Russell Greenberg – Avant Music News

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.

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Daniel Barbiero

The superb contemporary music ensemble Yarn/Wire—percussionists Ian Antonio and Russell Greenberg, and pianist/keyboardists Ning Yu and Laura Berger—is known as much for its willingness to transgress the limits of musical convention as it is for its performance prowess. Both qualities are on display with a pair of simultaneously released albums of very different kinds of new music, one of fully notated compositions within an expansive notion of modern small ensemble chamber music, and the other an unnotated exploration of extended techniques and unconventional instrumentation.

The album of traditionally notated work is Tonband, a set containing one composition each by German composer Enno Poppe and Swiss composer Wolfgang Heiniger, and one composition by both together. The first composition on the album, Poppe’s knottily acoustic, two-movement Feld (2007/2017), has the most conventionally Modern sound of the three. This is particularly true of the second movement, an expanding field of sound developed out of dissonant piano stabs and accumulating fragmentary rhythmic cells underscored by snare drum. The centerpiece is the title work, Poppe and Heiniger’s collaboration from 2008/2012. Tonband is an absorbing thirty-minute-long, two-movement electroacoustic composition involving a complex system of live electronics in which signals from contact-mic’d percussion are fed to the pianists, here playing electronic keyboards, who manipulate pitches and timbres and fabricate melodies shaped by the percussionists’ sounds and gestures. As might be expected, the result is a soundworld that stretches the timbral imagination, but even during the more extreme passages of sonic distortion, the percussionists’ gestures are still discernible beneath the clangorous surface. Heiniger’s Neumond (2018) at an economical nine minutes long is the shortest composition on the album; it is also the most “electronic”-sounding of the three. Both pianists play MIDI keyboards while the percussionists, in addition to playing a battery of wood, membrane, and metal instruments, sing wordlessly along.

Into the Vanishing Point, a 2019 work by composer Annea Lockwood, is the Yarn/Wire track on the album Becoming Air/Into the Vanishing Point. A very different proposition from the work on Tonband. the piece is the result of a collaborative process in which Lockwood set out a general structure and then, through playing, listening and discussing, the ensemble together with the composer shaped the sonic details. And these details make for a sound that is very sparse indeed. Through a combination of unconventional instruments and conventional instruments unconventionally played, Yarn/Wire create a porous texture of largely unpitched sounds that, as the title has it, are poised just at the point of vanishing. The other composition on Becoming Air/Into the Vanishing Point is Becoming Air (2018), a technically demanding solo work for trumpeter Nate Wooley.

Daniel Barbiero

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