The Concorde Music Ensemble's "Reflections:" Music of the Past Decade

The music of the last ten years illustrates even more vividly the trend of the past 20 years. In the area of contemporary classical music, multi-stylistic expression and a creative eclecticism prevail. No one school of composition dominates. The musical signposts of classical composition from around 1900 through to 2011 are all present on the map of what's being written today. And certain inclusions of folk and vernacular influences are present that perhaps have not heretofore been a part of the various approaches of the recent past as well.

That is clear and also very well illustrated by Ireland's Concorde Contemporary Music Ensemble and their new CD Reflections (Navona 5835). The album features five composers and works from the past decade that call upon anything from a mid-sized chamber ensemble to a duet. The composers are from a wide variety of backgrounds, but all share a commitment to making a music that is embedded in the world we live in today. The five composers, Alejandro Castanos, Jane O'Leary, Stephen Gardner, Judith Ring and Si-Hyun Yi each weigh in with a distinctive work. Highlights include Castanos' "Angulos" which has a lively rhythmic thrust and some of the best writing for temple blocks I have heard! Gardner's "Klezmeria" uses Klezmer related themes for a thoroughly charming clarinet-violin duet.

Through the various compositions a near-constant is the very formidable bass clarinet of Harry Sparnaay. He sounds beautiful.

If you want some very new music that is advanced without necessarily jarring loose the fillings in your teeth, seek no further.

It is a definite feather in the cap of the Concorde Ensemble, who plays these pieces beautifully, as it is a fascinating introduction to some very new music and new composers. Recommended.

Benet Casablancas and "The Dark Backward of Time"

Spanish composer Benet Casablancas (b. 1956) is a new one for me. He is a modernist with an inventive flair and a sure hand at orchestra color and orchestration. A serious listen to his new CD The Dark Backward of Time (Naxos 8.579002) shows a composer in a mature phase, a master of orchestral gesture. The title piece is a whirlwind of orchestral excitement, building layers of sound density that nevertheless have appealing transparency and dramatic impact.

Four other compositions are included on this set, covering a span from 1981 to 2006. All show a style that stands apart from his contemporaries and an increasing mastery of the palette that a full orchestra can provide the imaginative crafter of sounds. Salvador Mas-Conde conducts the Barcelona Symphony and the Catalonia National Orchestra with assurance and sympathy to the composer's aims.

This is a fine disk and a welcome addition to recordings of modern Spanish orchestral music. Recommended.

Michael Nyman's Music for Three Accordions

If you read my review of two of Michael Nyman's later operas (see December 15th posting from last year), you'll perhaps recall that I discussed what seemed to be new, deliberately banal elements injected into his music. In the operatic context, the music fit the dramatic action: music hall sorts of things, 1940's popular dance music allusions. . . . All that fit in with the period and plot.

Turning today to some of Nyman's chamber music, viz his recording with the Motion accordion trio from Poland (MNR 117) some of that banality again reappears. To be honest it put me off at first. There are what sound like polka-march references, doo wop rhythm section accompaniments and other "found" referential elements.

To backtrack, what we have on this disk is ten relatively short pieces, all but one including the Motion Trio, many with Nigel Barr added on trombone or euphonium, and Michael Nyman on the piano (with himself alone on one piece).

The music has been arranged by Motion Trio member Janusz Wojtarowicz.

Much of the music has a rock-steady sort of insistence rhythmically, which the accordions accentuate. But there's always an irregular, sometimes quirky element in the music that steers it away from the sort of bludgeoning hammer stroke sound that some heavy metal favors, for example.

After several listens, I came to like this music. It's not minimalism that others have done. It's Nyman's own brand. Now as long as one realizes that Nyman's more overtly insistent sorts of compositions do not negate or take anything away from his other work or, indeed, the other various approaches to minimalism that have flourished in the past 40 years now, then one should be free to enjoy the music on its own terms.

The Motion Trio are an impressive lot. If you love the accordion, this will give you plenty to love. It's so quirky to hear accordions doing this kind of music that I found myself pleased with it after a time. It sure beats Lawrence Welk!

