With Above and Below; Schenck’s straightforward tools— an alto saxophone and two microphones— transcend the ordinary; capturing and conveying an intricate collage of tone; feeling; and history: Old memories of hymns and her father’s sermons; the spiritual immediacy of nature as ocean buoys become church bells; childhood and motherhood; past and present; heaven and hell.

Breathing – Remembering – Dissolving is a collaborative record bringing together a collection of contemporary experimental musical perspectives that all share a common interest: challenging the idea of what the human is in a musical performance. Composers, Clara Allison, Seán Ó Dálaigh, Julie Herndon, Hassan Estakhrian, Manuel Pessôa de Lima, and Marcel Zaes, contribute unique responses to themes we typically associate with being human, the body, and the larger aspects of sociality in/with/around humans. The project collects six works by composers of various backgrounds, gender and racial identities, and diverse musical styles, coming from the San Francisco Bay Area, United States, Latin America, and Europe. Each original work was created specifically for the Kuku-ruz Quartet while in residence in the Bay Area.

Based in Switzerland, the Kukuruz Quartet— 4 pianists on 4 pianos — is a close-knit group of divergent artistic personalities, all trained in disparate musical fields: Simone Keller is a versatile pianist in contemporary and classical music, Philip Bartels is an exper-imental theater stage director, Duri Collenberg studied composition in Amsterdam, and Lukas Rickli has broad experience in improvi-sation. They are equally at home on theater stages, concert halls, clubs, bars, office buildings, and studios.The ensemble was founded in 2014 in a corn field — Kukuruz means “corn” in several languages. These four pianists were first seen and heard making their contribution to a production by musician and theater director Ruedi Häusermann at the Zurich Schauspiel-haus. From the outset, the group has been engaged with classical music, jazz, and improvisation. This album is sponsored by Innova Recordings and American Composers Forum’s Bay Area Pilot program with support from Pro Hel-vetica and the Stanford Department of Music.

Passover is a new album documenting ensemble thingNY’s performance of composer-writer Rick Burkhardt’s piece of the same name, in which a sextet of speaking instrumentalists, seated around a dinner table with a double bass lying on it, take turns relating stories of escape. The album marks the first time in a decade that a recording of Burkhardt’s remarkable compositions have been released, and the first time ever that one of his extended compositions has been released on an album.

Burkhardt is an Obie award winner known for his intricate chamber pieces like Great Hymn of Thanksgiving and musically centered theatrical works like Three Pianos. His work fuses explorations of extended instrumental technique as in Helmut Lachenmann, use of compositional linguistics influenced by Kenneth Gaburo, an ear for American speech akin to Robert Ashley, and an experimental approach to narrative inspired by his favorite innovative playwrights, Adrienne Kennedy, David Greenspan, and Wallace Shawn.

The Lakota Music Project is a program of the South Dakota Symphony Orchestra. The Lakota Music Project addresses racial tension by creating an environment of openness through music. South Dakota has nine reservations and a long history of racial tension. Native American communities have faced the loss of cultural traditions, with many losing traditional native languages due to generations of criminalization from discriminatory laws and cultural erasure. At its foundation, Lakota Music Project is a practical demonstration of how music can advance cultural understanding. Lakota Music Project strives to lay a path for reconciliation by using music to break down barriers between cultures by exploring our cultural similarities, rather than focusing on their differences.

Brent Michael Davids’ Black Hills Olowan honors the relationship between the Black Hills and the Lakota people. Integrating the traditional Lakota song “Heart Butte Special” into an orchestral texture, the work features the Creekside Singers, a Lakota drumming group from the Pine Ridge Reservation. In the concluding moments, the singers become the leading voice, driving the music to its rousing conclusion. Wind on Clear Lake was composed by Jeffrey Paul. The soundscape created suggests waves lapping at the shore, leaves rustling, wind chimes, distant thunder, and even the sound of an occasional frog or barn swallow. Victory Songs by Jerod Impichchachaaha’ Tate is an orchestral rhapsody inspired by the writings of Charles Alexander Eastman and composed in honor of Lloyd Running Bear, Sr. and all Lakota Indian warriors. Each movement depicts a legendary Lakota warrior and his deeds.

Jeffrey Paul originally composed Desert Wind on a pawn shop electric guitar, and he describes the work as both contemplative and as “a primal cry into the beautiful and endless open spaces of the natural world.”

