Cold Blue Music has released Waves and Particles, a new CD by John Luther Adams featuring the JACK Quartet. This new album by the Pulitzer Prize-winning Adams explores the deeper levels of elemental nature through extraordinary musical expression. The composer writes: “Waves and Particles was inspired by quantum physics, fractal geometry, and noise – which function as elemental metaphors in my music.” This is realized by the renowned JACK Quartet who artfully extract new and exceptional sounds from the standard string quartet. This new album follows three previous CDs by Adams, released by the Cold Blue label and recorded by the JACK Quartet.
Particle dust, track 1, opens with a rapidly repeating tutti phrase that carries a strong sense of power and motion. The dense texture and churning sound is reminiscent of Steve Reich’s classic Different Trains. The music is dominated by this texture and surges forward without melody or counterpoint like a swirling cloud of particles. Pauses occur, filled with softly ethereal sustaining tones that break up the hard driving tutti sections. The texture alternately thins and swells depending on various combinations of string parts. At 4:20 a few seconds of silence is heard followed by a series of delicate sustained tones, as if the piece is gathering its breath. The fast growling in the cello returns as the other parts enter, building the intensity. The playing by JACK is rapid but always under control. Particle dust is engaging without convention and compelling in its purpose.
Spectral waves follows and, by contrast to the first track, begins with a lush sustained chord that slowly increases in volume. The smooth tones gradually change in color and evoke a warm, welcoming feeling. Introspective and nostalgic, never fast or flashy, spectral waves shares the same gentle sensibility as heard in The Wind in High Places and other John Luther Adams string pieces. The parts blend well together and the result is a soothing bath of beautiful sounds. Velocity waves, track 3, returns to the rapid and rugged textures of particle dust. The fast chugging sounds in the cello are offset by slowing notes in the higher registers. The tempo gradually slows as the dynamics decrease. The phrasing surges and swells, only to fall back again in a repeating pattern. These cycles seem to vary in pitch, velocity, acceleration and deceleration. At 4:20 the sounds turn languid and soft for a short stretch, but soon recover their previous energy. At times, the tempo in the lower strings is slowing while that in the violins is increasing – and then they reverse. The final dash to the finish in the lower strings perfectly captures the concept of a velocity wave. The unexpected charm of velocity waves is the direct result of the precise and disciplined playing by the JACK Quartet.
Tridac waves, track 4, is next and opens with low sounds, increasing in volume and pitch, then reversing. The effect is like that of a sluggish siren but with an urgent and immediate unease. These siren-like sounds proceed in layers and in different registers. This pattern continuously repeats, but splits between the parts; some times the higher registers dominate while at other times the lower strings lead. Tridac waves is full of unusual and alarming sounds, skillfully conjured from conventional string instruments.
Murmurs in a chromatic field, track 5, features a series of scary sustained tremolos that immediately produce a dark, spooky feeling. The tones and timbre are unusual for strings and might well have been electronically synthesized. As the piece proceeds, the sounds and pitches become more alien and spacey. Some conventional chords are heard from time to time, giving the rest of the piece some harmonic context. Brief silences appear between the longer stretches of sound, and this adds to the sense of mystery. More pauses follow, in a similar pattern and the silences get longer towards the fading finish. Murmurs in a chromatic field is an apt title for this piece – it is quietly intimate and beautifully performed.
Particles rising is the final track on the album and opens with short bursts of four delicate violin notes. This is followed by a pause, then repeated several times. The second violin joins in with same rhythm, and in harmony. The viola and cello enter, in turn, until all four parts are engaged in sustained tones and a lovely warm harmonic wash. Fast skittering notes in the upper voices are heard, culminating in a strong and continuous fiddling in all four parts. The lower strings soon dominate with a strong dynamic and a full, growling texture. Short stretches of quiet sustained tones in harmony punctuate the harsher sounds, offering the listener a fine contrast. All of this is played with skillful ensemble despite the absence of a leading melody or strong pulse. Particles rising is a muscular piece appropriate to a strong physical phenomenon, but never overwhelming or alien in character.
This album is full of remarkable sounds that the composer extracts from the conventional string quartet. Quantum physics, fractal geometry, and noise are part of the natural world, yet we know of them only abstractly by scientific observation and measurement using complicated machines. Can these phenomena be treated in the same way as mountains, forests, rivers and oceans? The music in this album, although often powerful, is never distant or intimidating. Rather it shares the same welcoming warmth of other string quartets by Adams, inspired by the conventional natural world. Waves and Particles makes a strong case that we need to embrace the totality of nature, even down to its elemental particles.
The JACK Quartet is:
Christopher Otto, violin Austin Wulliman, violin John Richards, viola Jay Campbell, cello
Waves and particles is available directly from Cold Blue Music and from US retailers by Naxos and other music outlets.
