Michael Schell has been passionate about modern music ever since being spooked by a recording of The Rite of Spring as a toddler. He has two degrees in music, and has had various avocations as a composer, intermedia artist, systems engineer and cribbage player. He's lived in Texas, California, Iowa, Nepal and New York, and now enjoys life in Seattle, where he hosts Flotation Device on KBCS-FM and Radio Eclectus on Hollow Earth Radio.
Destruction and reclamation, gimmick and avant-garde
One of the odder fads bequeathed to us by the 1960s is the ritual destruction of musical instruments. It’s a custom most famously associated with the likes of Jimi Hendrix and Pete Townshend. But what bursts out in popular culture often has precedents in the avant-garde, and the origins of this particular brand of onstage iconoclasm can be traced to the Fluxus movement, specifically its founder George Maciunas. In a nod to classical tradition Maciunas chose the piano, rather than the upstart electric guitar, as the foil for his aggression, directing performers of his 1962 Piano Piece #13 to nail down the keys of the chosen target (Sonic Youth famously performed the piece in 1999). Maciunas’s legacy was continued by fellow haute culture exponents Raphael Montañez Ortiz and Annea Lockwood, the former using an ax, the latter using an array of execution methods that included burning, burying and drowning.
The instrument (photo: Jack Straw)
It was Ortiz that provided the inspiration for the Pacific Northwest’s most famous entry in the klavierzerstörungen tradition. To help gin up publicity for a 1968 outdoor concert benefitting two local arts organizations (including the now defunct KRAB-FM radio), promoters arranged for a secondhand upright piano (purchased for $25) to be dropped from a helicopter. The stunt succeeded in its goal, with a few thousand young attendees journeying to a rural farm in Duvall (25 miles outside Seattle) for a day of folk, rock and choreographed demolition. In the event, safety concerns limited the plummet to a modest 50 feet, producing more of a dull thud than a thunderous clang. But it was still enough to obliterate the case, keyboard, hammers and dampers, leaving only the frame, soundboard and the top five octaves of strings.
The addled contraption lay half-buried in its grade-level tomb for 50 years before being exhumed by Jack Straw Cultural Center, the successor organization to KRAB-FM and a Northwest counterpart to New York’s Harvestworks and Roulette. The carcass was deposited on an exhibition table in Jack Straw’s New Media Gallery, where it was made available for the explorations of several West Coast musicians. The missing bass strings precluded performances of “under the lid” standards by such early masters as Cowell and Crumb, and the missing keyboard ruled out what could have been an intriguing variation on Lachenmann’s Guero. So the invited artists set out to create new works for this unique instrument, working under few restrictions other than an appeal to accept its deformed intonation and to limit the duration to a Cagean 4’33”.
Amy Denio (L) and friends (photo: Levi Fuller, Jack Straw)
Thus it happened that on February 23, 2019 a standing audience assembled around the beleaguered corpse to watch 16 composers and ensembles strike, stroke and probe its innards. The acts included a folk band and an oral history reminiscence (both evoking the hippie spirit of the 1968 event), but most of the new works were composed miniatures in the American experimental tradition. Many of them emphasized standard Cowell/Crumb on-string playing techniques, occasionally aided by digital effects or EBows. But Music for a Dropped Piano by Seattle’s ubiquitous multi-instrumentalist Amy Denio stood out in its use of bowed piano technique. And Aaron Keyt’s Piano Gusting saw four performers directing their breath through straws at clip-on contact microphones attached to the strings, the signal thence fed into small handheld loudspeakers, creating a chorus of metallic piano-like tones modulated by breath rhythms—one of the evening’s most remarkable sound experiences.
Two other composers found unexpected points of reference. Luke Fitzpatrick, a violinist by trade who recently resuscitated Partch’s Adapted Viola from decades of case-bound oblivion, levered his experience salvaging moribund instruments with his piece 3144. Attacking the Duvall piano with finger taps on the soundboard and plucks and strums on the strings, Fitzpatrick directly evoked the sound world of Partch’s plectrum instruments. Simultaneously he intoned the piano manufacturer’s stamp and serial number (“Ivers and Pond Piano Company No. 5, 3144”) using the same delivery he has developed for his performances of Partch’s Li Po Songs.
Hendrix immolating his guitar (photo: Ed Caraeff 1967)
Dave Knott also found an external reference, gently laying a small guitar (that had itself been dropped and detuned) on top of the piano’s remains like a vicarious empath, conjuring up images of saplings rising from the decaying nurse logs common in the nearby forests. While Knott strummed the baby guitar, his fellow Eye Music members David Stanford and Susie Kozawa played the doomed piano like a huge prepared autoharp.
The vaunted instrument destroyers of the 1960s tended to enlist their actions as anti-war agitations, or as demonstrations of the fragility of life and culture. But the performers showcased at Jack Straw embraced a different, more redemptive tradition, one closely associated with the Pacific Coast: that of reclamation. Whether it’s Cage, Harrison and Partch making percussion instruments from junk, or Edward and Nancy Kienholz building sculptures and installations from society’s discards, the tradition is one that regards art as a regenerative act that reminds us of the essential musicality and expressiveness in the tiredest and poorest things around us.
Piano Drop featured works by Jeffrey Bowen, James Borchers, Bradley Hawkins, Ski, Gust Burns, Austin Larkin, Brandon Lincoln Snyder, Bruce Greeley, Home Before Dark, Jay Hamilton, Count Constantin and Stanley Shikuma in addition to those mentioned in the review.
