Musical America Blogs

This week, Cantaloupe released Rushes, Michael Gordon’s latest recording. An album length piece for multiple bassoons, it layers ostinatos of repeated notes into buzzing micro-polyphonic textures. It is much like Timber, his recent work for percussionists playing wooden slats, but, of course, the permutation of pitches are more accentuated by Rushes’ bassoons.

You can hear the recording this week on WQXR; it is their album of the week. Or go to hear it live tonight in Boston, on Friday in Philadelphia, or at Montclair State University in Montclair, New Jersey on Saturday. (details below)

Tufts’ Granoff Music Center (Boston) – 3/26
The Icebox at Crane Arts (Philly) – 3/28
Montclair State Univ. (Montclair, NJ) – 3/29

Milton Babbitt: All Set

Boston Modern Orchestra Project, Gil Rose, conductor

BMOPsound CD

One of the challenges for the reception of music by Milton Babbitt (1916-2011) has been the difficulty the composer encountered in finding performers up to the task of recording his ensemble works with clarity and precision. While one is grateful for those brave souls who first tackled his compositions and recorded them for posterity, All Set, Boston Modern Orchestra Project’s latest recording of his works, fills in some gaps and provides clear sound and well-executed renderings of several of his pieces. Composition for Twelve Instruments, one of Babbitt’s earliest integrally serial pieces, is given rhythmically crisp and expressive treatment. The title work, Babbitt’s most overtly jazz-influenced piece, employs the instrumentation of a jazz combo and, despite its serial design, gestures that remind one of modern jazz solos. The recording, with its ebullient gestures and snappy rhythms, demonstrates that the BMOP players can play formidable modernist works, but they can bebop too!

The group also tackles one of Babbitt’s trickiest pieces using tape, Correspondences, and provides an ardent reading of Paraphrases, one of Babbitt’s more labyrinthine scores (which is saying something). A suave version of Babbitt’s birthday tribute to Elliott Carter, In the Crowded Air, and soprano Lucy Shelton’s laser beam accurate rendering of “From the Psalter” round out the disc. All Set is one of the most important additions to the Babbitt discography in years. Of course, there’s more work to be done on behalf of Babbitt’s bigger pieces. Dare we hope that Gil Rose might tackle Relata and the Concerti on a subsequent outing?

Voices from the Killing Jar

Kate Soper, composer and vocalist; Wet Ink Ensemble

Carrier Records CD Carrier 021

On her first portrait album, composer and soprano Kate Soper inhabits the interior lives of eight women in various stages of danger and distress. Embodying characters penned by authors ranging from F. Scott Fitgerald to Gustave Flaubert to Shakespeare is no mean feat. Soper deploys a wide vocal range and a correspondingly wide expressive range — from whispers to wailing — to create a striking, at times chilling, palette of tone colors. Similarly, Wet Ink Ensemble is game to provide all manner of acoustic and electronic sounds, including a number of extended techniques, to accompany Soper. The sound world tends toward the bracing and occasionally approaches grating. However, given the violent ends destined for at least four of the eight female protagonists, this shouldn’t be surprising. Indeed, Soper’s edgy sonic explorations are audaciously memorable.

Vijay Iyer – Mutations

Vijay Iyer, piano and electronics; Miranda Cuckson, violin; Michi Wiancko, violin; Kyle Armbrust, viola; Kivie Cahn-Lipman, violoncello

ECM Records CD ECM 2372

Pianist and composer Vijay Iyer makes his debut on the ECM imprint with Mutations, a recording of three piano pieces (two of them electronically enhanced) and the title work, a quintet for piano, string quartet, and electronics. The electronics involved are triggered from a laptop. Most are samples of stringed instruments making non-pitched sounds which are often used as rhythmic gestures or else as atmosphere.

The CD presents both Iyer’s notated music and improvisations. Rather than try to make a seamless transition between these two aspects of music-making, they are placed side by side in Mutations, with concert music for quartet in the spirit of Ligeti and Reich abutting jazz piano solos. All of the various elements – notated composition in modern and minimal veins, electronics, improvisation – dart in and out of the proceedings, creating a stylistically kaleidoscopic effect. What unites these disparate elements is the abundant musicality with which Iyer deploys them.

