Tag: contemporary composition

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AMN Reviews: Kyle Bruckmann – of rivers [New Focus Recordings fcr399]

A solo recording by oboe and English horn virtuoso Kyle Bruckmann is like a communique giving news of the latest stages in those instruments’ ongoing musical evolution. Like his colleague and sometime collaborator bassoonist Dana Jessen, Bruckmann has taken a leading role in inventing and developing new techniques for a venerable if sometimes overlooked orchestral instrument, and in the process adapting it to the high-tech environments of contemporary composition and improvisation.

Bruckmann’s latest, of rivers, contains one composition by Bruckmann in addition to five other works, some acoustic and some electroacoustic, by five other composers. What all have in common is a willingness to push Bruckmann’s instruments and instrumentalism to the limits of their musical possibilities. This is apparent from the very first piece, Jessie Cox’s AT[ou]M, an acoustic work that sets extreme leaps of register as well as a number of extended techniques – overblowing, multiphonics, pitch bending – within an open-textured, fragmentary structure. Hannah A. Barnes’ Dis/inte/gration matches oboe with live interactive phase vocoder in a work that, despite its title, gradually integrates both instruments into an evolving texture of increasing density that culminates in an assertive rush of electronics and oboe lines evoking a frenzied soprano saxophone improvisation. Helen Grime’s Arachne is a brief, thematically beautiful solo for oboe that brings out Bruckmann’s more conventionally expressive side. For the electroacoustic DROP, Linda Bouchard created a graphic score whose figures are based on the sounds of water in its various states. Bruckmann’s interpretation of Bourchard’s score, played out against an abstract electronic backdrop, affords him the opportunity to create a virtuoso performance drawing on his wide-ranging technical resources. Bruckmann’s own Proximity, affect, is a solo piece reflecting its origin in the isolation of the Covid lockdowns. For this electronic work Bruckmann recorded and manipulated sounds originating from different parts of the oboe. The instrument’s presence is largely submerged in the processing, but occasionally the sounds of key clicks or breath blowing through the tube make themselves known. The album closes with Christopher Burns’ Mutiny of Rivers, a long piece featuring electronics artist Ernst Karel interacting with Bruckmann. As on DROP, Bruckmann improvises an exciting solo line on the basis of suggestive compositional material. In duet with himself via Karel’s electronic manipulations, Bruckmann’s warm acoustic voice dramatically counterpoints its processed double.

Daniel Barbiero

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AMN Reviews: Arne Eigenfeldt – A Walk to Meryton [Redshift Records TK 533]

Canadian composer Arne Eigenfeldt’s AI-facilitated Walk to Meryton comes at a moment when questions about artificial intelligence’s effects on the art, both potentially positive and negative, are in the air. Eigenfeldt, who has been working with generative compositional software since the 1980s, comes down on the side of those artists for whom AI is a useful compositional tool rather than an existential threat.

For A Walk to Meryton Eigenfeldt created compositions using a modular, interactive system of bots called Musebots that he developed with the help of a group of Australian coders. The system generated musical environments as well as scores that were given to Vancouver musicians John Korsrud (trumpet), Jon Bentley (tenor and soprano saxophones), Meredith Bates (violin), and spoken word artist/writer Barbara Adler. The scores served as guides for the live musicians’ improvisations, which were then laid over Musebot’s audio environments. These latter are tonal and rhythmic, and made up of washes of sound often recalling expansive string orchestras or carillons. The contributions from Korsrud, Bentley, and Bates are impeccable, the blend of synthetic and organic sounds being seamless and making for instrumental tracks that are lush and unapologetically beautiful. Adler’s Jane Austen-inspired texts and delivery also make for a good fit with Musebot’s evocative soundscapes.

No doubt the relative merits of AI and its ramifications for art will continue to be debated. But if evidence is needed for the ways in which AI can function as a benign element enhancing creativity, A Walk to Meryton surely can provide it.