When an Italian pianist falls in love with the American Southwest, he or she is apt to respond in some grand, expansive and colorful way to the space, light, and culture of the region. This at least was the case with Emanuele Arciuli, international concert artist and keyboard virtuoso, who started collecting artwork and piano pieces connected to the area. Walk in Beauty is a double album of fourteen of those works, many commissioned and premiered by him. Together they form an intimate love letter as well as a tribute as toweringly magical as the Sangre de Cristo mountain range. Early attempts to use American Indian themes in Western art music, while sincere, often betrayed the composers' lack of cultural understanding. This collection, however, includes works by indigenous composers alongside those of Anglo heritage; those who have spent serious time and energy researching their subjects and incorporating what they have learned deeply into their compositional method. The Native composers here include a wide range of approaches and styles; Connor Chee's fantasy on a Navajo theme, Raven Chacon's exploration of noise and feedback from the piano mechanism, Brent michael Davids' sultry jazz miniature, and ballet transcriptions by inspirational forebear Dr. Louis Ballard. The other composers pay homage to particular themes, such as John Luther Adams' stone figures, Michael Daugherty's bison dance, Peter Garland's peyote rituals, Kyle Gann's chant to save the earth and Martin Bresnick's homage to Ishi, the last of his tribe. The program is rounded out with complementary works by Jennifer Higdon, Carl Ruggles, Peter Gilbert, and Sufi convert Talib Rasul Hakim.

Maya Beiser, the “reigning queen of the avant-garde cello” (The Washington Post), presents this new release, TranceClassical. A very personal project, Maya says of this album, “TranceClassical started from a washed-out still photo in my mind - me, as a little girl curled with a blanket on my parents’ sofa, hearing Bach for the first time, hanging on to every mysterious note coming out of the scratchy LP… the pieces I bring here give me a sense of trance - a reverie and meditation on his place in my heart.” A varied program, the album opens with Maya’s interpretation of Bach’s Air on a G String, in which she channels the sound of an old vinyl record, spinning on some far-off turntable. Especially notable are Maya’s arrangements of Imogene Heap’s Hide and Seek and Hildegard von Bingen’s O Virtus Sapientiae.

“With virtuoso chops, rock-star charisma, and an appetite for pushing her instrument to the edge of avant-garde adventurousness, Maya Beiser is the post-modern diva of the cello.” (The Boston Globe)

Long-established as a leading voice among composers of his generation, Michael Hersch is also one of the great pianists of our time. While always few, his public performances have become increasingly rare. This special CD/DVD package includes Hersch performing his "Suite from The Vanishing Pavilions" live in concert, his first appearance as a pianist in New York City in over a decade. Also included is a film of that performance and a documentary, The Sudden Pianist, focusing on Hersch's music for the piano and his performance of it.

This release is a celebration of the successful relationship between ETHEL and Native American musician, instrument builder, and Grammy Award-winner, Robert Mirabal. The River is a live performance, which immerses the listener in a seamless flow of music, narrative, and ritual. Ethel and Mirabal created this program exclusively for this recording, calling upon traditional Native American traditions and exploring the bounds of contemporary artistry. ETHEL, which was founded in New York City in 1998, earned a reputation for being one of America’s most adventurous string quartets. They quickly immersed themselves in the culture of young artists who blended together conservatory musicianship with boundary pushing, genre-bending compositions. Robert Mirabal is a best-selling artist, and in addition to the instruments he builds and the music he composes, he is an accomplished painter, playwright, and poet. In addition to three Grammy awards, he has also received a National Endowment for the Arts Award.

Great fun.

In 2003 the Netherlands Flute Orchestra simultaneously celebrated its 10th, and Henry Brant’s 90th birthdays. The programme was somewhat more ‘serious’ than that of the CD covered in this review, but did contain a spatial piece called Ghosts and Gargoyles (2001); a partner work to Brant’s early pioneering success Angels and Devils (1931). The concept of spatial music with Ghosts was to have a drum-kit centre-stage and a wandering flute soloist – in our case the marvellous Eleonore Pameijer – and four flute ensembles front back and sides beyond the audience. The effect was a continuously varying sound-field, with the attention constantly diverted in a way less conventionally found in today’s concert halls, though more common with ‘surround sound’ in modern cinemas. The effect also worked very well with Brant’s concept of the ‘Missa de Angelis’ performed in various kinds of canon, also with four groups placed at the points of the crucifix in the churches we played. Having experienced and performed Brant’s work firsthand, and looking at the high regard with which this composer is held here in The Netherlands, I feel reviewing this CD is a bit like a ‘home game’.

