Enrico Rava Fearless Five with Joe Lovano: Corners (ECM 2868)

| Tyran Grillo

Enrico Rava
Fearless Five
with Joe Lovano
Corners

Enrico Rava trumpet, flugelhorn
Joe Lovano tenor saxophone, tarogato
Matteo Paggi trombone
Francesco Diodati guitar
Francesco Ponticelli double bass
Evita Polidoro drums, vocals
Recorded July 2025
Auditorium Parco della Musica
Ennio Morricone, Rome
Recording engineers: Angelo Mincuzzi, Massimiliano Cervini,
and Roberto Catucci (supervision)
Mixing engineer: Stefano Amerio
October 2025, Udine
Cover photo: Max Franosch
Album produced by Manfred Eicher
Release date: October 16, 2026

On Corners, Enrico Rava’s lyricism acquires fresh contours in the collective imagination of his Fearless Five. Melody enters a studio whose occupants can move the walls, and the trumpeter’s familiar eloquence discovers unfamiliar dimensions within its own breath. Formed after an impromptu concert outside Rome in 2022, the quintet takes its name from a composition on his 1978 Enrico Rava Quartet. Guitarist Francesco Diodati, trombonist Matteo Paggi, bassist Francesco Ponticelli, and drummer Evita Polidoro bring distinct compositional identities to the ensemble’s ECM debut, joined by guest saxophonist Joe Lovano, whose partnership with Rava yielded Roma in 2019. Diodati alone had worked with Rava in other groups; their intuitive rapport helps make freedom a practical condition of the music. Recorded at Rome’s Auditorium Parco della Musica on July 21–23, 2025, and produced by Manfred Eicher, the album gathers contributions from every participant. Shared authorship becomes an invitation to alter the terms of belonging. Rava’s language passes between generations, acquiring shadows with anatomies of their own.

His flugelhorn introduces “Certi angoli segreti” with a supple assurance that lets the melody reveal itself by degrees. There is something clandestine in its poise, a private staircase descending through the center of a public gesture. Diodati’s delicate marbling deepens the rhythm section’s contours, giving Lovano ample space to carve airborne trajectories without losing the grain of his sound. The tenor’s robust delicacy holds ascent and gravity in the same phrase. Around Rava’s unraveling lines, the ensemble adjusts its proportions, allowing a melodic turn to become an opening through which the whole group can pass. Paggi’s solo burns through that space with exhilarating conviction, its lower register lending physical force to the gathering intensity. Diodati, too, pursues distortion, summoning a brilliance reminiscent of Terje Rypdal: the guitar’s radiance has teeth. Across nearly 12 minutes, the piece establishes how freely this ensemble can change direction while keeping each player’s presence sharply audible. Even the most fugitive line leaves a pressure mark.

That expansiveness makes the intimacy of Diodati’s “Sin peso” especially arresting. Its cinematic sensibility allows the open distances of a western to fold into noir’s troubled interiors. Rava’s muted trumpet moves with the composure of a figure carrying an undisclosed past; each phrase seems to know which door would be dangerous to open. The guitar supplies a landscape whose horizon has been confiscated, leaving the melody to negotiate distance through touch. Polidoro’s “Le mie gambe” draws that inward movement closer to the body. Sung by its composer, it is one of the album’s most affecting performances, her voice finding a passage through the instruments that seems scarcely wide enough for speech. Slinking guitar and tender bass give the song a palpable warmth, while the horns bring its emotional implications forward through their intimate harmonies. Feeling becomes audible at the point where the individual timbres begin to soften into one another. The voice inhabits that threshold, lending the ensemble’s abstraction a pulse beneath the skin.