Daniel Barbiero

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AMN Reviews: Gabriel Vicéns – Mural [Stradivarius STR 37292]

Mural is the fourth studio album from New York based guitarist Gabriel Vicéns, perhaps best known for his work as an improviser. With this album we see another side of his musical personality: the composer of contemporary chamber works. The seven pieces represented here, all of which were composed between 2019 and 2022, feature ensembles of various sizes and instrumental combinations, ranging from solo piano to mixed sextet of percussion, strings, and winds. What emerges is a consistent compositional language built of discontinuous sound spaces, reiterated micro-themes, dynamic contrasts, and fused timbres. All of these qualities are on display in the title track, a trio for clarinet, violin, and piano composed in 2021, which opens the album. The pivot point for the entire piece is a single note played on the piano, repetitions of which alternate with brief stabs of chords interspersed with silences. Vicéns arranges the violin and clarinet in short bursts played together or in alternation, creating passages of staccato rhythm and free-standing points of hybrid color. A quiet middle section marked by generous uses of negative space gives way to a brisk pulse crafted of call-and-response fragments for violin and clarinet laid over held piano chords. The sextet El Matorral (2022), for piano, vibes, flute, clarinet, violin, and cello, highlights Vicéns’ ability to create striking timbral effects given a rich palette of instrumental resources.

Daniel Barbiero

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AMN Reviews: Robert Gross – Penumbra [New Focus Recordings fcr381]

Penumbra, Robert Gross’ second release on the New Focus label, gives witness to the composer’s interest in conventional and unconventional instrumental combinations by presenting acoustic, electroacoustic, and electronic works together. While the differences among these six works are readily apparent from their instrumentation, they do share a common language in Gross’ whole tone-based quasi-tonalism and predilection for composing with a classical clarity of line.

The title composition, a string quartet performed by the Cordova Quartet, opens the album with a dramatic flourish. The piece is densely textured and maintains a high level of tension through its manipulation of dynamics and pulse; Gross’ tendency to score the voices in rhythmic agreement keeps the composition’s organizing motifs clearly legible throughout. In a radical change of instrumental means the track following Penumbra is the all-electronic Essay for Autoharp and Electronics, a composition for autoharp samples and the Absynth 5 synthesizer. The sound is delightfully reminiscent of the classic electronic compositions of the 1950s and 1960s – a kind of look back at what the past thought future music would be like. Although its soundworld obviously contrasts with the acoustic string quartet, like the quartet it coheres by presenting its motifs in multiple voices moving together.

The album’s most engaging piece is the electroacoustic Five Movements for Flute and Electronics, performed by Anne McKennon on flute and Gross on electronics. Like the Essay for Autoharp and Electronics, this composition features sounds reminiscent of electronics past, most notably from the 1970s. Gross sets up a semi-independent relationship between the two voices with the flute being left in its natural state as it moves within the electronic ambience. The first movement turns around a predominantly whole-tone pitch set expounded on flute, with answering gestures from the electronics; the second movement is a lyrical soliloquy for flute against a backdrop of futuristic washes and a portentous synthetic choir. For the third movement flute and electronics-as-synthetic-harpsichord fall into a more-or-less conventional relationship of lead and accompaniment, a relationship continued with a contrapuntal twist into the fourth movement; the concluding movement binds the two voices more closely together in rhythmic unison. Gross employs a similar architecture, but on a larger scale, in his acoustic Concerto for Tenor Saxophone and Nine Instruments, the album’s final piece.

Penumbra also includes the electronic Symphonies of Electronic Instruments, and the vocal work Here We Call it Pop.

Daniel Barbiero

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AMN Reviews: Yu-Hui Chang – Mind Like Water [New Focus Recordings fcr393]

The new monograph recording by Taiwan-born, Massachusetts-based composer Yu-Hui Chang contains three compositions for chamber ensemble and one for solo cello. What emerges from the recording is an impression of Chang as a composer of finely etched fragments and melodic discontinuities divided up among her ensembles’ different voices.

The three-movement In Thin Air for violin, piano, and percussion is a largely episodic piece underscored by the subdued thunder of low-pitched drum rolls. Rhythm is present here, but represented as much by breaks between the sounds setting it out as by the sounds themselves. Germinate, a single movement work for cello, piano, percussion, flute, and bass clarinet, is a quick-witted, intricately polyphonic composition in which the five voices mix and respond to each other in a way that seems to simulate a particularly coherent free improvisation. The title track is a composition in one movement for string quartet that falls roughly into two parts. In the first half Chang plays with contrasts of dynamics and timbre, while the second half is dominated by unison passages and a passing around of lines from instrument to instrument.

