(+++) OF SOUND AND NATURE

Gavin Bryars: A Native Hill. The Crossing conducted by Donald Nally. Navona. $14.99.

Carl Vollrath: Five Songs on the Text of William Blake; Love Songs; Variations in Verse–Rural Poems. Aliana de la Guardia, mezzo-soprano; Emalie Savoy, soprano; Yoko Hagino and Nathan Brandwein, piano; Timothy Phillips, clarinet; Philipp Stäudlin, saxophone. Navona. $14.99.

     There is nothing new about poets and composers exploring nature’s wonders and challenges, but many contemporary creators tend to bring a greater sense of urgency to the topic than prior ones did, given the vastly increased urbanization of humanity and the many threats to the natural world from human and other sources. Two new Navona discs feature composers tackling matters of nature in different ways and mostly from different angles. Gavin Bryars’ A Native Hill is a very extended (more than hour-long) a cappella cantata based on words by Wendell Berry (born 1934) and written specifically for The Crossing, the vocal group that performs it on this CD. Although the work is “much of a muchness” and does not really sustain at its full length – even voices as good as these tend toward a kind of aural monochromaticism after a while – it has many highly intriguing elements and will certainly interest performers and listeners seeking an experience somewhat akin to that of Henry David Thoreau, but updated for more-recent times. There are 12 sections in A Native Hill, with Berry’s words – prose, not poetry, although they are oftentimes poetic – detailing rural existence and its minutiae and also speculating on how the simplicity of nature reflects (and reflects on) the complexity of human life in general. This is thus a not-atypical philosophical study of how nature and human life intersect, interact, complement each other and are sometimes at odds. It is hard not to accept the underpinning and sought meaning of phrases such as, “when the mind wanders rather than the feet, one returns to the old route,” and “the streams are great collectors of comings and goings.” However, much of the pleasure of this recording comes from the sheer sound of The Crossing under Donald Nally, not (or not solely) from Berry’s words. Bryars (born 1943) wrote A Native Hill not only for the ensemble but also for specific voices within it, and his exquisite sensitivity to individual as well as grouped vocal performance shows through again and again. Bryars does not fear simplicity or tonality, and many sections of the work have a churchlike feeling about them – again, something not out of keeping with typical “nature’s wonders” music. But Bryars also knows when to sprinkle contemporary techniques and sounds in this music, from occasional humming and whistling to a highly chromatic opening of the final section, “At Peace,” which only gradually resolves into a feeling that matches the segment’s title. An hour-plus of unaccompanied vocal music setting words from a single essay is quite a bit by any standards, no matter how well-meaning Berry’s words and Bryars’ settings of them may be. A Native Hill is an immersive experience in many ways, not one that will fully engage many audiences – even very well-meaning ones – but one that will appeal strongly to lovers not only of the natural world but also of sensitively designed and characterized musical interpretations and explications of it.

