(+++) HOW THE VOICES ENTWINE

Undertaker’s Songbook. Sons of the Never Wrong (Sue Demel, Deborah Maris Lader, Bruce Roper) and guest artists. Sons 3 Records. $15.

Gráinne Mulvey: Great Women. Elizabeth Hilliard, soprano. Métier. $9.50.

     There is a certain solidity to folk music, a certain timelessness to its simplicity, its straightforward rhythms, its frequent emphasis on storytelling above tunefulness. There is an underlying naïveté to the form, one that comes through even when the words of songs are more complex and less straightforward than usual. It is the combination of the naïve, the traditional, and the sophisticated – or at least problematic – verbiage that makes Undertaker’s Songbook interesting. These are songs that hint at meaning beyond the everyday, sometimes through their titles (Bob & Socrates, Om Not This Time) and sometimes through specific lyrics: “This land is made of reason, a million years, and all four seasons.” “I’ve been a witness, but I’m not sure just what I’ve been witnessing.” “In the end we’re all panes of glass that see the same things differently.” Some of the presentation by Sons of the Never Wrong is as traditional as it is possible to be: O Chocolay, for example, tells an entire mythic folk story in straightforward narration before the actual singing begins. And most of these 15 songs use the time-honored verse-and-chorus form that is integral to so much folk music. The singers blend throughout – with each other, with instruments, and with the words, often giving the songs a quality of eternal contemplation that makes this essentially simple, even simplistic music thoughtful in ways that transcend both the tones and the language. It is interesting how effectively this music speaks of music: “The lights are low, the song is over,” and “I used to be a singer, songs so hard to hear, but the melodies still haunt me all the same.” There are no especially haunting melodies in Undertaker’s Songbook, but there are words and thoughts that will stay for some time with listeners who gravitate to music of this type. And there are enough flickers of blues, rock and other musical forms to give many of the tracks some individual character. As a totality, the compositional simplicity belies an underlying thoughtfulness that is communicated all the more effectively because the musical means of doing so are, certainly on the surface, so forthright.

     The focus is equally solidly on vocals on a new Métier CD devoted to a single, 26-minute work by Irish composer Gráinne Mulvey. But the contrast in the way vocals are focused here could not be greater. Great Women is for a single voice (soprano Elizabeth Hilliard) and electronics, and it is neither more nor less than a basically straightforward presentation of the words of Irish women whose statements and deeds underpin the nation as it exists today. The audience for this hagiographic portrayal of Ireland and some of the past turmoil through which it became a modern nation is extremely limited, but the disc will surely speak with great feeling and meaningfulness to the very narrow listenership for which it is intended. Taped words from more than a century ago – from Countess Constance Markievicz and Rose Hackett – appear along with the much-more-recent words of two modern Irish presidents, Mary Robinson and Mary McAleese, plus Latin phrases put together by Mulvey. Hilliard, to whom Great Women is dedicated, contributes a variety of contemporary vocal techniques that range from text fragmentation to expressive vocalise. Mulvey’s work is a sociopolitical statement that does not really constitute a piece of music except in its partial use of select musical techniques. Its focus on verbal communication is every bit as strong as the focus of folk music – stronger, in fact, since there is not really anything significant to hear in Great Women except the words. If folk music tends to rely on intermingling of accessible verbiage with accessible tunes and harmonies, Great Women is more concerned with the intersection of the words of the present with the words of the past, with a modicum of musical/electronic reinforcement. An interpretative treatise for the Irish nation, Mulvey’s work exists in service to one country’s history – and is strictly for those deeply steeped in both the past and the present of that single nation.