Tag: electronics

CD Review, Contemporary Classical, Electro-Acoustic, File Under?, Flute

Laura Lentz releases new EP (CD review)

Laura Lentz

Prismatic/Plasmonic EP
Music for flute and electronics
Laura Lentz, flutes; Sean William Calhoun, electronics
Blue on Blue Records

 

Laura Lentz’s Prismatic/Plasmonic EP consists of three works, each addressing contemporary approaches in a different fashion. Lentz plays beautifully, with enviable control and supple phrasing. Although the pieces include amplification and electronics, they do not dilute her sound in the slightest. 

 

Prismatic Wind by Chloe Upshaw is a work meant to abet sound healing. Upshaw is a flutist who lives in Arizona and the idea of supporting the health of others, particularly other musicians, through a composed  version of music therapy is an important part of her work. Prismatic Wind features gestures of rising tension and gentle release, affording an experience not dissimilar to meditative breathing. Electronics are used to add resonance to the flute and to underscore the aforementioned phrasing. 

 

Plasmonic Mirror is written by Rochester-based composer/electronic musician William Calhoun. Cast in four short movements, the piece begins with a lyrical flute passage, followed by beat heavy electronica, altissimo passages, a synth interlude, an IDM pattern with a new theme in the flute, altissimo flute lines, and dovetailing with a bass synth. It closes with the synths and beats moving double time with the flute playing trills and a triumphal ascent. 

 

Lentz and Calhoun collaborate on what is effectively a remix of Claude Debussy’s 1913 solo flute piece Syrinx. Lentz plays alto flute and Calhoun incorporates a warm bed of synths and a high countermelody, all accentuating the modal and whole-tone writing in Syrinx. It is an intriguing experiment. One eagerly awaits Lentz’s next full length recording, but for now, there is plenty to savor in Primatic/Plasmonic.

 

Christian Carey

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=pAhJk7mOZ90

 

by Christian Carey
CD Review, Contemporary Classical, Electro-Acoustic, File Under?, Violin

Olivia de Prato – Panorama (CD Review)

 

Panorama – Olivia de Prato (New Focus)

 

Violinist Olivia de Prato has established herself as a staunch advocate of new music. In addition to her work with Mivos Quartet, she is a talented soloist. On her second solo release for New Focus Recordings, Panorama, she undertakes a recital disc of female composers. A number of the pieces include electronics, fleshing out the solo texture in diverting fashion.

 

The album opens with Missy Mazzoli’s violin plus electronics piece Tooth and Nail (2010). The original version was written for violist Nadia Sirota; this is a transcription for violin. The piece begins with string sounds in the electronics accompanying the live violin. De Prato digs into the vigorous passagework, executing arpeggiations and glissandos with incisiveness. As the piece progresses the electronics add a lower register to the piece, ending the piece. This is probably my favorite of Mazzoli’s instrumental works.

 

Jeom Jaeng Yi (Fortune Teller) by Jen Shyu is inspired by American polyartist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, including some of her poetry as a spoken word component. The gestures in the solo part are based on speech rhythms. Speaking isn’t constant but de Prato makes clear the connections between violin and voice. There is a mournful cast to the piece: someone’s fortune was disappointing.

 

The title track, for violin and electronics by Angelic Negrón, employs a bath of ambient synths and supple legato phrasing from de Prato, often with glissandos, that employs sumptuous high notes. Mallet samples and piano press the music forward, with repeating passages and pizzicato in the violin responding to the post-minimal electronics. Gradually the music picks up speed, with regularly articulated synth chords and oscillations in the violin. The texture becomes fuller, with a return of synth ostinatos, and once again upper register violin glissandos soar over the top of the varied palette of electronic sounds. The coda features a two note oscillation and clouds of chords accompanying the violin’s final melodic strands.

 

Mapping a Joyful Path, by Miya Masaoka, employs pitch bends in places in the synth parts. Mostly, however, the electronics part consists of sustained sine tones that are varied in register, with overtones skirting in and out of the texture. De Prato plays with varying bow pressure, aggressive repeated notes, microtones in double stops, and Eastern sliding tone to interpret a multifaceted and fetching piece. It finishes with a held altissimo note in the violin and the drones receding.

 

The recording concludes with Balconies by British composer Samantha Fernando. The piece can be played by five live violinists or one with a pre-recorded part. It begins with an arpeggiated flourish and overlapping ostinatos. After another iteration of the opening arpeggio, the texture thickens in the second section, moving from the triadic opening to secundal chords articulated with repeating notes. Soft pizzicatos interrupt the chordal texture, and the arpeggio announces a third section, this one supplying more spacing, but no less complicated harmonies. Melodic fragments are taken up, breaking up the verticals for a time. Melody and richly constructed chords then interact. The original gesture is reconfigured as chords in the alto register, followed by a coda of pizzicatos. Balconies is an arresting piece on recording. I would love to hear de Prato and four friends playing it live.