Unlike those big-media favorites lists that appear in mid-December to grease the skids of the Great Shopping Season, my year-end reckonings dawdle until the last moment and don’t claim to define the best of anything. But with audio streaming, social media and other factors pushing the contemporary music landscape into an increasingly variegated but fragmented state, some measure of thoughtful inventorying seems both prudent and practical. In that spirit, here’s a biased and opinionated survey of albums and other media released in 2018 that made an impact on me.
Stage to screen
New music theater was a recurring theme during the year. Tops in prominence was the premiere of Kurtág’s Fin de Partie at La Scala, but we’re still waiting for that to be recorded. Another notable 2018 event was the US premiere of Saariajo’s chamber opera Only the Sound Remains (its European video release was one of my picks in 2017). Over in the UK, a string of high-profile operatic premieres—including Muhly’s Marnie, Dean’s Hamlet and Adès’s The Exterminating Angel—reached an apex with the captivating Lessons in Love and Violence by George Benjamin. Its libretto, which Martin Crimp adapted from Marlowe’s play Edward II, divides the palace intrigue into seven scenes, and shoehorned into a tight 90 minute span, the result invites comparisons with Wozzeck (though Berg, when faced with the insane King’s insistence that “I can hear drumming”, would surely have used the orchestra to depict his deluded reality, whereas Benjamin depicts things as they really are). Lessons is similar in style to Hamlet and Angel, but Benjamin’s textures are thinner and clearer, and thus seem more varied and communicative by comparison.
Lessons in Love and Violence (photo: ROH/Stephen Cummiskey)
You can view streaming video of the Royal Opera’s premiere production at medici.tv (subscription required) or purchase it on Blu-ray. Highlights include the powerful second scene where three peasants describe their impoverished agony to the callous Queen Isabel (played by Barbara Hannigan). One peasant asks why both the poor and the rich sleep three-to-a-bed (the latter alluding to Edward’s same-sex consort Gaveston). Another fine moment is the brief threnody for Edward that features cimbalom and Iranian tombak drums (one of the opera’s few nods to beat-driven vernacular music). Benjamin’s use of cimbalom and two harps is effective throughout: they seldom play simultaneously, but working in tandem they create a soundscape rich in struck/plucked string sonorities.
Musgrave with another famous female British politician (photo: John Stillwell/PA Wire)
Speaking of British royalty, there’s Thea Musgrave’s Mary Queen of Scots, wherein Scotland’s most famous female composer weighs in on its most famous female politician. The long-unavailable 1978 recording of this most admired of Musgrave operas has finally reappeared in celebration of her 90th birthday (Amazon, Spotify, YouTube). While Lessons in Love and Violence belongs to the Tippett tradition of English-language opera, Mary is squarely within the more conservative Britten lineage, but its style is still contemporary and unsentimental. My favorite moment comes in the ballroom scene where one courtier starts up a bawdy reel to disrupt Mary’s dance with a rival, the musics clashing like the men’s ambitions. Won’t someone revive this work onstage in lieu of yet another production of Donizetti’s Maria Stuarda?
Shell Shock (photo: Filip Van Roe)
In November 2018, while various world leaders were in France commemorating the end of WW1 (or in Trump’s case, hiding indoors from the rain), Parisian audiences took in a concert staging of Nicholas Lens’s 2014 opera Shell Shock. The libretto, a collection of anguished reflections from war veterans and widows, ostensibly set during the Great War, was penned by Nick Cave, thus explaining how a traditional opera might open with a lyric like “Some asshole…some asshole…some asshole shouts at me in words I do not properly understand”. The eclecticism of Lens’s score is reminiscent of Henze, though specific passages conjure up other composers. The prelude, for instance, is practically a clone of the Kyrie from Ligeti’s Requiem, while the Canto of the Nurse resembles the serial music heard throughout Eisler’s German Symphony.
That Shell Shock has been successful enough to warrant revival is due largely to its weaving of cultivated and vernacular styles into a fabric that is postmodern but not hackneyed. ENO and the Met should take note of how much better this works for “accessible highbrow” than Marnie, whose application of bel canto opera accoutrements in service of fancified Broadway-style music comes off as pretentious and overproduced.
Video of Shell Shock can be streamed here for a limited time.