Other projects on ECM have been announced to follow Mutations, including recordings with small jazz groups and large ensemble. But leading with this CD is an audacious move that signals a new, ands thus far fascinating, chapter in Iyer’s body of recorded works. Recommended.

There Never is No Light

Joshua Rubin

Tundra TUN 002 CD

On There Never is No Light, International Contemporary Ensemble’s clarinetist Joshua Rubin presents a program of new music for clarinet, bass clarinet, and electronics by a diverse group of composers, both elder statesman and those of the thirty/forty-something generation. The Soul is the Arena, a piece for bass clarinet and electronics by Mario Diaz de Leon, crackles with incendiary energy, its synthetic photon bursts offset by growling multiphonics and Eric Dolphy style wails. Rubin also nets the premiere recording of Mario Davidovsky’s Synchronism No. 12, for clarinet and synthesized sounds. As with all of Davidovsky’s Synchronisms, coordination is key. Rubin’s rhythms are spot-on and his responsive playing creates an animated colloquy with the electronics.

Suzanne Farrin’s Ma Dentro Dove, for clarinet and resonating body, is a reverberant meditation rife with trills, repeated notes, and angular melody. Salto Cuántico, a work by Ignacio Baca Lobera for prepared clarinet and electronics, juxtaposes bumptious riffs and altissimo cries with percussive interjections and cascading crescendos of electronic sound. Cory Smythe’s Toast includes piano as well as electronics and has an avant-jazz cast that alternates with Webernian post-tonal melodies. Upon hearing it, one is impressed with Rubin’s seamless maneuvering between styles and playing demeanors.

The album closes with Olly Wilson’s 1974 work Echoes. While very much a period piece, technologically speaking, it is nearly as successful as the Synchronisms at providing the illusion of a dialogue between the tape and performer. Rubin again provides an animated performance that furthers this impression. Excellently performed and thoughtfully curated, There Never is No Light is a fine recording.

Next week, the eightieth birthdays of two very different composers are celebrated in New York. On March 3rd, New York New Music Ensemble fetes English composer Harrison Birtwistle with a portrait concert at the DiMenna Center (details here). Cygnus Ensemble and several soloists perform the music of Mario Davidovsky on the 4th at Merkin Concert Hall (details here). While Birtwistle is best known for his stage works and Davidovsky is known for his Synchronisms, music for electronic tape and soloists, both have written compelling chamber music and this is what will be the focus of these two events. Happy birthday to them both!

Bryce Dessner – St. Carolyn by the Sea

Jonny Greenwood – Suite from There Will be Blood

Bryce and Aaron Dessner, guitars;

Copenhagen Philharmonic, André de Ridder, conductor

Deutsche Grammophon CD

That crossover is not a “one size fits all” phenomenon is amply demonstrated by a new recording on DG. St. Carolyn by the Sea features two of rock’s best known guitarists and is out on March 3rd. These are no dabblers or interlopers; they take the development of classical “chops” very seriously. Bryce Dessner, whose regular gig is with the National, and Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood have both written several pieces for orchestra. Their offerings on the DG CD are a study in stylistic contrasts.

Dessner’s work hews more closely to the minimalist aesthetic. The three pieces here each clock in at over ten minutes in duration, one closer to twenty, and Dessner uses that time to build ostinatos, textural overlays and passages of contrasting moods. Several of his sweeping crescendos are worthy of John Adams or Philip Glass. On St. Carolyn by the Sea and Raphael, Dessner neatly incorporates clear-sounding electric guitars and percussion writing that give the pieces the impetus of a rock drummer but, when the entire section is going hell for leather, writ large. In the work Lachrimae, there are also more delicate passages filled with sustained strings that are particularly affecting. Although Greenwood’s piece is the one that is a suite from a film score, there is a cinematic quality to passages in Dessner’s music too. Some of St. Carolyn’s more thrilling passages could easily be heard alongside a top notch suspense film.

