD era dawned).

Now Crumb was isolated from his earlier audience, and by the mid-80s he seemed mired in a slump. His students recounted him looking for excuses to avoid composing. And when new works did materialize they often seemed like a diluted echo of past achievements. Mundus Canis (1998), a portrait of five family dogs for guitar and percussion, and the third and final work featured at Spotlight: George Crumb, epitomizes these fallow years. Performers Jordan Dodson and Ji Hye Jung managed to bring out its humor, including a guiro imitating a dog scratching fleas. But in general, the work seems slight and halting, with the poignant eloquence of Lorca and the ritual callouts of Black Angels now replaced by shouts of Yoda! Bad dog!. It was in this context that Kyle Gann’s aforementioned judgment seemed fitting.

Unexpectedly, though, the new millennium saw a rejuvenation in Crumb’s output. Encouraged by family and friends, he undertook a series of settings of traditional American (and later, Spanish language) songs that ultimately totaled nine distinct Songbooks. Their reception was lackluster: apart from a few gems such as a bitter, Mahler-quoting rendition of When Johnny Comes Marching Home, they tend to sound sluggish and monotonous compared with Crumb’s earlier vocal works, and they lack the disjunction between archaic tonality and modern atonality that makes the pastiche and quotations of Black Angels so captivating. But they did succeed in refocusing Crumb’s compositional energies in ways that found their best expression in his late piano works, including the Mozart and Thelonious Monk-inspired Eine Kleine Mitternachtmusik (2001), one of the few items from this period to secure a foothold in the repertory, and the two books of Metamorphoses (2017 and 2020): 20 aural portraits of paintings by Klimt, Klee, Chagall, O’Keeffe and others, concluding with van Gogh’s The Starry Night (which had inspired Music for a Summer Evening decades earlier). Conceived as a resumption of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, they’re among the most remarkable keyboard works ever composed by an octogenarian—a worthy companion to the Makrokosmos volumes, and a fitting bookend to an oeuvre that officially began in 1962 with Five Pieces for piano.

By comparison, Kronos-Kryptos, Four Tableaux for Percussion Quintet (2018–20), the centerpiece of the just-released 21st, and final, volume of Bridge Records Complete Crumb Edition, feels less compelling: a competent but anachronistic retread of Crumb’s earlier music that’s nevertheless notable as his only composition for percussion alone—an astonishing fact given his longstanding reputation as a pioneer of modern percussion writing. Its best passage comes in its quiet finale: a dirge on Poor Wayfaring Stranger composed in memory of Crumb’s daughter Ann, a vocalist who premiered many of his Songbooks before her death of cancer in 2019.

The culmination of the Crumb canon deals another blow to the great generation of postwar American avant-gardists whose surviving ranks are now headed by Anthony Braxton and the original minimalists. On the morning of his death Crumb was arguably the most important living composer of piano music, and the last giant in a distinctively American line of innovative percussion writers whose praxis has been so thoroughly assimilated into the mainstream of Western art music that it no longer seems to represent a distinct “thing”. Crumb was also instrumental in developing the postmodern practice of pastiche and theatricalized performance. Whether his best-known works remain worthy of the approbation they received half a century ago, or whether Andrew Clements’ revisionist pronouncement (“too much surface, far too little depth”) is closer to the mark, their influence seems certain to greatly outlive their creator. Crumb, as Mark Swed put it, may have been famous only within new music circles. But he mattered well beyond them.

Founded in 2015 by Andrew Goldstein and violinist Kristin Lee, Emerald City Music has secured a niche in the Northwest music scene for its distinctive brand of “high-end” concertizing, featuring such accoutrements as snacks, an open bar, projected titles and artist profiles, perusal scores spread out in the lobby, and an eclectic mix of contemporary and historic Western art music of both the composed and improvised kind. Most of their Seattle performances take place at 415 Westlake, an event space in the heart of Amazon’s corporate digs in South Lake Union that’s well suited to the trademark ECM experience, allowing for such endeavors as performing Georg Friedrich Haas’ Third String Quartet in total darkness. The program for Spotlight: George Crumb featured three works totaling 50 minutes, plus National Sawdust’s 20-minute portrait film Vox Hominis, filmed at the composer’s home and studio on his 90th birthday. This modest lineup was probably a good thing: Crumb’s music, like Webern’s, is best savored in small portions.

As the pandemic recedes in our rearview mirrors, the flow of new albums of radical music has returned to its pre-COVID level, as has the year-end ritual of Best of… lists from critics and other interested parties. Indeed, it’s that post-lockdown deluge of recorded activity, along with the resumption of live musicmaking, that saturated my inbox to the point that I’m combining two years of critical listening and Flotation Device curation into this one article, which endeavors to summarize where Western art music stands today as an integral, global practice that comprises improvised, composed and fixed-media music.

Transcultural exemplars

• Heiner Goebbels: A House of Call – My Imaginary Notebook (ECM)
  One of the most remarkable items to cross my desk lately is Heiner Goebbels’ latest full-length orchestral project. Starting with a longstanding penchant for juxtaposing dissimilar kinds of music, then borrowing a technique from Gavin Bryars, Goebbels has assembled an anthology of recorded voices culled from old archival phonographs, tasking the live musicians with accompanying them in unexpected ways. Some of the vocal sources seem innocuous enough, like a classical Persian singer delivering a text by Rumi, or Heiner Müller riffing on the text Stein Schere Papier (“rock, paper, scissors”). Others are more ominous, such as a Georgian solder recorded in a German POW camp during WW1. In one movement a Namibian native is accompanied by fractured big band music that suggests a Trinidad night club, which seems innocent enough until you learn that the source recording was made at a German-owned cattle ranch in southwest Africa at the height of the colonial era. Although Goebbels hints at his ideological stance in the title for this section, Wax and Violence, he nevertheless presents his material dispassionately. What’s conveyed here, and throughout the album, is a disorienting ambivalence—perhaps a nostalgia for lost voices and myths, but also a reminder of the tenuous cohesion of human memory, and how deeper meanings often lurk beneath the surface of things.

  

  At a time when many artists seem intent on bludgeoning audiences with political messages, Goebbels leaves it to us to contemplate the unpredictable and sometimes tragic impacts of new technology and the abutment of cultures, demonstrating that music often communicates more profoundly when things are left ambiguous.

• Eunho Chang: Sensational Bliss (Kairos)
  A different kind of cultural abutment occurs in a breakthrough album from Eunho Chang which comprises 20 short pieces scored for a combination of Korean and Western instruments and voices, with stylistic inputs ranging from Korean pansori to German lieder and Darmstadt-era post-serialism. In one vignette, Donna Summer and Pierre Boulez appear to be conversing in heaven, a cross-cultural 21st century Pierrot Lunaire from this young and uninhibited South Korean composer.

