Harry Partch: Delusion of the Fury / Ensemble Musikfabrik
Wergo
CD
$26.99Jul 22, 2022
“It was only with Partch that a music began to take shape that could do equal justice to the physical desire for rhythmic pulse and a curiosity for new, unheard sounds; a music that enthralls us despite, or rather, precisely because of its unfamiliarity. A music for which we have no category, and which has no location, and yet in a strange way is grounded.” (Heiner Goebbels) The American composer Harry Partch (1901-1974) is considered a pioneer of the Just Intonation movement and was far ahead of his time when he began to explore microtonality. In the course of his life, he not only created a highly complex tonal system, but also designed and built an extensive set of instruments of sculptural beauty and great stage presence for its realisation, the only and original set of which is preserved in the USA.
On the occasion of the opening of the Ruhrtriennale 2013 with "Delusion of the Fury", staged by Heiner Goebbels, Harry Partch's entire set of microtonal instruments was reconstructed for the Ensemble Musikfabrik and learned by the musicians. It was only through this enormous reconstruction that performances of Partch's music outside his home country became possible at all. The dance and music theatre "Delusion of the Fury", whose recording by the Ensemble Musikfabrik sets new standards, is considered a key work and musical quintessence in Harry Partch's oeuvre. The extensive booklet documents the extraordinary music theatre production with numerous pictures as well as texts by Heiner Goebbels and Edu Haubensak.
The title 'Vida' of Misha Cvijovic's portrait album combines meanings from different languages - life, sight, healing and myth. The composer's music is equally multi-layered, resulting from her exploration of varying sonic and artistic perspectives. Booklet author Carl Rosman explains: 'A keen awareness of stage and physicality is constantly present, in works whose language is typically gestural, eclectic, and direct - although not without irony and polyvalence.' The album has three focal points: it begins with early compositions such as 'Lica Persefone', 'Tikkun Olam' and 'Cirque du Soleil'. As part of a young generation of composers from the former Yugoslavia who are significantly shaping the local contemporary music scene, Cvijovic also uses the ?-time rhythm of the Balkan region in the latter work, among others. She transfers this into a kaleidoscopic sound world in which the trumpet (Marco Blaauw) stands out with short acrobatic solos. The album also includes works such as 'Penumbra', 'Carbon' and 'Emotional Logic - Anger', which depart from the classical mainstream and take greater risks in improvisation and form, for example by expanding the ensemble with the timbres of accordion, baritone saxophone and electric guitar in 'Penumbra'. With 'Iktsuarpok' and 'Incandescent', the focus finally shifts to electronic and electroacoustic sound. Five of these works were recorded especially for this album in collaboration with the Ensemble Musikfabrik and Deutschlandfunk Kultur. The Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin conducted by Enno Poppe can also be heard, as well as Sebastian Berweck on the Minimoog and the Trio Splitsignals Berlin.
Multifaceted tonal colours, virtuosity, and a field of tension between ruptures and connections characterize the music of Turgut Ercetin. In particular, he illuminates the in-between spaces in a wide variety of dimensions. As Paul Griffiths explains in the booklet, the composer explores "the space between instruments or groups, between harmony and noise [...], between spectra, between what is played and what resounds from the performance space." At the center of the album lies the cycle "Das Phonem zwischen zwei Wortern" ("The Phoneme Between Two Words"). The largest part, (b), draws on one of Turgut Ercetin's research fields: vanished architecture, here referring to two demolished Byzantine buildings. In this work, the SWR Symphony Orchestra as a modern orchestra meets a Baroque ensemble with musicians from the ELISION Ensemble. However, the two formations do not appear as opposites but as mutually interacting seeds. The smaller pieces (a) and (c) function as fanfare and epilogue: they condense the themes of fusion and separation, ultimately leading the ELISION musicians back to modern instruments. Ensemble Musikfabrik is featured in two works on this album: "Resonances (b)" and "Thousand Dead Bodies Under My Bed, All Cloaked with the Breath of the Living". The latter recalls how the past continues to live on - in art, in memory, in trauma. Within three interlaced ensembles, an interplay unfolds: characteristics drift from one group to another, while the very nature of the piece as a whole gradually shifts.