 

Once again, Olivia de Prato has presented a program of fascinating musical discoveries. Panorama supports female composers with advocacy and skill. Recommended.

 

-Christian Carey

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

File Under Favorites 2022 – Olivia de Prato (CD Review

File Under Favorites 2022

Olivia de Prato

I.AM.

New World Records

Violinist Oliva de Prato is one of the stalwarts of the New York new music community, performing premieres with a plethora of organizations and in demand as a solo artist. Her latest recording for New World, I.AM. is a celebration of “Artistry and Motherhood.” De Prato, a mother herself, commissioned composers who are navigating motherhood and their careers. The project provides a nurturing, welcome perspective.

 

“Automatic Writing Mumbles of the Late Hours,” is by Natacha Diels, a composer and sound artist. The piece requires de Prato to trigger various electronics. The resultant sounds create shimmering textures in the upper register, while angular melodies accrete in the middle register. “Mycorrhiza I,” by Katherine Young, employs bow pressure and altissimo glissandos in alternation and accreting in intensity. Partway through, the music stops and resumes with transparency and sparer bow pressure A swath of pizzicatos, including pizzicato glissandos, are offset by bell-like repeated notes. Electronics adds a tolling drumbeat while the upper register materials are combined to create off-kilter swaths of detailed harmony.

 

Hang-Yang Kim’s “May You Dream of Rainbows in Magical Lands” is written in a just-intonation system called “Centaur.” Demonstrating the interval qualities, the piece focuses on sustained notes from electronics and violin. These stack up, creating held sonorities in which notes move in and out of the verticals. It is a beguiling, gradually transforming sound world and the blend of electronics and violin is beautifully presented. Little traces of found percussion, played by de Prato’s son, nibble at the edges of the pitch scape. 

 

Pamela Stickney is a composer and theremin player. She joins de Prato on “Noch Unbennant,” a piece developed by the duo from initial improvisations. Theremin and violin are a felicitous pairing, and alongside electronics, the duo explores a panoply of sounds in a labyrinthine formal design. “Fire in the Dark” began from vocal improvisations by its composer, Jen Baker, who then collaborated with de Prato to translate these into harmonics, bow pressure, and altissimo melodic patterns. This is succeeded by purely tuned sustained multi-stops, which gradually devolve, sliding away from the initial interval. After a pause, pianissimo skittering gestures provide an interruption before once again de Prato plays sustained glissandos. A brief coda of the same intervals articulated in short values closes the piece.

 

Zosha di Casti’s “The Dream Feed” opens with glassy electronics, percussive punctuations, and a duo between violin and piano. Thrumming bass notes and breathy sustained ones build alongside repeated passages from the violin, overdubbed with soprano register solos. These are offset by electronic percussion and glissandos. A high double stop, pressed even higher as it sustains, is accompanied by an aggressive bass register and percussion electronic passage. The electronics drop out and de Prato plays a mid-register modal melody, swathed in a piano ostinato. Sustained harmonics and repeated notes populate the upper register while the piano’s part becomes increasingly disjunct. A piano ostinato and blurring glissandos create a hazy atmosphere. Percussion, gruff electronics and another ostinato, this time ascending microtonally in the violin, bring the music out of its reverie and intensify the piece’s conclusion. A treble splash from the piano serves as a punctuation. 

 

A half dozen pieces, all in an experimental vein and hypervirtuosic in terms of demands, yet each distinct and compelling in their own right. De Prato remains an extraordinary advocate and here presents an imaginatively conceived and superlatively performed recording. 

 

-Christian Carey



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

Best Drone Recording 2017: Lee Plays Gibson

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Randy Gibson

The Four Pillars Appearing from The Equal D under Resonating Apparitions of The Eternal Process in The Midwinter Starfield 16 VIII 10 (Kansas City)

Andrew Lee, amplified piano

Irritable Hedgehog

Composer Randy Gibson is best known for his compelling experiments with intonation. R. Andrew Lee is the go-to pianist for Wandelweiser and minimalist-oriented music. On Gibson’s The Four Pillars Appearing from The Equal D under Resonating Apparitions of The Eternal Process in The Midwinter Starfield 16 VIII 10 (Kansas City), he meets Lee in the middle, creating a mammoth work out of very restricted means. The pitch material of the piece consists of just seven notes: D in all the octaves on a concert grand piano in equal temperament. Added to this are amplification and a small amount of electronic manipulation, designed to add resonance to the overtone vibrations taking place.