Big thinking

One of the dominant styles of contemporary orchestral music nowadays is the static, colorful, drone-and-cluster variety that’s closely associated with Scandinavian composers, especially Icelandic ones like Anna Thorvaldsdottir, whose Archora, Aiōn and Catamorphosis were all featured on Flotation Device in 2023. For this list, however, I’m going with three different works in this vein, one of them from an unexpected source.

• Jóhann Jóhannsson: A Prayer to the Dynamo (Deutsche Grammophon)
  The late Icelandic composer, best known for his film scores (including The Theory of Everything) is represented in this posthumous release from Daníel Bjarnason and the Iceland Symphony Orchestra whose centerpiece was inspired by (and incorporates field recordings gathered by the composer from) a hydroelectric plant in his home country. It combines the now-classic Thorvaldsdottir-esque style with influences from John Luther Adams and Takemitsu’s late orchestral works, building enormous orchestral swells from a slowly ascending bassline.

• 

  Žibuoklė Martinaitytė: Hadal Zone (Cantaloupe)
  Although she originates from Lithuania, Martinaitytė eschewes the spiritual minimalism pursued by most Baltic composers in favor of what she calls acoustic hedonism, which embraces the sensuality of Nordic composers like Anna, Jóhann and Anders Hillborg while retaining fidelity to the great sonorist works of György Ligeti, in particular Lontano (1967), which uses diatonic clusters and micropolyphony. Hadal Zone depicts the darkest depths of the ocean using a bottom-heavy ensemble (bass clarinet, tuba, cello, double bass and piano) plus sampled voices and instrumental sounds.

• Liza Lim: Annunciation Triptych (Kairos)
  One composer not typically associated with the Nordic style is the Southern Hemisphere-dwelling Liza Lim, who built her reputation on rhythmically-complex post-serial works for mixed chamber ensemble (including 1993’s The Oresteia). Yet her Annunciation Triptych—three ambitious orchestral works each inspired by a prominent female historical or mythical figure—shows her diving into the world of sound surface composition. The Sappho/Bioluminescence movement, for example, inspired by the lyric poetry of Sappho of Lesbos, explores the essence of “physical flesh as enlightenment, erotic trance [and] hallucination” (or in more modern terms “phosphorescent plants and genetically engineered creatures glow[ing] in the dark”) and incorporates spectralist elements, including natural harmonics that occasionally clash with equal tempered tones, before ending with a B♭ major chord.

Improv from Braxton and Zappa outward

• 

  Ghost Trance Septet plays Anthony Braxton (El Negocito)
  Anthony Braxton might be the most influential American composer alive today who’s not a minimalist, with over half a century at the forefront of applying highly-structured compositional techniques of a sort associated with the likes of Carter, Stockhausen and the spectralists to the world of improvised music. His relentless Ghost Trance Music, tackled here by an elite group of Belgian and Danish musicians, is inspired by the nonstop, stupor-inducing music associated with the Ghost Dance religion, a Native American revivalist movement founded in 1889 by the Northern Paiute shaman Wovoka that quickly spread among Plains and Great Basin tribes, much to the consternation of the US Government. Braxton’s Composition No. 255 consists of 56 sheets of musical instructions for guided improvisation, centered on a tune made up of short, separated notes broken up by triplets that recurs in various guises throughout the 23-minute performance, suggesting the experience of an outdoor ceremony that might go on for hours or days.

• Kate Gentile: Find Letter X (Pi)
• Kate Gentile with International Contemporary Ensemble: b i o m e i.i (Obliquity)
• Matt Mitchell: Oblong Aplomb (Out of Your Head)
• Brandon Seabrook’s Epic Proportions: brutalovechamp (Pyroclastic)
  Drummer Kate Gentile and keyboardist Matt Mitchell (who collaborated on the massive 6-CD box set Snark Horse, one of my picks for 2021) are among the most prominent younger musicians to follow in Braxton’s footsteps. Their stunning mix of cultivated and vernacular elements, driven by Braxtonian off-kilter rhythms, and such techniques as deriving chords from saxophone multiphonics and rhythms from Carteresque metric modulations (both employed in the subsurface track from Find Letter X) are well represented in their three newest albums. Brandon Seabrook likewise comes from the Braxton lineage, but with a generous dose of Zappa-esque nonchalance thrown in. His brutalovechamp album, named for a late beloved dog, features Seabrook on guitar, banjo and mandolin, traversing a Disney cartoon-ride array of unpredictably-juxtaposed bluegrass, rock and free jazz milieux in the company of his electroacoustic octet Epic Proportions.
• Zappa/Erie (Zappa Records)
  Speaking of Zappa, one of the most interesting items to emerge from his archives in recent years is Zappa/Erie. Drawn from live recordings by his mid-70s touring bands, it’s notable for the presence of Lady Bianca, the only prominent female singer to tour with Zappa. Listen to her improvised solo in the two-chord downtempo vehicle Black Napkins (heard at 1:30:44 in Flotation Device‘s 2023 Mother’s Day Zappathon, linked below), and consider how her gospel-informed voice helps to mitigate the impact of Zappa’s snarky and often puerile lyrics.

• Live Forever, Vol. 2: Horvitz, Morris, Previte Trio: NYC, Leverkusen 1988​–​1989 (Other Room)
• Scott Fields Ensemble: Sand (Relative Pitch)

  

  Another key figure in shaping the landscape of the contemporary free improvisation movement is Butch Morris (1947–2013), a lynchpin of the Downtown New York scene who helped to bridge the African-American tradition of free jazz with the predominately white world of avant-rock. He also developed the conduction technique that’s been adapted by younger musicians like Wayne Horvitz in their guided group improvisations. Horvitz is featured alongside Morris and drummer Bobby Previte in a remarkable new archival album that documents their trio performances in New York and Germany during the late 1980s. Scott Fields recalls Morris in the group improvisations of Sand, recorded in Cologne in 2022 and featuring a large group of vocalists and instrumentalists who extemporize from melodies, texts and other raw materials provided by Fields.