NEW YORK – The Manhattan Choral Ensemble is an auditioned forty-voice group. Among them are enthusiastic amateurs, professional singers who want to work with Director Thomas Cunningham, who is a dynamic musician and imaginative programmer, and singers from music-adjacent pursuits, notably musical theater. A diverse group to be sure, but they sing beautifully together.
The main offering on their May concert program was by Tomas Luis de Victoria (1548-1611), his Requiem Mass, published in 1605. Victoria was chaplain in Madrid to Empress Maria, and the piece was written for her funeral in 1603. It is one of the most highly regarded works of the late Renaissance.
MCE performed both the chant and polyphonic portions of the mass, impressively tuned in unison passages and counterpoint alike. Cunningham took tempos realistic for a forty-voice group. At the same time, he urged them to sing in animated fashion, crafting a rendition of the Requiem that retained a sense of period practice.
Recognizing that his audience came to the concert with varying levels of background, Cunningham introduced the Requiem with a brief overview. Between sections, he discussed the piece, pointing out aspects of the music to listen for and features of its text. It was an excellent way to help attendees listen to a piece in liturgical Latin, and in a style that may have been foreign to some of them.
The program included a few other pieces interspersed with movements of the Requiem. While including texts that were appropriate additions, this afforded listeners a pause from Victoria’s musical language. Beati quorum via, by Charles Villiers Stanford (1852-1924), is broken into sections of women and men in canon that then come together in sumptuous harmonies. The piece affords the sopranos an opportunity to sing in soaring upper lines, and the other parts each to access their best respective registers, the conclusion saving and savoring the low basses.
Abendlied by Josef Gabriel Rheinberger (1839-1901) is a gently lyrical piece using short imitative exchanges that alternate with homophonic passages and cadences redolent of late Romanticism. The concert concluded with In Paradisum, by Z. Randall Stroope (b. 1953), which is dedicated, “In honor of the victims of the coronavirus pandemic, and the thousands of families left behind.” A touching composition in a colorful pantonal language with rich dynamic contrasts, including swelling crescendos and gently reflective pianissimo passages. This was followed by a brief Responsorium in plainchant. The additions to the program demonstrated the versatility of MCE, capable of performing early music, emotive Romantic fare, and a challenging twenty-first century piece.
Visual art is often featured as part of the group’s presentations. Allison Walker created beautiful, abstract prints that were placed around the performance space, illuminating each of the movements of the Requiem. Art, music, and an interspersed lecture all served to support a memorable performance by the Manhattan Choral Ensemble.
Nancy Galbraith has taught for a number of years at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. During that time, she has created a body of compelling orchestral works. Colorfully scored and post-minimal in approach, Galbraith’s music has received prominent performances but been relatively underserved on recording. As a corrective, Boston Modern Orchestra Project, conducted by Gil Rose, has recorded for BMOPsound three of her concertos, all written in the past eight years.
Violin Concerto No. 1 (2017) was premiered by its soloist here, Alyssa Wang, with the Carnegie Mellon Contemporary Ensemble. In the liner notes, Galbraith says that the piece was waiting for a talent like Wang with whom to collaborate. While it is surprising that it took the composer this long to create a violin concerto – she has written well for strings in the past – the piece is an important one in her catalog, in which she explores an abiding interest – Asian music.
The first movement employs the sliding tone and rotating pentatonic scales found in Chinese music. Alongside it is a riff using the same scalar elements but with a blues scale cast. The soloist remains in the world of Asia, while the ensemble traverses the musical distance between Beijing and the Bayou, particularly in the piano part and the movement’s final cadence. There is even a snatch in the middle of a Gershwin-like sauntering dance. The second movement, subtitled “Eggshell White Night,” inhabits an impressionist sound world, the solo intermingling with flute, harp, and an exotic theme in the strings and brass. It underscores the connection between French music at the turn of the twentieth century and the incorporation of non-Western materials.
The last movement intersperses short arcing cadenzas and perpetual motion passages with another theme using five-note scales in the strings. As the piece progresses, harp, chimes, and wind chords are added to the mix. The violin soloist plays modal arpeggiations against polyrhythms in the orchestra, then a final cadenza, beginning slowly with double-stops and building to an emphatic flourish. The orchestra rejoins, presenting the theme against a final scalar passage that closes the piece in the stratosphere. Here as elsewhere, Wang does a superb job balancing virtuosity and expressivity, creating a thoughtful and ebullient reading of the concerto that befits its heterogeneous identity.
Lindsey Goodman is the soloist in Galbraith’s Concerto for Flute and Orchestra (2019). The opening sets up metric transformations and mixed meters in bongos and other drums, and Goodman soon enters with a syncopated solo that serves as the theme for the movement. Her tone, even in the highest portions of the melody, is rich and dynamically nuanced. Chords in the strings and mallet instruments accompany a second melody, bifurcated into oscillations and arpeggiations. Repeated notes move the piece into a brisk section completed by a cadenza with a series of special effects. The main theme returns to complete the movement.