Electronic music today…
Fixed media music has often been marginalized within the broader classical music world because it doesn’t align with traditional performer-centric institutions and publicity machines. That its prominence is increasing today is testament to the shakeups engendered by inexpensive digital instruments and new distribution channels. One of the few regrets I have over this development is the amount of high-quality studio work that I’ve had to set aside to shrink this part of the list to a manageable size:
Steve Layton: Virtual Composition (Bandcamp)
Layton, whose work is almost entirely studio-based, seems to exemplify the fraught interface between new media and traditional music institutions. Despite being one of Seattle’s most important composers, he flies largely under the radar of the city’s classical music establishment. Virtual Composition is a 3½ hour compilation of fixed media pieces stretching back to 1998. By contrast with the more groove-oriented tracks of his 2017 No Answer album, this collection features music conceived in symphonic terms but realized with digital instruments. Ekphora is one of the standouts, reminding me both of Kurtág’s Stele and Zappa’s Civilization Phaze III (the title refers to Greek funeral processions). I enjoy the moment-to-moment unpredictability and eclecticism of this music, which overcomes the clichés of the “orchestral MIDI” sound that’s ubiquitous in demos and low-budget jingles nowadays
Sarah Davachi: For harpsichord, For pipe organ and string trio (Bandcamp)
This young Canadian exponent of dark ambient has gotten praise for her recent Gave In Rest album, but I think this slightly earlier, but notably grittier music is more interesting
Ian William Craig: A Turn of Breath (Spotify)
Another Canadian electroacoustician, albeit of a different stripe. This sampler album, originally from 2014 and recently rereleased in expanded form, offers a selection of short pieces built from looped samples, often of voices. A track like A Slight Grip, a Gentle Hold (Pt. I) demonstrates that even a very slight modification of a found object can cause us to listen to it very differently. Other tracks are reminiscent of William Basinski’s classic Disintegration Loops
Okkyung Lee: Speckled Stones and Dissonant Green Dots (Bandcamp)
Sine tone patterns with no dynamic or timbral changes. Serious minimalism in the stoic tradition of Karel Goeyvaerts
Anthony Paul De Ritis: Electroacoustic Music (Spotify)
De Ritis’s technique takes a single solo acoustic instrument, then through digital manipulation spins it into a dense and strident web. This album from Albany Records gathers works created between 1993 and 2011 in honor of De Ritis’s teacher, the late David Wessel (1942–2014)
Stuart McLeod: Tetraktys, All Is Number (Bandcamp)
A Pythagorean shape, a font of mathematical relationships, which in McLeod’s hands evoke musical structures that are varied but unified. See my review here
Langham Research Centre: Tics and Ampersands (Bandcamp)
My soft spot for these British advocates of live electronic music goes back to their 2014 album John Cage: Early Electronic and Tape Music, one of the most impressive latter-day surveys of critical repertory pieces like Cartridge Music and Imaginary Landscape No. 5. This half-length album available digitally and on cassette features their own noise pieces in the Cagean tradition
…and yesterday
Éliane Radigue with her ARP 2500 (photo: Yves Fernandez)
Éliane Radigue: Œuvres Électroniques (14 CDs, from GRM, available at Metamkine, excerpts on SoundCloud)
The epic electroacoustic works of the mother of dark ambient, gathered into an attractive 14-CD box. My contribution to Second Inversion’s Top 10 Albums of 2018
Jerry Hunt: from “Ground” (Bandcamp)
Other Minds reclaims this 1980 studio performance by America’s most iconoclastic shaman-musician. See my review here
Xenakis: Persepolis (Bandcamp)
Martin Wurmnest and Rashad Becker’s new presentation of this 1971 tape piece is a true remix (not an arrangement) of Xenakis’s 8-track original. It’s simply awesome: strong bass, clear separation, by far the best this classic has ever sounded on record
More tribute to the elders
Gloria Coates (photo: Simon Leigh)
Gloria Coates: Piano Quintet, Symphony No. 10 (Drone of Druids on Celtic Ruins) (Spotify, YouTube)
Coates is like a kinder, gentler Ustvolskaya with her single-minded emphasis on colliding sound masses and abstract forms. This new Naxos recording starts with her un-Brahms-like Piano Quintet (2013), in which half of the string instruments are tuned a quarter tone sharp (a technique borrowed from Ligeti’s Ramifications). Next comes her Symphony No. 10 (1992–3), which is like a Phill Niblock piece arranged for brass choir with a battery of snare drums added in. A new octogenarian and longtime Munich resident, Coates is finally receiving some well-deserved recognition in her native United States
Dominick Argento: The Boor, Miss Havisham’s Wedding Night, A Water Bird Talk (Spotify, YouTube) The Boor competes unfavorably with Walton’s The Bear (both set the same Chekhov play), while Miss Havisham’s Wedding Night (adapted from Great Expectations) loses out to Maxwell Davies’ similarly-themed Miss Donnithorne’s Maggot. But it’s all worth it for A Water Bird Talk (1975–6), one of this nonagenarian’s most imaginative works. Featuring a baritone solo, some clever use of bird song, a little bit of coughing and a small chamber ensemble, it’s like Erwartung for people who prefer Britten to Schoenberg
Berio: Sinfonia, Boulez: Notations I–IV, Ravel: La Valse (Amazon, Spotify, YouTube)
Ludovic Morlot and the Seattle Symphony are joined by Roomful of Teeth to present one modern and one postmodern sacred cow. With Boulez’s orchestral miniatures thrown in. One of my colleague Christian Carey’s picks, along with…
Harbison: Symphony No. 4, Ruggles: Sun Treader, Stucky: Second Concerto for Orchestra (Spotify, YouTube)
Harbison further represents the octogenarian set, and his Fourth Symphony (2003) is one of his more humorous orchestral works. The Ruggles performance is second only to Michael Tilson Thomas’s classic 1970 recording, while the late Steven Stucky (1949–2016) is well represented by this colorful work from 2003 that might remind you of a composer like Stephen Albert. David Alan Miller conducts the National Orchestral Institute Philharmonic
Kondo: Syzygia, Snow’s Falling, Pebbles: Pine Cones Fall (Bandcamp)
Paul Zukofsky (1943–2017) is another recent departure, an accomplished violinist (he premiered the title role in Glass’s Einstein on the Beach), conductor, arts administrator, and the bane of many a graduate student whose interest in his father—the noted symbolist poet Louis Zukofsky—was thwarted by his zealous copyright guarding. In this, his final recording project, he showcases Kondo at his most Feldman-like. Syzygia is like hearing the Lutheran hymnal reimagined by old Morty, while the choral Snow’s Falling is like Rothko Chapel with a literary reference to Three Voices thrown in. In between the two Kondo tracks is Craig Pebbles’ similarly Feldmanian Pine Cones Fall
Ichiyanagi: Sapporo (audio excerpt)
Seattle’s Eye Music ensemble takes a fresh look at a quintessential graphic score from 1963 in this new CD from Edition Wandelweiser. See my review here
Richter, Schnittke et al: Through the Lens of Time (Spotify)
Looking back even farther is violinist Francisco Fullana’s concept album whose centerpiece is Max Richter’s The Four Seasons Recomposed, a droll update to Vivaldi’s famous concerto tetralogy (imagine Winter in a modern 7/8 time). Between each Season, Fullana inserts other neo-Baroque compositions: Schnittke’s Suite in the Old Style (modeled after Baroque dance suites), the Spaniard Salvador Brotons’ Variations on a Baroque Theme, and a fantasy on Bach’s Musical Offering by Isang Yun. Fullana and company present these works in the best possible light, leaving it to you to decide whether they’re transient nibblings at the feet of the old masters, or fresh prospects deserving of a foothold in the repertory
Justifiably admired
Next come three albums that seem to be on everyone’s list, and understandably so.
