This release is Alarm Will Sound’s fifth full-length project with Cantaloupe Music, and precurses several performances throughout 2016. The six tracks on this album feature incidental variations on compositions by The Beatles, Charles Wuorinen, Edgard Varese, and more. Best described as postmodern classical music, this genre-bending ensemble doesn’t fail to entertain as they push the outer limits of the canon with this adventurous project. -----

REVIEWS:

The 23 members of Alarm Will Sound perform the provocative pieces playfully, inviting all sides of the modernism debate to lighten up and listen. Each work composed for the ensemble is easily digestible, running under seven minutes. Wolfgang Rihm’s Will Sound delivers in trickily spaced bursts, mostly centered around a sinewy saxophone line. The ensemble’s percussionists are in particularly fine form, rattling and skipping through unintuitive and complex rhythms.

– NPR

The comic portrait of screaming human faces on the album's cover poses a rhetorical question: Do we honestly still need to act scared by this modernist stuff? Over the course of their set, the Alarm Will Sound players and conductor Alan Pierson respond to this prompt by delivering pure modern-classical fun. The six pieces they’ve chosen speak different structural languages, though each one shares a desire to bring across a sense of wildness that is exuberant at heart.

– Pitchfork

J. L. ADAMS Inuksuit & • Thad Anderson, Noam Bierstone, Omar Camenartes, Michael Compitello, Nathan Davis, Christopher Demetriou, Rob Esler, Matt Evans, Diego Espinosa, Tim Feeney, Benjamin Fraley, Amy Garapic, Russell Greenberg, Nathaniel Hartman, Phil Hermans, Ayano Kataoka, Kelli Kathman, Danny Lichtenfeld, Ryan Maguire, Shard Mamoun, Krystina Marcoux, Murray Mast, Annie Laurie Mauhs-Pugh, Carson Moody, Benjamin Reimer, Jessica Schmitz, Jeff Stern, Bill Solomon, Christopher Swist, Lisa Tolentino, Alessandro Valiante, Owen Weaver (perc) • CANTALOUPE 21096 (CD: 59: 54, DVD 1:23:00)


& Strange and Sacred Noise video directed by Len Kamerling


This is an event. Inuksuit was written in 2009, and has become John Luther Adams’s signature piece. It is designed to be performed in an open, outdoor space, with a range of performers from nine to 99 (this recording uses 32). It is loose in its construction, with a flow of events that is similar from one performance to another, but whose details and ensemble will vary, depending on choices made in performance, and the characteristics of the environment chosen. Its title comes from the abstract stone structures made across Alaska by the Inuit over the centuries. It uses mostly unpitched percussion (or more precisely instruments of relative pitch) such as drums, cymbals, and gongs, but it also uses harmonic “whirly tubes,” conches, sirens, and glockenspiels and piccolos near the end. But Adams’s primary focus on less pitched, more “noisy” sound sources is a savvy one, as it allows great density and complexity of texture without all the additional harmonic complications that would result from using traditional orchestral instruments (for the record, lessons he’s learned from Inuksuit are being applied in a new work for outdoor wind ensembles).


I heard the piece a couple of years ago in New York at the Park Avenue Armory, a performance whose very venue of course contradicted the original premises of the piece, but was nonetheless magnificently executed. But this recording, made in the forest abutting Vermont’s Guilford Sound, captures better the sense of how the piece interacts with the natural environment (especially its birds, who seem quite unintimidated by all the racket). It also gives us a sense of the space that the piece creates and occupies.


The aspect of the work that impresses me the most is its pacing. Sounds are given their natural time to assert themselves before they are overlapped with others that naturally grow from the earlier ones’ timbres and envelopes. Thus “whirly tubes” eventually transform to conches, and are interrupted by drums whose seemingly random attacks become increasingly dense and patterned, which are joined by cymbals and then gongs, with sirens emerging out of the shimmering soup of upper partials, while the drums grow higher in register and more patterned … until it all crests like a tsunami and we are left with the twittering of birds, both musical and real.


The piece lasts roughly an hour (though the literature on it suggests a longer span, c.75–90 minutes), but with each repeat listening I never find it long. Rather, it is like the weather; one sees a storm front approaching and is mesmerized by the growing darkness, the rising wind, the smell of coming rain. It’s a tribute to Adams’s instinctive feel for the natural that he can pull this off; that it feels so open and spacious, and resists judgment.