Many of the recordings on this volume of this excellent Innova release come from the 1984 Holland Festival, which was a major celebration of Brant’s work. This included a performance by several truckloads of flautists moving through the canals of Amsterdam on open boats – an experience some of my more senior colleagues still remember, with mixed feelings it has to be said. Humour is a major factor in this release as some of the titles indicate, but humour in music – or anywhere else for that matter – only really works if there is an underlying seriousness present. In this case there is also a deadly professionalism at work which, if not entirely fireproof in terms of taste for those can’t bear this kind of thing, has an undeniably breathtaking virtuosity of ideas, and shows an unstoppably creative mind hard at work.

Whoopee in D is an overture which mercilessly murders J.S. Bach’s melody to the chorale ‘Wachet auf’. Mercilessly, but not disrespectfully, since the irrepressibly cheery scherzoid idiom goes so far away from Bach that, if you didn’t know the tune, you would probably still ‘get the joke’. Brant does admit that he used the tune to annoy his piano teacher, who used to play the chorale as an encore at recitals. Either way, it appears here played with marvellous élan by a wind ensemble which includes several members of the old Netherlands Wind ensemble, in the richly vibrant acoustic of Vredenburg in Utrecht. The other work on this disc to abuse Bach is the Jazz Toccata on a Bach Theme (Toccata on “Wachet Auf”), in which the melody is subjected to extreme jazz styling in the fashion of Art Tatum. This is heard here in its first public performance ever in the IJsbreker in Amsterdam – well known to contemporary music fans of a certain generation, and appropriately a former billiard hall.

The idea Music for a Five and Dime Store derives from the 1920s and 1930s promotional concept of having a pianist to hand in such shops, ready to play fancy versions of any sheet music available at the counter in order to win over potential customers. I’ve certainly never heard Reinbert de Leeuw play piano with such whacky verve, and with Vera Beths on violin and the composer himself hitting the pots and pans I need say little more about this miniature gem – other than to say, if you are a bit down, this will pick you up in short order.

Revenge Before Breakfast is “a short piece of spatial chamber music for three isolated duos.” The rather dry Poncho Hall acoustic doesn’t really help the illusion of distance between the players, though you do have some sense of distance with the stereo spread from the recording. Relatively quiet, there are some nice dialogues between a lone accordion and some squeaky strings, but the plonky percussion did less for me, and the piece doesn’t really live up to the promise of its title – a subject upon which Brant unfortunately doesn’t elaborate.

With the masterpiece Inside Track we are back ‘on track’, with incredible vocals from Barbara Hannigan, and a piano solo which could be a Conlon Nancarrow piano roll. The work is in fact a piano concerto, with a Dixie ‘street band’, string septet and woodwind quartet spaced around the hall. While the jazz elements have a comic effect, this is sometimes more in the nature of a Kurt Weill or Hans Eisler -esque parody, and often with more of a whiff of lonely nostalgia than ‘in your face’ jokiness. The work was premiered at the 1982 Holland Festival, but appears here in its first Canadian performance in an energetic, if marginally thin-sounding recording.

The Jazz Clarinet Concerto brings out pleasant associations with Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw, not only with the fine jazz playing of the musicians under Werner Herbers of Ebony Band fame, but also because the 1984 recording has been transferred from a cassette recording, and sounds every bit like an old 1940s mono tape. The piece was in fact written for Goodman, but he never played it, saying it was “too abstract.” This seems hard to credit now, especially as he commissioned and performed works by the likes of Hindemith, Milhaud and Bartók – the piece is every bit as much fun as Bernstein’s ‘Prelude, Fugue and Riffs’. This is an excellent performance, but the work deserves a full digital recording as well – I bet it would sell by the bucket-load.

Double-Crank Hand Organ Music only waits for a vocal from Tom Waits to finish it off. It is “an Ives like attempt to reproduce the actual sounds of the out-of-tune and broken-down hand organs that were common in New York City around that time [1933]” Less of an attempt, it sounds pretty authentic to me – though I admit to a lack in reference material. Jangling piano keys and badly set percussion, and you really do gain the vision of a dusty old mechanical instrument which has well passed its sell-by date. We used to have a few barrel-organs like that in Amsterdam, but they’ve all been tarted up for the tourists now.

Altitude 8750 “refers to the height of a mountain ski resort in Telluride, Colorado, where 16 composers met ... and improvised on musical materials produced by Henry Brant.” The result is a mixture of Brant’s interesting instrumental colouring, the licks and styles of individuals mixed in with a certain amount of structuring. The recording is a rather remote taping of this spontaneous event, but there are some interesting events, and I’m always a sucker for harmonium and vocal clusters. The whole thing gives its secrets up very quickly however, and while it is good improvisation and clearly made a fine concert piece, the recording is unlikely to become a staple over my speakers.