Dennett and Johnson (photo: Alonso Nichols, Patricia Nolan)
Scott Johnson: Mind Out of Matter (Amazon)
Alarm Will Sound performs this new “atheist oratorio” from the master of speech melody, based on speeches by Daniel Dennett. I review it here
Josh Modney: Engage (Spotify)
Three CDs of (mostly) unaccompanied violin? Yes, it works! Modney takes us on a journey that includes Bach, free improvs in the Malcolm Goldstein mold, live electronic music (Sam Pluta’s Jem Altieri with a Ring Modulator Circuit), an attractive duo for amplified violin and prepared piano by Modney’s Wet Ink Ensemble co-director Eric Wubbels, and one of Anthony Braxton’s finest composed works (Composition No. 222)
Tyshawn Sorey: Pillars (Bandcamp) Pillars inhabits the epic-length free improv space that includes such monuments as Is and People in Sorrow. But it also has a foot in the drone minimalism lineage of Young and Radigue. Sorey employs an octet instrumentation whose most striking component is three double basses. Their bowed rumbles can be heard anchoring the chorale section at the 1:11:08 mark of Pillars I that’s soon followed by trombone and cymbals music obviously borrowed from the Tibetan ritual orchestra.
Tyshawn Sorey (photo: John Rogers)
Another neo-Tibetan passage starts in the 30th minute of Pillars II with trombonist Ben Gerstein doing his best dungchen impression. Sorey soon enters on a real dungchen, though the result is more evocative of a didgeridoo. Several minutes ensue with drone plus bells/cymbals and later a bass drum. In the 37th minute, bowed double basses again launch a deep industrial growl which builds for four minutes until it completely usurps the drone from the dungchen. This slow and deep music continues until the 45th minute. Hopefully you’ve gotten an idea of the album’s sound world and slow pacing, but remarkably, the music never seems to drag
Back to the Old World
Malin Bång: Structures of Light and Spruce (Spotify, YouTube)
This Swedish composer has emerged onto the international radar this past year thanks to this portrait CD and the Donaueschinger premiere of her orchestral piece Splinters of ebullient rebellion. Reviewers have been apt to compare her to Lindberg and other Scandinavians. But her practice of deriving instrumental material from analysis of field recordings (as in this CD’s title track) suggests the influence of spectralism, while her mix of conventional instruments and mundane sound sources like woodworking tools reminds me of Kagel’s “strict composition with elements which are not themselves pure”. Arching, for example, “consists of a dialogue between the cello and the tools that constructed the instrument”, definitely a Kagel-worthy exercise in musical deconstruction
Pehr Henrik Nordgren: Evocation (Spotify)
I’ve gushed before about this composer, who died in 2008, and whose music remains practically unknown in North America. A typical Nordgren piece might start out sounding like European expressionism before veering suddenly into a tonal passage with a syncopated accompaniment (Equivocations for string trio and Finnish kantele does this at about 3:30). It’s the genius of Nordgren that you never know what direction the music will take next, but regardless he holds the flow together with motivic connections that keep each composition coherent. This latest CD of his music features the Kokkola Quartet and friends performing chamber pieces for strings
Saariaho x Koh (Spotify) Graal Théâtre (Grail Theater), Saariaho’s violin concerto from 1994, is the centerpiece of this album from American violinist Jennifer Koh. With its relatively modest forces, the piece lacks the congestion that sometimes plagues her larger works for electronic and orchestral sounds. You can hear the connections both with her fellow Finn Nordgren and with the IRCAM-based spectralists of her adopted France. Though less often cited, there are also connections with North American composers like Robert Erickson and Morton Subotnick who experimented with live acoustic-electronic mixes
Daniele Roccato plays music by Stefano Scodanibbio (Spotify)
I’m not always blown away by “new music for [pick your instrument]” albums, but this one is a stunner, a tribute to double bass virtuoso and composer Stefano Scodanibbio (1956–2012), whose own works are in the lineage of Scelsi and Sciarrino. Alisei astounded me by having a single bass as its source (sustained harmonics on one string with fingered tremolos on the adjacent one make it sound like a duet), while the more linear Two Brilliant Pieces displays Roccato’s utter virtuosity and impeccable intonation. Da una certa nebbia (From a certain fog) is for “double bass and another double bass”, the second instrument adding a nebulous haze to the first one’s more straightforward declamations. Then there’s a crazy Octet that’s a half-hour tour de force of novel sound combinations for eight basses
Miscellanea and esoterica
David Schiff: Carter (Oxford University Press) (Amazon)
Schiff’s third book about America’s most irrepressible musical modernist takes a more personal approach to its subject matter while extending coverage to Carter’s very late works. The book is almost too untechnical (there are hardly any musical examples), but it’s still informative and insightful, an undemanding read about a demanding composer
The Residents: I Am a Resident! (Amazon, Spotify)
Fortuitously coinciding with the beginning of The Residents’ post-Hardy Fox era, this new release sees the surviving band members looking both rearwards and forwards as they remix covers of their own songs submitted by fans
En Seumeillant: Dreams and visions in the Middle Ages (Spotify)