The headnote may be a little confusing, but this release is the sort of hybrid to which we’re becoming more used today, and yet it also is presented a little confusingly. There is a standard CD of the piece. But there is also a DVD, which includes 1) the same recording, but with multi-track surround sound ( as well as straight DVD stereo) and a video of a different piece, Strange and Sacred Noise (1997). This work is a sort of prelude to Inuksuit , for percussion quartet in several different monotimbral scorings, and using many of the same process-driven techniques (you can read my review of the Mode 53 release in Fanfare 29:5). It’s led by the amazing Steven Schick, and Adams provides succinct commentaries between each of the eight movements. I particularly love the long third one, inspired by the overlapping accelerandos and decelerandos of Nancarrow and Adams’s contemporary Peter Garland. The performance is filmed in the Alaskan tundra, and is stark and dramatic in the juxtaposition of the players with the vast landscape.


I can’t fully review the surround-sound version because I do not have that configuration. But I can certainly testify that the DVD recording is more detailed, and has more presence and depth. (You also get about a dozen nice slides of the stone sentinels and the Alaskan landscape, that cycle endlessly through the piece.) But the CD sound is just dandy as well.


OK, I must briefly carp: While the piece is divided into five tracks for access-convenience (in both audio versions), Cantaloupe nowhere tells you the timings (even on the page for the disc on their web page). It also takes a bit to realize that the video on the DVD is under “extras.” It would have been nice if the contents had been presented just a little less elliptically. This is a minor kvetch; it’s just a little irritating in what feels to me like the label’s slightly cavalier attitude toward the listener.


But I don’t want this to color my overall enthusiasm for this release. This is a visionary work, in the tradition of Ives, Cage, Harrison, and Tenney—all acknowledged ancestor-mentors of the composer. Adams is deeply tuned into the eco-sensibility of the era in a humane, unpretentious, yet grand way. Indeed, I could express it more simply by saying that his art is grand but not grandiose. Want List for the coming year.


FANFARE: Robert Carl

"...48 minutes of an almost violent but passionate performance. The one-man percussion orchestra was sonically heightened by the digital delays that blasted through the speakers. Though we were underground, Ilimaq seemed to seep into the New York City streets." - Baeble Music (Review of the Carnegie Hall performance of Ilimaq at the 2014 Ecstatic Music Festival, New York.)

Grammy-winning composer John Luther Adams always speaks with reverence about capturing “the tone within the noise,” and if any of his recent work can be said to take that mission directly to heart, it’s Ilimaq. A true electro-acoustic recording that channels the energy, passion and precision of Wilco drummer Glenn Kotche, Ilimaq (which loosely translates from the native Alaskan Inupiaq language as “spirit journeys”) maps a vivid, phantasmagorical progression through liquid cascades of percussion, otherworldly ambient soundscapes, harmonic dissonance, melodic convergence and almost everything that’s musically—and sonically—possible in between.

Of course, as the old adage goes, the “map” is not necessarily the territory—but in the right hands, it can come pretty close. Although they both live and work in different, almost diametrically opposed worlds of music, Adams and Kotche didn’t just choose to collaborate on a whim. Back in 2008, while Wilco was on tour in Alaska, Kotche personally emailed Adams and asked to meet. It soon came to light that he had been following Adams’ work for years; by the same token, Adams’ own background as a rock drummer gave him a uniquely informed glimpse of what Kotche had in mind. (As Adams says in the liner notes to Ilimaq, “...in Glenn Kotche, I’ve found the drummer I always imagined I could be.”) - Cantaloupe Music

NUMBER 24 ON BILLBOARD CLASSICAL CROSSOVER CHART AUGUST 2005 The long-awaited followup to their acclaimed all-Steve Reich debut, Alarm Will Sound, the young 22-piece new music band featuring voices, strings, brass, woodwinds, and percussionists, takes on twisted techno master Aphex Twin in Acoustica. Alarm Will Sound, who the NY times calles 'the future of classical music,' has, with a cadre of 10 arrangers, painstakingly recreated and rethought Aphex Twin's legendary electronic work for an all-acoustic band. From creative new transcription ideas to using non-standard 'classical music' instruments to ensuring that all four drummers are kept busy with Aphex Twin's unimaginably intricate beats, this sounds like no CD you've heard before. With bonus remixes of the remixes by the emerging Berlin-based techno master Dennis DeSantis.

