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CD Review, Contemporary Classical, File Under?

Molly Tuttle – Crooked Tree on Nonesuch (CD Review)

Molly Tuttle and Golden Highway

Crooked Tree

Nonesuch

 

Songwriter, vocalist, and guitarist Molly Tuttle makes her Nonesuch debut with Crooked Tree. Co-produced with dobro virtuoso Jerry Douglas, the release includes a number of prominent traditional musicians as collaborators and focuses on Tuttle’s connections to bluegrass and roots music. Previous releases have seen Tuttle sit astride pop and bluegrass, and while Crooked Tree emphasizes the latter, the memorability and single-worthy character of many of its songs reminds us that she is a versatile and formidable talent. 

 

Tuttle plays guitar in a flat-picking style and at turns plays nimble lead lines and boisterous rhythm. A showcase for her playing is “Goodbye Girl.” On this track, as elsewhere, Douglas makes the perfect addition to the proceedings, seamlessly integrating his formidable chops into arrangements with Golden Highway. His solo on “Goodby Girl” is simultaneously fleet and soulful. Tuttle’s band Golden Highway, which consists of fiddle-player Bronwyn Keith-Hynes, mandolinist Dominick Leslie, banjo-player Kyle Tuttle, and bassist Shelby Means, are a formidable combination, all equally comfortable taking a solo turn as well as being imaginative yet rock solid ensemble players. Other musicians joined the sessions in Nashville, including bassist Viktor Krauss, drummer Jerry Pentecost, and harmonica-player Cory Younts. Ketch Secor co-writes several songs with Tuttle and contributes mandolin. Melody Walker is another co-writer and sings backing vocals on the album. 

 

The title track starts with a slow build to the chorus, upon which we get the full band providing a vintage bluegrass arrangement, with a stirring fiddle solo from Keith-Hynes. “She’ll Change” and “Over the Line” show the assembled musicians to excellent advantage. Kyle Tuttle’s banjo takes the instrumental spotlight on “Flatland Girl,” while Margo Price contributes vocals. The layering of her voice with Tuttle creates a beautiful blend. Adding Old Crow Medicine Show to the “Big Backyard” creates another highlight focusing on group singing, a verse with a memorable hook followed by ebullient choruses. Guitarist and singer Billy Strings joins Tuttle on the blues shuffle “Dooley’s Farm.” The waltzing “San Francisco Blues” is a melancholy duet with Dan Tyminski. Perhaps the biggest star turn is Gillian Welch’s appearance on “Side Saddle,” a ribald, rousing showcase for the vocalists with great licks from Douglas. 

 

Left to their own devices, Tuttle and Golden Highway provide equally compelling performances. “Nashville Mess Around” is great fun – a hootenanny, complete with yodeling. “The River Knows” has a haunting melody that alternates sparsely arranged accompaniment of the singing with intricate instrumental breaks.“Castilleja” co-opts the melody of “Poor Wayfarin’ Stranger,” but takes it uptempo. The album  closes with a moving song, “Grass Valley,” which deals with family and loss with an uplifting sensibility. Crooked Tree is a compelling, uniformly excellent recording. Recommended. 

 

-Christian Carey

 

 

 

by Christian Carey
CD Review, Contemporary Classical, File Under?, Orchestral, Orchestras

Wolfgang Rihm – Jagden und Formen (CD Review)

Wolfgang Rihm

Jagden und Formen

Bavarian Radio Orchestra, Franck Ollu, conductor

BR-Klassik CD

 

Wolfgang Rihm’s hour long orchestra work Jagden und Formen (2008) has its roots in an earlier work, some fifteen minutes long, from 1996, dedicated to Helmut Lachenmann on his sixtieth birthday. The piece ultimately morphed and expanded into the version recorded here. There is precedence for this in postwar Europe, particularly in several of the works of Pierre Boulez, which remained in progress and perpetually expanding throughout his lifetime. In his program note, Rihm says that the piece will henceforth likely remain in its current form.

 

While it is dedicated to Lachenmann, the piece remains solidly in Rihm’s language. The music is muscular, post-tonal, and replete with strongly articulated gestures. At the same time, there are guideposts that afford the listener a sense of groundedness: returning sections, repeated pitches that provide momentary centers, and phrase boundaries that include landing points akin to cadences.