Dialog in the Jungle is preserved here in its 1964 premiere performance. Narrated and performed in a style which might be considered ‘sprechstimme’, but leaning more towards Walton than Schoenberg, the wind band accompanies a fable in which man and a tiger wrestle with the base needs of hunger and the dilemmas of morality which arise. This is all done with great gusto, and with direct as well as some quite subtle humour in the text. The chorales which emerge when the two are ‘beatified’ create an effective apotheosis in what is a no-nonsense, nonsense work of art.

This release is volume 8 of what looks to be a definitive collection of Henry Brant’s recorded works from this label. With tapings from a variety of sources this is no Hi-Fi demonstration disc, but with the sheer vibrancy of most of the manic music on offer here this in fact adds to the charm of this compilation. Interestingly, the Innova website states for this CD that “If your funny bone is not touched in some new way, Innova promises your money back, miseryguts.” I will be interested to see if anyone tries, but once you have this CD I doubt very much if you will want to send it back.

-- Dominy Clements, MusicWeb International

REVIEWS:
The Wire (p.66) - "[The recordings] convey Brant's involvement with layered textures and timbres, his interest in sonic collisions and clashes."

HOVDA Onyx. Song in High Grasses. Snapdragon. Leaning Into and Away. Ariadne Music. Coastal Traces Tidepools 1. Shenai Sky. Record of an Ocean Cliff. Crossings in a Mountain Dream. Glacier Track. Glosses Glacier. Beginnings. Coastal Traces Tidepools 2. Borealis Music. Boundaries. Cymbalmusic: Centerflow/Trail II. Journey Music. Lemniscates. Regions. Jo Ha Kyu. Ikima. Breathing The Proclamation: excepts. Dancing in Place. Spring Music with Wind. 40 Million Gallons of Music • Prism Players; Libby Van Cleve (ob, English horn, shenai); Jack Vees (el gtr, b gtr); Eleanor Hovda (pn, cymbals, shakuhachi); Relache; Cassatt Qrt; California EAR Unit; Jan Weller, David Gilbert (fl); Elizabeth Panzer (hp); Lee Humphries (pn); et al. • INNOVA 808 (4 CDs: 4:20:03)


I’ve written about Eleanor Hovda (1940–2009) in these pages before; indeed, in the program notes for this release I’m quoted at length. For that I’m honored, because I feel she is a major composer in need of a certain rescue now. She died of cancer far too young; she forsook positions in the Ivy League and New York artistic life for grassroots arts administering in her native and beloved Minnesota; she wrote music that, despite genuine complexity, often looked simple or naïve in score. In short, by life and aesthetic choices she herself made, and by the cards dealt her over which she had no control, she was marginalized in the broader culture of American music. But we still need her.


Parts of this comprehensive collection were originally released by O.O. Discs and I reviewed some of it in Fanfare 22:4; I’d urge interested readers to check this review out in the online archive, as it goes into much more technical detail about the music than I will here. The second disc, Coastal Traces , is more of an extended collective improvisation for dance featuring Libby Van Cleve, double reeds; Jack Vees, guitars; and Hovda on piano interior. But the other three discs consist of more clearly defined pieces, even though they still have the composer’s trademark openness.


I now think of Hovda to some degree as the American Scelsi. By that I mean there’s an emphasis on pure sound as an expressive medium, shaped at the macro and micro level to bring out what Wallace Stevens called “the beauty of inflections.” There’s also a mystical/spiritual bent, but it’s never overbearing. Unlike Scelsi’s, Hovda’s music is often fragile, gentle, and delicate. As a result, when it really rips loose, it carries a shocking impact. I now feel that she’s an example of what I call “sonic charisma,” a capacity to take basic sonic materials that should be simplistic, facile, messy, and then imbue them with such authenticity that you can’t resist them. (Christian Wolff is another such composer in my book.)


The performances are consistently imaginative and committed, and make the case for the music persuasively. Some of the recordings are more “archival” than others, but I’d never for a second preclude their inclusion because of some hiss or ambient noise. The works range from the exceptional oboe work Jo Ha Kyu (thrillingly performed by Libby Van Cleve) to the Cassatt Quartet’s glasslike rendition of Lemniscates to what sounds like a vast Tibetan tantric ritual in 40 Million Gallons of Music (in fact the real story is just as wild, as the piece is a sonic exploration of a giant underground water storage tank in Fayetteville, Arkansas, recorded just after 9/11). Hopefully that gives some idea of the range. As a grand bonus, the scores for works on three of the four discs are viewable on your computer as pdfs (as are extended program notes for the entire set). One senses both how free and how precise the composer was; her craft is evident in these striking scores in her own hand. Though there is one score, Cymbalmusic, whose graphic approach is incredibly beautiful and imaginatively focused, in all the scores one sees a magical touch at work, mixing scribbling doodles with more traditional notation.