In tribute to her longtime mentor and friend Frederic Rzewski, the intrepid, iconoclastic and politically active pianist-composer who passed away in 2021, pianist Lisa Moore presents five poignant performances of his most lyrical work. Taking its title from the vibrant, lush and melody-rich ‘no place to go but around’ (composed in 1974), the recording is of a piece with Moore's wide-ranging 2016 Cantaloupe release The Stone People, and finds her once again embracing an adventurist streak as she digs deep into the nuances of Rzewski’s timeless music. “He was blunt, matter-of-fact, frustrating, and brilliant,” Moore recalls in her revealing liner notes for the album. “Yet deep down, he was a real mensch who cared deeply for humanity. His works had strong underlying, or overlying, messages of social justice. He was a bohemian family man, giving most of his meager income to his children and grandchildren. Personally, when I once thought of quitting piano, he encouraged me to keep going — he said, ‘Why stop playing? Don’t waste your investment. Just do other things, too.’ We always got along. I worked with him closely on De Profundis and To His Coy Mistress. ‘The playing’s always fine, Lisa,’ he said, ‘but go further, to exaggerate the words. You have to be the crazy woman in the attic.’”

REVIEW:

Pianist Lisa Moore has recorded the music of Frederic Rzewski in the past, but this 2022 release, recorded not long after Rzewski's too-little-remarked death, makes a fine memorial to the composer. In general, Moore's playing is beautifully attuned to Rzewski's music, which has a kinship to minimalism in its use of repeated material but deploys it in such a way as to produce tension. She has the chops to handle Rzewski's eruptions of virtuosity as well. These are somewhat neglected Rzewski pieces; the substantial title work is probably the best known, but Moore makes a strong connection with each one, and this shows signs of being a Rzewski recording that will last.

-- AllMusic.com (James Manheim)

In his third solo recording for Cantaloupe Music, Florent Ghys radically retools his approach with Ritournelles & Mosaïques — a wide-ranging two-part opus that pulls back the curtain on an intrepid composer, double bassist and electronics bricoleur in full sonic exploration mode. Ghys began work on the project in late 2019, but like the rest of the world, he soon found himself in the midst of a prolonged isolation period, which inspired him to expand his creative palette. On his previous album Télévision, Ghys had begun with an audio-visual idea; this time, he started at the root: with the sound. “I just wanted to make something that sounded great,” he says, “so I spent a lot of time studying the sound of my bass — analyzing it, making sample libraries, recording it — and then studying the different microphones, different rooms, different basses too. So it really started from the sound, and then adapting my audio-visual ideas to that.” Ritournelles is essentially the electro-acoustic, ambient instrumental portion of the program, while Mosaïques is more sample-based and electronic, seething with textural complexity. “Despite the differences though,” Ghys explains, “they really come from the same initial artistic impulse.”

Introspective, multi-layered and quietly majestic, composer Jane Antonia Cornish's Sierra is a vivid meditation on how our deep connection to nature can move us to an inner stillness and awaken the creative impulse. Sierra consists of five separate pieces composed for multiple pianos, ranging from the poignant solo excursion 'Last Light' to the cascading, undulating 'Ocean' and the epic 15-minute title piece. Performed with confidence and commitment by pianist Vicky Chow, whose ability to flex in different interpretive directions, depending on the composer's intention, is renowned in the modern classical community, Sierra captures a palette of subtle but insistent emotions - wonder, wistfulness, joy and awe - that can elevate and transport us with astonishing power.

Classical Music

"In July of 2016 I got an email from the Icelandic composer Johann Johansson, telling me about how a commercial fisherman off the coast of Iceland had found four reels of a Soviet film in his net. The film, Derevensky Detektiv (1969), was not a lost, rare, or even a particularly good film...but as I often make new films out of disused old films, I was interested in learning more. The story told in the sunken film involves a stolen accordion. I started to think about the accordion as an instrument — as a set of lungs that is found in the folk music of people all across the globe. Thankfully, David Lang was excited by the fact that this film had sat on the bottom of the ocean for 50 years, and that it now had new stories to tell. Ultimately we arrived at a soundtrack played by a single accordion, a single set of lungs diving into the ocean to retrieve this story. And the extraordinary music David wrote perfectly captures this, and the beautiful, tragic, and inexorable drift of time." (Producer and filmmaker Bill Morrison, from the liner notes)