Lovano’s “Sun Rava” unsettles the ground again. Its abstract blues opens onto freer exchanges, with momentum repeatedly finding and relinquishing its footing. The tenor’s conversation with drums and bass is particularly enthralling: Polidoro and Ponticelli make motion responsive enough to accommodate Lovano’s changing inflections, so that each rhythmic decision has consequences for the next breath. Freedom here involves the vertigo of being heard with such precision that an impulse can alter the entire group’s direction. Rava’s “Hitchcock at the Beach” concentrates its drama into a much shorter span, Polidoro’s vocals adding a silver sheen to its nostalgic atmosphere. Lovano’s melancholy points toward tragedy with remarkable restraint, leaving grief suspended at the threshold of articulation. The ache resides in that withheld disclosure. On “Tone, Shape and Colours,” a collective improvisation sparked by a Lovano motif, the tarogato gives contemplation a reedier edge. Bells and gongs float across the surface as tensions gather beneath them. Their eventual surrender to rest feels almost anatomical, a clenched hand discovering the space inside its palm.

Ponticelli’s brief “Ça va sans dire” distills these roaming impulses into a melodic aphorism. Its nocturnal wanderings leave Diodati a generous surface on which to work, the guitar giving depth to a statement whose brevity invites close attention. Rava’s “Bowery Dance” then turns toward the remembered streets of his New York years. Guitar fuzz and pliant bass introduce an abstract opening before a harder groove assembles itself, interrupted by stops and starts that keep its momentum alert. Lovano and Rava exchange phrases with lived experience in their jaws, allowing memory to find fresh musculature in the present tense. Their ease carries the knowledge of musicians who can recognize an opening before it has fully formed. Paggi’s “Mamma” brings this restless company into a tender close. Its gentleness gives the ensemble’s responsiveness an unexpectedly vulnerable meaning, reaching beyond the bandstand toward the strange beginnings of personhood. A child enters a language already in progress, addressed long before it can answer. Someone lends significance to a cry; a sound acquires a place in another person’s life. The musicians’ mutual attention gives that ancient transaction an adult complexity, their experience deepening the risk of allowing a phrase to need an answer. Fearlessness becomes unexpectedly fragile here, entrusted to another pair of hands. Rava’s lyricism, so articulate throughout Corners, approaches the obscure tenderness from which articulation first emerges. The first person begins in the second.

A Tragicomedy of Defiance: Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground

| Tyran Grillo

Published in 1864, Notes from Underground enters the nineteenth century through a wound in its confidence. Russia’s arguments over human emancipation had become arguments over the human creature itself, over whether an enlightened understanding of self-interest could make goodness inevitable. Dostoevsky places a solitary voice inside that promise and allows it to gnaw through the floor. The result anticipates the estrangement of later modernist fiction and the problems existentialism would make its own, yet its historical force remains inseparable from its peculiar intimacy. The novel makes consciousness a place where the future can be refused before it arrives. Its speaker possesses enough intelligence to expose the arrogance of a system and enough vanity to turn that exposure into an excuse for tormenting others. These capacities occupy the same cramped body. Their coexistence gives the book its terrible vitality.

Even its chronology refuses the reassurance of a straight line. The first part presents the underground man at forty, elaborating the convictions with which he has upholstered his seclusion. The second, “Apropos of the Wet Snow,” returns to his life at twenty-four. We encounter the philosophy before the experiences against which it has hardened, then discover how much flesh has been concealed inside its abstractions. This reversal changes the meaning of what we have already read. Arguments that initially resemble a defense of human freedom acquire the odor of an alibi, while episodes of humiliation expose the needs that theory has learned to disguise. His earlier life never becomes a simple explanation of his later consciousness, since the older man retains control of the telling and continues to dispute his own evidence. Memory enters stage left under escort. The book’s two halves form a struggle over interpretation in which a life keeps escaping the conclusions imposed upon it. The philosopher has delivered his speech. Now someone must pay for it.

“I am a sick man…I am a wicked man.” Between those declarations, the narrative opens its cynical caesura. Sickness might solicit care, whereas wickedness seems to forbid it, and the speaker cannot resist arranging both possibilities before us. Translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky preserve the nervous immediacy of a voice that has scarcely announced itself before beginning to revise the announcement. The man believes his liver is diseased, although he admits uncertainty about what ails him. His refusal to consult a doctor becomes an act of spite whose only injured party is himself. Already the comedy has begun its patient work upon our sympathy. Who is supposed to suffer from this magnificent refusal? The doctors will survive it. He knows this and insists upon it anyway, extracting sovereignty from the prospect of getting worse. His body becomes the hostage of an argument addressed to nobody who needs to answer. In that opening hesitation, a whole existence curls around the pleasure of making its own misery ungovernable.