 

The piece’s scoring is somewhat unusual. Winds are doubled, but strings are one to a part, the result being a kind of sinfonietta with bolstered textures. The choice for solo strings is canny, in that Rihm frequently deploys them like a chamber quintet within the whole ensemble. The extraordinary tone of the Bavarian Radio Orchestra’s strings undoubtedly abets this impression. This is equally true of the rest of the ensemble, which frequently creates glistening textures and just as often fluid counterpoint that ricochets between instrumental cohorts. 

 

The recording is broken up into tracks, but these do not demarcate movements. They connote sections with particular tempos and scoring, and so suggest the overall formal trajectory of the piece. Adding to the aforementioned concertino impression are a number of solo turns. Particularly impressive are the blindingly fast runs by pitched percussion and the equally fast angular solos taken by the oboe and bassoon. Jagden und Formen traverses a number of tempos, and it is to Franck Ollu’s credit that transitions are seamlessly negotiated and even the most breathless passages are well-coordinated. The piece’s abundant variety and compelling sound world make it a solid addition to Rihm’s compendious catalog. Jagden und Formen will likely see more performances, but this recording will long remain a benchmark.

 

-Christian Carey



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

Aleksandra Gryka on Kairos (CD Review)

Interialcell

Aleksandra Gryka

Florian Müller, harpsichord; Klangforum Wien, Joseph Kalitzke, conductor

Kairos CD

 

Klangforum Wien is undertaking a series of portrait recordings on Kairos of Polish composers. The first solo CD of music by Aleksandra Gyrka (b. 1977), Interialcell, is an impressive introduction to this composer. Consisting of ensemble pieces  written from 2003 to 2015, Interialcell provides a sense of the maturation of an already talented composer in her late twenties to work that takes on successively more intricate materials and formal designs in her thirties. 

 

Regarding the impetus for her music, Gryka is fairly secretive. The hard sciences, particularly quantum physics, are mentioned frequently as a reference point, as are cosmology and sci-fi. A number of her works deal with uncomfortable emotions in extremis, notably the theatre works Scream You! and Our Hell and incidental music for several plays. The instrumental pieces on Interialcell may not have a narrative component that is specifically locatable, but they clearly are wrought from the same combination of scientific, theatrical, and fantastical elements, melding together a panoply of musical elements to provide a sense of this inspirational diversity. 

 

Youmec is a work for harpsichord and ensemble. Florian Müller is frequently called upon to play clustered verticals as well as enigmatic ostinatos. These are accompanied by undulating glissandos in the ensemble. In a sense, the texture is an inversion of the usual concertino. The soloist plays chords while the group is afforded gestural writing. At the piece’s climax, the ensemble begins to ricochet its own vertical off of the solo’s repeated chords.

 

Interialcell opens with thrumming timpani and angular melodic cells in the strings alongside fast chromatic runs in the piano and pitched percussion. The accents of the cells become a grid for rhythmic transformations in a number of scorings and dynamic levels; a deft structural design. Emtyloop begins with furious, corruscating, overlapping strings. This idea of overlapping ostinatos is explored throughout the piece, with hairpin dynamics creating swooning contrasts. Particularly affecting is the later overlap in the upper “dolphin call” register, supplanted by cello glissandos. einerjedeneither juxtaposes percussion pulsations with chromatic wind lines, spectral verticals, and frequent silences. Instruments blown through, aphoristic piano gestures, and microtonal bends complete a haunting, gradually unfolding environment.

 

Mutedisorder closes out the album with furtive, hushed gestures in a portentous ambience. It is somewhat reminiscent of Mark André’s recent works exploring pianissimo. Gryka demonstrates command over the wide range of materials she selects and a special ear for timbre. Recommended. 

 

-Christian Carey 



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

Music for Hard Times (CD Review)

Living Earth Show and Danny Clay

Music for Hard Times

Self-released CD

 

It is fair to say that recent times have been hard on nearly everyone. Living Earth Show decided to create an interdisciplinary project, “Music for Hard Times,” to provide a source of musical comfort. They collaborated on the project with composer and music educator Danny Clay, who created a series of open instrumentation scores to be  interpreted by the group and made available for others to play. Music for Hard Times, the CD, provides one possible, and compelling, interpretation of Clay’s work.