Of all the historical periods in Western art music, it’s the Ars Subtilior, the mannerist era at the end of the 14th century, that scholars most frequently cite as a precursor to the post-WW2 frenzy of musical experimentation. This album by the Basel-based Sollazzo Ensemble casts a spotlight on that repertory, with ancillary beams extending a half century in either direction. Included is one of the most lugubrious ever renditions of the most famous of all Ars Subtilior compositions, the hyperchromatic rondeauFumeux Fume
Oskar Fischinger: Visual Music (DVD available from Center for Visual Music)
This second disc in a retrospective series devoted to this pioneer of experimental animation features several shorts from the 1920s through the 1940s. There’s even bonus footage of Fischinger outside his California home, though it’s apparently not the location where Cage briefly worked as an assistant in 1937, accidentally drenching Fischinger’s camera to extinguish a fire started when the drowsy filmmaker dropped his lit cigar on a pile of rags and papers
The quantity of thought-provoking work that came along in 2018 makes this list quite a bit longer than last year’s, and testifies to the ongoing resilience and sophistication of Western art music even as some voices prophesize its imminent demise or assimilation. But perhaps a bit of perspective should be offered by two final albums whose scope lies well outside that usually associated with Western-influenced cultivated arts:
Music of Northern Laos and Music of Southern Laos
Cherishingly recorded between 2006 and 2013, and released this year on Bandcamp by the irrepressible Laurent Jeanneau (AKA Kink Gong), these two albums showcase the remarkable heterophony and sound world of traditional Laotian folk music. On display are the spicy timbres of bamboo tube instruments, the vertical mouth organ called a khene (basically the same instrument as the Japanese shō and the Chinese sheng) and singing in a variety of throaty and nasal styles. Per Jeanneau, “most recordings available in the Western world focus on the dominant culture in Laos. I focus on marginalized ethnic minorities”. It’s a monument to the tenacity of threatened cultures clinging to life amid the pressures of global artistic commodification.
Thomas Dausgaard conducting members of Seattle Symphony in Abrahamsen: Schnee (photo: James Holt/Seattle Symphony)
[untitled] is the moniker given by Seattle Symphony to its thrice-annual Friday night new music events. Staged in the lobby of Benaroya Hall, it’s a semi-formal atmosphere in which the Symphony can deploy its musicians in smaller groupings better suited to the exigencies of postmodern music. The first [untitled] concert of the new season took place on October 12, and featured the regional premiere of Hans Abrahamsen’s Schnee, offering listeners in the Pacific Northwest an opportunity to judge how well this work has earned the considerable attention it has received in its brief ten-year lifetime.
Scored for two piano quartets (one conventional, the other with woodwinds instead of strings) flanking a central percussionist, this hour-long piece is officially a chain of ten canons conceived in pairs. But don’t bother looking for Row, Row, Row Your Boat-style rounds. Abrahamsen’s vision of musical canons ranges from relatively straightforward imitation between two voices in stretto…
From Canon 2b (other instruments omitted)
…to rhythm-only canons, to cases where the only trace of a traditional canon is the successive entries of similar lines:
(click to enlarge)
It’s probably easiest to think of the canons as a set of ten segued movements in which each instrumental group stays within a tight-knit band of musical material. An important structural characteristic of the piece is that these canons get progressively shorter, starting with 8–9 minutes allotted to the distended Canons 1a and 1b, and ending with the fleeting Canons 5a and 5b, lasting a minute apiece (audio links and the YouTube embed above are from the work’s only commercial recording, by ensemble recherche).
Accompanying this process of diminution is a corresponding process of detuning where the string instruments, then the woodwinds, shift their intonation downwards by 1/6 and 1/3 tones so that they gradually go out of tune with the pianos. Mikhail Shmidt, violinist for the [untitled] performance, likens the effect to melting. Such a reliance on “dirty” intonational clashs—most prominent in Canons 5a/5b—reflects the influence of Abrahamsen’s teacher, Ligeti. In a particularly imaginative stroke, three Interludes are inserted as composed tuning breaks to allow the musicians to effect the retuning without a break:
Ritual orchestral tuning is often satirized, and audiences will occasionally mistake tuning for an actual piece, but there is little precedent for written-out retuning occurring in the middle of a composition.
Schnee of course means snow in German (curiously favored by this Danish teutophile over his native sne), and this hour-long work is a suitably frosty and brittle affair. It begins and ends in the extreme treble register, and its overall sound world is dominated by white noise effects suggested by the title’s initial consonant. The score calls for scratchy bow noises, the application of Blu Tack to muffle piano strings, and frequent “half-breath” effects on the woodwind instruments (which in the case of the contralto flute and bass clarinet seem to have been specifically chosen for their breathy quality). The percussionist’s job mainly alternates between rubbing writing paper on a smooth surface and rubbing wax paper on a rough surface, the task broken up only by the use of sleigh bells in Canons 4a/4b and a single tamtam stroke at the end of Canon 3b. Other noise effects show the influence of Lachenmann, most notably his piece Guero, whose technique of gliding fingernails across the piano keyboards is directly borrowed in Schnee.