The second movement features chimes and imitation between the strings and the flute solo. It is an elegant combination of exoticism and pastoral effect. Eventually, the flute is joined in a contrapuntal version of its solo and then a ground bass in the strings that lead into another cadenza passage, this one using standard techniques with off-kilter phrasing. The chimes, other pitched percussion, and a registrally dispersed version of the string chords accompany a denouement in the soloist and winds. The final movement is a moto perpetuo redolent of South Asian rhythms and melodic elements. Once again, the bongos provide a strong groove that is soon replicated rhythmically by the flute in flurries of arpeggios. The soloist remains in the foreground, with harp and pizzicato strings joining. The tempo downshifts a bit and a muscular passage of string melodies and overblown flute is accompanied by clangorous percussion. A final cadenza brings the music to a boil, with a racing tutti passage accompanying the flute playing fleet arpeggios and an altissimo octave leap to conclude.
Everything Flows: Concerto for Solo Percussion and Orchestra, is an ideal showcase for the talented percussionist Abby Langhorst. Syncopated, jazz-inflected riffs include an Aeolian theme that serves as a refrain between solo breaks and appears fragmented elsewhere. An electric guitar adds to the vernacular quality of the orchestration. The percussionist plays a number of non-pitched instruments, including a plethora of different-sized drums, woodblock, brake drums, and cymbals. They embellish the refrain rhythms by successively troping it and adding contrasting polyrhythms. The percussionist also gets their own chance to play the refrain in glockenspiel passages. There is an oasis in the midst of the work, with the soloist undertaking a lyrical melody on vibraphone. The departure from it slowly rebuilds from small solo passages in several of the winds and then a subdued major key ground that adds vibraphone, guitar, and double bass. As this floats away, the final theme is announced by quick lines on the marimba. This is a feint, as we return to the earlier ambience. A chiming solo passage, accompanied by alto flute and sustained strings, is belatedly succeeded by a return to the uptempo riff on woodblock and a fortissimo cadenza of toms, bass drum, and, finally, the entire fleet of drums at the soloist’s disposal. The main theme returns in an artful division into the various sections in swinging counterpoint. The soloist buoys the ensemble with the groove from his final cadenza, the piece ending in a fortissimo tutti.
Galbraith’s recent concertos are expert creations. Abetted by abundantly talented soloists and the skilful advocacy and playing of BMOP under Rose, this release is highly recommended.
On February 1, 2024, sadfam records released Stained Glass, a new album of experimental electronic ambient music by Los Angeles-based keyboardist Steve Blum. Inspired by the glasswork at the Zionskirche in Berlin, this album is “…where the past and future intersect: destruction and creation, ostentation and modesty, reactionaryism and progressivism.“ Minimalist in structure with a variety of electronic and ambient sounds, Stained Glass skillfully blends technology with the art of music.
Forest is the first track of the album and has a bright, bouncy piano line to open. The notes sparkle like rain drops as a countermelody is heard in the middle register. A low, twangy guitar line weaves its way in and around the others. This results in a nice groove with all the elements balanced and working together. About halfway through, a slower section of bass tones dominates as the piano lines recede into the smooth overall texture. Forest has an energy and variety that uplifts and refreshes. Towards the finish the tempo slows as the sounds diminish and thin out to a quiet ending.
Kinetic, track 2, opens with solitary beeps in a simple melody, soon joined by other lines that form a bubbly, playful groove. This has a strongly percussive texture – a bit like being inside a pin ball machine. About halfway through, the rhythms start to unravel and no longer seem to be following the same beat. There is a rising sense of disorder but this soon recovers back into a steady beat before fading to the finish. Kinetic is both an elemental and lovely piece.
Track 3 is Dialogue and this opens with a strong beat in a repeated, syncopated knocking sound. Aggressive and only minimally melodic, electronic beeps soon join in to form a swirl of new, higher lines. Different rhythms appear with strange sounds, some of which are reminiscent of music by Weather Report. The knocking continues independently, as if in a dialog with a call but no response. There is an intriguing, mysterious feeling to Dialogue.
At just a little over two minutes in length, the shortest piece of the album is Interlude, track 4,. This has a nice rolling beat in the middling registers with some lovely rhythms above. There is a sunny and optimistic feeling to this as well as a sense of roiling purpose. The texture becomes broken and sketchy as the short existence of Interlude dissembles at the finish. Acting as a kind of bookend is Postlude, another short piece that concludes the album on track 10. This is solo piano music with a gentle and melodic opening, conventional harmony as well as a warm romantic feeling. Not fast or flashy but quiet and thoughtful – a perfect way to end Stained Glass.