 

Bell sonorities, pitched percussion, piano, and guitars are the primary instruments of Living Earth Show’s recording. In places, string pads halo the proceedings, and late in the album, lyric-less singing and string solos join in. Some online music platforms have pegged Music for Hard Times as New Age, but it encompasses a number of genres, with some of the scores affording leaping intervals and chromaticism that suggest contemporary classical being a strong influence. Elsewhere, ostinatos evoke post-minimalism. Clay’s scores invite a plethora of scorings, and Living Earth Show’s arrangements supply abundant variety, and beauty, in response. 

 

The performances are lush, ambling, and soothing: just what is on order for hard times. 

 

  • Christian Carey
by Christian Carey
CD Review, Choral Music, File Under?

Three Recordings for Holy Week (CD Review)

J.S. Bach: St. Matthäus-Passion

Pygmalion, Raphaël Pichon

Harmonia Mundi 2xCD

 

J.S. Bach: St. John Passion

English Baroque Soloists, Monteverdi Choir, John Eliot Gardiner, conductor

Deutsche Grammophon 2XCD

 

The Bach Passions are a staple of the choral repertoire for Holy Week, and there are a number of fine recordings of them. There’s room for more; two additions to this corpus from 2022 are extraordinary: a St. Matthew Passion recorded by Pygmalion, directed by Raphaël Pichon for HM, and a St. John Passion by one of the great Bach conductors, John Eliot Gardiner, with his house bands the English Baroque Soloists and Monteverdi Choir, for DG. Even if you already have recordings of these remarkable works in your collection, it is well worth investing in these. Both are recorded in vivid sound and take a period-informed approach that is lithe and lively, never fussy. 

 

Pichon crafts an exciting version of the St. Matthew Passion that underscores its theological story and musical gravitas. Some recordings split tracks in such a way that there is a distinct feeling of stopping and starting again. Not this one, where the listener is afforded a propulsive trajectory all the way through the trial and execution of Jesus that scarcely lets up. Julian Prégardien as the Evangelist and Stéphane Degout as Christ make for a compelling pair of principals, both underscoring the narrative component of the Passion setting. The soloists, taken from the choruses of Pygmalion, provide singing of arias that is supple and often poignant. In particular, bass-baritone Christian Immler’s singing of the arias “Gebt zum meinem Jesu wieder” and “Mache dich, mein Herze rein” are some of the best versions on record and Tim Mead is a memorable presence in the countertenor solos.  

 

Gardiner’s recording – his third of the St. John Passion – was made from a live performance that occurred on Good Friday, 2021. In adhering to Covid protocols, the performers were more spread out than they usually would be. Rather than weakening the impact of the piece, the spaciousness of ensemble deployment serves it well, with contrapuntal lines distinctly rendered and tutti passages losing little of their weight. The choir’s sections are vivid, displaying excellent diction and musicality, and the instrumentalists present Bach’s music with sensitive tuning and diverse timbral combinations. The soloists, to a person, are compelling interpreters who are well cast in their respective roles. The difference in sound between the two tenors, Nick Pritchard’s eloquent Evangelist and Peter Davoren’s powerful tenor solos, is a fetching contrast. William Thomas, cast as Jesus, provides a strong and eloquent protagonist. In their solos, soprano Julia Doyle and countertenor Alexander Chance spin legato lines that dovetail with obbligato instruments in seamless blends.

 

Now The Green Blade Riseth

The Choir of King’s College, Cambridge, Daniel Hyde, conductor

Matthew Martin, Paul Greally, organ

 

On Now The Green Blade Riseth, the Choir of King’s College, Cambridge, presents selections that reflect the Holy Week journey from Palm Sunday to Easter. They include hymns and anthems that range in date from the Renaissance to the present day, with special emphasis on pieces that have been performed at King’s in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Daniel Hyde has crafted the choristers’ voices into an extraordinary blend, from the clarion topmost trebles to a powerful bass section, particularly for one found in a scholastic setting. 

 

The hymn-singing emphasizes a blend and balance that encourages collectivity; listeners may well find themselves singing along, particularly to the Palm Sunday hymn “Ride On in Majesty,” and a rousing version of “Jesus Christ is Risen Today,” which includes a cadenza with some surprising twists and turns. Those who have performed with church choirs, from amateurs to professionals, will doubtless enjoy the inclusion of John Stainer’s anthem “God So Loved the World,” from his cantata The Crucifixion. Bob Chilcott’s version of the title hymn, using Lydian rather than the original tune’s Dorian mode, shows off the delicate stops on the organ and piano singing from the choir to great advantage. 

