Tag: Another Timbre

Canada, CD Review, Contemporary Classical, File Under?, Piano

Martin Arnold – Flax (CD Review)

Martin Arnold 

Flax

Kerry Yong, piano

Another Timbre

 

Martin Arnold’s solo piano work Flax has a sad backstory. It was originally commissioned by the abundantly talented new music pianist Philip Thomas, who shortly afterward became seriously ill and was unable to premiere the work. Kerry Yong performs the piece in his honor on an Another Timbre CD. The piece was already well underway when this transpired, but one cannot hear the considerable poignancy and elegant gracefulness of Flax without connecting it to Thomas’s loss of health. 

 

Arnold is a Canadian composer whose work is influenced by Morton Feldman and the Wandelweiser Collective. Feldman is a nexus between Arnold and Thomas, whose recordings of Feldman’s complete piano music are superlative. Flax, at over eighty minutes in duration and in a slow tempo throughout, is certainly reminiscent of the aforementioned influences. However, when creating Flax, Arnold also had other considerations to ponder. In the CD’s program note essay, we learn  that Thomas had mentioned to Arnold that the composer’s use of the upper register had made the pianist rethink it. Thus, Flax prioritizes the top two octaves of the piano. When writing the piece, Arnold was also considering bebop and early modern jazz, how there are dissonances added to the changes that create harmonic ambiguity. The first two thirds of Flax use extended verticals garnered from this practice. The ending section of the piece returns to modality and organum, both aspects of much of Arnold’s other music. 

Thelonious Monk’s voicings and Feldman-esque delicate slowness are an interesting mix. The placement of much of the music in the upper register also reframes the harmony. Until nearly halfway through, when a bass note appears, it feels like an event. At that point, there begins to be a duet between diminished chords and bass notes in the left hand and slow motion bop in the right. 

 

Kerry Yong is a persuasive interpreter of Flax, with a detailed approach to dynamics and phrasing that punctuates distinctive registral spaces in the music. Voicing of the harmony is a pivotal component of this piece, and it is where Yong truly excels, providing a sense of trajectory throughout.  

 

I don’t think that I have heard a Wandelweiser adjacent work that embodies anything close to this one. That said, Flax is a successful experiment from Arnold, stretching his language in surprising and appealing ways. Recommended.

 

-Christian Carey

 

by Christian Carey
Birthdays, Composers, Contemporary Classical, Experimental Music, File Under?

Happy Birthday Jürg Frey

Sequenza 21 is pleased to wish a Happy Seventieth Birthday to Jürg Frey. The Swiss composer has been a member of the wandelweiser collective since the 1990s, and his work exemplifies its aesthetic. For fifty years, Frey was also a well-regarded clarinetist.

 

We will celebrate with coverage of two of Frey’s recent recordings.

 

Borderland Melodies

Apartment House

Another Timbre

 

Apartment House has become something of an ensemble-in-residence for the Another Timbre label. The group revels in experimentation, taking special interest in living British composers, the New York School, and wandelweiser. Borderland Melodies includes three pieces featuring both clarinet and bass clarinet. Like much of his music, the compositions here explore “landscape,” not as a program, but as a musical vantage point. Thus, moment-to-moment events are organized in terms of long stretches in which rhythm, pacing, and harmony give a different sense of space. While discussing such intricate layers of sound, one cannot help but draw a parallel to the precision and thoughtfulness of Top casino’s zonder Cruks, platforms designed to provide a tailored gaming experience that adheres to the specific preferences of players while offering a sense of freedom and accessibility. The sound of the two clarinets together, played by Heather Roche and Raymond Brien, is lovely, perhaps serving as an homage to Frey’s own clarinet playing. In the title piece, they are accompanied by solitary piano notes and string harmonics. The idea of melody, while palpable throughout, is executed through compound melodies and attenuated Webernian utterances.

L’état de Simplicité is cast in four movements. Thrumming bass notes are offset by sustained pitches in movement one, Á la limiter du sens. Toucher l’air refers to the technique of vibrating the air moving through an instrument. The third movement features beguiling rearticulated verticals. The final movement, Les Zones neutres, juxtaposes pizzicatos with sustained winds, to which sometimes are added violin harmonics that make chords blossom. Moment, ground, fragility is a half hour long, shorter than some others of Frey’s pieces, but long enough to get a sense for how he deals with a big compositional canvas. There is a noticeable economy of means, with repeated pitches and intervals moving around one another like an orbital process. Percussion is part of the ensemble here, providing a slow tactus that, rather than feeling like a downbeat accent, is accompanied by isorhythmic structuring in the other instruments. Those who wish to start with a piece by Frey might consider Moment, ground, fragility as a point of entry.

