(+++) SMALL-SCALE AND MODERN

Allison Loggins-Hull: Chamber Music. AVIE. $19.99. 

Noah Meites: Chamber Music. New Focus Recordings. $20.99. 

     It is a commonplace in contemporary composition to say that it is much harder to get a second or third performance of a new work than to get a first one. Music may get heard once in a “new music” context or at a festival, but it has to prove its worth quickly in order to receive repeated hearings and perhaps eventually move into the realm of almost-standard repertoire. The more complex performance requirements are, the more musicians they require, the more difficult it is for a work to establish itself; and this is one reason many contemporary composers turn their attention to chamber music, whose more-limited scale makes it easier to program and, hopefully, re-program. A new AVIE disc featuring works of Allison Loggins-Hull (born 1982) shows some of the ways in which a sensitive modern composer approaches smaller-scale material. The six works on the CD come in a variety of forms and require a variety of performers, but all share a characteristic common in contemporary music: the pieces are intended to reflect or comment on extramusical matters, and it is necessary for an audience to know what those issues are for the music to be fully effective. Patchwork is for viola (Eliesha Nelson) and cello (Brian Thornton). It is supposed to portray a long-term romantic relationship – the identification of these two songful instruments with the partners is clear enough – and reflects the ways matters evolve over time. The intertwining of the instruments is what makes the work attractive; this is actually the one piece on the CD that can be enjoyed without being required to pay close attention to its intended foundational meaning. Matters are different in Can You See? This is for a larger chamber ensemble, with Loggins-Hull conducting flute (Jessica Sindell), horn (Jesse McCormick), violins (Katherine Bormann and Zhan Shu), viola (Nelson), cello (Thornton), bass (Maximilian Dimoff), and percussion (Thomas Sherwood). The piece is one of those “America is far from perfect” bits of obviousness intended to show that the reality of life in the United States does not live up to its ideals, and its history is at best a checkered one. Ho-hum: neither the work’s pseudointellectual gloss nor its rather ordinary sound is particularly engaging, although some of the percussion elements are interesting. Homeland is for solo flute, played by Joshua Smith. Flute is also Loggins-Hull’s instrument, and she writes knowledgeably for it. As in the previous work on the disc, this one uses The Star Spangled Banner as a touchstone for what is intended as commentary on a nation falling short of its ideals – in this case based on the aftermath of a hurricane and various sociopolitical circumstances surrounding it. That is a lot of freight for a solo-flute piece to carry, and the work does not really connect meaningfully with its intended nonmusical themes. It does, however, sound quite good in its own right, and sustains well and without fussiness throughout its modest length. The Pattern is for flute (Sindell), clarinet (Georg Klaas), violin (Jason Yu), cello (Thornton), piano (Daniel Overly), and percussion (Sherwood). Yet again, it is supposed to be about something societal, in this case racial injustice, which it displays through considerable racket and dissonance that never quite disappears even in quieter sections. Certainly the work is disquieting and never quite resolves in any positive musical way, but neither does it connect with its reason for being unless listeners pre-study the composer’s reasons for creating it – a common issue in contemporary music that is intended to reflect societal matters. Kalief is another piece intended to comment on injustice, this time in the case of a teenager named Kalief Browder, who was arrested for a crime he did not commit and kept in solitary confinement for 700 days; two years after his release, he committed suicide. The case has been made into a TV miniseries and on that basis may be familiar to some potential listeners, but it has to be known to the audience for Loggins-Hull’s work to have any effect. The short piece (3½ minutes) is for clarinet (Klaas) and piano (Overly) and is somehow supposed to suggest that if Browder had been white, he would have been treated differently – which may or may not be the case, but which is in no way apparent from anything in the music. Once again, the work is well-crafted and makes some solid musical points, but those are not what Loggins-Hull wants it to do – she expects it to be a work freighted with a massive sense of racial imbalance and injustice, and it simply is not. The CD concludes with Shine, for soprano (Laquita Mitchell), flute (Loggins-Hull herself), viola (Nelson), and piano (Overly). The text by U-Meleni Mhlaba-Adebo celebrates light-despite-darkness in unsurprising ways (“we shine bright / even in dark spaces” is said repeatedly) and with multiple clichés (“inside & outside the lines,” “we lift / each other / up,” “oceans of our tears”). The expressions are unexceptionable and the musical accompaniment unexceptional; the vocal line dips into and out of intelligibility. The work sustains more uplift than the intentionally gloomier societal-commentary pieces on the disc, but is less musically involving than some of them. In her balancing act of social consciousness with music-making, Loggins-Hull shows throughout this release that she is a skillful composer but only a commonplace thinker and analyst of societal rights and wrongs. 

     The longest work on a New Focus Recordings release of music by Noah Meites (born 1982) strains the bounds of chamber music: it is for no fewer than 19 instruments – plus four voices (two sopranos and two altos). Called Counting, the piece is more conventionally avant-garde than the works by Loggins-Hull and is much more concerned with pure musical matters. It is immersed in the pop-music world as well as that of classical music, and includes gestural material from keyboard, electric guitar and other instruments more closely associated with Prince (whose music Counting partly reflects) than with traditional chamber works. Meites tries very hard to keep the piece interesting at its considerable length (19 minutes), and if he does not quite succeed – the interjections and repeated contrasts of sonority become unsurprising after a while – he does show considerable skill in balancing the potentially unwieldy ensemble. There is a definite extramusical connection to Counting: the vocal soloists sing words from Jeremy A. Schmidt’s 2011 poem Censuspeak, which juxtaposes Census Bureau words and bits of the U.S. Constitution to attempt societal commentary. But the ensemble’s size and Meites’ approach to the instruments mean the nonmusical matter never really becomes the focus of Counting, and that is all to the good: what interest the work sustains has more to do with its elaborate instrumentation and rhythmic diversity than with anything in the verbiage. The six other pieces on the CD are more modest in scope. Cadere (a sextet performed by Brightwork New Music) is a mainly texture-focused piece whose use of pitched percussion is noteworthy. Sonance for two pianos (played by HOCKET: Sarah Gibson and Thomas Kotcheff) is one of those experimental-keyboard-sound pieces of which some modern composers are enamored: it stops and starts and stutters and alternates between regular and irregular rhythms and pace to no particular purpose. Fracture Mechanics for four saxophones (played by the New Thread Quartet) moves from sonic haze to frantic activity and back again, with intermittent elements of quiet and intensity. To Whom Shall I Tell My Grief is a set of two pieces for viola (Linnea Powell) and piano (richi valitutto, spelled without capital letters). The movement titles are similar – “Restlessly” and “Agitato” – but the actual music differs somewhat, the first movement dipping into longer lines after a disconnected opening while the second bounces around in both instruments without any apparent sense of direction or intentionality beyond the staccato. The CD ends with Voyager Golden Record for septet and fixed media electronics, its performance attributed to LA Signal Lab. Like Counting but unlike the other works on the disc, Voyager Golden Record reaches for specific extramusical meaning, its title referring to the Voyager probes’ deep-space exploration and its content including recordings related to the program, notably the words “the only home we have.” Unsurprisingly, the work seeks a sense of musical weightlessness and ethereality as it moves toward a kind of peaceful uplift. It does require knowledge of its referents to be fully effective, but has a clearer connection to its foundational inspiration than Counting or the societally focused works of Loggins-Hull. Over time, it is the inherent musicality of all these new pieces – not their attempts to force audiences to accept and endorse their composers’ thoughts beyond the realm of music – that will determine whether they receive ongoing programming placement and recording or simply become some of the heard-once-and-abandoned detritus of the avant-garde.