 

There are gems aplenty among the anthems, both in terms of selection of repertoire and performance. The Ubi Caritas setting by Maurice Durufle is the writer’s favorite selection on the CD, a beautiful work beautifully performed. Civitas Sancti Tui by William Byrd, which scholars have often suggested is a coded message of solidarity with recusant Catholics under Elizabeth’s reign, finds the choristers reveling in luxurious imitative counterpoint. O Salutaris Hostis by Giacchino Rossini instead provides powerful tutti passages in an operatic shading of a church anthem. Antonio Lotti’s Crucifixus balances chordal writing with aching suspensions. 

 

English music from Elgar forward is given particularly affectionate treatment. That composer’s relatively early “Light of Life,” affords the organ a lush accompaniment and the singers’ close-knit harmonies. Samuel Sebastian Wesley’s “Wash Me Throughly” features treble solos and ensemble passages, reminding listeners of the extraordinary musical training that young people receive at King’s. A standout is John Ireland’s “Greater Love Hath No Man,” which begins subtly with intricate harmonies and builds to a soaring climax. Christus Vincit by Martin Baker alternates melodic phrases between upper and lower voices and a vigorous organ part. The CD closes with a transcription by Durufle of Tournemire’s Improvisation sur le ‘Victimae Paschali,’ a solo organ piece that serves as a postlude ending things in virtuosic fashion. Thoroughly recommended for Easter or any time of year.

 

-Christian Carey

 

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

Abrahamsen’s Schnee (CD Review)

Hans Abrahamsen

Schnee

Lapland Chamber Orchestra, John Storgårds, conductor

DaCapo

 

This is the second recording of Hans Abrahamsen’s Schnee (‘Snow,’ 2008), an hourlong imaginative ensemble work populated by idiosyncratic canons interspersed with intermezzos. The first, by Ensemble Recherche in 2015, was an excellent document of the piece. That said, this second interpretation is welcome, as it brings out different aspects of Schnee. Recherche’s recording is atmospheric and colorful, while Lapland Chamber Orchestra provides a rhythmically charged and dramatically intense rendition, in vivid sound with a wide dynamic range, and incisive delineation of canonic voices. 

 

One needn’t adopt a programme for listening to Schnee, but the gestures in Canon 1A  are suggestive: pitched percussion and keyboard as gentle snow falling, squalls of wind in the searing violin and clarinet lines. Another way in, one accentuated in Lapland’s recording, is the pervasive counterpoint in imaginative technical and instrumental combinations. Followed by a hushed sustain in Intermezzo 1, Canon 2B is a signature example of Abrahamsen’s writing at its most rigorous, with overlaps between strings and winds and emphatic keyboard glissandos creating a vigorous, linearly saturated ambience. Where the clarinet and piano led Canon 1, here the flute provides altissimo lines and flourishes that take center stage. The denouement of the movement resembles an ostinato by Stravinsky. 

 

Schnee is abundantly varied. Each movement shifts both the canonic devices used and the way in which they are scored.Canon 3A presents slower moving lines, with glissandos punctuating brass iterations of the canon. As Schnee moves towards its conclusion, compression takes place and the last two sets of canons and intermezzos are miniatures in comparison to the previous sections. They may be compact, but the concluding portions are powerfully wrought, containing permutations of many of the previous lines and textures, but now overlaid and juxtaposed to create a potent summary. 

 

Abrahamsen is one of our great living composers – he turns seventy this year. Schnee was a turning point piece for him, and it is good to hear it encompassing multiple performances that serve to develop its interpretative possibilities. Keeping with the wintry theme, Abrahamsen is now at work on his first opera, an adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Snow Queen.” 

 

-Christian Carey

 

by Christian Carey
CD Review, File Under?, jazz

Vermillion: Kit Downes on ECM (CD Review)

Kit Downes

Vermillion

Kit Downes, piano; Petter Eldh, double bass; James Maddren, drums

ECM Records

 

After listening to Obsidian, Kit Downes’s debut as a leader for ECM, one might justifiably think from his considerable prowess as an organist that it was his sole specialty. Not so, as is eminently demonstrated on Vermillion, a piano trio album in a modern jazz idiom for ECM. On a set of originals by Downes and bassist Petter Eldh, along with a rendition of  “Castles of Sand” by Jimi Hendrix, these two musicians along with drummer James Maddren demonstrate a simpatico collaboration, filled with rich harmonic progressions and a well-coordinated sense of swing. 