The highlight of the recording is the three-movement Alter Ego for solo cello, given a fine performance by Rhonda Rider. Each movement is named descriptively for a mood or a manner of acting. The first movement, titled “affectionate,” is played pizzicato and is notable for its short, sharp attacks and strummed chords. The second movement – “expressive, yet somewhat distant” – is quietly reserved, with a tinge of melancholy given an edge from passages played sul ponticello. The final movement, “methodical,” is just that. The idea of method is brought to life with a now explicit, now implicit, insistent pulse as well as in a set of asymmetrical, meticulously laid out and repeated motifs.

Daniel Barbiero

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AMN Reviews: Douglas Boyce – The Bird Is an Alphabet [New Focus Recordings fcr387]

From Washington, D.C. composer Douglas Boyce, The Bird Is an Alphabet is an album of three sets of works for voice in various settings. For one of these sets Boyce has chosen the conventional voice-and-piano setting, while the other two feature more unusual orchestrations. The first three tracks are taken from Boyce’s A Book of Songs, scored for tenor voice and piano (on this recording, Robert Baker and Molly Orlando, respectively), which sets texts by various poets and philosophers. The three pieces included here are well within the tradition of Western art song and feature poems by Jorie Graham, Wallace Stevens, and B. J. Ward. On Ward’s contribution, “The Apple Orchard in October,” Boyce elicits an autumnal mood by framing the text in dark harmonies and drawing the words out in long, brooding lines. Scriptorium, a setting of four texts from poet Melissa Range’s 2016 book of that title, was written for the duo of soprano Corrine Byne and trumpeter Andy Kozar – a challengingly spare combination of voices. Boyce’s scoring, which alludes to the modality and contrapuntalism of early music, not only effectively exploits the possibilities available to two single-line instruments, but fittingly matches the medieval theme that informs Range’s poetry. Range’s own graceful handling of language’s consonances and fluid rhythms would seem to lend itself to melodic writing and plays no small part in the success of these pieces. The final set of pieces is Ars Poetica, written for the fine contemporary chamber ensemble counter)induction (Daniel Lippel, guitar; Nurit Pacht, violin; Caleb van der Swaagh, cello) and poet Marlanda Dekine. This nine-part work consists of five settings of Dekine’s poems, read here by the poet, alternating with four instrumental interludes. Boyce underscores the drama and rhetorical force of Dekine’s words by contrasting the poet’s evenly measured speech rhythms with the ensemble’s darting along in skittish counterpoint or breaking up into fragmentary motifs.

Daniel Barbiero

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AMN Reviews: Eren Gümrükçüoglu – Pareidolia [New Focus Recordings fcr343]

“Pareidolia” describes the condition of seeing meaningful patterns—in, e.g., the grain of a wood panel or the shape of a cloud formation—where none have been put there. It’s a well-chosen title for a collection of music by the Turkish-born, Florida-based composer Eren Gümrükçüoglu, whose music tends toward the assembly of rapidly changing yet cohesive patterns from seemingly random sounds and gestures. Fittingly, the album’s twenty-three minute long title track epitomizes the approach. The piece is scored for string quartet, fixed media, and performers doubling on clarinet and tenor saxophone, piano and synthesizer, and percussion and drumkit. The basic material is made up of fragmentary surges and abrupt bursts of sound coalescing and dispersing in an unpredictable series of instrumental combinations. A low-density middle section for piano, electronics, and vibraphone falls on the pointillistic side of Gümrükçüoglu’s pattern creation, while the concluding passages embrace denser textures and more assertive dynamics. The two string quartets Bozkir and Xanthos, both performed by the Mivos Quartet, bring two variations to the basic schema. Bozkir is organized around a focal tone and rhythmically-charged shards of melody that are passed around the four strings, while Xanthos features a textural and startling timbral diversity balancing on the fulcrum of a long, purely pizzicato passage.

Pareidolia also includes Lattice Scattering for piano, flute, and fixed media; Ordinary Things for fixed media and small chamber ensemble, and opening and closing tracks for fixed media generated by a computer program improvising sound structures from an input of recordings made of an elevator.

Daniel Barbiero

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AMN Reviews: Monica Pearce – Textile Fantasies [Centrediscs CMCCD 30322]

Textile Fantasies, composer Monica Pearce’s debut monograph recording, is aptly titled. Textures of various densities and timbral combinations, rather than more conventional melodies, dominate the sound of much of the music, which is largely scored for percussion instruments of various kinds.