     One of the three works by Carl Vollrath (born 1931) on a second Navona release has some parallels with A Native Hill. This is Variations in Verse–Rural Poems to words by John Gracen Brown (born 1936). This too is a lengthy series of movements – 14 of them – but most individual ones are quite short, so the whole collection lasts just a bit more than half as long as does Bryars’ work. Brown’s words are poetry rather than prose, so they come by some of their expressive effects naturally through the process of poetic creativity; and Vollrath sets them for a single voice (mezzo-soprano Aliana de la Guardia) and the interesting accompaniment of piano (Yoko Hagino) and saxophone (Philipp Stäudlin). The result is a kind of pervasive “poetic melancholy” throughout the cycle, with rather less of a philosophical overlay than in Bryars’ work and considerably greater use of modern compositional techniques, notably including dissonance (although most often resolved to consonance). The expressiveness of the music is tied, again and again, to specific sylvan scenes, from “Early Spring” to “The Coming of a Rainstorm,” from “Night Is Coming” to “Walk at Twilight.” There is certainly room here for some philosophical musings, notably in the final two settings, “On Leaving a Place in the Woods” and “Oh the Sky Is Deep Tonight.” But Vollrath’s work is more a piece of impressionism than one seeking symbolism beneath the natural scenes. The other two cycles on this CD focus, respectively, on human concerns and beyond them. Love Songs sets seven works by Sara Teasdale (1884-1933), a popular choice among composers seeking the bittersweet and attracted not only by Teasdale’s words but also by her tragic life, including her suicide two years after that of former lover and fellow poet Vachel Lindsay. Vollrath has Teasdale’s poems interpreted by soprano (Emalie Savoy), clarinet (Timothy Phillips), and piano (Nathan Brandwein) – and just as the inclusion of saxophone in the Brown cycle produces a dark and introverted overall tone, so the use of clarinet lends additional expressivity and occasional plaintiveness to a collection that includes “Barter,” “Faults,” “Child, Child,” “After Love,” “Gifts,” “Dusk in War Time,” and “Joy.” The cycle is effective – but the most interesting music on this disc features only mezzo-soprano (de la Guardia) and piano (Hagino), and uses the oldest words of all. This is Five Songs on the Text of William Blake, whose title interestingly does not say “texts,” thereby pointing to the notion that all the poetry of Blake (1757-1827) was somehow part of the same overarching theme. This is not far from the truth: Blake’s religious/spiritual mysticism, and his repeated use of simple language and extremely naïve scene-setting as a gateway to deep philosophical thoughts, are characteristic of all his poetic work (and indeed of his art, which is as remarkable and affecting as his poetry). It is in Blake that the nature focus of Brown and the human focus of Teasdale are combined – or were combined, since he predated them both. Again and again Blake brings a message of disappointment that at times devolves into despair: the “scorn” in “The Wild Flowers Song,” the too-intense seeking of joy in “Eternity,” the fleeing heavenly visitor that returns too late in “The Angel,” the “blind hand” of destruction in “The Fly,” the “invisible worm” that brings death to “The Sick Rose” – these are the feelings of the five poems set by Vollrath, all of which are handled with care and sensitivity by composer and performers alike. Like the Bryars disc, this one of Vollrath’s music will most appeal to a somewhat specialized audience, but will bring considerable pleasure through its thoughtfulness to lovers of contemporary settings of a wide variety of words with considerable variations in meaning and expressiveness.

(+++) HOW THE VOICES ENTWINE

Undertaker’s Songbook. Sons of the Never Wrong (Sue Demel, Deborah Maris Lader, Bruce Roper) and guest artists. Sons 3 Records. $15.

Gráinne Mulvey: Great Women. Elizabeth Hilliard, soprano. Métier. $9.50.

     There is a certain solidity to folk music, a certain timelessness to its simplicity, its straightforward rhythms, its frequent emphasis on storytelling above tunefulness. There is an underlying naïveté to the form, one that comes through even when the words of songs are more complex and less straightforward than usual. It is the combination of the naïve, the traditional, and the sophisticated – or at least problematic – verbiage that makes Undertaker’s Songbook interesting. These are songs that hint at meaning beyond the everyday, sometimes through their titles (Bob & Socrates, Om Not This Time) and sometimes through specific lyrics: “This land is made of reason, a million years, and all four seasons.” “I’ve been a witness, but I’m not sure just what I’ve been witnessing.” “In the end we’re all panes of glass that see the same things differently.” Some of the presentation by Sons of the Never Wrong is as traditional as it is possible to be: O Chocolay, for example, tells an entire mythic folk story in straightforward narration before the actual singing begins. And most of these 15 songs use the time-honored verse-and-chorus form that is integral to so much folk music. The singers blend throughout – with each other, with instruments, and with the words, often giving the songs a quality of eternal contemplation that makes this essentially simple, even simplistic music thoughtful in ways that transcend both the tones and the language. It is interesting how effectively this music speaks of music: “The lights are low, the song is over,” and “I used to be a singer, songs so hard to hear, but the melodies still haunt me all the same.” There are no especially haunting melodies in Undertaker’s Songbook, but there are words and thoughts that will stay for some time with listeners who gravitate to music of this type. And there are enough flickers of blues, rock and other musical forms to give many of the tracks some individual character. As a totality, the compositional simplicity belies an underlying thoughtfulness that is communicated all the more effectively because the musical means of doing so are, certainly on the surface, so forthright.