The very first canon fulfils the evocative trajectory of the title, beginning on a repeated violin harmonic on an A♮ that’s so high, you mainly hear bowing noise (the score says “like an icy whisper”, though North American listeners might find it inadvertently reminiscent of a certain cinematic shower scene). Pentatonic white note tinkerings in the 1st Piano’s top octave soon enter (E-A-F-D-E is a prominent pattern), and one might wonder if this will be a characteristically long and static exposition of European postminimalism. But the complexity increases as the canons proceed, reaching an apogee in the third canon pair where the harmonies are atonal, the rhythms unmetered, and the pitch range fully extended to the bass register (intensified by tuning the cello’s lowest string from C down to G). The process then reverses in the last two canon pairs, and we eventually revert to the white note pentatonicism of the opening. It’s the simultaneous revelation of both arch-like vectors (range and complexity) and straight-line vectors (length and detuning) as the work progresses that gives Schnee such dramatic impact.
The influence of Feldman is often close at hand in Abrahamsen’s music, and it’s quite obvious in Schnee’s Canon 3b. But a different parallel can be found with Feldman’s Three Voices, a unique and uncharacteristically texted and beat-driven work from 1982 that in its repetitions, quirky metricality, overall length and architecture based on concurrent unfolding of both linear and arch-shaped processes, is a tantalizing predecessor to Schnee. It even features as its sole lyric this most apropos poetic snippet by Frank O’Hara:
Who’d have thought that snow falls
Schnee is the kind of piece that can die in a too-dry space, but [untitled]’s idiosyncratic venue is just live enough to avoid this pitfall. Being designed as an entry and reception point rather than as a performance space though, it does come at the cost of an omnipresent background rumble from the building’s HVAC system. This often overwhelmed the subtle piano resonance effects and smeared the rhythmic definition of the percussionist’s paper shuffling (both prominent in Canon 3b). But the piece would have gotten lost in either of the two conventional concert spaces at Benaroya Hall, and the capable ensemble, drawn from regular Seattle Symphony musicians with frequent adjuncts Cristina Valdés and Oksana Ezhokina handling the piano parts, managed to traverse the work’s rhythmic complexities with no trace of strain or sloppiness.
They also did something perhaps more remarkable: avoiding the temptation, especially in the excitement of live performance, to play this music too loudly, too quickly and too brashly. Abrahamsen’s bleak snowscapes, like Varèse’s deserts, are those of the mind as much as of nature. What this piece needs is not so much the brisk extroversion of Ludovic Morlot, but a healthy dose of Scandinavian reserve, which it received under the conducting of Thomas Dausgaard, who will assume Morlot’s role as Music Director next season. In this performance, the first of this piece for any of the evening’s musicians (including Dausgaard), we perhaps have a glimpse of the direction that the Symphony’s programming will take under Dausgaard’s leadership.
Hans Abrahamsen (photo: Lars Skaaning)
Abrahamsen, born in 1952, presents an unusual musical example of a late career breakthrough. He started out as a Danish representative of New Simplicity, but much of his music from that period now seems rather…simplistic. After a Schoenbergian decade of relative silence, Abrahamsen reemerged with a more synthetic style that elevated his international profile to the degree that he can now be reasonably considered the most prominent living Danish composer other than the venerable Per Nørgård (1932–).
The best survey of Abrahamsen’s career arc is the Arditti Quartet’s recording of his String Quartets 1–4, whose dates range from 1973 to 2012 (this album was one of my favorites of 2017). His recent hits include some orchestral songs for Barbara Hannigan and a concerto for piano left hand, but these works seem less distinguished to me measured against the formidable European corpus of modernist orchestral music. It’s Schnee, completed in 2008, that continues to stand as Abrahamsen’s masterpiece, comparable in scope and ambition to Haas’ In Vain, and likewise exemplifying the alloy of exploration and consolidation that characterizes the most accomplished of contemporary European art music. Its reputation as one of the classics of the young 21st century (advanced by the likes of Paul Griffiths, who chose it to conclude the current version of his book Modern Music and After), was given powerful witness by Dausgaard and the Seattle Symphony musicians.
One year ago the Pacific Northwest’s new music community was stunned by the suicide of Matt Shoemaker: painter and musician, enthusiastic traveler, frequent performer with Gamelan Pacifica, and accomplished creator in the genre of dark ambient. Shoemaker’s “electroacoustic soundscapes” have been released in a variety of formats by Elevator Bath, Helen Scarsdale Agency and other labels, and I offer an overview of this work in the Second Inversion article Mutable Depths: Remembering Matt Shoemaker. Shoemaker was a veteran of Seattle’s formidable electronic music scene, and he often performed his music at the Chapel Performance Space, the workhorse venue for experimental music in this city. It was there that an assembly of his colleagues, friends and admirers gathered on the night of May 5 to honor his memory.