Irritable Hedgehog’s recording is a single unedited live performance from 2016 at University of Kansas City Missouri, with electronics realized alongside the piano part. Clocking in at some three-and-a-half hours, Lee deserves credit for a tour de force of stamina, focus and, perhaps above all, musicality in shaping the repeating pitches into countless varied phrases. Gibson is a master of deploying overtones. He has figured out how to exploit the various spaces between D’s to gradate the appearances of the harmonic series’ upper notes, or partials, and to maximize their potential. Shimmering conglomerations of overtones abound in The Four Pillars … it is certainly not a piece just about D! And while pitch serves as a focal point, it is worth mentioning that the piece’s overall shape, labyrinthine in scope, and its localized rhythmic gestures are equally well conceived. Four Pillars is one of the most compelling pieces yet from Gibson, and is Sequenza 21’s Best Drone Recording of 2017.

 

by Christian Carey
Brooklyn, Composers, Contemporary Classical, File Under?, Interviews, Microtonalism, New York, Opera

Friday: Ueno Opera at Sawdust

At National Sawdust on Friday April 7th at 7 PM, Opera Cabal presents the premiere of Ken Ueno’s new opera Aeolus. Joined by vocalist Majel Connery and Flux Quartet, Ueno performs throughout the opera. His fascinating blend of vocal techniques includes microtonal inflections, megaphone-amplified directives, and throat-singing. Electronics, video projections, and an architecturally conceived set design converge to make Aeolus a potent multimedia concoction. I recently caught up with Ken as he was in the thick of preparations for the opera.

Hi Ken. Thanks for taking the time to talk with Sequenza 21.

 

Why are you calling this an opera instead of some other genre? As you well know, multimedia theater pieces are called all sorts of things…

 

Following the examples of Monteverdi, Mozart, and especially Nono, “opera” seems to be an open enough label, if we need a label, so I hope it’s appropriate for this piece.  But you’re right – I don’t really know what to call it. It doesn’t have a regular narrative. It features two voices that are in distinct contrast to bel canto singing. But I am attached to the possibilities Prometeo opens up, so if Nono’s is an opera, then, Aeolus, can be an opera too, right?  Aeolus does feature a suoni mobili (Nono calls the movement of sound the main drama in Prometeo) characteristic in that, in the guise of Aeolus (the ruler of the winds), I move around the hall, directing my non-semantic vocalizations with a megaphone to articulate the architecture, the space, as an instrument.

You’ve mentioned that there are autobiographical elements in the libretto. Since it is fairly nonlinear in terms of narrativity, would you like to share how some of your own history fits in?

 

Memory is non-linear.  Spaces between texts and texts in memory become islands in search of a place in time, an ostensible home, which the idea of a Penelope represents.  My biographical circumstance is that my family moved around so much during my formative years that I don’t have a normative sensation of a home. So, the idea of a home is a mythic space for me, one I’ve also begun to associate with not only a place, but also specific people with whom I shared lived in those spaces that felt like places to which I belonged. That’s also, I think, why James Joyce resonates so powerfully in me. If there is a main narrative in Aeolus, it’s the counterpoint between the semantic and non-semantic in search of a home.

 

If I may, here’s an excerpt of a draft I’m writing for something else, which elaborates on this:

 

My own language acquisition parallels Dedalus’ in that the trajectory from babbling to fluency did filter out a palette of sounds that were extraneous to language. As a baby, I remember understanding language before I could actually speak. I remember both the frustration of not being able to communicate, as well as the tiny victories when I somehow managed to reach out and get through – sometimes purely through the inflections of non-semantic vocalizations, maybe combined with clear physical gestures like pointing or shaking my head.

When I was four, my family moved to Switzerland, and apart from speaking Japanese with my family I was a mute child again, unable to speak the local French. The burgeoning richness of my internal life was frustrated by this communication setback. Around that time, I was given a portable Aiwa tape recorder and started to make non-linear musique concrète, playing with snippets of sounds of my little world in exile. Listening to those recordings now, through auto-archaeology, I discover not only that I was vocalizing non-semantically, but that I was singing multiphonics. I was babbling, testing the limits of my vocal repertoire, expanding the repertoire of sounds my body could make. Unhinged from semantic obligation, I was freely playing at making sounds for the pure sake of making sounds, developing a series of dexterous moves ancillary to spoken language – to logos. I remember how it felt. The complex vibrations of the multiphonics reverberated in my body, shaking my bones. It was soothing. I learned to make a variety of sounds that registered different feelings. They felt like different weights of the world. Not being able to speak the local language, not having any friends, I was performing, rehearsing for my future self. The future will rationalize the past. When I read James Joyce as a teenager, the tropes of alienation and exile, and the distance between language as sound and language as semantic medium, all resonated with me.  