     The focus is equally solidly on vocals on a new Métier CD devoted to a single, 26-minute work by Irish composer Gráinne Mulvey. But the contrast in the way vocals are focused here could not be greater. Great Women is for a single voice (soprano Elizabeth Hilliard) and electronics, and it is neither more nor less than a basically straightforward presentation of the words of Irish women whose statements and deeds underpin the nation as it exists today. The audience for this hagiographic portrayal of Ireland and some of the past turmoil through which it became a modern nation is extremely limited, but the disc will surely speak with great feeling and meaningfulness to the very narrow listenership for which it is intended. Taped words from more than a century ago – from Countess Constance Markievicz and Rose Hackett – appear along with the much-more-recent words of two modern Irish presidents, Mary Robinson and Mary McAleese, plus Latin phrases put together by Mulvey. Hilliard, to whom Great Women is dedicated, contributes a variety of contemporary vocal techniques that range from text fragmentation to expressive vocalise. Mulvey’s work is a sociopolitical statement that does not really constitute a piece of music except in its partial use of select musical techniques. Its focus on verbal communication is every bit as strong as the focus of folk music – stronger, in fact, since there is not really anything significant to hear in Great Women except the words. If folk music tends to rely on intermingling of accessible verbiage with accessible tunes and harmonies, Great Women is more concerned with the intersection of the words of the present with the words of the past, with a modicum of musical/electronic reinforcement. An interpretative treatise for the Irish nation, Mulvey’s work exists in service to one country’s history – and is strictly for those deeply steeped in both the past and the present of that single nation.

(++++) SWEET!

The Big, Fun Kids Baking Book. By Food Network Magazine. Hearst Home Kids. $19.99.

     The biggest problem with this book is the table of contents, or rather the pages immediately after the table of contents. The TOC itself blandly lists the types of baked-goods recipes to be found on upcoming pages: Muffins & Quick Breads, Brownies & Bars, Cookies, Cupcakes, Cakes and Fake-Out Cakes. But the six following pages, which show pictures of the specific items in each section, are so delicious-looking that you can gain three pounds just by staring at them. And you can quickly get to a state of “paralysis by analysis,” trying to figure out just which scrumptious goodie to make first, and second, and third, and 17^th, and…and, and, and (there are more than 100 possibilities!).

     What is particularly delightful about The Big, Fun Kids Baking Book is that kids who follow the recipes (which, it is worth mentioning, often would be greatly helped by some adult assistance – a great recipe for bonding time) really can end up with baked goods that look remarkably like the photos. Both the recipes and the pictures are that good and that accurate.

     This is not to say that everything in The Big, Fun Kids Baking Book is easy to do. Most baking, until you get quite good at it, is rather unforgiving of recipe deviations. The folks at Food Network Magazine make that point subtly at the start of this book, suggesting that readers who “like to throw a little of this and a handful of that into the pan and see what happens” will tend to be cooks (the audience for the previous volume, The Big, Fun Kids Cookbook), while those who like to “take your time, measure everything carefully and follow recipes just as they’re written” will tend to be bakers. That’s a pretty good distinction for the young and presumably just-learning-the-ways-of-the-kitchen audience for whom this book and its predecessor are intended. But that is not to say that young readers must slavishly follow the words here: some of those words are intended to promote creativity even as the book as a whole shows the importance of following baking recipes with care. For instance, in addition to recipes for several types of muffins and quick breads, there is a “Design Your Own Recipe” offering for banana bread, which gives the basic way to make a loaf but encourages five different possible mix-ins (such as nuts, dried fruit and chocolate chips) and provides three options for glazes. That’s a good start for the sort of adaptive behavior that enthusiastic bakers develop sometimes out of creativity (“what if I mixed this with that instead of that?”) and sometimes out of necessity (“how am I going to make frosting when I’m out of powdered sugar?”).