• Keith Jarrett: Bordeaux Concert (ECM)
  Keith Jarrett enters our spotlight through a new release documenting a 2016 live performance in Bordeaux, France, recorded just two years before a pair of strokes left him without the full use of his hands. Although Jarrett largely abandoned his avant-garde sensibilities after 1973 in favor of the gospel-inflected style that drove his lucrative solo career, the improvisations captured here reveal how he often returned to modernism in his later years. Part V is a good example of Jarrett’s discursive atonal playing that’s still characteristically lyrical.
• Sergio Armaroli, Veli Kujala, Harri Sjöström, Giancarlo Schiaffini: Windows & Mirrors, Milano Dialogues (Leo)
• Jeb Bishop, Tim Daisy, Mark Feldman: Begin, Again (Relay)
• Grdina | Maneri | Lillinger: Live at the Armoury (Clean Feed)
• Craig Taborn, Mat Maneri, Joëlle Léandre: hEARoes (RogueArt)
  Among the more interesting new specimens of European free improv is an offering from a quartet of Italian and Finnish musicians featuring the unusual instrumentation of saxophone, trombone, accordion and vibraphone. Another atypical combination that eschews bass and electronics is made up of Chicagoans Jeb Bishop (trombone), Tim Daisy (drums) and Mark Feldman, who might be the most interesting improvising violinist since Leroy Jenkins. Mat Maneri began his career as a violinist, but switched to viola in his 30s, becoming (with Ig Henneman), one of the world’s leading exponents of that underappreciated instrument as an improvisational vehicle. In Live at the Armoury, Maneri collaborates with drummer Christian Lillinger and the intriguing Vancouver-based guitarist and oud player Gordon Grdina. hEARoes features Maneri in a trio with bassist Joëlle Léandre and Craig Taborn, whose playing combines the lyricism of Jarrett with the jagged rhythms of Cecil Taylor, suggesting a promising way forward for lyrical on-the-keys solo piano improvisations now that the careers of both those masters have reached their endpoint.

(North) American masters

• Meredith Monk: The Recordings (ECM)
  There’s nothing new to hear in this bundling of all twelve of Monk’s releases on ECM, cherishingly produced for her 80th birthday in November 2022. But a bevy of new articles, archival photos and other accoutrements shed new light on her development between her 1980 breakthrough album Dolman Music and 2016’s On Behalf of Nature, helping to illuminate Monk’s impact on both musical minimalism and new music theater.
  
• Steve Reich: Reich/Richter (Nonesuch)
  Reich’s recent works represent something of a throwback to the mid-70s heyday of classic minimalism, deploying large ensembles in service to the familiar spinning of rhythmic patterns that underpin simple modal melodies. Reich/Richter, created for an abstract film by Gerhard Richter, is the most accomplished of the lot, making its two predecessors Music for Ensemble and Orchestra and Runner—also recorded for the first time in 2022—seem diluted in comparison.
• Terry Riley: IN C Irish (Louth Contemporary Music Society)
  If Reich is the most respected classic minimalist among his peers, Riley was the one who got there first. This new 50-minute traversal of the most landmarky of all minimalist landmarks features Irish folk musicians playing an array of flutes, bagpipes, fiddles and other traditional instruments, the performance culminating in a lively reel.
• Frederic Rzewski: No Place to Go but Around (Cantaloupe)
  Rzewski fans have long clamored for a modern digital recording of No Place to Go but Around, his 1974 piano variations on an original bluesy theme that ended up being a study piece for his massive The People United Will Never Be Defeated!. Rzewski himself recorded the piece on a scarce, out-of-print Finnadar LP. And Bang on a Can veteran Lisa Moore has now brought it into the 21st century, replete with an obligatory mid-piece improvisation on the Italian labor anthem Bandiera Rossa.
• Robert Black plays John Luther Adams: Darkness and Scattered Light (Cold Blue)
  Moore’s fellow Bang on a Can veteran Robert Black recounts John Luther Adams’ haunting and delicate music for solo and multitracked double bass. It’s one of Black’s final recordings, and an apt memorial to his advocacy for new music, as well as his agile technique and flawless intonation.
• Carlos Chávez: The Four Suns/Selections from Pirámide (reissued in Carlos Chávez Complete Columbia Album Collection)
  My favorite reissue of the year comes from the vaults of Columbia Records, which has—finally!—begun offering digital editions of its essential but long out-of-print experimental music recordings from the 60s and 70s. Harry Partch, Steve Reich and Pauline Oliveros are a few of the radical musicians who first reached a wider audience through Columbia Masterworks and its Odyssey subsidiary. Another was Carlos Chávez, once the dominant voice in Mexican art music, but now consigned to obscurity, his mostly neoclassical compositions languishing in the shadows of giants like Stravinsky and Copland. The ballet score Pirámide is a remarkable outlier though—evoking the specter of a now-lost Mesoamerican ritual heritage using acrid orchestral writing combined with choral exclamations that resemble Māori haka songs more than conventional singing. It’s amazing to hear these sounds once again in high-quality digital audio.

Eurasian masters

• Iannis Xenakis: Electroacoustic works (Karlrecords)
• Xenakis révolution: Le bâtisseur du son (ARTE France)
  Two noteworthy projects to come out of the 2022 Xenakis centenary celebrations are Karlrecords’ new digital edition (with enhanced bass) of Xenakis’ collected electroacoustic works (including 1962’s Bohor, considered a precursor to contemporary noise and dark ambient music), and Stéphane Ghez’s documentary film Xenakis revolution: The architect of sound, which features archival and home movie footage of the composer tied together by reflections from his daughter Mâkhi. Among the interesting topics are Xenakis’ emotional attachment to Corsica, whose rocky coast reminded him of Greece, from which he was exiled for nearly three decades. “I imagine him here [in Corsica], when I listen to his music” says Mâkhi, who also recounts how his early sonorist masterworks were influenced by the sounds of World War II. The film intercuts footage from the British occupation of Greece—street demonstrations, gunfire, and tracer ammunition lighting up the sky—with excerpts from his percussion sextet Pléïades (performed by Le Collectif Xenakis). Later, cluster and density pieces like Pithopratka (1956) are intercut with the sound of raindrops and images of undulating clouds of fish and flying birds. Pascal Dusapin recalls how Xenakis told him he was constantly endeavoring to recreate the sound he heard when he was hit in the face by shrapnel from a British tank (which cost him an eye and left him disfigured). “His message was: music does not always come from music.”
  
