(+++) FORMS OF MODERNITY

Sarah Louise Bassingthwaighte: Cape Flattery; Concerto for Double Bass and Orchestra; Let There Be Sparrows, then; A Mountain Symphony. Steve Schermer, double bass; London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Bobby Collins and Jonathan Pasternack. Aria Classics. $18.99. 

Music from SEAMUS, Volume 34. New Focus Recordings. $16.99. 

     Modern composers have a myriad of influences from which to choose and a nearly infinite variety of compositional processes and approaches available from which to craft their works. The specific methods and sounds each composer selects are determined in large part by the type and size of audience that each seeks to reach, in addition to whatever content, whether “pure” or programmatic, the music is intended to possess. The four works by Sarah Louise Bassingthwaighte (born 1967) on a new Aria Classics CD all have extramusical associations and illustrative purposes, and all use traditional acoustic instruments and typical orchestral forces to paint their sound pictures. The symphonic poem Cape Flattery is intended as a portrait of the land at the farthest northwest point of the continental United States. As in many similar “landscape” works by other composers, it reflects variegated scenes and weather events through differing pacing, orchestration and music that contrasts the intense and emphatic with the almost-lyrical. It is well-made but will be most effective for listeners who already know the place to which it refers, or at least the surrounding region – it lacks the atmospheric tone painting of works that reach out beyond a specific time and place, such as Mendelssohn’s Fingal’s Cave overture. Bassingthwaighte’s Concerto for Double Bass and Orchestra is considerably more interesting. Here the supra-musical inspirations are subsumed within a work that is intriguing on its own terms and that moves effectively from a rather extended slow movement (titled Lachrymae but not overdoing a sense of tearfulness) through a nicely proportioned Scherzo to an energetic concluding Pesante feroce that displays double-bass virtuosity in a way rarely heard since the days of Giovanni Bottesini. The people involved in the inspiration for the work, soloist Steve Schermer and conductor Jonathan Pasternack, present it with strong commitment and understanding, and listeners intrigued by the very notion of a double-bass concerto will certainly be drawn to the piece, especially the back-and-forth between solo instrument and ensemble in the finale. Let There Be Sparrows, then (the final word of the title uncapitalized) is supposed to be bird-focused, poetry-focused (its title comes from a line in a poem by Shaun O’Brien), and focused on Dietrich Buxtehude, whose D minor Passacaglia provides the basis of its theme-and-variations form. This is rather a lot of freight for the music to carry, and its determinedly contemporary aural world – more of a bow to the avant-garde than are the other works on this disc – makes the various connections rather attenuated. The most expressive and interesting element of the work is its delicacy (it is scored for chamber orchestra), which tends to be at odds with portions of its soundscape, almost as if its avowedly contemporary elements are constantly under threat of being overtaken by a rather sweet lyricism. The inevitable birdsong-like elements actually fit rather imperfectly into a sound world that is more elusive than precise. A Mountain Symphony is more matter-of-fact and forthrightly illustrative than works such as Hovhaness’ Mysterious Mountain symphony, although it uses similar tonal language. Like Cape Flattery, Bassingthwaighte’s symphony is intended to portray and display impressions of a specific landscape, and like that single-movement work, the two-movement symphony consists of variegated instrumental sections designed to show the many moods of a mountain region and, by extension, of people experiencing it. There is nothing particularly groundbreaking in the work’s expressiveness or its rather forthright portrayals of varying environments. But it is well-crafted and has some especially effective integration of percussion into its structure – along with an almost achingly sweet violin solo and some other well-considered individual-instrument touches. The London Symphony Orchestra does a first-rate job with all the music, with Bobby Collins conducting everything other than the double-bass concerto (in which Pasternack leads the orchestra). Bassingthwaighte is a skilled orchestrator whose works on this disc are at their best when they are least insistent on being “about” something and most content to be offered simply as high-quality experiential presentations that are sufficient unto themselves. 

     Bassingthwaighte’s pieces tend to reach out to a fairly wide audience, even when some are rather self-limited because they reference specific places or circumstances with which few people will be familiar or acquainted. The audience for works from SEAMUS, the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music of the United States, is quite different and is self-identified as an “in crowd” for people who enjoy a venue in which the avant-garde composers who use SEAMUS as a membership society can test and sometimes extend the limits of acoustic instruments, voices, and electronics of all sorts. The 34^th  volume of SEAMUS creations, available on New Focus Recordings, offers nine pieces that fit quite comfortably into the SEAMUS universe and that are, by design, aimed by SEAMUS members (who perform on electronics) at other SEAMUS members – and perhaps a small “extended family” that finds productions and sounds of this sort congenial. Every work here, whether for electronics alone or for electronics plus something else, can be, indeed must be, experienced through the lens of the non-musical. Patrick Reed’s Premier D’Aion is about reincarnation and life cycles, using sound that moves through its own life cycle along with a supporting video (not seen on the CD, of course) that was created using artificial intelligence – which is, if you will, a “life” of its own. Leah Reid’s Jouer mixes electronics with amplified soprano saxophone (played by Kyle Hutchins); in line with its title of “play,” it is supposed to reflect adult and children’s games, sports events, casinos and more (and it has some distinctly amusing elements, as when the saxophone perkily plays “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” above electronic sounds). Andrew Burke’s I Wasn’t Thinking is supposed to be a journey through guided meditation, using everything from fixed-media electronics to cellphones and including visual elements (again, not available on the CD). Kerem Ergener’s In Praise of Shadows supplements electronics with flute (Lea Baumert), percussion (Chase Gillett), and violin (Aaron Gonzales), and is tied to a book of the same name by Japanese novelist Jun'ichirō Tanizaki – familiarity with which is a necessity for understanding of the piece. From the cycle Images by Liann J. Kang, for electronics and alto saxophone (Jack Thorpe), this CD includes Blue Air and Traces, the intent in both cases being to put across abstract and intangible ideas through aural impressions – which are indeed abstract and intangible, although no direct connection between these aural images and any specific ideas is determinable. Mickie Wadsworth performs both with her voice and with electronics in Mirror, Mirror, whose idea is to ask rather than answer the existential question of what stares back at someone who stares into a mirror. Oliver Harlan’s xerox In (the first word not capitalized – a frequent affectation in avant-garde titling) sounds like what people who are not particularly enamored of electronic music would expect it to sound like, being a series of repetitive noises including taps, bumps, squeaks, squeals, clangs, feedback and so forth, gradually accumulating atop each other until a final “outer-space-like” chord that eventually fades away. And the rain washed away the fear (no capital letters at all) features the voices and on-electronics performances of Aleu Botelho and Paul J. Botelho in a piece wherein the vocals are augmented, extended, electronically processed and otherwise modified, all with the intention of exploring the source of whatever people hear and the difficulty of knowing just what that source is. Everything here is very earnest, very sincere, and very unlikely to appeal in any way to people who are not already fully committed to the worldview and aural approach for which SEAMUS and its members stand.