Adam Groh: hawthorn; Emma O’Halloran: how sweet the thought of you as infinite; Alex Dowling: ∞; Ian Dicke: Eight Oh Eight; Ethan Frederick Greene: Lissajous. Adam Groh, percussion. Ophelia Music Press. $10.
Sid Robinovitch: Adieu Babylon; Noam Lemish: Pursue Peace; James Rolfe: O Greenest Branch. Amy Hillis and Noa Sand, violins; Katherine Dowling, piano; Catherine Gray, viola; Mark Chambers, cello; Eric Abramovitz, clarinet; Sara Schabas, Jane Fingler, and Vania Chan, sopranos; Veronika Muggeridge and Rebecca Clayton, altos; Mark Duggan, percussion; Clark Schaufele, organ; David Fallis, conductor. New Focus Recordings. $20.99.
The question of just what forces to use to express musical ideas is one that composers have wrestled with pretty much forever – at least when they have had options. And there are plenty of options today, not only for acoustic instruments but also for electronics – and also for voices, whether used traditionally or in vocalises or as nonverbal instruments themselves. Percussionist Adam Groh, not surprisingly, focuses on the communicative powers of percussion on a new recording from Ophelia Music Press that opens with a work of his own, hawthorn (titled without a capital letter, an affectation for some contemporary composers). The music has a pleasantly continuous, rather monotonous beat that is coupled with field recordings from Missouri (hawthorn is the state flower); it progresses at a mostly steady tempo, the rhythmic variation carrying it forward. Although not especially expressive, and certainly not florally evocative, it continues pleasantly enough until eventually and rather inevitably fading to nothing. In Emma O’Halloran’s how sweet the thought of you as infinite (again, no capital letters in the title), the percussive elements are more emotive and the volume range wider, with elements that seem to drift coupled with more-driven ones that, however, go nowhere in particular. Alex Dowling’s ∞ has a title apparently designed to befuddle old-fashioned typesetters, who (fortunately for the piece’s identification) no longer exist. The very deep sounds with which the work opens contrast significantly with the audio landscape of the Groh and O’Halloran works, and Dowling soon progresses into Ligeti-like “space music” material that continually sounds as if it is growing and growling into something portentous, although it never actually gets to any such place. The constant background sense of slow-breathing swells and diminutions plays out against a more-varied foreground that is repetitiously insistent almost throughout. Ian Dicke’s Eight Oh Eight has an aural focus on electronic enhancement of a drum set and is an intellectually interesting study of musical development almost wholly utilizing untuned percussion – a rhythmically intriguing endeavor that will likely be of considerable interest to Groh’s fellow percussionists, although it gives everyday listeners little to latch onto except for the chime sounds first heard midway through and recurring toward the end. It actually ends emphatically, not with a fadeout – a pleasant differentiation from what has come before on the disc. Ethan Frederick Greene’s Lissajous is one of those works whose genesis needs to be understood for it to have its full effect: it is based on Lissajous curves, geometric patterns created by plotting two notes or sound waves against each other on X and Y axes. Heard strictly as music rather than a geometry-class requirement, the work is more aurally varied than most of the others on this CD, with exclamatory intervals bursting occasionally from its evenness of tempo and with electronic sounds more overtly produced and more prominent than in the other pieces here. It is the longest piece on the CD, at 15½ minutes, and does not really sustain throughout its length; and its vibraphone focus wears thin after a while despite the sonic variations produced by the electronics. Nevertheless, it – like all the other pieces here – gets a strongly committed performance from Groh, who has clearly lived with all this music long enough to absorb the composers’ varying approaches and to differentiate the pieces to the greatest possible extent. Certainly not a disc for everyone, this CD will intrigue percussionists and, at least in small doses, be of interest to audiences hungry for music generated neither solely acoustically nor entirely electronically, but through a percussion-focused melding of both sources.
The musical forces are more conventional but at least equally varied on a New Focus Recordings release whose three works are united strictly by extramusical factors: all are by Canadian Jewish composers. One of them, Noam Lemish (born 1983), is the prime mover behind a York University project intended to showcase these and other contemporary works, and himself contributes one of the pieces heard here. Whatever Lemish’s motivation may be, the fact remains that for these and the many other pieces written on behalf of one cause or another, the music must succeed on its own terms, not within a narrow historical or sociopolitical context, if it is to have any hope of reaching out to anyone beyond a tiny niche audience. Lemish’s Pursue Peace (2015) for clarinet and string quintet is so permeated by a “cause” mentality that its musicality seems a distinctly subsidiary element of its existence. It was written for a group called the Israeli-Iranian Musical Initiative, its title is a reference to Psalm 34, and its movement titles are insistently geopolitical, especially the first, What’s the Distance Between Tel Aviv and Tehran? The work also draws on music by two Israeli composers, Baruch Chait and Sasha Argov. And what is in store for potential listeners unaware of the very substantial gloss required for full understanding of the purpose of this music? The second movement, Two Plus Two, is especially arresting in its contrast between a melody that flows gently and intense passages that contrast with and interrupt it, while the concluding movement – called Pursue Peace, replicating the title of the entire work – reaches no particular conclusion but seems to suggest, especially in the strings, that pursuing peace and finding it are far from the same thing. Lemish’s work is preceded on the disc by Adieu Babylon (1991) by Sid Robinovitch (born 1942). This single-movement work is scored simply, for violin and piano, and although written during the Persian Gulf War, communicates in more-general terms through its mixture of mournfulness, nostalgia, intensity, vigor and Middle Eastern coloration, often pushing both instruments into their high registers before it eventually comes back to the opening material. It effectively takes listeners on a journey that sounds less like an adieu and more like a circling back to the past. Robinovitch’s spare scoring contrasts with the approach of James Rolfe (born 1961) in O Greenest Branch (2019), the final work on the CD. Written for soprano, vocal ensemble, percussion and organ, this six-movement piece mixes texts by Hildegard von Bingen with two Jewish laments, one medieval and one written in the 20th century. It is easier to admire this work’s skillful construction than to enjoy it, and enjoyment is not its primary purpose: it is essentially dark, using voices, both solo and grouped, to lament centuries of Jewish persecution. The intellectual/emotional edifice is the work’s reason for being, but its most musically attractive elements are not the mainly dark vocal ones but the well-chosen and sometimes genuinely engaging touches in the accompaniment. The organ tends to underline the vocalizing while the percussion more often comments on what is being put forth. As a whole, this is an interesting work that tries very hard indeed to be meaningful – especially in the intensity of the solo-soprano parts – but that comes across as musically rather monochromatic despite the number of performers Rolfe uses. The CD as a whole is self-limited by its topic and orientation, and it is hard to escape the notion that the composers, and Lemish as curator, are basically fine with that. They would like to reach out to an audience wider than the obvious one, but if not, so be it – they will be satisfied to communicate among themselves.
No comments:
Post a Comment