Reflection, track 5, is the longest piece on the album and features vocalist Kathryn Shuman. In fact, according to the composer “…every sound on track 5 is from a sample of Kathryn’s voice, re-pitched and edited.” This opens with a long series of electronic beeps and boops that are sometimes in harmony and sometimes dissonant. The sounds pulse rapidly through different registers and seem very much like signaling. There is a lot of energy here, partly electronic and partly vocal. Yet overall these elements blend together into a coherent texture. Bubbly and welcoming at times while strident and alien at other times. Ms. Shuman’s vocals are both agile and highly creative, mixing well amid the swirl of sounds.
At about 5:45 lower and warmer sounds are heard underneath in two different lines. This has an organic and exotic feel that could be a conversation in a foreign language; perhaps a discussion between life forms? A low vocal gesture finishes the piece. Reflection is engaging and animated throughout.
Puristic follows on track 6 with sharp, single electronic notes accompanied by a bass beat. This has a distinctly percussive and explosive feel, like listening to popcorn. Several interleaving lines enter and fade with repeating figures. An altogether happy sound, upbeat and sunny. As the piece proceeds, the lines wander in their rhythms evoking the other-worldly before returning to a more coherent texture. Puristic is joyful yet precise music.
Uncle, track 7, opens with an intense all percussion sound. The rhythms syncopate briefly then return, developing into a nice groove. This has a primal feel with a strong beat and inviting texture. Some rapid drumming adds to the energy of Uncle, an inventive piece that gets a lot out of its mix of percussion. The next track, Idyllic, also has a strong percussive presence, combined with a smooth electronic melody line that is nicely offset by counterpoint below. Idyllic rolls along with different lines moving around but always giving off a sweetly contented vibe.
Ocean, track 9, follows, opening smoothly with a gentle but deliberate tempo. A simple piano line arcs over over sustained chords in strings. The slow rising and falling of the dynamic evokes a calm ocean, and the warm harmonic undercurrents produce a quiet, reflective ambiance. Ocean is always at ease as it drifts along, free of tension or anxiety, a beautiful piece of music.
Stained Glass successfully combines alluring and colorful electronics with minimalist rhythmic energy. Steve Blum’s music is exotic, but not alien, and at the same time it is agreeably familiar in its emotional intention.
Stained Glass is available for digital download at Bandcamp.
Pianist Jeffrey Kahane with The Knights (credit Jennifer Taylor)
It’s always a family affair with The Knights. The orchestra was founded in 2007 by the brothers Eric and Colin Jacobsen, who share artistic director duties as well as musical positions (Eric is conductor; Colin is concertmaster). Another family connection on the May 16, 2024 program at Carnegie’s Zankel Hall was that of the soloist, the pianist Jeffrey Kahane, for whom his son Gabriel Kahane wrote a concerto. Heirloom, a work which explores music through the lens of several generations of Kahane’s family, received its New York premiere at this concert. Its conventional three-movemennt construct and post-Shostakovich style fit right in with 21st century classical music – especially of the ilk that The Knights often features on its programs. The pianist Jeffrey Kahane was as virtuosic a player as when he burst onto the classical music scene in the early 1980’s as a finalist of the Van Cliburn Piano Competition. He flew through the complex rhythms and flashy runs musically and compellingly, every note a joy to hear. In the first section, “Guitars in the Attic,” G. Kahane explored the colors of the orchestra, from the shining brass to a florid section highlighting double reeds to a whimsical melody played by marimba.
The emotionally penetrating middle movement, “My Grandmother Knew Alban Berg,” alludes to Gabriel’s grandmother’s love for German music and culture contrasting with the terrors of Nazi Germany from which she narrowly escaped. The movement began with a languid trumpet solo in a duet with the piano, and I’m guessing that the solo piano melody was a tone-row (a compositional element at the core of Berg’s style). The center section includes a dense “Brahmsian” theme with a German flair.
The composer looks at life through the eyes of his young daughter in the final movement. “Vera’s Chicken-Powered Transit Machine” (the title refers to a makeshift toy crafted out of an empty diaper carton) included fiddling strings, a playful wood block and muted staccato trumpet. The work’s kickass conclusion was predictable, but that didn’t make it any less thrilling.
Singer-songwriter-composer-guitarist Gabriel Kahane with The Knights (credit Jennifer Taylor)
The younger Kahane is more known as a singer-songwriter than as a composer of concert music. He has a compelling voice, both aurally and figuratively. The audience at Zankel was treated to two of his songs, both with the composer as vocalist and electric guitarist, accompanied by The Knights with Mr. Kahane, Sr. at the piano. Where Are the Arms was on the program immediately following Heirloom; and Little Love was a touching encore at the end of the concert.
The program opened with Rhapsody No. 2, a work by Jessie Montgomery heard for the first time in this version for violin and orchestra created by Michi Wiancko. The violinist Colin Jacobsen was the soloist, in complete command of the fiddle techniques that this colorful work required. With Copelandesque chords and jazzy rhythms, the work’s style was unequivocally “American”.
