(+++) VOCAL SOUNDS AND OTHERS

Music for Clarinet, Voice & Percussion. Sputter Box (Kathryn Vetter, clarinets; Alina Tamborini, voice; Peter White, percussion). New Focus Recordings. $20.99. 

Tomás Gueglio: Ciclo Lamarque, Part 1—Songs & Madrigals. Quince Ensemble; Ensemble Dal Niente; Ekmeles. New Focus Recordings. $20.99. 

     The human voice is among the many traditional elements of music that some contemporary composers are determined to push to their limits and beyond, as two recent New Focus Recordings releases show clearly. The various composers employ the voice differently, sometimes as an instrument within an ensemble (essentially a vocalise, although not in the sense in which that terms has been used since the 18^th century), sometimes in a more-traditional singing mode, and sometimes to produce extended sounds that parallel, in their own way, the expanded techniques that avant-garde music creators like to bring to acoustic instruments. The clarinet-voice-percussion trio Sputter Box presents six works for its unusual sonic combination on a CD that, although short (40 minutes), pulls vocal contributions through a wide variety of styles and sounds. Martha Callison Horst’s Exchanges explores the vocalise environment, but not in any sense of vocal training (the original use of vocalise): there are syllables and breaths and individual vowel and consonant sounds combining, rather uneasily, with the clarinet and percussion elements. Allison McIntosh’s Snapshot of the Red Eclipse is closer to a song, using words by Anna Goodson, but the instruments do not so much accompany the voice as surround it with sounds, especially percussive ones. Filippo Scaramucci’s Vita vana, using words by Tito Balestra, mostly repeats its title nearly ad infinitum, sometimes with clarity and sometimes with intensity and sometimes with a sarcastic edge. Daijana Wallace’s Stillness to..... (titled/punctuated that way) is the audio portion of a multimedia work; it consists of a number of disconnected and irrelevant-to-each-other phrases (all intended to connect in some way to the ellipsis of the title), ranging from countdowns to words expressing emotion, with a touch of an instrument here and there. Bethany Younge’s Doublespeak uses techniques similar to Horst’s but carries them further with indrawn breaths, bits of chants, and other fragments of sound coming into the forefront – and complementing similarly fragmentary instrumental elements. And Brendan Sweeney’s Séance Serenade is one of those works with no meaning unless you know its genesis: it is supposed to reflect a soprano being possessed by composers of the past during a séance – but what it sounds like is a combination of shrieks and screams and vocal exclamations of all sorts intermingled with snippets of instrumental punctuation points. The whole CD wears its “experimental” bone fides on its sleeve and, if it does make an impression on an audience interested in how vocalizing fits into contemporary music trends, is unlikely to be a disc that bears repeated listening. 

     Much the same is true of a slightly longer (48-minute) disc of music by Argentine composer Tomás Gueglio. The CD offers five multi-short-movement works (containing two to four movements of two to four-and-a-half minutes) performed by three modern-music ensembles. Some contemporary composers absolutely require listeners to know the extramusical inspirations of their creations in order to follow the music, and that is certainly the case for Gueglio: everything on this disc involves music from a 1940s Argentine movie called Cita en la frontera, in which one of the composer’s grandmothers appeared. Without knowing the personal connection, the movie connection, the time period of the film, or Argentine filmmaking in general, a listener will have no touchpoints for understanding the music or even knowing what is going on. Gueglio does try to give the movie-sourced texts of his works a level of greater generality by rearranging them rather than giving them in the movie’s sequence, but by no stretch of the imagination does this material reach out to any but the most rarefied possible audience – one whose cultural heritage and understanding of film are thoroughly in synch with Gueglio’s own. The scoring of the four works on the CD does vary: for example, Madrigales del Rio is for female vocal quartet, while Triste y madrigal is for soprano, flute, French horn, harp, electric guitar, and violin. But the differing sonic environments do little to reach out to different potential audiences – and reaching out of any sort seems largely beside the point here, with Gueglio primarily interested in telling a story of his own to his own inner circle (family included). Lamarque Songs, Soap Madrigals, Canciones que el río murmura – the titles of these little vocal groupings tie only to personal referents; and most individual movements are simply numbered rather than named, so those not already in the know get no guidance toward meaning beyond what they bring to the material themselves. Some of the vocal writing is actually handled interestingly, and the supplements to the voices – including electronics – help enlarge the aural canvas. But Gueglio, like many avant-garde composers, seems little concerned with any sort of communicative canvas, preferring a kind of navel-gazing music whose very narrowness shuts out those not already in the know and not already fully committed to sharing the highly specific, thoroughly personalized thoughts and feelings that the composer explores in his own way and for reasons of his own.