Pevear’s introduction cautions against mistaking the narrator’s proximity for a direct statement of Dostoevsky’s beliefs. The caution matters because this man knows how to recruit a reader. His “gentlemen” are an imagined audience whose objections he can supply before they arrive, a tribunal assembled from the educated assumptions he despises and the approval he cannot stop desiring. They often embody the rationalist confidence associated with Nikolai Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky and his followers, although their function exceeds any single historical party. The reader who laughs becomes another occupant of that audience, while withholding laughter merely invites speculation about the motive for our refusal. Whatever we do, he has already begun discussing us with himself. We are invited into his consciousness under conditions that make every response available for confiscation, and his apparent candor gives the confiscation its charm. He courts attention through declarations of indifference, finding in our resistance another reason to continue.

Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done?, published in 1863, supplied the radical imagination with a utopian fiction that became a formative text for revolutionary readers. Its rational egoism proposed that a proper understanding of self-interest could bring individual benefit into harmony with the common good. Notes from Underground attacks that assurance and parodies the confidence that human life can be reorganized according to a comprehensible plan. A proverbial crystal palace condenses the promise into an architecture of perfected satisfaction. From the underground man’s corner, its transparency looks suffocating. The danger he identifies concerns the reduction of lived existence to a calculable mechanism, an arrangement in which human flesh remains present while its freedom has been explained away. Yet the rival he installs beneath this edifice is hardly a trustworthy liberator. A grievance has seized the emergency exit and declared itself the guardian of the soul.

His strongest objection begins with the possibility that a person might knowingly choose injury. If human conduct follows enlightened advantage, what becomes of the pleasure of refusing advantage itself? “What makes you conclude that man’s wanting so necessarily needs to be corrected?” he asks in kind. The question pierces the benevolence that appoints itself curator of someone else’s desire. Wanting may embrace reason, but it can also insist upon a satisfaction that reason has no wish to recognize. To preserve this troublesome remainder, the underground man will defend even a ruinous caprice, musing to himself, if not also about himself, “I even think the best definition of man is: a being that goes on two legs and is ungrateful.” The sentence is wonderfully indecent. Gratitude would acknowledge that the world has given us something worth accepting, and his creature reserves the right to spit upon the gift. Such ingratitude can expose coercion decoratively wrapped in generosity. It can also become the reflex by which every offered kindness is ruined before it has the chance to make a claim upon us. His defense of freedom carries both possibilities in its mouth.

Arithmetic therefore acquires a menace disproportionate to its innocence. Two times two is four, and the underground man hears in that result the shutting of a door. The equation becomes intolerable when its certainty is promoted into a model of existence, when the unresolved human creature is treated as a problem awaiting its final solution. A completed life would have no room left in which to want. “And though our life in this manifestation often turns out to be a bit of trash,” he goes on to say, “still it is life and not just the extraction of a square root.” Destruction consequently offers the strange consolation of reopening what completion has sealed. He suspects that people may overturn a perfectly furnished happiness simply to feel their own hands at work upon it. Here his argument finds an unsettling strength, for increased knowledge supplies no automatic moral improvement. A civilization can condemn bloodshed while becoming more accomplished at committing it. Reason may sharpen an instrument whose purpose remains atrocious. But the very force of this insight tempts him toward a disastrous privilege, allowing the refusal of reason to appear honorable regardless of what that refusal does. Freedom begins to resemble a house whose owner burns each room to prove that the keys are his.