  Mâkhi opens her father’s notebook from his lessons with Messiaen, begun in December 1951, revealing that his notes were taken in French, not Greek. In another sequence, a tour of the chapel in the Couvent Sainte Marie de la Tourette, which Xenakis helped Le Corbusier design, illustrates the connection between modern architecture and music. The chapel’s natural lighting is designed as a series of “cannons of light” providing just enough illumination to support essential functions (“la louange et la prière” as the interviewed Dominican priest puts it). An animation superposes a graphic representation of the string glissandos of Metastasis over the unconventional angles of the chapel’s windows. And another sequence features Jean-Michel Jarre reflecting on the 1972 premiere of Polytope de Cluny at an old Roman bath in Paris. A groundbreaking sound and light show, including early lasers, it anticipated the elaborate multimedia spectacles we’ve since become accustomed to. “Today’s DJs are all great-grandchildren of Xenakis, without knowing it.” In all, the film makes a worthy and visually pleasing introduction to one of modern music’s most unique figures.
• György Kurtág: Rückblick (Altes und Neues für 4 Spieler – Hommage à Stockhausen) (musikFabrik)
  This new, valedictory work by Hungary’s leading composer often reminds us of the epigrammatic Kurtág we all know and love, but it also sometimes sounds like Scriabin, late Stravinsky, Ustvolskaya, or even Ravel—as befits an hour-long work whose title means Review, “old and new”.
• Salvatore Sciarrino: Chamber Music (Brilliant Classics)

  

  Two premiere recordings of attractive works by Italy’s most important living composer.

• musica viva #40 – Wolfgang Rihm: Jagden und Formen (BR Klassik)
  Rihm, along with Helmut Lachenmann, is one of the two great elder figures in contemporary German composition. Yet I’ve often had trouble with his awkward instrumental writing and his frequently clotted textures. Jagden und Formen (“hunts and forms”) in its revised 2008 version, here given its premiere recording by the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, is a breath of fresh air, with lively rhythms and unusually clear and colorful orchestration. It’s also a good representative of his chased form approach, wherein musical sections succeed each other in an unpredictable way, rather like an exquisite corpse.
• Otto Sidharta: Kajang (Sub Rosa)
  A worthy anthology of recent fixed-media pieces by Indonesia’s leading exponent of electroacoustic music. The title piece is reminiscent of much of today’s dark ambient music, but the changes from section to section happen more quickly. Sidharta has collected field recordings all over Indonesia, and the sounds in Kajang often suggest a rainforest or an insect chorus.
• Bernd Alois Zimmermann: Recomposed (Wergo)
  This new three-CD set features mostly early, mostly unrecorded works—-including orchestrations of piece by Casella, Milhaud and Villa-Lobos—by the late 20th century’s most tormented composer. Most of the selections are fun but trivial compared to Zimmermann’s most substantial works. But the final track, a recording of his valedictory composition Stille und Umkehr, is as gripping as any I’ve heard of this neglected masterpiece.

New and discovered

• 

  Tyondai Braxton: Telekinesis (Nonesuch, New Amsterdam)
  Once upon a time there were acoustic instruments, and then in the 1980s sampling synthesizers came along and eventually imitated the sound of acoustic instruments well enough to replace them in many commercial applications. Professionals could still tell the difference though, and this new project from Tyondai Braxton (son of Anthony) seems to suggest that we’ve come full circle wherein elaborate section-by-section studio recording techniques can be used to get acoustic instruments to sound like samplers imitating the sound of acoustic instruments! The result is an interesting aural tapestry that’s not quite natural, not quite artificial—possessing something of a Frankensteinian vibe. Fittingly it was inspired by a story from the manga series Akira, where a boy gains the ability to move objects telepathically, but is unable to control his power, so that it eventually destroys him, hence the title Telekinesis.

• Yikii: The Crow-Cyan Lake (Unseelie)
• Yikii: Black Hole Ringdown (Bandcamp)
  A more playful approach to skirting the threshold between authenticity and artifice is explored by vocalist and electronic musician Yikii, who hails from the Manchurian city of Changchun. These quirky fixed-media pieces—featuring her girlish voice accompanied by a brash machine orchestra capable of strange, abrupt transitions—sound like a cross between Björk and The Residents, but in Chinese.
• Wet Ink Ensemble: Missing Scenes (Carrier)

  

  Moving in a more rarefied direction is this release from one of America’s most formidable composer-led ensembles, featuring works from three of its co-founders: Alex Mincek, Sam Pluta and Kate Soper, known for her literary-themed works that combine continuous music with texts delivered by Soper through a combination of singing and recitation—a technique that has a spotty history in Western art music (viz., Stravinsky’s oft-maligned Perséphone), but one that Soper usually manages to pull off. Her best known work is an evening-length piece called Ipsa Dixit, which Seattle Modern Orchestra recently presented with Maria Männistö handling the solo part, demonstrating that it’s possible to perform Soper’s music even if you’re not Kate Soper. Featured in Missing Scenes is Soper’s new commentary on Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale.

• Heinz Winbeck: Aus der Enge in die Weite (Genuin)
  German composer Heinz Winbeck (1946–2019) is little known in North America. But these premiere recordings of his string quartets reveal his music to be an attractive mix of German modernism and American minimalism that’s deserving of more attention.
• Cergio Prudencio: Works for Piano (Kairos)
  Bolivia’s foremost living composer is well represented by the sparse, enchanting piano works receiving their premiere recordings in this album.
• Visions of Darkness in Iranian contemporary music Volume II (Unexplained Sounds)
• Anthology of Contemporary Music from South Africa (Unexplained Sounds)
• Anthology of Experimental Music from Latin America (Unexplained Sounds)
  Unexplained Sounds Group continues to plumb the underexposed corners of the world with a new batch of regional anthologies—good places to harvest gems borne of the coupling of cheap laptops with unique perspectives, a testament to depth and global reach of today’s experimental electronic music culture.

Drones and darkness

When hundreds of new albums cross your desk every year, sorting them by style and genre can identify what kinds of music have been deemed “easy” to produce. Postminimalist, drone and slow-changing electronic musics have long topped that list in our domain. But below are some practitioners whose longevity and/or invention sets them apart from an ever-growing pack.

• 

  Élaine Radigue: Occam Delta XV (Collection QB)

• Phill Niblock: Working Touch (Touch)
  Two of the OGs of drone minimalism, both of them still creating in their 90s, are represented in new releases. Radigue is renowned for her epic fixed-media works dating from the 1970s through 90s, and constructed from complex, gradually-transforming drones created using an Arp 2500 synthesizer. When digital synths took over the electronic music scene at the turn of the 21st century, Radigue found them poorly suited for creating the sonorities she favored. So she began composing for acoustic instruments instead, working directly with performers by rote or through written instructions, instead of through conventional notation. Montreal’s Bozzini Quartet recently recorded two versions of one such work, Occam Delta XV, wherein Radigue allows herself a distended exploration of such quaint things as open fifths and major triads. As for Niblock, long a lynchpin of the Downtown New York experimental scene, a new album from the Touch label features one of his favorite multichannel, microtonal, monotimbral creations: Vlada BC for overdubbed viola d’amores.
• Sarah Davachi: In Concert & In Residence (Late Music)
  Davachi is one of the leaders of the young generation of drone minimalists, and the range and nuance of her work is showcased by this new compilation album. Stile Vuoto is interesting for its combination of string trio and pipe organ, with the heterostatic, artifact-laden long tones of the bowed strings complementing the steady-state drones of the organ. Lower Visions features Davachi herself traversing its material in four different ways with four slightly different instruments ranging from a Hammond B3 to an E-mu modular synth.