Created by pianist and composer Michael Harrison, Seven Sacred Names is meant as a companion album to the book Nature’s Hidden Dimension by author, astrophysicist and modern Sufi mystic W.H.S. Gebel. The Seven Sacred Names, according to the mystical cosmology of Sufism, tell the story of "...an awakening primal Self," as Gebel writes in the album's liner notes. Taken together, Harrison's seven pieces (with the prologue and epilogue of "Kalim" comprising two distinct movements) foster a listening environment that is ethereal, meditative and at times almost tentative, but also rife with the anticipation and promise of glimpsing hidden truths about ourselves. Featuring a diverse range of artists that includes the Grammy-winning vocal ensemble Roomful of Teeth, vocalist Ina Filip, cellist Ashley Bathgate, violinists Tim Fain and Caleb Burhans, tabla percussionist Ritvik Yaparpalvi and Harrison himself on piano, the recording moves hypnotically through a subtle but ever-changing suite of tranquil moods and colors — with each stage defining a sacred or exalted state meant to inspire awareness, self-knowledge and self-expression.

As "arresting a figure in contemporary classical and experimental new music as he is in jazz (New York Times)," and a recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship in 2017, Tyshawn Sorey has carved out his own territory as a musician and composer whose range of vision, emotion and visceral power is a driving and defining force behind a young Black vanguard in new music. This pristinely recorded double-album collaboration with the vaunted chamber orchestra Alarm Will Sound documents two unique works — the stately, still For George Lewis (dedicated to the legendary avant garde trombonist and composer) and the cinematic, sweeping Autoschediasms (inspired by the real-time improvisational "conductions" of Butch Morris, with a special nod to Anthony Braxton's "language music" system). Taken together, these performances — part of which were recorded in a video chat during the pandemic — find the composer testing the limits of the ensemble's imagination and concentration, and paint a wide-angle sonic canvas that is by turns taut, trenchant, and profoundly moving.

8 is part of a series of works by Michael Gordon that started with Timber for six percussionists, and includes Rushes for seven bassoonists and Amplified for four electric guitarists. Each of these works is meant to induce a quasi-meditative, almost ecstatic state, in the listener as well as the performer. In essence, the recording of 8 also explores the dimensional quality of sound. The eight cellists are positioned in a circle, and the passages they play travel around the circle in both directions, call-and-response style. If you're in the middle of the circle, you can hear the dimensionality and perspective of the sound clearly. When listening closely to the recording, you can hear the bass notes traveling in space independently of the melody line. Each cellist plays both the melody and the bass, switching back and forth in a choreography of musical roles.

Internationally renowned composer and guitarist Kaki King co-produced her tenth album, Modern Yesterdays, with sound designer Chloe Alexandra Thompson and recording engineer Arjan Miranda. It's her first full-length studio project since the 2015 release of The Neck Is A Bridge to the Body ("bursting with masterclass talent," as reviewed in PopMatters), and her first to be recorded almost entirely on acoustic guitar. Rich in post-classical, jazz and blues-flavored motifs, as well as electronic and electro-acoustic influences, Modern Yesterdays mines a poignant, meditative arc that not only fits the mood of these turbulent times, but also once again establishes King as a tirelessly inventive composer whose imagination extends well beyond the sonic limits of her chosen instrument.

David Lang composed "love fail" in 2012 for the vocal quartet Anonymous 4; the work was conceived as a rumination on the timelessness of love, weaving together details from the story of Tristan and Isolde with more modern sources. This newly expanded choral arrangement, performed by the renowned Lorelei Ensemble and conducted by Beth Willer, adds haunting texture and power, as well as a more fully rounded sound, to Lang's austere original. Praised for their "impeccable musicality and pure-voiced precision" by the Boston Globe after the 2016 premiere of this version for women's chorus, Lorelei brings that same unmatched skill to the recording. From the hypnotic layers of the opening "he was and she was" to the almost devoutly meditative mood of "Head, Heart," there's an immediate sense of having captured an entirely new way of experiencing one of Lang's most soulful and mysterious works.

“We group ourselves into nations,” David Lang writes in the program note, “but it has never really been clear to me what that means, or what we get out of it.” In 2014, he wrote The National Anthems, the featured work on Cantaloupe’s new release. The piece uses one line from each national anthem of the United Nations’ 193 countries.

Attempting to find a universal truth in the process of researching the anthems, he instead came to realize they resembled prayers for fleeting freedom rather than confidence in it. By the work's end, what remains sounds like it could be heard inside a church.

Also on the album is his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Little Match Girl Passion. After hearing from nations of people, the piece places similar prayers in the context of one person.

All together, the album has the feeling of clutching hands. Whether you believe in patriotism or not, it reminds us that everyone in the world holds onto something — whether it’s words, a melody or that which we hope is true.

– WQXR-FM (Elena Saavedra Buckley)