Eric Lanzillotta opened the evening by coaxing deep, dense sonorities from a Moog MG-1 analog synthesizer. These gently modulated sounds were soon joined by filtered bands of pink noise, and then by low frequency sine wave glissandos. These latter often seemed to be amplitude modulated by a noise source to create an irregular tremolo, a time-honored technique for introducing complexity into the innately regular sonorities of electronic instruments. Lanzillotta often collaborated with Shoemaker, and the two can be heard jamming together in a 2005 session that has been released on Anomalous Records. An excerpt thereof is available on SoundCloud:
Jim Haynes took the stage next. This California-based musician and Helen Scarsdale Agency proprietor began by recounting the impact of encountering Shoemaker’s music for the first time (“Fuck, this guy is doing what I’m trying to do, only way better”). Next Haynes stepped up to his instrument table and brought in a major sixth drone that anchored the first several minutes of his set. Like Lanzillotta, Haynes exclusively used abstract, synthesized sounds—most notably a series of falling glissandos that swelled to an incredibly loud and thick climax before suddenly evaporating into one of those electronic “rattles” that evoke the world of Forbidden Planet-style sci-fi movie soundtracks.
I’d been curious about the half dozen 40W halogen bulbs scattered across Haynes’ setup until finally, ten minutes in, they started to illuminate, powered by the same pink noise source that was controlling the amplitude of his rumbling oscillators. A visual and aural crescendo ensued, the blinding effect of these irregularly flickering lamps inside the otherwise dark Chapel interior suggesting a campfire emerging from beyond the grave—a vast improvement over those tacky synchronized disco lights you see at popular concerts and clubs.
As he’d done before, Haynes suddenly cut the signal to the lamps and oscillators, leaving only a faint heartbeat-like pulse. After a few forlorn palpitations, the set ended. Of the evening’s offerings, it was Haynes’ music that reminded me the most of Shoemaker’s.
Matt Shoemaker’s LP Isolated Agent/Stranding Behavior (Elevator Bath eeaoa031) featuring his original artwork
Up next was Climax Golden Twins, a Seattle-based experimental music band that has been active in various guises for 25 years, and whose configuration for the night comprised founders Robert Millis and Jeffrey Taylor along with Dave Knott and Jesse Paul Miller. The instrumentarium featured analog and digital synths, guitars, a hi-hat and an array of toys and other homemade contraptions. The music was free improv with the continuous transitions and generally slow tempos that are characteristic of that genre nowadays. The 20 minute set included the first concrete sounds of the evening: radio signals transduced through guitar pickups, sampled instruments and, most poignantly, excerpts from Shoemaker himself playing a Millis piano piece. These latter sounds, repetitive tinkerings on a C♯ minor triad of a kind I’d associate with Brian Eno or West Coast postminimalism, served to anchor the final five minutes of the set, which saw Knott walking through the space plucking this same chord on a ukulele as the piano excerpts played on, both forward and backward.
Knott remained onstage for a solo set that featured a half-sized bottleneck guitar with custom re-entrant tuning designed so that when the fingerboard is barred at the 9th fret, the strings can be played on either side. Its timbre reminded me of the spicy, transient-rich sounds of a Japanese biwa or samisen. The improvisation began in free rhythm, eventually taking on a steady pulse the way that a raga performance might progress from alap to jor. As the music grew more animated, Knott’s use of a sliding glass rod imparted a bit of Hawaiian inflection, and for the last few minutes Knott performed overtone singing over his now-steady strumming.
Miller returned to close out the event with a video featuring footage he shot in Indonesia, where Shoemaker had once spent several formative months. The multilayered imagery was conveyed in extremely fast cutting, sometimes combined with time lapse layers, and the montage was accompanied by synth drones mixed with field recordings (also from Indonesia). It was a suitable conclusion, and a reminder of the visual side of Shoemaker’s art (which was simultaneously on display in a memorial exhibit at Jack Straw New Media Gallery). All told, it was a substantive and beautiful evening of timbrally rich music befitting its dedicatee.
This year’s Harry Partch Festival has kicked off at the University of Washington, where the original Partch instruments have been housed since 2014 under the capable direction of Charles Corey. On hand for the first evening concert on May 12, 2018 was composer-violist and Arditti Quartet alum Garth Knox who premiered his Crystal Paths, a concertino for viola d’amore and six Partch instruments. The work is basically a series of duets between Knox and, in succession, Partch’s Crychord, Bass Marimba, Surrogate Kithara, Chromelodeon and Harmonic Canon. An interesting twist is that once each duet has been underway for a minute or so, the previous Partch instrument joins in to make it a trio, kind of like having a jealous ex-lover butt in wanting attention.
Photo: Dániel Vass/ECM Records
The choice of viola d’amore was an inspired one. This Baroque-era monstrosity with seven primary strings and additional sympathetic strings has a penchant for microtonal inflections and sustained double- and triple- stops, both of which mesh well with the sound world of the Partch instruments. Many of the duets (which follow one another continuously) featured these sustained multiple stops, usually with microtonal slides, while others featured pizzicato playing and (in the case of the duet with the Harmonic Canon) even a “preparation” in the form of paper inserted between the strings. The piece concluded with a gentle tutti built around a diatonic viola melody.
Knox often departs from the standard viola d’amore tuning, which is heavily biased toward D major (which I gather was 17th century Italy’s official Key of Love). Tonight, Knox tuned the lowest string down from the usual A2 to G2 to match the “tonic” of Partch’s microtonal scale.
Knox says “each duo is based on a specific ratio which forms the harmonic and rhythmic basis for the relationship between the instruments”, and his structural metaphor is fluids coalescing into crystals (hence the title). But given that he physically walked around the stage, moving from duet partner to duet partner (his viola being the only portable instrument among six immobile Partch ones), the more obvious metaphor is the Partchian wanderer character ambling from conversation to conversation—a connection to the cantankerous American maverick that works on a literary/symbolic level without trying to conjure up his specific Depression-era hobo persona.
