Music for Winds and Voice by Ornette Coleman, Oliver Nelson, Eric Dolphy and Jeff Lederer. Mary LaRose, vocal soloist; Jeff Lederer, clarinet; Wildebeest Quintet (Michael Gentile, flute; Mike McGuiness, clarinet; Katie Scheele, oboe; Sara Schoenbeck, bassoon; Nathan Koci, horn). Little (i) Music. $10.
Lei Lang: Six Seasons—Instrumentation Lab. Charles Deluga and Lei Lang, live DSP; Stephen Drury, piano; members of Ensemble Dal Niente, Mivos Quartet, loadbang, and [nec]shivaree. New Focus Recordings. $24.99 (2 CDs).
The way music “should” sound is not always clear. Modern instruments and modern tunings produce effects very different from those employed in times past, and modern performance techniques – vibrato on strings, flutter tonguing on winds, and so forth – have also changed over time. Inherent performance expectations change as well: for example, the improvisational elements that are foundational in jazz have made their way into concert-hall music as well, taking the classical-music world well beyond traditional score modifications such as rubato. Elements of both the jazz and classical worlds intersect on a new CD from clarinetist/saxophonist Jeff Lederer (born 1962) – offered on his own label and including more than a touch of the electronic. The result is music both instrumental and vocal that will not likely reach a wide audience but that should intrigue, even fascinate listeners to whom works by Ornette Coleman, Oliver Nelson and Eric Dolphy already speak. Coleman’s Forms and Sounds, here rather unnecessarily presented as tracks separated by other material, has a strongly electronic aural quality along with some improvised bassoon material. Dolphy’s Woodwind Sextet, mvt 2 mixes enhancements with some very pure instrumental elements, notably in the flute. But most of the material on the disc comes from Nelson: Images, Lem and Aide, Nocturne, There’s a Yearnin’ and Three Seconds, all arranged to include electronically modified vocals (the adjective is “enhanced” for those predisposed to enjoy such modifications). Listeners who know and enjoy the music of Coleman, Nelson and Dolphy – these works or others – will find the differing sound of the arrangements here intriguing, and the entire involvement of a woodwind quintet casts a blanket of sound over the material that differs from what is usually heard. Enjoyment of specific tracks will be a matter of personal preference, but There’s a Yearnin’ and Three Seconds come across particularly well thanks to the clarity of Mary LaRose’s vocal delivery and the attractive differences between the two tracks’ rhythms. Also of considerable interest here is a work by Lederer himself, which has the intriguingly overdone title Cruxifiction (not a word). Arranged for winds and electronics, the piece has a haunting quality that does go on for too long – nine-and-a-half minutes – but that brings forth an interesting instrumental mixture of acoustic and electronic material whose varied pacing, from very slow to very quick, combines to good effect in some respects even though, in others, an underlying repetitive element simply becomes irritating. All the music here is well-played and presented with a sense of commitment to the composers’ forms and their communicative objectives. Heard simply as a sequence of intermingled sounds of varying types and points of origin, the pieces will be worthwhile experiences for audiences that gravitate to mixed genres and interpretation/reinterpretation of established composers’ works.
And speaking of intermingled sounds, they are very much the point of a very extended work called Six Seasons by Lei Liang (born 1972). New Focus Recordings offers the two-hour piece on two CDs, the first (Solos) lasting an hour and a quarter, the second (Ensemble) taking up the remaining time. Rather than being continuous, Six Seasons consists of a series of short works, ranging in length from less than one minute to more than 10. Most are not music in a traditional sense – the opening Prelude, for example, starts with the call of a beluga whale, followed by electronic-keyboard chords. The following items include a baritone solo featuring indrawn breath that sounds like an extended scream of pain, a trumpet-and-trombone item that sounds like percussion, and then pieces for piano, harp, bassoon, ensemble, trumpet, voice, trombone, bass clarinet, piano, cello, and electric guitar. The point made again and again is that he instruments do not sound like what listeners will expect them to sound like: Liang explores soundscapes that insist on being something beyond the “merely” aural, reaching out to – well, what they reach out to is far from clear. The sounds emanating from all the instruments are altered, filtered, overlaid, switched, expanded or contracted, and generally transformed into something recognizable as sound but not in terms of its point(s) or instrument(s) of origin. Liang’s idea involves taking ocean sounds (recorded off the coast of Alaska) and mingling them with highly modified instrumental sounds and extended performance techniques in order to produce a sense of immersion – presumably within the ocean, although this is never made explicitly clear, with some sections sounding more as if they are transporting listeners to the innards of a toilet bowl or the workings of a thunderstorm’s clouds. Both animal calls and instrumental sounds are occasionally intelligible, but their clarity comes within a sonic environment designed to distort perception and undermine the reasons for being of animals, instruments, and performers. The first part of Six Seasons ends with two pieces labeled Postlude, one sounding like gentle rain interrupted by a crash and the other like a small shriek with tiny bits of piano sprinkled on it. Liang’s determination to be perceived as extremely avant-garde is everywhere apparent, and the notion that only the cognoscenti can possibly appreciate the depth and richness of his tone-and-noise painting pervades the project. The second, “ensemble” part of Six Seasons is entirely for grouped instruments and consists, unsurprisingly, of six elements – which share their titles with six of the parts of the “solo” material. However, it is not always apparent that there are multiple instruments involved in these items, since the alterations worked in the “solo” material are also used in the “ensemble” elements, and the intentionally extensive electronic manipulation does an excellent job of concealing the source of whatever is being modified. The primary difference in the “ensemble” segments is length: they are much longer than the individual pieces in the “solo” realm. But they produce exactly the same impressions by using exactly the same methods of distortion, overlay, extension, textural modification, and so forth. Two hours of this is a lot of it, and if Liang was looking to reach an extremely rarefied audience and take listeners on a long, long journey to realms whose connection with any traditional notion of music is obscure at best, he has certainly succeeded. Six Seasons demonstrates, if any such demonstration is still necessary in the 21st century, that contemporary composers are quite as capable as slightly less-recent ones of producing material that will be extremely off-putting to the vast majority of potential listeners while making a tiny subgroup of fans feel as if its members are part of an inner circle of auditory superiority.
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