Tag: contemporary chamber music

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AMN Reviews: loadbang – Quiver [New Focus Recordings fcr 342]

The chamber ensemble loadbang may well be unique in its instrumentation of trumpet, trombone, bass clarinet, and baritone voice. A strange combination, yes, but one capable of producing interesting timbres and textures. Accordingly, some of the most effective music on this album of eight compositions by seven composers, three of whom are members of the ensemble, involves the dramatic extensions and juxtapositions of loadbang’s instrumental and human voices.

Disquiet (2016), by loadbang’s bass clarinetist Carlos Cordeiro, is a setting of a text by Fernando Pessoa suggestive of an individual’s experience of multiple personalities; Cordeiro emphasizes the characteristic qualities of the group’s instrumentation by arranging them as separate, abutting presences within a deliberately discordant and fragmentary whole. By contrast, vocalist Jeffrey Gavett’s Proverbial (2009), a setting of three of William Blake’s Proverbs from Hell, assembles the winds into massed and dissonant long tones. Washington DC area composer Heather Stebbins’ Quiver (2014), which was inspired by a trip the composer took to Iceland, uses muted brass and extended techniques for wordless voice to craft a spluttering, choppy allusion in sound to the lurching action of geological processes.

Further along on the spectrum of extended technique, Zong Yun We’s Flower (2015/2017) is a gestural work drawing heavily on unpitched sounds; something of a polar opposite is Quinn Mason’s harmonically conventional composition Aging (2017), a somber setting of a two-line poem by Adam Lefaivre anchored by the bass clarinet. Quiver also includes trumpeter Andy Kozar’s To Keep My Loneliness Warm (2016), a two-part setting of a text by Lydia Davis built around a microtonal drone and shards of words; Chaya Czernowin’s Irrational (2019), an assemblage of pulsing patterns, unpitched timbres, and wordless vocals; and Gavett’s 2016 quis det ut, a work for just intonation based on a 15-16th century Franco-Flemish motet.

Daniel Barbiero

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AMN Reviews

AMN Reviews: Eric Nathan – Missing Words [New Focus Recordings FCR314]

Composer Eric Nathan’s Missing Words is a six-song cycle of purely instrumental music. This sounds like a paradox and in a sense it is; the cycle is made up of translations into music of invented German words, which provide the texts for each movement. The words aren’t spoken or sung—and thus they’re missing—but they’re there nevertheless, in Nathan’s musical interpretations of their meanings. The cycle, which is arranged for chamber ensembles ranging in size from two to eight pieces, consists of six parts subdivided into several relatively short movements, each of which is dedicated to a single word.

And what words they are. Given the collective name of Schottenfreude—presumably a pun on “Schadenfreude”–the words were invented by Ben Schott to describe everyday situations and sensations that don’t have a readymade, dedicated word in English, or in German, for that matter. So Schott conjured them up by combining existing German words into new compounds. German is notorious for its apparently open-ended capacity to admit new words made by tying together seemingly endless strings of entries from its lexicon; Schott took advantage with such coinages as “Straußmanöver” (“ostrich-maneuver,” for hiding one’s head in the proverbial sand in order to avoid reality) and “Dreieckungsumgleichung” (“triangle-reorganization,” for when two people you’ve introduced exclude you from the friendship you helped facilitate).

Nathan’s musical translations of Schott’s words are often witty and always evocative. For example, Missing Words VI, for a quartet of two winds and two strings, contains three movements for the word “Witzbeharrsamkeit” (repeating a witticism enough times to ensure that everyone in the room has heard it). Each features a statement with variations of probably the most famous opening of any symphony in the classical repertoire–the first four notes of Beethoven’s Fifth—played in turn by flute, flute, and bass clarinet, and violin, against the background chatter of the supporting instruments. A movement for “Brillenbrillanz” (the sharpened vision one gets from new eyeglasses) is scored for the bright timbres of brass quintet, with just enough scattered movement to suggest the temporary disorientation that comes with the view through new lenses. “Dreieckungsumgleichung” is scored for a sextet of winds, percussion, and strings, which Nathan appropriately enough divides into two trios in which the voices seem to compete for each other’s attention.

Daniel Barbiero

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AMN Reviews

AMN Reviews: Douglas Boyce – The Hunt By Night [New Focus Recordings fcr290]

The Hunt by Night is the second monograph recording of chamber music from composer Douglas Boyce. Boyce, who is on the faculty of Washington DC’s George Washington University, often takes his inspiration from early music as well as from contemporary modes of composition. This comes out most explicitly in his Quintet l’homme armé, a piece for clarinet, violin, viola, cello, and piano performed here by members of the counter)induction ensemble, a group which Boyce co-founded. Boyce takes the late medieval melody L’homme armé and subjects it to a thorough refiguration in which it is transubstantiated into something with a completely contemporary sound.

The title track, The Hunt by Night, Quire 9 No. 3 is from Boyce’s Book of Etudes. The piece appared previously on the counter)induction album Against Method; in my review of that album I described it in these pages as “a trio for clarinet, cello, and piano that uncoils with a spry, loping energy that recalls the spirit of Les Six.” Stretto Perpetuo, Quire 4 No. 1 for cello and piano, is another one of Boyce’s twenty-one etudes. The object of this vigorous piece’s study is rhythmic, hence its foundation in a rhythmically varied, urgently repeated single note that cellist Schyler Slack and pianist Ieva Jokubaviciute pass around between themselves.

Sails Knife-bright in a Seasonal Wind is a trio for violinist Miranda Cucskon, guitarist Daniel Lippel and percussionist Jeffrey Irving. This is a sparely written piece that allows each individual voice to stand out with clarity against a background of open space; in particular, Lippel’s finely etched, plucked tones contrast tellingly with Cuckson’s bow work.

The Hunt by Night also contains the Piano Quartet No. 2, an essay in microtonality for strings.

Daniel Barbiero