Cellist Karen Ouzounian with The Knights (credit Jennifer Taylor)
A sumptuous work for cello and strings by Anna Clyne led the second half of the concert. Soloist Karen Ouzounian, a member of The Knights cello section, displayed her gorgeous singing tone on Shorthand, a beautifully lush composition. Clyne’s melodies reference Beethoven’s “Kreutzer” Sonata and Janacek’s String Quartet No. 1, “Kreutzer Sonata.”
The Knights turned to a crowd pleasing and familiar Mozart symphony, No. 31, “Paris”, at the end of the program. The group’s beautiful performance, oozing with musicality, precision and effective dynamic contrast proved their facility with core repertoire as well as newly minted gems.
This was the final concert of the ensemble’s three-program series at Carnegie this season. They’ll return to the Zankel stage for three concerts in the 2024-2025 season, with performances on October 24, February 20, and May 15.
Composer and conductor Richard Baker (b. 1972) has been an important fixture on the British new music scene for over a decade. While The Tyranny of Fun refers to a work on the recording, it also could be seen as an analog for Baker’s mixture of fierceness and whimsy in many of his pieces. He had the right teacher – Louis Andriessen at the Hague – to develop this sort of emotional dichotomy in his work. He has also championed composers like Gerald Barry and Philip Venables, who both walk an eclectic tightrope in their respective oeuvres.
The recording opens with Baker playing Crank, a brief piece for a diatonic music box that emphasizes playful delicacy. Made out of material from Andriessen, it in no way sounds like a student work. Crank is immediately followed by the far more forceful Motet II, an instrumental work (note the paradox), played by the contemporary ensemble CHROMA, conducted by the composer. Cast in six movements, Motet II is Baker’s Covid piece: like so many others, he was confined to his home during the worst of the pandemic, responding with a work that stretched his language to a viscerality that is both challenging and moving.
The title piece was commissioned by the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, conducted on the recording by Finnegan Downie Dear and adorned with live electronics by Nye Parry. The concept of fun as tyranny resonates with the endless birthday parties and children’s activities that a friend of Baker’s, who coined the phrase, meant. One can also look at it as the exhausting approach to consumption and the relentless pursuit of faux connectivity through electronic devices that has plagued our era.
The first movement’s refrain is a pulsating bass drum, reminiscent of a car driving past with a thunderous subwoofer engaged. Horn solos and low harp are juxtaposed with Stravinskyian terse melodies from flutes and piccolo. It is night music for an oversaturated urban landscape. In the second movement, low winds provide a minor third ostinato while strings deploy descending glissandos and pizzicatos, and brass undertake short blasts. The electronics are more prominent with cascades of chords and blurting melodies. The bass drum effect appears at particular points, this time accompanied by a syncopated, jazz-inspired arrangement. The low winds morph from interval to a swinging riff that is regularly interrupted by synthesizer in a modernist vein. The percussion is filled out to make a bespoke kit to accompany the arrangement. Partway through, fragments of the aforementioned are juxtaposed, often alternating rapidly. Learning to Fly finishes with a slow drag groove, followed by an accelerando, ending with the thrumming bass drum and two cymbal strikes.
Angelus is a finely textured piece for the percussionist group Three Angels. Chimes reminiscent of the Angelus bells – a Sunday night tradition in Ireland – and pitched percussion are built over a staggered eighth note rhythm. In its latter half, shifts of instrumentation and accentuation provide surprising moments in this otherwise quite subdued work. It closes with chiming, leaving us to the contemplation of the Angelus experience.
Learning to Fly is a three-movement piece for BCMG, once again conducted by Dear. It is Baker’s music appearing as totalist in style, with the first movement featuring basset clarinet, played by Oliver Janes and horn solos (the latter playing a blues scale), a Downtown groove from the percussion, repeated notes in the winds, and Hammond organ stabs. Marked “Boisterously,” it behaves as advertised. A raucous set of horn calls and high flutes in an ever-quickening accelerando closes the first movement, which leads attacca into the next, marked “Somnolent.” Janes plays a mysterious solo that is accompanied by pitched percussion and high flutes (mimicking their previous lines). Lurching winds and sustained harmony end the second movement pianissimo. A slap attack announces the last movement, subtitled “Suddenly Awake,” succeeded by a repeated-note filled solo from Janes accompanied by puckish percussion. Tutti chords and then horn solos are both added to the solo plus percussion cohort. Bass drum, cymbals and tutti brass overtake the proceedings in stentorian fashion. In the midst, the basset clarinet emerges, supported by the other members of the wind cohort. A slow horn solo and chimes announce a change in section in which the basset clarinet plays throat tones and then a high melody of oscillating seconds accompanied by whistle rods. This enigmatic conclusion is suddenly terminated with a forte triangle attack. Learning to Fly is a substantial work that demonstrates Baker’s formidable capabilities as an imaginative orchestrator with a keen sense of pacing.