• 

  Norm Chambers: Seaside Variations and Ajax Ensemble (Panabrite)
  Chambers (1972–2022) was one of the leading figures in the Northwest’s busy electronic music scene before his premature death from sinus cancer. He left a pair of albums in flight at his death that have now been assembled and published by Panabrite. Together they offer a bittersweet glimpse at his rhythmically lively transmissions from across the ether.

• Marc Barreca: Recordings of Failing Light (Palace of Lights)
  New fixed-media works from the Pacific Northwest’s foremost practitioner of dark ambient music.
• Evgueni Galperine: Theory of Becoming (ECM)
  Moving halfway from dark ambient back toward the classic montage style of Varèse and Stockhausen, this collection of short pieces demonstrates the “augmented reality of acoustic instruments”, constructed by this Soviet-born, French-resident musician using electronically-processed instrumental recordings.

In print

• Tom Perchard, Stephen Graham, Tim Rutherford-Johnson and Holly Rogers: Twentieth-Century Music in the West: An Introduction (Cambridge University Press)
  The most notable book on contemporary music to come along this decade is also the first that claims to cover 20th century Western art and popular music in a single volume. Rutherford-Johnson is familiar to new musicians through his Music after the Fall: Modern Composition and Culture since 1989. His new collaborative effort is an informative read, but like any survey of its kind it’s vulnerable to sniping over what it omits or neglects. A more serious objection is that it’s not so much a comprehensive history of music as it is a survey of postmodern music criticism (and media theory), whose copious in-line citations are as likely to refer to academics as actual musicians. Still, it’s a good first step in a worthwhile direction, managing to avoid the patronizing excesses of much current academic writing.

Opera on the screen

The return of new music theater to live stages means that it has also returned to the cinematic realm, both on the Web and through such undertakings as Metropolitan Opera’s Live in HD, which rates special attention as a truly luxurious way to watch traditional opera: in a high-end multiplex with reclining seats, cupholders and (judging from my recent experiences at least) a largely empty theater as well. This latter point is a shame since the multi-miked Live in HD sound is notably better than you’d experience almost anywhere in the audience at the real Met. Plus, the multiple camera angles give you both long shots of the scenery and close-ups of the performers. With the Metropolitan Opera’s renewed commitment to contemporary opera bringing opportunities to see exploratory work done with world-class production values, it’s definitely something to take advantage of, especially if you don’t live in New York.

• Brett Dean: Hamlet (Metropolitan Opera Live in HD)
  I was ambivalent about this opera when I saw it during its premiere run at Glyndebourne Festival. It seemed unfocused, its opening too derivative of the opening of Death In Venice, the music unmemorable aside from the Act I scene with the traveling players… But I was won over by the Met’s 2022 mounting of the same production, and the textural transparency delivered by one of America’s best orchestras, enhanced by Met in HD’s clarion audio (including the stereo separation of the twin percussion/clarinet/trumpet trios placed in the side balconies). Librettist Matthew Jocelyn displays excellent judgment in avoiding the most famous soliloquys, and consulting the play’s first quarto for new insights on the drama. Allen Clayton seems singularly equipped to enact the title role—both his musical nuances and his gestures and stage movements capture the essence of the character perfectly, repaying the audacity shown by Dean and Jocelyn in daring to adapt this most iconic of all Shakespeare tragedies.

  

• Terence Blanchard: Fire Shut Up in My Bones (Metropolitan Opera on Demand)
  The bebop-infused musical language of Blanchard’s Fire lies squarely in the tradition initiated by Anthony Davis’s 1985 X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X (which also just received its first staging at the Met), and rarely strays from familiar tonal haunts. But it still offers some imaginative details, including the a cappella rhythmic chanting of the hazing scene, and the handling of the Char’es-Baby character (a boy treble whose lines often shadow or double those of his adult counterpart an octave higher). What impressed me the most, though, is how the cultural and musical appurtenances of the story’s Southern African-American milieu are enlisted in service of a dramatic theme—sexual abuse and the trials of adolescence—that’s universal to all communities. The rural domestic scenes, the Louisiana poultry plant, the fraternity initiation at Grambling State, etc., all function in ways similar to the Parisian and Andalusian trappings of La Bohème and Carmen, while challenging the stereotype that black operas should be about slavery, hagiography or the police.

  

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  from Karlheinz Stockhausen’s LICHT:
  Dienstag (Philharmonie de Paris)
  Donnerstag – Acts I and II (Philharmonie de Paris)
  Freitag (Philharmonie de Paris)
  Le Balcon and Maxime Pascal continue their traversal of LICHT, Stockhausen’s hyper-epic seven-opera cycle (one for each day of the week) with three more days (staged by three different directors), adding to the previously-reviewed Samstag. Donnerstag (Thursday) contains some of the cycle’s most interesting music, starting in Act I with Michael’s Youth, an unusually personal and narrative traversal of Stockhausen’s traumatic childhood, including the wartime death of both parents (his mother shipped off to a mental institution where she was later euthanized, followed by his father’s death on the Eastern front). Act II is the famous Michael’s Ride Around the World, rendered in a modest concert staging with exquisite stereo sound (including the subterranean presence of the Invisible Choirs via Stockhausen’s own 16-track recorded realization), though less visual impact than MusikFabrik’s famous staging from 2009. Dienstag (Tuesday) is best represented by its first act, The Course of the Years, a quintessential 70s-era Stockhausen gagaku-influenced process piece.

  

  Then there’s the troublesome Freitag (Friday), whose sluggish music, dominated by canned 1990s digital synth drones, seems diluted by comparison with the other two operas (both composed earlier), and whose Urantia Book-derived cosmological narrative recounts a bizarre story of racial miscegenation, followed by a procession of increasingly strange “couples”, ranging from a cat and a dog, a crow and a nest, a tongue and an ice cream cone (get it?), and finally a pencil and pencil sharpener (ouch!), staged by director Silvia Costa as the result of student lab experiments. Whatever one’s misgivings about Stockhausen’s dramaturgy, it’s hard not to be astounded by the musicianship on display in these performances, including Freitag’s young choristers and instrumentalists, tasked with performing this notoriously complex and difficult music from memory. Le Balcon’s cherishingly-produced stagings offer much to ponder, including Stockhausen’s prowess as a sculptor of sensuous new sound worlds, and the conflicted emotions aroused by being simultaneously confronted with the bountiful imagination and megalomania of one of modern music’s most profligate geniuses.