 

Lieus d’ombres

3-CD box

Reinier van Houdt, piano

Elsewhere

 

“If I were a pianist, I would play my music like Reinier would play it.” — Jürg Frey

 

Frey has written a great deal of piano music. It has been performed by Dante Boon, Philip Thomas, and the pianist here, Reiner van Houdt. Lieus d’ombres was written over a long period of time, from 1984 to 2016. Yet the seven compositions are of a piece: Pianissimo, closely voiced verticals and single pitches that float at a slow and steady tempo. These are interspersed by section-punctuating silences. Changes in pacing then seem all the more significant. The language is primarily triadic, with shifts between pitch centers that retain the overall chordal spacings. It is a blissful listen.

 

-Christian Carey

 

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

John Tilbury Plays Terry Riley

Terry Riley

Keyboard Studies

John Tilbury, piano, harpsichord, celeste, and electric organ

Another Timbre

 

In addition to their impressive catalog of music of the moment, the past recordings that are uncovered and released by Another Timbre are frequently astonishing. This is certainly true of a recording of the great new music keyboardist John Tilbury playing three pieces by Terry Riley from 1965: Keyboard Study No. 1, Keyboard Study No. 2, and Dorian Reeds.  Written just after In C, these pieces are foundational as well, presenting the methods with which Riley would assemble solo work from patternings. Like In C, they do not have full scores, and their durations may vary. Dorian Reeds was originally written for saxophone with tape delay and is adapted here for electric organ. Tilbury is well known for his performance of New York School composers, Morton Feldman in particular, as well as his work as a free improviser. This is the first recording of him engaging with 1960s American minimalism.

 

The tapes from which this CD was made are from the late 1970s or early 1980s in Hamburg, with other details forgotten. They have weathered well, and provide an important link to that time period, in which American minimalism had begun to have a significant number of British and European interpreters. The 1980s would see minimalism capture English composers’ interest as well, with figures like Michael Nyman and Steve Martland creating distinctive repetition-based music.

 

Tilbury’s performance of Keyboard Study No. 1, played on the piano, clocks in at eighteen minutes. Like In C, a repeated pitch is a constant throughout. The piece features unraveling and returning patterns not dissimilar to Steve Reich’s phase pieces, with tasty secundal dissonances set against fourths and fifths and generally avoiding thirds. Gradually, it moves through all sorts of modal inflections and polyrhythms.

 

Keyboard Study No. 2 has the most elaborate instrumentation: piano, electric organ, harpsichord, and celeste. Over a half hour long, it is also the most expansive. Once again, scales and rhythms morph against a constantly repeating note. Here, the instrumentation brings out different parts of the patterning, the varied attack and sustain of the instruments allowing notes to become prominent or recede in the texture.

 

Dorian Reeds works well for organ, with intervallic oscillations and corruscating melodic gestures punctuated by repeated pitches. The organ registrations provide varied timbres for the piece’s motives, with more and more lines accumulating as the piece develops. Tilbury plays Dorian Reeds with tremendous dexterity. Here, as elsewhere, he delineates the counterpoint with deft touch. The original saxophone version is compelling, but this version is equally so. Recommended.

 

-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?

Two Wandelweiser Recordings (CD Review)

Sivan Silver-Swartz

Untitled 6

Wandelweiser CD EWR 1920

Nigel Dean, violin; Patrick Behnke, Tanner Pfeiffer, viola; Tal Katz, Julian Tedaldi, cello

 

Antoine Beuger

Jankélévich Sextets

Another Timbre CD at168

Apartment House – James Opstad, double bass; Mark Knoop, accordion; Heather Roche, bass clarinet; Mira Benjamin, violin; Joe Qiu, bassoon; Bridget Carey, viola

 

At twenty-eight years of age, Sivan Silver-Swartz is the youngest member of the Wandelweiser collective. A native of Ohio, he received his undergraduate degree at Oberlin College and then relocated to California to get his Master’s at CalArts. He has remained in Los Angeles since getting his degree in 2019.