     The recipes in The Big, Fun Kids Baking Book are delicious-looking and -tasting, although it would have been nice if calorie counts per portion had been included – to give young bakers an idea of when a good thing becomes too much of a good thing. The book includes so many forms of yum that it will be hard for a young reader who gets started to stop making treats. Of course, that is the point (although moderation really is called for with many of these recipes – parents will have to provide it, gently). And the “fun” part of the title (a grammatical irritation: “fun” is a noun, not an adjective, no matter what social media [plural] say) shows up again and again. For instance, there are two pages called “Decorate Your Doughnuts” that display five very different and highly colorful approaches; and there are “Did You Know?” boxes scattered throughout the book with baking-related facts (Albany, Georgia, is home to more than 600,000 pecan trees; Oregon produces 99% of America’s hazelnuts; you can make an edible jigsaw puzzle out of sugar-cookie dough; a classic Oreo cookie is 29% cream and 71% cookie; and so on). There are also “Tips” that add a little suggestion here and there to the recipes: Birthday Cake Bars, for example, “will still taste great” whether finished off with store-bought frosting, or with the book’s frosting recipe, or with no frosting at all; and any cupcake can be made in mini form – you get about three times as many minis as regular-size ones.

     As for the section called “Fake-Out Cakes,” it is for somewhat more-advanced young bakers, featuring cakes that look like what they are not. There is a Chili Dog Cake, and an Ice Cream Sandwich Cake, and more – but these recipes are not for anyone in a hurry: it takes two hours to make the Spaghetti-and-Meatballs Cake or the Pineapple Cake, an hour and a half for the Egg-in-a-Hole Cake, and so forth. Still, there is something extra-tempting about working on a Taco Ice Cream Cake (one-and-a-half hours plus freezing time) or a Grilled Cheese Cake (one hour and 45 minutes). And what might young bakers do to stay occupied as the “Fake-Out Cakes” come into being? Well, a “Did You Know?” box says, “The average person in the United States eats about 35,000 cookies in a lifetime. How many do you think you’ve had so far?” The more-complex recipes allow plenty of time to count – indeed, to add to the count. But, umm, it wouldn’t hurt to go online before doing that and figure out just how many calories are in 35,000 cookies. There are, after all, limits to fun, even to the fun in The Big, Fun Kids Baking Book.

(++++) AMERICANA

Music for American Wind Band by Patrick Sarsfield Gilmore, Edward Beyer, Ernesto Cavallini, Giuseppe Verdi, Jean Marie Missud, George Schleiffarth, August Damm, John Philip Sousa, Ciro Pinsuti, Allesandro Liberati, Thomas Coates, and Émile Waldteufel. Newberry’s Victorian Cornet Band conducted by Elisa Koehler. MSR Classics. $14.95.

Priscilla Alden Beach: City Trees; Linda Robbins Coleman: For a Beautiful Land; Alexandra Pierce: Behemoth. Lansdowne Symphony Orchestra conducted by Reuben Blundell. New Focus Recordings. $16.99.

Aaron Jay Myers: Skin; Lichens II; Oh, the Irony; Have-Not; Night of Pan; Clever Machines; Own Your Own Shadow; Paroxysm. New Focus Recordings. $16.99.