The music of Iranian composer Elnaz Seyedi challenges the listener to discover multi-layered and subtle sounds, often at the limit of perception. According to Dirk Wieschollek in the booklet text, Seyedi's compositions are characterized by the simultaneous presence of opposites: "the widely separated registers of the instruments, and the tension between fragment and continuum, development and stasis, tonal abstraction and enigmatic relationships to extra-musical content." Borrowings from poetry, which often form the intellectual breeding ground of her works, are particularly striking, such as in "Nach neuen Meeren" for clarinet and accordion, written for and interpreted by the Zollner-Roche duo. It was based on the homonymous poem by Friedrich Nietzsche. The painting "The Sun" by Edvard Munch in turn inspired Seyedi to create the ensemble work "a sun of one's own". The finest colour gradations and an imperceptible brightening are reproduced here by the Kommas Ensemble. In addition to traditional instruments, the composer also experiments with unusual sound producers such as spatulas of different sizes and pitches in the musical-scenic work "PS-nach Spuren" in collaboration with the composer Ehsan Khatibi, which is integrated into this portrait as an online video. Special instruments by the pioneer of microtonality Harry Partch can be heard in Ensemble Musikfabrik's interpretation of "fragments inside".
Our focus with the CD 'Coronation' is not on blue blood or kingly power. In processes that are positively vegetal, the music on this CD sends up its shoots and produces blossoms like crowns. '(co)ro(na)', by Vykintas Baltakas, springs from a cascade of motivic branchings, its roots in a cycle of works named after the alchemical Ouroboros, a snake that swallows its own tail. Its 'dragon's blood', so the legends say, is cinnabar red - like the hue that shines in 'cinnabar' by Rebecca Saunders. Magnus Lindberg's 'Joy' expresses itself through its profligacy with spectral harmonies and the resonant snapping of the strings of a demolished piano. Iannis Xenakis creates sieves that proliferate until they transform into archaic dances, refulgent with the brass tones characteristic of so many musical moments: This is the sound that crowns the affair.
Saunders, R.: Stirrings Still / Vermilion / Duo / Blue and G
Wergo
CD
$20.99Mar 01, 2008
What we call silence is for me comparable to a dense knot of noise, frequencies, and sounds," says Rebecca Saunders. "From this surface of apparent silence I try to draw out and mould sound and colour." Samuel Beckett's works have become very important for the composer. Therein lies, perhaps, a certain parallel to Rebecca Saunders's more recent music: in the increasing sparseness of a language that gradually shuts out the inessential and ornamental. "Stirrings Still" is a music that seems to be inside and outside at once - both mobile sound sculpture and a journey beneath the surface of the sound waves, into the interior of a sound that suddenly seems more distant yet more intense. "Such and much more such the hubbub in his mind so-called till nothing left from deep within but only ever fainter oh to end," Beckett writes at the end of his "Stirrings Still". "Oh all to end.
Michaels Reise Um Die Erde (Michael's Journey Around the World) is the second act of the opera Donnerstag (Thursday) from the seven-part opera cycle Licht (Light) by Karlheinz Stockhausen. It is a cosmic world theatre in which three protagonists set the tone: Michael as Prince of Angels who appears in human shape to lead mankind to God; Eva as Power of Love and Life; Lucifer as a fallen angel and adversary. To each of these three figures has been assigned a characterizing melody (a musical "formula"), which unfolds through the musical action of the entire opera cycle. In 2008, the ensemble musikFabrik performed Michaels Reise Um Die Erde twice at the Theótre Bobigny in Paris to great acclaim from the press and public alike. Wergo captured these live performances for release in the label's edition musikFabrik series.