 

Silver-Swartz’s work fits in well with the interest of Wandelweiser composers in the New York School, notably late pieces by John Cage and Morton Feldman. Six of his string player friends perform Untitled 6, an hourlong piece that takes its cue from the slow, soft music Feldman favored and that Cage adopted in his Number Pieces. Silver-Swartz pursues a quasi-aleatoric device in the score, with one chart of events that “change and do not return” and one of events that “change but do return.” The design of the events structure is the composer’s, but it gives the musicians considerable latitude in realization. There is a fair bit of overlap and harmonic presentation in Untitled 6 and the tuning reveals overtones from just intonation. The pace is steady and gradual, sumptuously so.

 

Antoine Beuger is one of founding members of Wandelweiser. From 2003-2005, he wrote a series of pieces, each for a different ensemble, that referenced cultural or intellectual figures in their titles, including Canto, Ockeghem, and Tschirtner; these three have all appeared on the label Another Timbre. The group Apartment House recorded the fourth in the series, Jankélévich Sextets, written for an interesting hybrid ensemble consisting of three strings (violin, viola, and double bass), bass clarinet, bassoon, and accordion. Vladimir Jankélévich (1903-1983) was a philosopher and musicologist. A French child of Russian-Jewish parents, he fought in the Resistance during the Second World War and later taught at the Sorbonne.

 

Jankélévich Sextets is also an hourlong piece that is primarily slow and soft. The performance instructions indicate that tones should be “very quiet; long to very long,” and that rests should give time to breathe or be much longer. Each pagelong section starts with a unison pitch in all voices (notes may be played in any octave) followed by an additional six pitches on each staff, with some repeated notes. Beuger indicates that the number of these sections used in a performance, as well as their ordering, is free.

 

Generally, the Sextets are, in this recording, presented in a thicker texture than that of Untitled 6. Given the freedom of ordering provided, the sense of trajectory alongside spontaneity is noteworthy. Octave displacements and freedom of pacing result in complex verticals, which are frequently fascinating. Arresting too are the places where simple intervals are given voice. For example, a multi-octave presentation just shy of twenty minutes in is a powerful point of arrival.

 

Neophytes who think that Wandelweiser pieces must all ‘sound the same,’ because of the affinity of its members’ aesthetic aims, would do well to compare these two works. They may be contained in similarly constructed vessels, but each has an individual character all its own. Kudos to the performers of both pieces for their tremendous attention to detail and keen sense of collaboration.

 

-Christian Carey

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

Marc Sabat and JACK – Harmony (CD)

 

Marc Sabat

Harmony

JACK Quartet

Canadian Composers Series #5

Another Timbre

 

Euler Spirals Scenery (2011), Claudiu Ptolemy (2008), Jean Philippe Rameau (2012)

 

A long time fixture on the Toronto scene as a string performer, improviser, and composer, Marc Sabat now resides in Berlin. However, he has taken his experimental penchant for tuning systems with him, writing in extended just intonation with a fluency that rivals Harry Partch and Ben Johnston’s own explorations of pitch. On the CD Harmony, JACK Quartet plays two quartets and a duo with rapt attention to the detailed nuances of Sabat’s pitch language and a keen sense of its corresponding flowing rhythms.

 

Euler Lattice Spirals Scenery (2011) is a five movement work that name checks various elements and personages of the intonation studies milieu. The first movement, Preludio, is subtitled “Les Quintes Justes” and it indeed does deal with sustained pure fifths in evocative fashion. Two of the movements, numbers two and five respectively, are titled Pythagoras Drawing. Movements three and four are each dedicated to a different composer who has been influential on Sabat; they are titled Harmonium for Claude Vivier and Harmonium for Ben Johnston. Each successive movement sends us a little further into the dark forest of dissonant overtones that accumulate on top of “Les Quintes Justes.” Thus, the entire piece can be seen as gradually revealing the compass of Sabat’s pitch palette.

 

Claudius Ptolemy (2008) is a duo, played by JACK violinist Christopher Otto and cellist Kevin McFarland (note: Jay Campbell now plays with the group). Open string double stops as well as dissonant intervals, harmonics, and ambling melodies combine in this adagio essay to make a fresh-sounding conglomeration of familiar playing techniques. The aforementioned “ambling affect” is one that Sabat shares with a number of his Canadian colleagues, not least Linda Catlin Smith, whose volume in the Canadian Composer Series (#1) appeared as a review here earlier in 2017. The final work on the Sabat CD is named after another important music theorist: Jean-Philippe Rameau (2012). Here the simultaneities are particularly fetching, with double-stops from multiple quartet members overlapping into beautiful chords. In one of his treatises( from 1737), Rameau struggled to describe the consonant and dissonant properties of just intonation: Sabat’s Rameau lays it out for all to hear with abundant clarity. 