     It was wind bands, not orchestras, that were the primary carriers of musical culture around the United States in the latter part of the 19^th century – emphatically so when John Philip Sousa completely revamped and reorganized the whole wind-band concept, but even before then, when the bands were largely a carryover from the Civil War. This makes wind-band music from the late 1800s and early 1900s a fertile field to explore, and one that has by no means been investigated as thoroughly as has concert-hall music of the same period. Hearing band music of this time on band instruments of this time is an even-less-common occurrence, and as a new MSR Classics disc featuring Elisa Koehler conducting Newberry’s Victorian Cornet Band shows, it is one that is very much worth experiencing. This is music for American wind band, but only some of it is American music, and that is a fair reflection of the programs that bands offered to audiences in this time period. Inevitably, there is one piece by Sousa – the rousing Semper Fidelis – but there are also works written for the concert hall or opera stage, arranged, as was customary at the time, for a full complement of winds. Interestingly, the only composer represented twice on the disc is none other than Verdi, whose Nabucco overture and terzetto and finale from Attila are given suitably enthusiastic performances. There is also a familiar piece here by Émile Waldteufel: the L’Estudiantina waltz, whose always-upbeat nature (it does not even have a typical Waldteufel slow introduction) fits the band complement very well. Well-known tunes of the time, often from operas or operettas, also show up in other works. For example, there is a Fantasia on “La Sonnambula” by Ernesto Cavallini (1807-1874) that is well-made, if not especially true to the mood of Bellini’s opera. And there is one of those “why do I know that tune?” works, Yankee Tickle Medley by Edward Beyer (c. 1830-c. 1897), which tickles listeners’ fancy with, among other things, an impressive fanfare that comes from Gilbert and Sullivan’s Iolanthe. The music on this CD may be inconsequential, but it is far from uninteresting. From Thomas Coates (1803-1895), often called the father of American band music, there is the rousing “I Am Up” Quickstep, and there are similarly positive-sounding pieces by composers who are now almost completely unknown: Salute to New York March by Patrick Sarsfield Gilmore (1829-1892), Mañana Chilean Dance by Jean Marie Missud (1852-1941), Jolly Bears (Polka Humoristic) by George Schleiffarth (1849-1921), Through the Air by August Damm (1849-1942), Serenade “Good Night Beloved” by Ciro Pinsuti (1829-1888), and The Battle Cry of Freedom by Allesandro Liberati (1847-1927). Even when the pieces are trifles, as many are, they are very pleasant to hear, and the entire disc is played exceptionally stylishly and with all the enthusiasm that the music deserves – which is quite a lot. The period instruments fit the music ideally, and the CD as a whole is a most-welcome time capsule giving entry to an earlier, perhaps more-optimistic, perhaps more-naïve America in which musical entertainment – before there were recordings, before there was radio – was largely the province of bands that, at their best, were as skilled as Newberry’s Victorian Cornet Band.

     There are still plenty of discoveries to be made in American music, which is to say music created by American composers, not just arranged for performance by American ensembles. Reuben Blundell and the Lansdowne Symphony Orchestra have led the way to a number of such discoveries, including three previously unrecorded orchestral works offered on a New Focus Recordings CD. The disc opens with the brief, atmospheric, mostly tonal and warm City Trees by Priscilla Alden Beach (1902-1970), a work from 1928 whose sounds of the sylvan in the city are as apt today as they were almost a century ago. The work’s speedier section midway through is more evocative of the trees’ surroundings than of the plantings themselves. Next is For a Beautiful Land by Linda Robbins Coleman (born 1954), a rather brash, proclamatory work from 1996. This is broadly expansive music that is very reminiscent of Copland’s “popular” mode – an outgoing, bright, forthright 11-minute tone poem whose emotions range from the celebratory to the playful. Finally there is Behemoth by Alexandra Pierce (born 1934), a 1976 work that is scarcely a leviathan, in fact being titled as “in five short movements.” Those range from the five-minute first to the 90-second fourth, all in the service of creating a tone poem quite different from Coleman’s. Pierce seeks here to expand, musically, the notion of the Book of Job and the struggles embodied in it, doing so with a darkly portentous first movement; a second movement even more percussion-infused than the opening one; a pathos-infused third movement, in which oboe and horn play prominent roles; a fourth movement that is essentially an extended percussion cadenza; and a finale that provides the only amusement in the entire piece, albeit through rather dark humor. Behemoth has attractive moments and some especially well-done percussion writing, but is not particularly convincing in terms of the theme it attempts to illustrate, although Blundell and the Lansdowne ensemble certainly play it with relish – as, indeed, they play all the music on this (+++) disc. It is, however, very unfortunate that the entire CD lasts barely 30 minutes: less-known, relatively modern music is a hard-enough sell without asking prospective listeners to pay full price for a half-hour disc of never-before-recorded material with which, by definition, they will almost certainly be totally unfamiliar.