Phil Kline & His Zippo Songs

OK, Phil Kline's song cycle Zippo Songs (Cantaloupe Music) has been available for some time now. If I am mentioning it today it is because it transcends the trendy and flavor-of-the-week sorts of come-and-go "product" that we find ourselves bombarded with every day.

Phil Kline created in this group of songs a kind of musical equivalent to Goya's Disasters of War paintings. It is based on the inscriptions soldiers in the Vietnam War scratched on their Zippo lighters. It's sometimes about a kind of gallows humor in the face of horror; then again the inscriptions sometimes communicate a despair that certainly is not at all ironic. They are invariably touching, moving, heart breaking.

The music is what of course puts this all over in a way that transforms it into art. We have a chamber ensemble of Todd Reynolds on violin, the composer on guitars and Dave Cossin on percussion. Theo Bleckmann takes on the vocal part, and he does so without using a trained, operatic sort of sound. This only serves to bring home the contemporaneity of the whole thing. There are electronic manipulations and double tracking passages that thicken the sound but of course that has been a consistent part of Phil Kline's sound and trademark.

I try not to read other reviews before I do one but I accidentally stumbled on a review of Zippo Songs by somebody; I don't recall who. It commented on the work's "brutality." Well certainly the music itself is not at all that in any systematic way. It is sad, reflective and a bit angry at times. But the music is so distinctive it does much more than parallel the lyrical content. It recreates the "looking at a distance" we necessarily experience looking back on a tragic event from a later time. That's in part the magic of this music. It's a tribute to the men and women who fought in that war and the absolute insanity of having to fight in it.

More than that, though, this is music that bears the Phil Kline stamp. It refuses to accept what the "modern classical" genre would dictate as to how the music sounds. It also refuses to accept what the "post-" mode would expect Mr. Kline to produce. There are moments of metal music, especially from the guitars, there are moments of a lyrical tenderness, there are influences of every sort of music Phil Kline has ever heard, I would think. And that's how it should be with a contemporary composer of his caliber.

We sometimes forget that a Haydn, a Mozart, a Beethoven enriched their compositional palettes by the music in which they were immersed as human beings in place and time. Hence interludes of "Turkish" music, references to the dance music of the era, and so on.

The difference between them and Phil Kline is that he is alive right now. And like the other composers I mention, this is not a matter of appropriation as it is of transformation. It isn't music about other music.

Zippo Songs I believe is one of the masterpieces of our current era; Phil Kline is one of our most important composers. But don't take my word for it. Listen.

Einojuhani Rautavaara, Orchestral Mystic

Composers who were musical mystics? Of course, we have Hildegard of Bingen, Mozart of "Don Giovanni" and the Masonic Music, Dukas, Scriabin, Ives ("The Unanswered Question," etc.), Messaien and today we have Einojuhani Rautavaara.

A new release of two of his orchestral pieces (Ondine) shows us a composer fully mature and stylistically singular. The Helsinki Philharmonic under Leif Segerstam give marvelously luminescent performances of Rautavaara's "Before the Icons" (1955/2005) and "A Tapestry of Life" (2007). The recording convinced me that Rautavaara is a contemporary original.

The music isn't exactly modern sounding, but it doesn't sound old either. There is a thickly rhapsodic quality to the music that does not ooze sentiment as much as map out a rather mysterious universe of affirming sound. It is quite beautiful, and not at all mawkish. Rautavaara orchestrates with thick impasto, vibrant blocks of color. It's like no other contemporary music, really. Grab this disk. Highly recommended.

Magical Sounds From Open Graves

I rely upon the kindness of strangers. OK, so I watched that movie again last weekend (A Streetcar Named Desire) and it still kills me. But I do depend on people I have never met (for the most part) and the music info dissemination network. If it weren't for that I would never have known about the group Open Graves and their CD Hollow Lake (Prefecture).

The group is Paul Kikuchi on percussion (the drummer for the Empty Cage Quartet, whose CD I reviewed earlier on these pages, among other associations) and Jesse Olsen, Bay Area composer and performer. Those preliminaries tell you little, just as I had no idea what to expect when I first put this CD on my player.