The late Sir Stephen Cleobury conducts the Choir of King’s College in one of Baker’s relatively few choral works, To Keep a True Lent. This setting is of a fascinating poem by Robert Herrick, which discusses that a fast based on spiritual contemplation is more important than abstaining from meat during Lent; a forward-thinking theological text. Repeating dyads and trichords create a canvas for the melody, which ricochets from part to part rapidly, with textual utterances equally quicksilver in their presentation. Its brusque post-minimalism suits the demands of the texts and is performed by King’s with impressive diction and intonation.
Homagesquisse and Hwyl fawr ffrindiau close the recording with two short works, again for BCMG conducted by Dearie. The first was written for a 2008 visit by Pierre Boulez to receive an honorary doctorate from the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire. It is a trope of Boulez’s Messagesquisse, containing brief excerpts from the piece and a similar hexachordal construction. Beyond that, Baker remains steadfast to his own compositional predilections, with pervasive shifts of dynamics and musical material that accumulate into a prismatic whole. The second, its title in Welsh befitting Baker’s own background and where he currently lives, is a translation of the children’s song “Goodbye Friends” (which is “Goodnight Ladies” outside of Wales). Baker himself trained as an oboist and this valedictory piece features the instrument. The farewell was to Jackie and Stephen Newbould, who served as Executive Producer and Artistic Director of BCMG, and were stepping down from their roles. Descending lines, including glissandos, in the oboe are then ghosted by other winds. The piano plays a prominent role, both in supporting the others with ground bass and chordal harmonies, and in a brief interlude that recalls the childrens’ song. The ensemble halts, leaving only a pianissimo descending minor third in the marimba to finish this artfully touching work.
The Tyranny of Fun is a generous sampling of Baker’s music, which is some of the most compelling written by his generation of British composers. BCMG performs with consummate skill and musicality. This is one of my favorite CDs thus far in 2024.
Composer and multi-instrumentalist David Crowell has minimalist bona fides: he played in the Philip Glass Ensemble for nearly a decade. But Crowell draws from a number of traditions in his work: prog rock, jazz, folk, and other contemporary classical idioms. His latest, Point/Cloud, features works for percussion, guitars, and a moving finale for voice, cello, and Crowell’s instrumentation.
Sandbox Percussion performs Verses for a Liminal Space. At nearly a quarter of an hour, it shows Crowell’s keen sense of pacing. He conceives of the piece as being cast in three verses. There is a totalist ambience to its opening, with forceful drums combined with pitched percussion to rousing effect. The middle of work is a beautiful slow section. The drums gradually recede to only articulating emphasized beats, and then fall into silence. Pitched percussion arpeggiations and a repeated semitone form a ground that gradually adds melodic content and bowed crotales. Shimmering glockenspiel transitions the work back to the fast tempo, with cascading riffs in the xylophone and the drums gradually returning, first just to accentuate and then to provide hemiola as metric undergirding. The pitched percussion likewise engages in metric transformations. Just when it seems that things are about to heat up, Verses suddenly ends, denying expectations. This is a common feature of Crowell’s music, and it reminds me of Schumann’s Papillions, where each movement feels like entering and exiting a room. The door closes and the sound world changes.
The title work for overdubbed guitars is played by Dan Lippel. Cast in three movements, it begins with a classical guitar solo that is soon joined by electric guitars in cascading repetitions and arpeggiated harmonies. The influence of Electric Counterpoint is clear. Crowell, however, also incorporates prog rock elements reminiscent of Steve Howe and Steve Hackett, particularly in the supple middle movement. However, in the final movement polyrhythmic ostinatos return the music to the orbit of Steve Reich. Lippel plays all the various components of this considerable challenging work with precision, employing a variety of timbres and dynamic shadings.
Lippel is joined by another guitar virtuoso, Mak Grgic, on the classical guitar duo Pacific Coast Highway. Once again, polyrhythms are omnipresent, and there is a sense of jazz and flamenco à la the Al Di Meola, John McLaughlin, and Pace de Lucia Friday Night in San Francisco album. The playing is authoritative, nuanced, and propulsive.
Vocalist and cellist Iva Casian-Lakoš collaborates with Crowell on the final piece, 2 Hours in Zadar. The work contrasts with the rhythmic effervescence of the previous three, moving at a slow tempo and exploring gradually evolving textures. The text is by Casian-Lakoš’s mother, Nela Lakoš. The piece begins with a sample of Nela Lakoš speaking Croatian. Casian-Lakoš plays shards of tunes and glissandos, singing with an exquisite fragility. Crowell’s sustained electronics and frequent wide glissandos, some manipulated samples of the voice, ghost the singing and cello lines, creating a compound melodic framework that is both colorful and vulnerable in presentation. Crowell hews closer to Sigur Rós than the influences found in the previous pieces. It provides the program with a touching valediction. Point/Cloud is uniformly excellent, a recording that is among my favorites thus far in 2024.