     Another (+++) offering from New Focus Recordings contains more than twice as much likely-unfamiliar American music, all by a single composer, Aaron Jay Myers. The quantity of material does not, of course, correlate with its quality, but what this disc does do is offer eight Myers works with differing instrumentation, increasing the likelihood that a listener who finds Myers’ approach congenial will discover at least one piece that is worth hearing and rehearing. Skin is for tenor saxophone (Philipp Stäudlin) and marimba (Matt Sharrock), an intriguing instrumental combination whose effect is vitiated by Myers’ determination to go the standard contemporary route of pushing the instruments’ sounds beyond the norm and likely beyond aural comfort – the saxophone, for example, sounding like a foghorn here, an electronic-style screech there. Lichens II is an eight-movement suite for solo violin (Nicole Parks), with each brief movement given a title relating to a type of lichen (Fruticose, Byssoid, Leprose, etc.) and each intended to be reflective in some way of that particular lichen. This is more of an intellectual exercise than an emotive one, and the work again shows Myers’ interest in changing the sound of an instrument to the point of unpleasantness (e.g., the loud scraping in Crustose). But there is some effective violin writing here, notably in spiccato sections and in the use of harmonics, and some of the piece is interestingly evocative of something-or-other, if not necessarily of lichens. The next work on the disc is Oh, the Irony for two sopranos (Rose Hegele and Stephanie Lamprea); this sounds like dozens, maybe hundreds of other works that treat the voice as just another instrument and the words and many non-word syllables being uttered as building blocks of sound for its own sake. Have-Not is a second duet including marimba (Sharrock), this time with bass clarinet (Amy Advocat) – in an aural juxtaposition somewhat more convincing than is found in Skin. Next on the disc is Night of Pan, whose instrumentation is even more interesting: flute (Sarah Brady), toy piano (Sarah Bob), harp (Amanda Romano Foreman), and marimba (Sharrock). This is the cleverest exploration of complementary and contrasting sonic material on the disc, somewhat overextended at nine-and-a-half minutes but filled with intriguing use of the instruments and some especially attractive writing for harp. Clever Machines combines two instruments heard earlier on the disc, bass clarinet (Advocat) and marimba (Sharrock), with electronics handled by Myers himself. The use of electronic sounds is not especially distinctive, and the interweaving of the acoustic instruments does not take the music in any particularly noteworthy (so to speak) direction. Own Your Own Shadow is for violin (Natalie Cristina Calma Gómez) and bass clarinet (Kevin Price). At more than 11 minutes, it is the longest work on the disc, and while it does use numerous comparison-and-contrast elements effectively in the context of a generally energetic presentation, it becomes somewhat over-preoccupied with its own cleverness well before it runs its course. The final work on the disc, Paroxysm, is yet another of Myers’ aural-combination-and-contrast works, here including bass clarinet (Price), electric guitar (Myers himself), piano (Bob), and drum set (Daniel T. Lewis). This is sort-of-rock music, its rhythms and propulsive forward motion more attractive than its thematic (or athematic) material and instrumental interplay. Certainly this hour-plus disc provides listeners with plenty of chances to find music by Myers with which to engage: the works are different enough to appeal to different people in different ways, if they successfully appeal at all.