Long fascinated with artifacts of modernism – including instruments such as the ondes martenot, for which he has written in the past – Greenwood draws upon a palette of stylistic resources that is often different from Dessner’s touchstones. Pileups of dissonances, cluster chords, and angular melodies suggest that Messiaen, Stravinsky, Dutilleux, and Ligeti are also on Greenwood’s listening list. In his Suite from There Will be Blood, I’m particularly smitten with the overlaid glissandos and chordal intensity of the movement “Henry Plainview.” Where there is repetition or the use of ostinato, as on “Future Markets,” it is more off kilter, frequently shorn off in dramatic fashion. And even though each movement of the suite is distilled from a film score cue, these aphoristic vignettes are vividly detailed and characterful.

So forget your preconceptions about “rock stars” as classical dilettantes: Dessner and Greenwood are the real deal.

The New Classical

by Christian Carey

I’m pleased to be increasing my involvement with Musical America as the official correspondent for “new music,” about which I’ll be blogging regularly in The New Classical.

About me: I am a composer, performer, writer, and musicologist specializing in music theory, Post-WWII, and American music. My compositions have been performed by the Cassatt String Quartet, New York New Music Ensemble, Locrian Chamber Players, League of Composers, and many others. My primary job is in academia, where I am an Assistant Professor of Music at Westminster Choir College in Princeton, New Jersey. Since 2001, I have been writing articles and reviews about classical, jazz, popular, and experimental music for a variety of publications, including Signal to Noise Magazine, Perspectives of New Music, Tempo, Intégral, Musicworks, Sequenza 21, NewMusicBox, Copper Press Magazine, Splendid Magazine, PopMatters, All About Jazz, Muso, and TimeOutNY. I have also contributed and edited articles for the latest edition of the Grove Dictionary of American Music and Musicians. (To learn more, visit my website: www.christianbcarey.com.)

There’s no way around it: describing something as “classical music,” particularly if it is music written by living composers, has become increasingly cumbersome. It is unlikely that we can forgo the term “classical” altogether: too many radio stations, stores (digital and brick-and-mortar), and arts organizations perpetuate the use of it. When connecting music that is being created today to the classical tradition, the terms “contemporary classical,” “new classical,” and “new music” are often used interchangeably. All three are somewhat problematic.

Both contemporary and new classical connect something happening today with something that all too many people — call them “civilians” — think was made exclusively by Austrian men in powdered wigs. Calling today’s classical music “new music” seems to ignore all of the new music in other genres that is currently being created. What happens to new music by composers once they have passed away: should we call Berio’s music “Near-contemporary Classical?” Partly in response to this conundrum, I am big on breaking down genre barriers (my other blog is titled File Under?). That said, here I will focus on what is going on in “New Classical” music, however loosely defined.

There are a lot of reasons to be excited about New Classical music today. The entrepreneurial and adventurous spirit of a number of ensembles, record labels, and concert series have provided us with a plethora of options to hear. Despite gloom and doom predictions about music’s future, there seem to be more and more composers interested in writing classical music and talented performers willing to play it.

As one can readily see from the biographical snapshot above, my pursuits are eclectic and tastes are catholic. And I am not alone. Many of the practitioners of New Classical music are interested in many different styles and are omnivorous in their listening habits. This informs their work with contemporary flavors that couldn’t be further removed from “music by dead white guys.”  That said, among these adventurous souls there is often a profound respect for and connection to the classical canon. Unlike the style wars of the Twentieth century, where composers had to choose sides based on the kind of music they wrote and the composers that camp permitted into their sphere of influence, musicians today ask, “Why does it have to be either/or?”

I frequently tell my composition students that their musical path can now be more varied than ever, that style has become just one aspect of making a new piece. Much like trying various orchestrations, composers can now experiment with composing in different styles from piece to piece while trying find a compositional identity that will serve them as a through-line. In a culture of streaming, shuffling, mixing, and remixing, composers are able to enjoy being part of a variegated, in some ways fragmented, music scene.

In the coming weeks, I will attempt to provide more context for New Classical’s scene. I hope to encourage you to explore this music–not out of a sense of duty, but with a sense of expectation and adventure.