Play is one of composer/percussionist Hannes Lingens’ open-form scores. The composition, for an ensemble of any number and instrumentation, consists of 100 cards, each of which contains a verbal instruction for a performer to interpret and realize in sound. The instructions are suggestive and leave much to the performer’s interpretive ingenuity; even when a defined category of sound is called for it is done in a way that leaves the specific pitch or nature of the sound open to the performer’s choice. Some instructions, such as “Something Airy;” “Something Hollow;” “In a Polite Way;” touch on musical or sonic qualities only indirectly. The set of cards itself appears to come with no instructions on how it is to be used; presumably it may be left up to the performers to decide such matters as how/whether to divide the deck among the players or in what order the cards should be played. Given a score such as this, one can reasonably expect it to facilitate a wide range of possible realizations with no two being exactly alike. This comes out interestingly in Play, the album, which contains two interpretations of Lingens’ score, one by a quintet including the composer recorded in Jerusalem in summer 2022, and one by a Paris-based quartet recorded in January 2023.
In addition to Lingens on snare drum, the Jerusalem ensemble includes guitar, piano, bass clarinet, and tenor saxophone. With the exception of some melodic passages from bass clarinetist Nitai Levi and a moving chord sequence from pianist Shira Legmann, the music largely takes the form of an episodic and sound-oriented aggregate of five independent voices. The Paris quartet consists of double bass, Baroque violin, guitar, and alto saxophone. As with the Jerusalem realization, some of the cards’ instructions – “Repetition” and “A Very Long Sound,” for example — can readily be identified. By contrast with the Jerusalem performance, the Paris group’s textures tend to be denser and slightly more abstract, and the voices more integrated. But the composition’s overall architecture is consistently audible in both performances; despite the inevitable differences in sound and feel brought in by individual players’ personal choices, there’s no mistaking that it’s the same piece being played on both occasions.
Daniel Barbiero
Avant Music News 