A final word of thanks and recognition to Philip Blackburn and the entire Innova organization, as this is yet another of the incredibly important rescue operations they’re performing for composers who might otherwise slip through the cracks (I think of their great Henry Brant series, for example). Every music library in America, for example, should have this collection. Bravo; it gives us all a little faith in lean times. And this is unquestionably on the next Want List.


FANFARE: Robert Carl

Those of us whose musical universe is focused on New York and the Northeast need to be reminded from time to time that a good deal of worthwhile music-making is happening across this broad land, and not all of it is symphonic-band-related (good as that branch of the repertoire can sometimes be). A good case in point is provided by this new release on a Twin Cities-based label, performed by one of the most actively recorded orchestras and conductors—the Seattle Symphony under Gerard Schwarz—of important and solidly crafted music by a composer already in his sixties, who has been closely affiliated with the Pittsburgh Symphony. It seems that over the past couple of decades David Stock (b. 1939), who is here making his major-label recording debut, has emerged from the academic serialist swamp to become one of the most compelling American composers of his generation.

Stock’s Second Symphony of 1996 introduces a relentlessly insistent pulse that grabs and holds the listener’s attention immediately. Then a striking germinal idea begins to be heard repeatedly over this foreboding beat—the movement’s opening is aptly called “Inexorable”—but instead of generating the expected minimalist ennui, this simple theme gradually metamorphoses and expands into a full panoply of orchestral fireworks, which is marked “Light, Dancing.” After a fleet but muscular scherzo (“Like the Wind”), the finale (“Ominous”) returns to the initial material but this time in a somewhat brighter and more optimistic key, though the overall work’s deeply pondered seriousness of utterance is never dissipated, making this half-hour work one of the most formally idiosyncratic, sonically intelligible and emotionally engaging American symphonies of the 1990s. This is so because Stock has taken the minimalist esthetic and transformed it by using it for much higher and more complicated ends.

The Viola Concerto of the following year opens in a similar vein with a repeated darkly lyrical fragment full of suppressed dramatic potential. But after a brief cadenza the work relaxes somewhat, subsiding into a nostalgic but forceful “Slow Waltz,” followed by a “Flowing” finale which comes to a comparatively subdued close, marking this work as a less anxiety-ridden and more withdrawn statement than the symphony. Nevertheless, Stock’s characteristic predilection for the striking idea and its clear and compelling development is always in evidence.

The program closes with an earlier overture or prelude-like shorter piece—American Accents of 1984. This effervescent work, with its displaced syncopations and antiphonal textures, is reminiscent of the sound world of one of our country’s most unjustly forgotten composers, Roger Goeb (1916–1990s). Stock’s affinity for the American vernacular is implicit throughout this very ingratiating eight and one-half minute piece.

The composer himself conducts performances of the Viola Concerto and American Accents, which, with such a well-tuned instrument as the Seattle Symphony at his disposal, are on the same high idiomatic and energetic level as Schwarz’s dynamite reading of the Symphony No. 2. Violist Assadi, the dedicatee of the concerto, offers a thrilling rendition of its many challenging passages. The disc (which was made under the auspices of the American Composers Forum’s Recording Assistance Program) has a wonderfully full-bodied acoustic that matches previous releases from this source.

A related earlier Innova release (563) offers three of Stock’s string quartets. The opening Third of 1996 is written in a similar style to the Second Symphony, constructed of highly charged force-fields consisting of obstinately repeated figures that build up to some really exciting climaxes. Its movement headings—“Obsessive,” “Manic,” and “Intense”— tell the tale. The earlier Second Quartet of 1981 shows Stock still under the obfuscating influence of Ives with some slight 12-tone echoes, while the most recent Fourth is a curious two-movement work, ending in a “Slow, Hypnotic” lament.
No one interested in American music of the post-serial period should pass up either of these releases. Stock, whose new Violin Concerto was premiered in Pittsburgh to great acclaim a few years ago, has now all at once become one of our most distinguished and fascinating mature composers.

Paul A. Snook, FANFARE

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music