  

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  Kaija Saariaho: Innocence (France Musique)
  Perhaps the most provocative item on the list is Kaija Saariaho’s final opera Innocence in its first video release. European composers often do better than their North American counterparts when it comes to writing for such tradition-laden institutions as orchestras and opera companies in ways that seem contemporary but not pretentious. Innocence carries the sound world of Alban Berg’s Wozzeck into the age of school shootings, culminating in a heart-wrenching scene where a bereaved mother meets the ghost of her murdered daughter for whom she’d continued to buy yearly birthday presents. The girl implores her mother to let her go…then disappears—an encounter that Saariaho sets with in a construct of folk singing and modernist orchestral sonorities, creating an effect that’s shattering but unsentimental.

  If you’re not up for something this wrenching, there’s Reconnaissance, a retrospective album of Saariaho’s choral music from BIS Records that includes several first recordings, and showcases how the late Franco-Finnish composer built a characteristic sound world out of slowly-changing instrumental and electronic textures from which fragmentary melodies emerge.

Prospectus

In my year-end article for 2021, I noted a tentativeness in the musical landscape, the lingering residue of lockdowns and their social and artistic impact. That seems to be gone now, but as the flow of contemporary music emerges from newly-reopened spigots, it enters a world increasingly beset by violence, division, and a propensity for closed-minded tribal thinking. Artists themselves are not immune to the latter. But the trajectory of the challenging and uncompromising music that best represents the contemporary global praxis of Western art music trends ultimately toward openness and individuality. Immerse yourself in its arduous, hard-fought authenticity as you carry your thoughts and hopes into what portends to be a obstreperous year.

Photo collage: Tyondai Braxton by Dustin Condren, Steve Reich via the artist, Anthony Braxton and Brandon Seabrook via Brandon Seabrook, Žibuoklė Martinaitytė by Lina Aiduke, Xenakis and Le Corbusier from Xenakis révolution: Le bâtisseur du son, Magdalena Kožená and Vilma Jää in Kaija Saariaho: Innocence, Frederic Rzewski by Michael Wilson, Gordon Grdina via the artist, trio (Butch Morris, Bobby Previte, Wayne Horvitz) by Keri Peckett, Liza Lim by Klaus Rudolf, Keith Jarrett by Daniela Yohannes, Frank Zappa and Lady Bianca by Alan Smithee/John Rudiak, Salvatore Sciarrino via the composer, Sarah Davachi via the artist, Terence Blanchard: Fire Shut Up in my Bones via Metropolitan Opera, Meredith Monk by Jack Mitchell, Cergio Prudencio via Kairos Records, Stockhausen: Donnerstag aus LICHT via Philharmonie de Paris, Yikii via the artist, Otto Sidharta via Sub Rosa Label.

Hanns Eisler’s biography might be better known than his music, at least on this side of the Atlantic. Born in 1898, he was German/Austrian, half-Jewish, a committed student of Schoenberg, and a staunch communist. He maintained a lifelong collaboration with Brecht, and like the latter, fled the Nazis for America in the 1930s, where he took up shop in Hollywood, composing well-regarded scores for numerous minor films before being hounded out of the US by post-War anti-communist hysteria. He ended up resettling in the short-lived and little-missed Deutsche Demokratische Republik (East Germany) whose national anthem he penned while languishing under the yoke of Soviet-bloc artistic and political oppression. He died there in 1962.

Eisler’s 125th anniversary this month, coupled with a new recording of his magnum opus, the Deutsche Sinfonie, provides an opportunity to revisit the legacy of this controversial musician, a task facilitated by Brilliant Classics’ ten-CD Hanns Eisler Edition, released in 2014 and featuring several generations of eastern German recordings, many of them originally issued on the Berlin Classics label. Eisler’s life and career followed a similar path to Kurt Weill’s through the latter’s premature death in 1950, and indeed the conventional wisdom tends to regard Eisler as a poor man’s Weill. Traversing these recordings for the first time in several years leads me to conclude that in this particular case, the conventional wisdom is pretty accurate.

Aside from his film scores, Eisler is best remembered for his many Brecht settings, ranging from simple lieder for voice and piano, through cabaret-style theatrical works using a small orchestra, on up to full-fledged martial protest songs for chorus and instruments. The essence of Eisler is the genre of cynical but tuneful cabaret song that’s closely associated with Weill. CD 6 of Hanns Eisler Edition features Gisela May’s classic renditions of many of these songs, and hearing her is a genuine treat. Her clear diction, appropriate use of sprechgesang, and obvious enthusiasm for the material come bubbling through, and the reworked sound of these recordings, mostly from the 1960s, is better than one might expect from a budget label. Among May’s interpretations is the anti-war song O Fallada, da du hangest, which refers to the Goose Girl story recounted by the Brothers Grimm.

CD 7 conveys a generous dose of old Irmgard Arnold tracks as she works her way through the Hollywood Liederbuch. After this come a few tracks with Eisler himself singing songs like Die Ballade vom Wasserrad (a kind of Brechtian Gretchen am Spinnrade).

Some of the most poignant of Eisler’s songs are his late Brecht settings: post-Holocaust poems like In the flower garden. Many others, such as the selections from Die Rundköpfe und die Spitzköpfe (Round Heads and Pointy Heads) are pretty indistinguishable from Weill’s brand of modernist-tinged cabaret, right down to the working class “pit combo” ensemble. Complementing this instrumentation are the many settings for voice and piano. Eisler may have been one of the very last composers to contribute meaningfully to the Romantic art song for this combination, a genre that has since become ossified and moribund.

After landing in the DDR, Eisler’s music got a lot more didactic and tonal. Mitte des Jahrhunderts (Middle of the Century, dating, appropriately enough, from 1950) is heard on CD 9, and it’s a good example of the simplified style. It’s a choral cantata with an interposed orchestral Etude that sounds more like Prokofiev than Weill. CD 10 continues the trend, focusing on choral arrangements of moralizing songs, including a few of Eisler’s most famous agitprop specimens, which to be sure, often originated in the 1930s. One thing Eisler did get out of his stint as DDR’s most internationally prestigious composer (most of his eminent colleagues having long since fled to the West) was the material support of the Communist regime in making these recordings. Aside from the East German national anthem (Auferstanden aus Ruinen, inexplicably omitted from Brilliant’s collection) Eisler’s most famous tune is probably his setting of Brecht’s Und weil der Mensch ein Mensch ist (AKA United Front Song) with its characteristic refrain “Drum links, zwei, drei”. CD 10 (and the set) concludes with a suitably militaristic choral rendition of it. The irony of deploying march rhythms and unison singing in the service of ostensibly anti-authoritarian texts is self-evident. And whereas Eisler’s Weimar-era kampfmusik used instrumental combos and ragtime/jazz-influenced rhythms to connote underclass origins, the effect here is more evocative of a frenzied mob or struggle session.