 

“Minus Monks” is an homage to Thelonious Monk, with slender voicings and an angular melody adorning a circuitous set of changes. Downes plays with a silvery, legato touch, frequently locking in on polychords with Eldh playing rock solid roots. Maddren is resourceful, using the entire kit yet never overwhelming the proceedings. “Sister, Sister” has an intro that could be translated from a Debussy Prelude, and the impressionist timbres continue once he is joined by Eldh and Maddren, the bassist playing fleet countermelodies and the drummer shading the tune with cymbals shimmering. “Seceda” is a loosely articulated ballad with post-bop filigrees followed by a pastoral progression inflected with blue notes. 

 

Eldh’s composition “Plus Puls” begins with a brief solo that sets a buoyant groove. The melody is frequently doubled in octaves by Eldh and Downes. The bassist’s tune “Sandiland” sets a walking line against syncopated piano chords and a wandering keyboard solo. “Math Amager ” is a showcase for Eldh’s fleet soloing. Maddren’s drums are featured on “Class Fails,” and the change in ensemble relationship provides welcome contrast. 

 

The most intriguing piece on Vermillion is Downes’s “Rolling Thunder,’ in which dissonant arpeggios put the trio outside the pocket. Eldh fills in some of the chromatic verticals which Maddren again punctuates with cymbals and gentle syncopated fills. “Bobbi’s Song” also focuses on intricate chord progressions thickly voiced with a tenor register countermelody from Eldh. “Castles Made of Sand” closes the album with Hendrix’s song given bitonal treatment with parallel voicings and harp-like arpeggiations. 

 

Whichever instrument Downes choses to play, piano or organ, he is a formidable and imaginative musician. One hopes he keeps the trio assembled here together: they collaborate with considerable skill and sensitivity.

 

-Christian Carey

 

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

Barbara Monk Feldman on Another Timbre (CD Review)

 

Barbara Monk Feldman

Verses

GBSR Duo with Mira Benjamin

Another Timbre CD

 

Given her association with Morton Feldman, both personal and professional – he was both her spouse and her instructor at Buffalo University – it is tempting to look for comparisons between their compositions. Tempting but unrewarding. Yes, Monk Feldman creates slow, quiet pieces, but so do many composers since Morton Feldman who have greatly departed from his legacy. A fundamental distinction one hears on Verses, Another Timbre’s Monk Feldman recital disc, is that the composer has a cogent sense of form; the longest piece is thirty-one minutes and there are even two five minute pieces, all of which have distinct sectionalization. 

 

The harmonic sensibility of Duo for Piano and Percussion (1988) and piano solo The I and Thou (1988) rely upon an extended sense of triadic post-tonality, with a great fluctuation of the deployment of pitches to create asymmetrical phrases. A distinct gesture that is found in most of the pieces on the recording is a grace note leading into or out of a rest, with this punctuation creating phrase-based boundaries within the pieces. The title work, for solo vibraphone, uses microphrases, short splashes of arpeggios with the pedal down that are followed by rests. Throughout the piece these expand and contract, thicken to wide-spaced chords and reduce to intervals, creating a miniature full of information and surprises. 

 

The recording’s centerpiece, The Northern Shore (1997) is inspired by a place where Monk Feldman, a Canadian, goes to every summer in Quebec. Like a number of the composer’s pieces, nature as a touchstone, rather than as a programme, serves as a wellspring of inspiration. There is something of a ritualistic quality to the way that each player interprets the same intervals and then passes them off to the next, in a kind of call and response. In addition to nature, Monk Feldman has long been interested in theater, particularly Noh, with her most recent opera, or “non-opera” as she prefers to designate them, finished just before the beginning of the pandemic. Color is an important consideration in The Northern Shore, with different verticals and arpeggiations having distinctly scored accumulations of pitch. Like much of her work, the use of triads that never quite resolve provides an achingly beautiful ambience. GBSR Duo – percussionist George Barton and pianist Siwan Rhys – joined by violinist Mira Benjamin, are sympathetic and compelling interpreters of the music. 

 

One question: when will her operas be recorded?