On Saturday, May 4th, 2024 the Ventura College Department of Performing Arts presented Ad Astra, a concert by the Symphony Orchestra and Chamber Orchestra. The program had something for everyone: the US Premiere of a new chamber work by Mark Menzies, a Shostakovich string quartet, part of a Prokofiev violin concerto featuring soloist Alex Fager and a full-bodied Star Wars suite for orchestra. A sizable audience filled Yunker Auditorium in the VC Performing Arts Center and the musicians completely covered the roomy stage.
The concert opened with the US premiere of Wai-rā-rawa, by Mark Menzies. This piece was inspired by the creation story of the Māori, the indigenous peoples of New Zealand. Mark Menzies was violin faculty for some years at CalArts and also a member of the Los Angeles-based Formalist Quartet. He now resides in New Zealand and is Professor of Music at the University of Canterbury. Menzies worked with the VC Chamber Orchestra on his piece during a recent visit to California. For this performance, the Chamber Orchestra was led by guest conductor Donovan Rutledge, a Ventura College alumnus.
Wai-rā-rawa opens with sustained chords that slowly unfold and develop an interesting texture. As the opening continues, the chords become somewhat disorganized and dissonant, perhaps suggesting the dark and formless beginnings of the earth. The music has a slightly eerie feel, but is never disheartening; it is solemn yet at the same time filled with a gentle reverence. An expressive violin solo is heard featuring a high, sustained pitch that adds to the uncertain atmosphere. As the piece proceeds, deep tutti chords with multiple harmonies materialize like clouds. Towards the finish, soft pianissimo notes are followed by broken rhythms at the ending. This music is distinguished by subtle rhythms, intriguing harmonies and textures, all smoothly directed by Donovan Rutledge. Wai-rā-rawa is both mysterious and wistful with perfect balance for describing the primal creation.
The second work on the program was String Quartet No. 8 in C minor (1960), by Dmitri Shostakovich, also performed by the chamber orchestra. For this concert the parts were doubled, with two instruments on each. The opening Lento movement was appropriately grim, with all of the repression of the old Soviet system seeming to weigh it down. There was good coordination and intonation among the players, however, with no uncertainty among the sections. The transitions to the faster Allegro and Allegretto movements were successfully negotiated; the violas were especially well-coordinated. The delicate textures in the dance-like segments were nicely observed, with some tension slyly creeping in.
The final Lento movements brought a return to the more severe feeling of the opening as strong tutti chords turned darkly dramatic. The players kept good control of the dynamics in all of the movements and also in the final decrescendo at the finish. String Quartet No. 8 is essential late Shostakovich, with all of his characteristic gloominess during this period fully evoked by skillful playing in this performance.
After a short intermission, the full Ventura College Symphony Orchestra took their places, filling the entire stage. The Andantino movement of Sergei Prokofiev’s Violin Concerto No. 1 in D Major, Op. 110 (1923) was next, with soloist Alex Fager. He is the winner of this year’s Allegro Solo Competition, open to musicians of all ages residing in Ventura County. This piece began with soft tremolos in the orchestra violin section, followed by a strong entrance from the soloist with a slow, expressive melody. As the phrasing became more active, Fager’s sound came across with a clear tone that reached out above the orchestra to fill the hall. As the movement proceeded, the mood turned stylish and lyrical, so characteristic of Prokofiev’s music. Fager’s skillful technique kept his violin in the foreground, even as variations in tempo, dynamics and texture rapidly changed. Towards the finish, the solo violin and flute played in a tricky counterpoint, with great effect. The movement then ended as quietly as it had begun. Violin Concerto No. 1 has a challenging variety of musical gestures in the Andantino movement and soloist Fager capably led the way throughout.
Although it was May the fourth and very appropriate, I will admit that I was a bit apprehensive about the last work on the concert program, the Star Wars Suite for Orchestra (1977) by John Williams. Star Wars is so overexposed that it has become something of a cultural cliché. An orchestra performing such a familiar piece runs the risk of disappointing its audience. This is big, sprawling music with five movements that include the themes that composer Williams has so artfully woven into this signature masterwork. The piece is full of challenges; there are many transitions to be navigated as the various leitmotifs are passed around between the sections. As the orchestra got going, the sounds and entrances of the various sections sharpened up nicely. Dynamics ranged from the barely audible to full blastissimo, and the orchestra fought successfully to maintain good balance. The string sections benefited from being at the front of the stage and provided solid support. The horns managed to be clearly heard from the very back of the risers during their important solos.
Vigorous applause was heard between each of the movements, and the orchestra seemed to build on the growing enthusiasm. The “Imperial March” was perhaps the most popular, with its full sound and driving beat. At the conclusion of the last movement, a long and loud standing ovation was given by the now-cheering crowd. Star Wars Suite for Orchestra might be a bit of a war horse, but the music still has surprising power when played by a live orchestra in a concert hall.