Tell us about your collaborators.

 

Majel Connery is my singer.  Though classically trained, she has a beautiful lyrical voice, that reminds me of Elena Tonra from Daughter or Beth Gibbons of Portishead. But that’s really unfair. I should not be naming names or comparing her to anyone else – she has a great voice, she is a primary referent in her own right. When I heard her voice and imagined what it was capable of, I knew I wanted to write songs for her. Songs that would carry the semantic exposition in Aeolus. She’s been very generous with me in trying out sketches of my songs in different keys, etc., so that we can get to the right voice/word combination to get to the pathos that I want to express. Majel is also a brilliant project leader. She is Opera Cabal. She is our fearless leader and most responsible for all of this happening. A visionary!

 

Thomas Tsang is a brilliant architect with whom I have been collaborating for ten years.  We met as fellows at the American Academy in Rome, and we’ve collaborated on installations ever since. As an artist, he brings a fully-fledged multidisciplinary edge to architecture. He questions traditional outputs and bravely creates installations, events, workshops that challenge us to rethink the history of specialization in our related fields.  The full vision for the opera is to have a space that he designs that is something more than a set or venue, something more integral to the expression of the piece. We are working towards that.

 

Erin Johnson is a video artist with whom I have been collaborating over the last few years. She’s an all-round creative force. Many of her works thread the line between video art, installation, performance art, curation, and community engagement. She naturally problematizes categories in her artistic output. She curated a work of mine last summer – Fortress Brass, a site-specific piece that took place on boats and then at Fort Gorges in Portland Harbor, in Maine. Erin made videos for four of the scenes in Aeolus, for scenes with voice-overs. Voice-overs take the place of dialogue in Aeolus (a move that I first began to experiment with in my first opera, Gallo). Being pre-recorded, the voice-overs inhabit a different time/place: it serves a distancing function.

 

I am also lucky to be working with the renown Flux Quartet. Specialists in the extreme demands of new music, breathtaking in their courage and inspiring. I am blessed to have this team.

 

What are some of the electronic elements in the piece?

Mostly, the electronics are backing tracks for the pop songs.  In one scene, I perform with a Max patch that the brilliant designer/composer Ilya Rostovtsev made for me. The patch lets me use my iPhone as a controller for algorithmic drums.

 

What does lateral bowing sound like? You’ve become a big fan of it … how did you first discover it as a technique?

 

I like lateral bowing because it sounds like breath – the link between my vocal practice, my body, and the embodied choreography of sounds that I notate for instrumentalists to perform.  I first came up with lateral bowing, when I was experimenting on a viola during the composition of my viola concerto, Talus.

 

What’s next for you?

 

I’m lucky to have pieces upcoming for talented friends: a piece for five-string baroque cello for Elinor Frey; a solo trumpet + electronics work for Andy Kozar; a solo cello piece for Jason Calloway; a saxophone piece for Vincent Daoud; a trio for Kim Kashkashian; and a long overdue piece for piano for Kathy Supove (and some other things too).

https://vimeo.com/196345650

by Christian Carey
Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Experimental Music, New York

Amy X Neuburg/Cory Smythe at Roulette: A Preview

On Tuesday, December 13, Bay-area artist Amy X Neuburg will collaborate for one-night only with NY-based pianist/composer Cory Smythe at Brooklyn’s Roulette on Atlantic Ave.

Neuburg’s brand of music, which has been dubbed “avant-cabaret”, promises to be an interesting blend with Smythe’s improvisational work as they will play a majority of the evening together, as well as some portions solo.

AMY X NEUBURG

Amy told us recently in an interview what to look forward to in this unique show:

We’re each performing a few solo songs, but the bulk of the evening will be brand new and collaborative. Much of our music leaves room for improvisation, and most of it involves live looping of the piano and the voice. You’ll hear a “cabaret improv” song about rat experiments, a completely whack song Cory has written which I am to sing in a country twang while looping piano chords in multiple odd time signatures, a duo of new songs (about personality disorders) constructed of simple layered lines, two composed songs that we played earlier this year in Milwaukee, and an unusual interpretation of “Gretchen am Spinnrade” that we have convinced ourselves Mr. Schubert would appreciate.

(more…)

by Chris McGovern