It is first off important to note that the entire album was recorded inside an empty two-million gallon water cistern. That factor gives the music a hugely cavernous resonance that makes the sound distinctively ambient. Kikuchi and Olsen wisely make full use of that sound by populating the eminations with plenty of room, with space between sounds and notes so that the full impact of space and sound becomes primary.

The musical sounds are produced by percussion instruments and a long noted, eastern sounding string instrument (sounds like something out of Harry Partch, but in an infinitely lengthened temporal world) among other things. The music is partly improvised, partly composed, and sounds like it belongs with some kind of ritual for a world we do not yet know. Parts consist of very long event-centered series of resonant sounds, other parts have a quasi-gamelan like quality and feature more pulsating chimed phrases.

This is music for your deepest brown studies. It has a kind of rather profound stillness to it in parts; in other parts it moves one along on a well-conceived path. Either way this is highly original, very moving aural sculpture that should be required listening for anyone who likes music in the long form, the lingering phrases, the feeling of universal expansion. It's subtle. And it is an uplifting experience.

David Simons and the Transformation of Sound Worlds

Composer David Simons disregards the borders between modern concert music and DIY ethnic music and he does it with a flair. This second album for Tzadik, Fung Sha Noon, shows this tendency admirably. Essentially there are four contrasting pieces on the program. "Odentity" takes Harry Partch's instruments and composes something new for them. Not surprisingly, the ghost of Partch hovers over the proceedings and the sound of the music reflects this. It is quite fascinating to hear this Partch/not Partch music and it shows you that Partch's ensemble of instruments has plenty of life left in it for those who feel the inspiration.

"Uncle Venus" follows with a strings plus gamelan lineup and an attractive ambiance that makes as much use of the space between sounds as the sounds themselves.

The two part "Music for Theremin and Gamelan" takes the timeless qualities of gamelan music and stretches them, modernizes them to suit Simons' concept. The theremin gives the ensemble an eerie lead voice and the violin-viola soundblock effectively provides a third color for the ensemble. It's all an indication of how Simons has internalized musical traditions and made them over to the music in his head.

For the finale, David Simons performs a solo piece for an array of percussion instruments, including the found onject of everyday life: cans, bottles and such.

This may not become a barn-storming blockbuster out there in musical-commerce-land. What it is is rather remarkable and thoroughly captivating. There's nothing of the tentative experiment in all this. This is fully formed David Simons music.

New Music from Ensemble Contemporaine de Montreal

It is quite obvious that the "new" new music isn't exactly like the "old" new music in the field of contemporary classical. It isn't afraid to incorporate influences from rock and jazz; it can be more tonal that its 20th century predecessors, or alternatively, not. The rhythmic qualities of any given piece are not predictable. Again, all sorts of influences from world and popular sources can be involved. It also does not draw a distinct line between electronic and acoustical music.

This can all be experienced first hand in the new release by the Ensemble Contemporaine de Montreal, Nouveaux Territoires 03 (ATMA Classique). The CD makes available four new pieces by composers with whom most will not be familiar: Andre Ristic, Michel Gonneville, Michael Desterle and Nicole Lizee.

Four new works, four composers of today. Ristic gives us a sonically advanced world for violin and chamber orchestra. Michel Bonnevile creates very compelling music for mezzo-soprano Michele Motard and ensemble. Ms. Motard does not sing entirely in an operatic mode which is refreshing, and her voice is subject to an electronic alteration that extends and reinforces the musical impact of the work. Michael Desterle provides our ears with a sonic landscape that combines spacial sprawl with unusual pairings of instrumental colors. Finally Nicole Lizee dazzles ones senses with very vibrant chamber orchestrating.

These are works that show the influences of the musical and cultural worlds we all experience right now. All four composers transform those experiences into music that is very contemporary, yet also very listenable, compelling, even quite pleasurable. If you want another take on the chamber orchestra today, this is an excellent place to look!