 

by Christian Carey
Canada, CDs, Chamber Music, Composers, Contemporary Classical, Experimental Music, File Under?

Linda Catlin Smith on Another Timbre

Linda Catlin Smith

Drifter

Apartment House and Bozzini Quartet

Another Timbre at105X2

 

Born in the US and residing in Canada for more than a quarter century, Linda Catlin Smith has become a fixture on that country’s cultural radar. She has been welcomed and feted as one of Canada’s own. For instance, she is only the second woman to win the Jules Léger Prize for Chamber Music and has had a long association with the ensemble ArrayMusic, whom she served as Artistic Director. Several recordings have been released of her music, but last year’s Dirt Road won her critical acclaim and belated notice in the United States, ending up on many critics’ “best of year” lists (mine included). Released by Another Timbre, Dirt Road was merely a foretaste of that label’s commitment to Canadian music. Another Timbre has recently released a set of five recordings in its Canadian Composers series (another batch of five is due later this year).  Catlin Smith features prominently, with the double disc Drifter serving as Volume 1 in the series. Other composers include Martin Arnold, Isiah Ceccarelli, Chlyoko Szlavnics, and Marc Sabat.

 

Drifter’s program is performed by two chamber groups: Apartment House and Bozzini Quartet. The “drifting” in question is not itinerant hitchhiking, but rather the placid tempo pathways frequently chosen by Catlin Smith. The piano trio Far from Shore, played here by Philip Thomas, Anton Lukiszevieze, and Mira Benjamin,  is a case in point. Slow, soft music for the trio, often reminiscent of Morton Feldman’s approach (one that Catlin Smith acknowledges as a signature influence on her work) abides alongside passages of colorful piano chords. The spectrum moves from inexorably repeated constrained sets of pitches, to chromatic counterpoint, to whole washes of sound. The intuitive sensibility that Catlin Smith claims as her approach in preference to any dogmatic systemization clearly allows her to move through constantly changing musical terrain, all the while maintaining an organic sense of each piece. How does she manage this? An interview in the booklet accompanying the Canadian Composers set quotes her as saying,”Listening. Lots of listening.” One could do worse as a composer in any style to listen as carefully as Catlin Smith does.

 

Cantelina (2013) for viola and vibraphone, played by Emma Richards and Simon Limbrick, presents another of the composer’s interests, one in heterogenous instrumental pairings. Both here and in the Piano Quintet ( 2014), another of Catlin Smith’s predilections, exploring tightly knit counterpoint in close registral positions, is featured. The overlapping in Cantilena is quite fetching (it is a combination that should be explored by more composers and one I’ll keep in my own hip pocket) and it is equally affecting when writ large in the quintet. The title work is also for a seemingly challenging combination, piano and classical guitar, played by Philip Thomas and Diego Castro Magas, but Catlin Smith’s gentle daubs of coloristic harmony and unequal ostinatos work beautifully in this duo context as well. Mon Qui Tremblais (1999), played by Thomas, Benjamin, and Limbrick, has a pulse-driven piano part that is joined by sustained violin and bowed pitched percussion. An interesting notational device is used: rather than writing out all the notes and rhythms, the composer specifies that the musicians silently read a Rimbaud poem and use its speech rhythms to shape the musical work (for instance, the percussionist gets his attack points from the accented French syllables).

 

Bozzini Quartet appears in two string quartets by Catlin Smith. Folkestone (1999) pits a persistently high violin line against blocks of slow articulated, syncopated chords played by the other three members (these have an almost accordion-like quality in their spacing). Gradually, other lines emerge from the texture, with the cello playing a poignant solo dissonant with the rest of the harmony. The chordal passages begin registrally to disperse, bringing the locus of activity closer to the violin’s sustained flautando melody. Mid-register lines now break free and the chords move in double time for a brief stretch before ceding the terrain to widely spaced and again slowly articulated harmonies. This alternation of patterns includes still more elements to be introduced: pizzicatos, duets, flashes of quartal harmonic brilliance, and a bass-register cello melody made truly weighty by the registers it has balanced against before. Clocking in at more than 32 minutes, Folkestone is a substantial and thoroughly captivating composition. Gondola involves members of the quartet coming in and out of unison and a gentle boat-rocking pacing that Catlin Smith describes thus:”The title loosely refers to its slight undulation or floating qualities – a subtle motion or disturbance of the surface, like trailing the hand in water.”

 

Evocative imagery for truly evocative music-making. Drifter is an album (a double-album at that) worth savoring.

 

 

 

by Christian Carey