CD 10 also includes a handful of English-language performances, such as From Narrow Streets and Hidden Places and The Flame of Reason.

So much for the stereotypical Eisler. What’s striking to me, though, is how much instrumental music he left us. Brilliant Classics includes much of it here, mainly suites arranged by the composer from his many film and stage scores. These are a delight to listen to, both because they’re unfamiliar and because they’re more harmonically advanced than his better-known vocal works. Eisler’s Hollywood scores are particularly obscure today because they mainly went into films that did not become classics. The lively Nonet No. 2, culled from his music for the 1941 film The Forgotten Village (itself a curious example of ethnofiction, with a voice over written by John Steinbeck) is characteristic of this style, which shares a common lineage with early Hindemith (e.g., his Kammermusik No. 2 from 1925).

It’s in these works that Eisler’s debt to Schoenberg comes through most vividly. Vierzehn Arten den Regen zu beschreiben (Fourteen Ways to Describe the Rain), composed for a Joris Ivens film, recalls Schoenberg’s Suite, Op. 29, but benefits from Eisler’s penchant for solo winds and open textures (by contrast with Schoenberg’s frequently turgid orchestration). It’s worth recalling that Weill’s earliest canonical music is also heavily indebted to Schoenberg, and many of Eisler pieces for mixed chamber ensemble bear a close resemblance to the sound world of Weill’s youthful Violin Concerto.

CD 8 features solo piano music from the 1920s, closely modeled after Schoenberg’s groundbreaking Op. 19/23/25 pieces. Many compositions in this style emerged from the interwar Germanosphere, but Eisler’s are among the best that weren’t written by Schoenberg, Berg or Webern. This music delights in its unabashed atonality, shorn of the constraints of functional harmony like a nudist shorn of uncomfortable clothes. It occasionally suffers from the same rhythmic rigidity that disfigures much of Schoenberg’s serial music: endless bars of 2/4, 3/4 and 4/4 time with steady eighth notes.

A mid-century German Symphony?

Most of Eisler’s works are miniatures or collections of miniatures. And they tend to be repetitive forms like strophic songs or variation sets (c.f., the aforementioned Vierzehn Arten). Eisler seemed most comfortable in short formats, relying on brief characteristic musical gestures, and an ever-vibrant range of instrumental color (hence the eagerness to employ mixed chamber ensembles). There’s one big exception to this though: the Deutsche Sinfonie, Eisler’s most musically ambitious and distended work. It occupies all of CD 3 in Brilliant Classics’ set in a 1974 recording that features multiple East Berlin musicians under Max Pommer, and is also available in a 1989 live performance featuring Günther Theuring and the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra that’s just been released by Capriccio (an Austrian label specializing in lesser-known European modernist works such as Henze’s Das verratene Meer, Schulhoff’s Flammen and Wellesz’s The Sacrifice of the Prisoner).

Basically, the Sinfonie is an 11 movement oratorio for soloists, speaker, chorus and orchestra. It lasts over an hour, setting several anti-fascist texts by Brecht and one by the Italian novelist Ignazio Silone. Its sound world is comparable to Schoenberg’s Jacob’s Ladder or A Survivor from Warsaw as they might have been adapted by Weill and Brecht. Originally composed in 1935 and 1936, with new movements added as late as 1957, the Sinfonie is “full of political warning to the German people and to those Communists in lock-step with Moscow” as Steve Schwartz puts it. Several of Brecht’s texts tell of German concentration camps, which it’s worth remembering were first opened in 1933, well before Kristallnacht.

Eisler’s works don’t rise above the agitprop as well as Weill’s, and Deutsche Sinfonie can seem as preachy as the most sycophantic cantatas of Shostakovich and Prokofiev. Nevertheless it’s one of his most musically compelling works, containing many fascinating and unnerving moments. It seems to be a precursor to works like Henze’s 9th Symphony, and probably deserves to be more widely heard, at least on disc.

The Sinfonie‘s Praeludium opens with a slow mournful theme entrusted to the violas, kind of a twelve-tone echo of Mahler’s 10th Symphony.

A bit of worldly buildup and subsidence sets the stage for the chorus’s entry: a homophonic setting of verses from Brecht’s Germany (Oh Deutschland, bleiche Mutter! Wie bist du besudelt, meaning “Oh Germany, pale mother, how you sit defiled”). The quotation of the Internationale in the trumpets at 4:50 is obvious to anyone who still recognizes that tune. Less familiar nowadays is its counterpoint in the trombones, which quotes a lament for the martyrs of the 1905 Russian Revolution that became known in German as Unsterbliche Opfer (Immortal Victims) and which is also quoted in Hartmann’s Concerto Funèbre and Shostakovich’s 11th Symphony.

All but the last of the Sinfonie‘s movements are twelve-tone, displaying Eisler’s characteristic implementation which emphasizes traditional tonal relationships and the facile extraction of short riffs. A good example of the latter is in the second movement, Brecht’s To the fighters in the concentration camps, a passacaglia over a ground constructed from two pairs of repeated half-steps (which in turn spell out a transposition of the famous B-A-C-H motif). Brecht’s poem features the notable line Verschwunden aber Nicht vergessen (“gone but not forgotten”).

Next up is the first orchestral interlude, called Etude 1. Eisler appropriated this lively movement from the finale to his Orchestral Suite No. 1 (track 4 on CD 1). It leads directly into Brecht’s Erinnerung (Remembrance), commemorating a suppressed anti-war demonstration in Potsdam. It’s set as a kind of post-Mahlerian funeral march. Next comes In Sonnenburg, named after one of the Nazi’s first internment camps. In the 1958 published edition from Breitkopf & Härtel this is cast as a baritone solo, but both Pommer and Theuring do it as an alternating duet between soprano and baritone soloists. On the word leer (“empty”) in ihre blutigen Hände aber immer noch leer sind (“their bloody hands are still empty”) the singer is instructed to perform a fascist salute.

