Jexper Holmen's Oort Cloud: Sustained Sound-Poetry at a High Level

What is an Oort Cloud? It is a massive cloud of comets that surrounds our part of the universe, a great distance away in human terms, but local presumably on the infinite universe level.

Danish composer Jexper Holmen has composed an hour-long work based on the contemplation of that formation. It is entitled Oort Cloud and has just been recorded and released as a Dacapo Records CD (8-226562).

When I worked at Scientific American books, the then-president referred to comets in a launch meeting as "those snoozy things." True. Get one of them in isolation, they are rather just "there." Put them in an Oort Cloud surrounding our friendly neighborhood universe-space and they become rather mysterious and at this point, ineffable.

The same might be said for Holmen's composition. One minute of it will not bring you to your feet with shouts of "Bravo!" An hour of this music very well might. That's because it's the cumulative effect of the musical cloud, hovering over our aural world, that becomes increasingly mystical, as it were, in its ever-presence.

The nuts and bolts of it are as follows: there are two accordionists and what sounds like an alto or soprano sax, situated in a resonant performance space. The accordions play continuous key-less tone clusters that shift gradually note-wise and vary in dynamic levels. The saxophonist gives out periodically with long multiphonic blasts and quieter soundings of same, as well as overtone-rich sustain notes. The key operative here is "sustain." The music is a continuous series of long tones that form collectively a kind of musical equivalent to the Oort Cloud.

It's ambient. It has patches that are fairly dissonant. The resonance of the performance chamber and the continually shifting blocks of unusual sound clusters make for an aural experience that has a kind of expansive effect on the perceiving hearer. It can become a kind of meditation on the mysteries of the universe and that cloud of comets that ring our world. That was what I began feeling as I listened over time.

There is nothing quite like this piece out there.You may love it, you may hate it, but you cannot ignore it. That says something. In that way, as in other ways as well, this music is a ringing success. Don't go near it, though, if you expect some kind of entertainment. It is rather more serious than that. It's almost a form of knowledge. For all that, it is unparalleled among works being produced today.

The Orchestral Music of Knut Vaage, Present-Day Norwegian Composer

Norwegian composer Knut Vaage (b. 1961) writes orchestral music that is sensually modern.It is music that constantly moves along, transforms, yet has a discursive logic to it. The three works included in Gardens of Hokkaido (Aurora 5072) give a nicely rounded picture of the breadth and depth of his work, at least a part of it.

The title piece concerns a train trip the composer made from Tokyo to Sapporo, Hokkaido. The constantly shifting landscape viewed out the train's window is one of ever-unfolding change within a continuity of the cultural-geographic space and time of the traversal. And so the solo piano part begins with a motif that is passed around the orchestra in ever permutating form,while the context that the motif recurs in is also constantly shifting. As Magnus Andersson's lucid liner notes make clear, this is a kind of exposition-meditation on the Zen "it" of immanent presence, the suchness of forgetting the past to experience the ever-permuting moments of now. In the process Vaage gives us a rather thrilling concerto for piano and orchestra that is engagingly expressive, totally modern and beautifully crafted.

"Cyclops" revels in quietude alternating with moving sound-block edifaces--in contrast to the rather more boisterous, more multi-delineated preceding work. "Cyclops" is a long dark murmer (and the occasional growl) that underscores the texture that timpani and the lower ranges of the winds can provide in varying sound complexes. Parts have a murky quality, almost as if the orchestra were underwater (so to speak), only to emerge in moments of sharp and sometimes dense clarity.

The final work, "Chaconne," shows how Vaage treats the traditional form of the same name--a continually recurring chord sequence overtop of which is a set of variations. Here Vaage slows down what chordal sequences there are and writes some intriguing variations on variations where neither the chord sequence nor the theme is readily apparent. It is music of great atmospheric beauty, masterfully conceived for flute, harp and orchestra.

The Bergen Philharmonic under the various conductors do a wonderful job realizing this music and the sound is rather brilliantly transparent. In the end one is certain (after many listens) that Knut Vaage is a composer of convincing inventions, and a master of the present-day symphony orchestra. Very much recommended.

Neue Bilder: The Music of James Harley

James Harley composes in the now somewhat venerable tradition of classic modernism. That is not to say that he is some clone of Webern or Boulez. It's only to say that the periodicity and flow of his music has little of the droning insistency of minimalism or the lavishly applied impasto of the neo-romantics. It means he pays careful attention to sound color; he constructs complex, many-voiced aural tapestries that create a sonorous musical whole out of the comings and goings of the individual instrumental voices. The fact that he does this is not exceptional. It is the quality of the invention, however, along with the attention to the part writing that puts him in a good place as, to my mind, one of the most important Canadian composers active today.

The album Neue Bilder (Centrediscs 15010) gives you a good sampling of his music, well performed by the New Music Concerts aggregation under Robert Aitken. Two larger chamber ensemble works form the origin and terminus points for a concert that also includes three more intimate chamber works: for solo flute (very imaginatively performed by Aitkin); flute, cello and piano; and bass flute and percussion, respectively.

This is a winner. Recommended.

Danish Composer Anders Brodsgaard and "Galaxy"

Modern Danish composers? DaCapo brings us a bird's-eye view of some of what goes on there, as you may have noticed from previous posts on this blog.

Today, another very interesting release, Galaxy (DaCapo 8.226551), focusing on the orchestral music of Anders Brodsgaard (b. 1955). First things first: Christopher Austin and the Odense Symphony Orchestra illuminate the two works covered with bold definition and verve. The sound is quite good as well.

The two works? "Galaxy," (composed between 1990-1999), and "Monk's Mixtures" (2009). The former matches a large orchestra with an expansive, continuous sonic matrix. It is in turn consonant, dissonant, relatively quiescent or boldly dynamic. The sound universe suggests an isomorphic relation to the nearly infinite yet complexly patterned logic of a galaxy in motion. It is a finely nuanced, deeply expressive work that never seems less than inspired. His use of the orchestra shows a complete mastery of the sound-producing resources available to him, though he mostly realizes his ever-shifting sound masses without recourse to the less conventional sound-producing techniques developed by composers like Xenakis and Penderecki in their breakthrough works. Yet the overall effect is singular.

"Monk's Mixtures" is no less interesting. The music moves along more briskly, more periodically, as the movement titles ("Moving," "Walking," "Flying") suggest.

In the end one gets a sense of Brodsgaard the composer; a musical mind that is as attuned to orchestral color as it is inventively original in a melodic-harmonic sense.

This is bracing music, a jump into a cold stream. It's a good thing to hear. It gives you an open window into Brodsgaard's universe of sound. Recommended.