The opening composition, toile de jouy for solo harpsichord, shows Pearce putting the ancient instrument to an unorthodox and decidedly modern use. Its delicate, staccato sound is conventionally associated with contrapuntal music, but here Pearce scores it to generate rough-hewn, opaque blocks of fortissimo dissonances. The piano and percussion duet leather, a heavily rhythmic work, similarly creates an almost unpitched-sounding lower register rumble with the piano, which Pearce sets into contrast with the bright timbres of gongs and other metal percussion. Velvet, for percussion ensemble, takes cascades of notes and repeated motifs on mallet percussion and places them against a background hum of thickening and thinning density. Perhaps the most novel combination of instrumental voices occurs in damask for tamboura, tabla, and toy piano.

Textile Fantasies also includes chain maille for percussion ensemble; houndstooth and silks, both for solo piano; and denim for two percussionists and two toy pianos.

Daniel Barbiero

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AMN Reviews: Andrew McIntosh & Yarn/Wire – Little Jimmy [Kairos 0022000KAI]

Little Jimmy is a backpacker’s campground in the Angeles National Forest; it also is a place in which Los Angeles composer Andrew McIntosh made field recordings during a visit in 2019. The recordings—of trees and birds—play a role in two of the six movements of Little Jimmy, a work for two pianists and two percussionists composed in 2020 for the quartet Yarn/Wire, one of contemporary music’s most exciting chamber ensembles.

Little Jimmy is an atmospheric work in which evocative sounds rather than melodies or harmonic patterns provide the binding thematic material. The brief first movement provides an opening flourish of repeated, upper-register figures passed between the two pianos. McIntosh’s field recordings come into play in the sparse second movement, largely made up of subdued, quasi-electronic sounds interspersed with piano interventions suggestive of birdsongs. Movement three is a variation on the first movement, followed by a long fourth movement centered on a tamboura-like, overtone-rich drone played on bowed piano strings which surges over and under subtle washes of tuned percussion. The slow call-and-response between the pianos and tuned and untuned percussion of the penultimate movement sets up the conclusion, a somber movement framed by field recordings. This final movement retrospectively recasts the entire piece as an elegy for Little Jimmy, which shortly after McIntosh’s visit was devastated by a fire.

Little Jimmy is accompanied by two shorter works for solo instrumentalists. I Have a Lot to Learn (2019), performed by pianist Laura Barger, consists of an austere series of chord stabs allowed to decay at length into the surrounding space, while 2021’s Learning, commissioned and performed by percussionist Russell Greenberg, is a contemplative piece for vibraphone, glockenspiel, and sine tones.

https://www.kairos-music.com

Daniel Barbiero

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AMN Reviews: Fabrice Villard & Pierre-Stéphane Meugé – Musique Logique [Nunc]

Over the course of several decades, composer Tom Johnson has developed a style of composition based on rigorous forms derived from numbers games of various kinds. His Rational Melodies of 1982, a set of twenty-one pieces constructed of logical permutations of minimal pitch sets, exemplified the style. It also served as the inspiration for composer Fabrice Villard’s 25 pièces pour saxophone seul, performed by Stéphane Meugé on soprano, alto, tenor, and baritone saxophones. The inspiration was more than academic; as part of the Dedalus ensemble both Villard, who is a clarinetist as well as a composer, and Meugé, participated in the New World Records performance of Rational Melodies.

One of the qualities Johnson was striving toward with the Rational Melodies was a certain structural transparency. Both the pitch sets and their systematic variations were presented in such a way as to be audible in a manner that, for example, serial composition’s pitch sets and their transformations often are not. Such structural audibility also is a feature of Villard’s twenty-five pieces, which Meugé plays with the clarity they demand. Essentially a set of combinatorial variations on limited and well-defined pitch sets, they develop with an almost Baroque inevitability. Although the music is logically organized, listening to it isn’t necessarily an analytical experience; one can often just feel or sense the pieces’ systematic structures through their regular rhythms and simplicity of phrasing. Villard’s decision to realize his elaborate compositional formulas as arpeggiations played solo on a monophonic instrument goes far toward making them intuitively accessible.

In addition to the twenty-five pieces for solo saxophone, Musique Logique includes four similarly mathematically-derived compositions for two, three, and four saxophones, as well as alternate takes of five of the twenty-five solo works.

Daniel Barbiero