The second orchestral interlude, Etude 2, follows. It appears to have been originally composed for this piece, and is in two broad sections: slow-fast. The main motivic idea is two descending major thirds separated by a minor second (e.g., D♯-B-D-B♭), an idea also foregrounded in the second movement. Movement 7 is Burial of the Troublemaker in a Zinc Coffin, the “troublemaker” being a worker demanding to be paid his wages and be treated as a human being. The chorus dramatically personifies the compliant mob with “He was a troublemaker. Bury him! Bury him!”. Male and female soloists are heard here too, lending the movement quite a bit of coloristic variety. Like several of the other movements, this one frequently has a martial feel to it. After the choral admonition that “whoever proclaims their solidarity with the oppressed will be put into a zinc box like this one”, the movement ends with another soft and resigned funeral march, this one emphasizing triplet rhythms on the first and second beat.

Next up is a four-part cantata-within-an-oratorio, appropriately called Peasant Cantata. It’s the only movement with a non-Brecht text, excerpted from Silone’s 1936 novel Bread and Wine (which the US surreptitiously disseminated among Italian partisans to gin up anti-Mussolini support during WW2). It too opens with march rhythms. Part three uses two male speakers accompanied by strings and soft humming in the women’s chorus. The fourth part is yet another march.

The movements have been getting longer and more complex as we go on, and at 15 minutes, the Worker Cantata (AKA Das Lied vom Klassenfeind or Song of the Class Enemy) is the longest individual movement in all of Hanns Eisler Edition. At last the composer puts forth an extended organic structure, melding stanza form with elements of traditional sonata form. After an orchestral introduction, the mezzo-soprano delivers what sounds like a strophic song, with a folk-like, though serial, melody in straightforward 2/4 time.

The continuation descends stepwise.

After two statements of this comes a new idea, one of those jaunty workers’ marches harkening back to Eisler’s Weimar days. The text here is passed to the baritone who sings a new tune, but then ends with the same continuation theme as the soprano.

An orchestral passage recalls the march and leads to a climax after which (at 5:29) comes one of the Sinfonie‘s most effective moments: a soft kettledrum roll on low A♭ providing the sole accompaniment for the choir as they dramatically enter with a chorale-like setting of “and as the war was about to end”. Some developmental passages follow, climaxing with the mezzo-soprano and baritone soloists singing in octaves (a doubling previously avoided in the Sinfonie). Fragmentation of earlier material in the choir takes us to a scherzo section in 3/4 time (8:26), which features new material and alternation between soloists (still singing in octaves) and chorus.

We arrive back at the march song which, as before, is entrusted to the baritone. An out-of-tempo quasi recitativo passage in the mezzo-soprano leads to the coda, which Eisler launches by having the chorus alternate lines with one of the speakers from the Peasant Cantata. The apogee comes with a repetition of the march idea with the chorus delivering the closing line “and the class enemy is the enemy”.

Movement 10 is the last of the orchestral interludes. Originally conceived as the finale, it’s of also extended length (nearly ten minutes, making it one of the longest instrumental tracks in the collection), using a structure that approximates sonata form. We start right out in allegro 3/4 time. After some introductory bars, a low string ostinato sets in, over which the main theme is stated by a solo horn (at 0:25). If it sounds vaguely familiar it’s because it uses the same row as the viola melody that opens the Praeludium. The first trumpet immediately inverts the tune, and later the violins restate it in its original shape. The tempo slackens for the second theme, heard in clarinets in thirds (at 1:50). Sudden timpani strokes (4:23) herald a change to duple time. At 5:09 Eisler returns to triple time, and starts to develop the first theme, in both original and inverted form as before. At 6:10, the trumpet develops the second theme in canon with the horns. The meter continues to switch between duple and triple, and the development become more fragmentary and the texture thinner until we’re left with an accompanied cadenza for solo violin. The coda reprises the main theme and its dotted rhythm amid multiple layers of crescendo’ing counterpoint, leading to a conclusion which, while not exactly triumphant, is rather more upbeat than most of what we’ve heard before. I personally find the mood of this movement a bit out of character with the rest of the sprawling Sinfonie, despite its motivic integration. An interesting detail reported by David Drew is that the three orchestral movements make up a sort of symphony within the oratorio, with Etude No. 2 taking the role of both scherzo and slow movement.

The work ends with a surprisingly brief choral Epilog, little more than a fragment built atop an A-E♭-F♯ ostinato in the low strings that underpins Brecht’s “this is what you get” lament for the German war dead (the complete text in German is Seht unsre Söhne, taub und blutbefleckt vom eingefrornen Tank hier losgeschnallt! Ach, selbst der Wolf braucht, der die Zähne bleckt, ein Schlupfloch! Wärmt sie, es ist ihnen kalt! Seht unsre Söhne, the key words meaning “See our sons”). This movement was tacked on in 1957, years “after the fact” on the occasion of the work’s publication and full premiere. It’s actually an arrangement of the introduction to Eisler’s cantata Bilder aus der Kriegsfibel, which is heard on CD 9. In its resigned ambiguity it seems to sum up the despair Eisler must have felt toward the end of his life, when so many of his personal and ideological dreams lay shattered. Indeed the compositional history of the Deutsche Sinfonie is itself a microcosm of Eisler’s plight: composed mainly in exile, unperformable in Germany during the Nazi era, and upon Eisler’s return promptly suppressed by communist censors for its Schoenbergian atonality in keeping with the Soviet-imposed dogma that Eisler himself had helped promulgate through his enthusiastic endorsement of the Zhdanov doctrine at the 1948 International Congress of Composers in Prague—a cautionary precedent to today’s bilateral attacks on artistic and academic freedom.

Thanks to a modest cultural liberalization in 1958 the work was finally unveiled, but by that time Brecht was dead and the basic anti-Nazi message was no longer as topical.

Risen from the ruins?

Eisler’s music may not be of the same caliber as Schoenberg’s or Weill’s, but it’s good enough to repay the time spent listening through these recordings. As with most Brilliant Classics releases, Hanns Eisler Edition comes with a few cut corners, notably the lack of song texts and translations. But you do get extensive program notes by Günter Mayer (which can be downloaded, along with track listings, from Brilliant’s Web site). And the budget price certainly makes it a compelling purchase for almost anyone interested in 20th century music—at least if you’re able to approach Eisler’s didacticism in the same spirit that freethinkers are obliged to employ when appreciating musical settings of religious texts. Spend a couple weeks with the Eisler oeuvre, then go on to Brilliant’ Paul Dessau Edition and the new recording of Dessau’s Lanzelot to complete your tour of the DDR’s musical mini-heyday.