 

-Christian Carey

 

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

Feldman Late Piano Pieces (CD Review)

Morton Feldman

Late Works for Piano

For Bunita Marcus, Palais de Mari, Triadic Memories

Alfonso Gómez

Kairos 3xCD

 

Morton Feldman’s late piano works are totemic structures, influential on a generation of composers from the Wandelweiser collective to American experimentalists. Slow-moving, prevailingly soft, and quite long, apart from the Palais de Mari, which still clocks in at nearly a half hour in duration. This Kairos recording presents compelling renditions of Feldman in clear, focused sound that captures the pedaling and decay of notes with admirable detail. Alfonso Gómez’s recent recording of Messiaen’s Vingt Regards, also on Kairos, was an impressive outing and he is more than equal to the challenges and subtleties of Feldman’s music.  

 

Feldman often mentioned that the usual late twentieth century pieces, which often were bounded by a somewhat arbitrary 20-minute time frame, were easier for programming. Feldman preferred to think of his predilection for longer pieces as exploring “scale” rather than “form.” Thus the somewhat diffuse direction found in For Bunita Marcus. Written for a composer whom Feldman mentored, it distinctively uses short, thread-like gestures in the middle register in distinctive fashion. These melodic cells are then expanded into dissonant arpeggiations. As is so often the case, the introduction of a new pitch seems like an important event. The pauses and, for lack of a more accurate term, cadential points, are even more so, and beguilingly asymmetrical. 

 

Palai de Mari plays with a widely spaced chordal domain, with two to four sonorities frequently connected in post-tonal voice-leading. A number of the verticals sound like the added note triads found in Poulenc or Milhaud, but they are of course deployed without the sense of harmonic rhythm that propels music by Les Six. These are interspersed with melodic fragments that emphasize the usual seventh and, less usual, fifth. All told, the effect of the piece is that of Feldman exploring different sonorities within his preferred framework of “scale” rather than “form.”

 

Triadic Memories, clocking in here at nearly an hour and a half, is a journey of thirds set against Feldman’s characteristic use of dissonances. Shifts of pacing are pointed up by Gómez’s rendition, where the tempo ranges from very slow to andante. In general, changes in texture, tempo, and pitch selection are faster than the previous two pieces, yet in the uncoordinated and unexpected nature of these shifts Feldman manages to create music that floats rather than inexorably moving towards a goal. His late fascination with Asian rugs, with their uneven threading, is a worthy analogue to this piece in particular. 

Gómez thrives in the epic environments of Messiaen and Feldman. His focus and sense of large-scale pacing are without peer. Recommended. 

 

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

Catherine Lamb String Quartets (CD Review)

Catherine Lamb: String Quartets

JACK Quartet

Kairos 2xCD

 

Catherine Lamb’s studies with James Tenney at Cal Arts, as well as  substantial research of figures such as Erv Wilson, have led her to crafting compositions with subtle tuning systems based on just intonation. On a double-CD from Kairos, JACK Quartet performs an early piece, Two Blooms (2009), and a recent, gargantuan opus, divisio spiralis (2019). Where extended just-intonation composer Ben Johnston created quartets like his Fourth, based on “Amazing Grace,” where the  focus is melodic cells, Lamb is interested in the confluence of different intervals, creating beats from difference and combination tones and reveling in the interplay of harmonics. 

 

JACK plays the subtle shifts of intonation with gorgeous specificity, savoring each dyad or vertical construct as a sound image in itself, yet providing a flowing legato that connects the various strands. Their renditions take time, the phrases breathing within a subtle, mainly soft, dynamic spectrum. In this one hears Lamb’s predilections for allowing difference tones to be articulated without the high amplitude of pieces by LaMonte Young and Phil Niblock. The overtones nearly take the role of extra voices in the texture, shimmering and poignant. Two Blooms focuses on the development of the entire compass, not stinting intervals in the tenor and bass registers. It ends with an open fifth that is perfectly tuned, abundantly spacious. 

 

Her most recent quartet, divisio spiralis, is an epic journey of thirteen movements. It too focuses on the entire compass, but the main sections often deal with piquant dissonances in the upper register, where major and minor seconds deliver achingly biting beats. As the piece progresses, wider intervals, particularly open fifths and octaves, provide a context of progression to the formerly aloft altissimo duos. Seconds become sevenths, affording a triadic component to the work’s conclusion. Despite the epic proportions of divisio spiralis, listeners will be rewarded with further details in subsequent listenings. Highly recommended. 

 

by Christian Carey