It’s hard to write for the Partch instrumentarium without sounding either like minor league Partch or else generic postmodern chamber music for “weird” instruments. But this piece succeeded a lot better than most. The coupling of a Partch “backup band” with a conventional but archaic Western solo instrument was a compelling one, and the work seemed to strike the right balance between abstraction and referentiality.
The ensemble included Charles Corey on Crychord, Knox’s fellow violist Melia Watras in her secondary career as a Bass Marimba player, Swedish guitarist Stefan Östersjö on Surrogate Kithara, composer and Director of the UW School of Music Richard Karpen on Chromelodeon, and Vietnamese đàn tranh player Nguyễn Thanh Thủy on Harmonic Canon. The concert also featured Partch’s Two Studies on Ancient Greek Scales, and premieres of new works by Watras, Karpen and veteran Partch advocate John Schneider. Still to come over the weekend are several concerts and symposia whose centerpiece is the first complete performance in the Pacific Northwest of Partch’s The Wayward.
David Lang’s symphony without a hero received its premiere on February 8/10 by its commissioner, Seattle Symphony and Music Director Ludovic Morlot. As usual, Lang spells his title in all lowercase letters, a gesture of acquiescence that particularly befits the resigned tone of this work’s namesake, Poem Without a Hero by the Soviet writer Anna Akhmatova. Lang, who is quite the Russophile, took his inspiration from Akhmatova’s wartime lament for her hometown Leningrad (St. Petersburg), besieged and abused at the hands of both Nazis and Stalinists. Lang’s reflections present as a single-movement essay that, regardless of one’s feelings toward postminimalism or orchestral composition in general at this stage of the 21st century, surely deserves to be ranked among his most compelling works.
Lang conceived symphony without a hero as the unfolding of “a melody that goes from the beginning of the piece to the very end—a 28 minute tune”. This melody, closer to 23 minutes at Morlot’s tempo, lies in the bass instruments: a gruff pseudo-ostinato that constantly tries to climb a C♯ minor triad (C♯ G♯ C♯ E) without ever literally repeating itself. It’s somewhere between a “real” tune and a clumsily-executed arpeggio exercise (imagine the fragmentary musical gestures of The Little Match Girl Passion, but louder and harsher). Above it the high strings, coupled with other treble instruments, spin a tonally ambiguous web of overlapping sustained tones derived from the bass tune, creating an effect akin to the angelic choir atop Ives’ texture in the Prelude to his Fourth Symphony. There’s little going on in the middle registers—it’s as though each instrument is compelled to choose between bass and treble. As Lang puts it, the two sides “don’t talk to each other”.
As from a tower that commands the view From nineteen-forth I look down. As if I bid farewell anew To what I long since bade farewell, As if I paused to cross myself And enter dark vaults underground.
(1941, Leningrad under siege)
– Anna Akhmatova, translated by Nancy K. Anderson
David Lang (photo: Dacia Clay/Second Inversion)
Lang has spoken about being led into composition through his early encounters with Shostakovich. And the tone of his symphony is akin to Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony shorn of its triumphalism and cumulative effect. I kept thinking of that piece’s notorious first movement, but with its melodic and harmonic details blasted away, leaving just the repetitive martial rhythms as symbolic foundations to the bombed-out buildings of wartime Leningrad whose smoldering shells remain but whose trappings of life have been pulverized and left to circulate as a disorganized cloud in the smoky air. As if to reinforce the siege metaphor, Morlot positioned the drums at the left of the orchestra with the lower strings and brass on the right, effectively enveloping the jumbled and pleading voices of the treble choir. There’s definitely an edge to this music that you don’t always get with Lang.
Halfway through the symphony the quasi-ostinato stops, leaving the web of treble instruments standing alone. Most prominent here are the violins, supported by some high woodwinds, harps and a celeste. The bass reenters, but now with an alternation of sustained chords a half-step apart, reminiscent of Philip Glass (for whom Lang once worked as a copyist, meticulously typing the lyrics of Akhnaten into the score). As before, bass and treble proceed independently until the bass finally drops out entirely, leaving the violins (just as in Ives’ Symphony) with the last word.
To complete the evening Morlot paired Lang’s symphony with its putative opposite, Strauss’ Ein Heldenleben (A Hero’s Life) from 1898. The antebellum naiveté of that old warhorse has long screamed out for revisionism, and programming it after the brutal honesty of the Lang only seemed to emphasize its insouciance. If there was a moral to the evening, it was that true heroes are the ones bearing hard witness to bitter truths. In that light we can be grateful for Seattle Symphony’s long record of supporting contemporary music, a record that one hopes will continue despite the imminent departure of both its Music Director Morlot and its President/CEO Simon Woods.
One of the odder fads bequeathed to us by the 1960s is the ritual destruction of musical instruments. It’s a custom most famously associated with the likes of Jimi Hendrix and Pete Townshend. But what bursts out in popular culture often has precedents in the avant-garde, and the origins of this particular brand of onstage iconoclasm can be traced to the Fluxus movement, specifically its founder George Maciunas. In a nod to classical tradition Maciunas chose the piano, rather than the upstart electric guitar, as the foil for his aggression, directing performers of his 1962 Piano Piece #13 to nail down the keys of the chosen target (Sonic Youth famously performed the piece in 1999). Maciunas’s legacy was continued by fellow haute culture exponents Raphael Montañez Ortiz and Annea Lockwood, the former using an ax, the latter using an array of execution methods that included burning, burying and drowning.
Ichiyanagi: Sapporo (