A good part of the credit for this fine performance by the Ventura College Symphony Orchestra must go to Director Ashley Walters. Her conducting style is everything a player wants: an unmistakable beat, precise cues and decisive dynamics. Walters adds no superfluous movements or theatrical histrionics, and her clarity of purpose brings real leadership to the podium. Walters undoubtedly carried this same focus and energy into rehearsal, and the result was an outstanding concert of compelling music.
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.
Percussion layout for Berio: Circles
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”.
JACK Quartet’s Austin Wulliman at Spotlight: George Crumb with violin, maraca and crystal glass (photo: Carlin Ma)
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.
George Crumb: Makrokosmos I
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).
Emerald City Music’s Ji Hye Jung and Jordan Dodson perform Mundus Canis (photo: Carlin Ma)
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.
Oboist, composer, and electronic musician Kyle Bruckmann is a dedicated advocate for contemporary concert music. One of the founding members of Splinter Reeds, he currently plays in a number of ensembles in the San Francisco Bay area, including sfSound, San Francisco Contemporary Players, and the Stockton Symphony. Bruckann teaches oboe and contemporary music at University of the Pacific.
On his latest recording, Bruckmann programs a number of pieces that incorporate wildly challenging extended techniques and, in some, electronics. Bruckmann’s own Proximity, Affect features the latter, as well as deconstructed instruments. Thrumming bass and harmonics derived from it, succeeded by scraps of bleeps, bespoke instrumental interjections, and white noise open the work. Gradually, a bass passage an octave higher is introduced, along with a steady stream of repetitions. It is distressed by snippets of the middle’s material. The big bass returns only to have its ostinato hijacked by a percussive variant.
Jessie Cox’s AT(ou)M is a festival of multiphonics, microtones, and altissimo register playing. Its concept is the exploration of resonant spaces. The reverb imparted to the oboe attacks makes a point of this. Its concomitant idea is the exploration of the silences between attacks as they decay. This is an important component, as it invites the listener to hear the piece as more than its sounds, to experience slices of time with minimal transitions. Cox is a thoughtful composer, and AT(ou)M is a signature example of this. Here, as elsewhere, Bruckmann displays consummate technical skill, even in the most challenging elements of the score.
Hannah A. Barnes samples the oboe, put through a vocoder, and uses this material for the electronics part of Dis/inte/gration. The title is a good clue, as the piece begins with the foundational gesture of the tuning pitch, gradually moving away from it in sinuous scalar passages and angular leaps. The electronics arrive and begin to augment the proceedings with sounds that range from low octave grumbles to a choir of oboe glissandos. Its conclusion is described by Barnes as, “exacting change, and forcing the material to collapse in on itself, a ‘bacteria of voices.’”
Helen Grime used to be an oboist herself, and Arachne (spider) displays her familiarity with the instrument, particularly in her awareness of how note choices and the use of various fingerings abet artful lines. The piece has an incantatory quality, with beguiling ascending runs and cascades of trills – all seeming to weave a web of modernist counterpoint. An insistent upper note becomes an idée fixe, only to dissolve in the piece’s denouement.
Drop by Linda Bouchard, for solo improviser and electronics, starts off with howling high notes, soon to be followed by water sounds: droplets, waves, and ice breaking, which are juxtaposed with terse rejoinders from the oboe. In one of the best moments, fleet runs directly respond to the flurries of rainwater in the electronics. Drop is an example of an organic use of sampling, and Bruckmann’s response to the recorded sounds is well-considered and abundantly chops-laden.
Christopher Burns prefers to work closely with the interpreters’ of his music, creating a personal, collaborative experience as part of a composition’s gestation. The Mutiny of Rivers is written for EKG, Bruckmann’s duo with electronics musician Ernst Karel. Karel usually employs analog electronics, while Burns works in the digital domain. The composer combines both of these, and Bruckmann plays English horn, playing both composed and improvisatory passages. This agglomeration of elements proves to be the best of all worlds, with Karel’s analog instruments, typifying EKG’s “slowly unfolding textures and timbral nuances,” and Burns’s digital “spiky and multi-layered aesthetic,” combine in an intricate sound palette of microtones, timbral variety, and glissandos. Bruckmann, in turn, uses an instrument with additional low notes, yet plays in the altissimo register with aplomb.
Burns also intends The Mutiny of Rivers to contain puzzles and even traps. One is that he gives Karel six tracks of sampled audio to use, some of which may be chopped or suppressed in performance. With versatile approaches and abundant aleatory, one can readily hear this as a playfully earnest way to provide a measure of trapeze walk to the piece. Burns cites Luigi Nono’s La Lontananza Nostalgica Utopica Futura as a totem work and although The Mutiny of Rivers contains its own panoply of sounds, the shared intent is manifest.
Bruckmann’s of rivers is a formidable and satisfying recording, one of my favorites thus far in 2024.