Within that house, consciousness proliferates until movement becomes nearly impossible. Every intention produces a witness against itself. Revenge requires an injury that can be believed in long enough to justify acting upon it, yet analysis keeps dissolving the belief. A motive reveals another motive beneath it, and the excavation continues until the ground has vanished. His intelligence discovers contingency everywhere, then awards itself a distinction for being unable to stand. The “characterless being” he calls morally obligatory becomes a person whose capacity to imagine alternatives has swallowed the possibility of choosing among them. There is real anguish here, as well as a peculiar snobbery. He cannot become an insect, but even this failure can be made into evidence of exceptional depth. The confession keeps returning a dividend to the vanity that financed it. Each admission of worthlessness is quietly stamped with the assurance that an ordinary man could never understand such worthlessness so well.

The stone wall of natural necessity provides a further occasion for this divided pleasure. A direct person can accept a limit and proceed within it. The underground man continues to suffer against the wall even after conceding that he cannot break through. Acceptance would deprive him of the quarrel through which he feels himself existing. His “voluptuous standstill in inertia” is filled with imaginary reprisals, many of them exquisitely revised and none capable of exhausting the offense. Action would expose revenge to the indifference of an actual world. In fantasy, the grievance retains an obedient audience and a limitless duration. Even suffering becomes theatrical, as his reflections on toothache suggest. A cultivated sufferer can make a moan accuse everyone within hearing, turning pain into a demand that others should be inconvenienced by its existence. Dostoevsky lets us laugh at the grotesque ingenuity of this arrangement. The laughter catches unpleasantly in the throat when we recognize how easily the wish to be understood becomes a wish to punish those who have failed to understand us.

Dreams offer the apparent escape. There he can inhabit the “beautiful and lofty” without submitting his grandeur to the humiliating conditions of an encounter. His imagined heroism excuses his degradation, and the degradation gives his heroism something sufficiently immense to redeem. Ordinary decency would spoil the arrangement by asking for an action too small to furnish an epic. The dreamer needs humanity at a distance, where love can expand without meeting another person’s inconvenient will. This is one reason the novel’s collision of the sentimental aspirations of the 1840s with the rationalist programs of the 1860s feels so corrosive. Both provide languages through which a person can substitute an ideal for an encounter. The underground man inhabits their incompatibility, dressing his hunger in whichever vocabulary will make it appear most impressive.

That condition has a disquieting contemporary echo. The imagined “gentlemen” anticipate the audience before whom a person can spend an entire life preparing reactions to reactions. Social media gives such anticipation a visible apparatus, but Dostoevsky locates the deeper machinery in the desire to secure recognition while retaining control over what recognition may reveal. His protagonist rehearses exposure until it becomes another means of concealment. He can confess to vanity with such conspicuous intelligence that the confession begins to demand admiration. His contradictions draw us into a relation where we enjoy detecting the trap and continue supplying it with victims. To call him simply unreliable hardly reaches the problem. We often perceive his evasions correctly and remain susceptible to their pleasure. Reading becomes an experiment in how far insight can coexist with complicity. The man keeps asking whether we are laughing because laughter gives him both the wound he expects and the contact he requires.

Pevear and Volokhonsky make this entanglement audible through an English that permits the voice its awkward insistence. The repeated language of “profit” gives desire a commercial shadow, allowing the attack on rational self-interest to remain entangled with the terms of its opponent. “Wanting” preserves an ordinary bodily pressure that a more elevated vocabulary could too easily dignify. Even the phrase “little debauch” carries the faint absurdity of a speaker attempting to manage his disgrace through scale. These choices matter because the book’s thinking takes place inside speech that keeps slipping out of its speaker’s control. Sudden qualifications interfere with an assertion before it can settle into authority. A joke exposes an intention the narrator immediately tries to reinterpret. The intellectual violence depends upon these abrasions. In this translation, his voice retains the feeling of a thought catching on its own teeth, producing an eloquence whose injuries remain visible.

When the second part returns to the young clerk, those verbal injuries acquire a social history. “I was then already bearing the underground in my soul,” he admits. Office life makes his body a surface upon which he imagines everyone else reading contempt. Another person’s face can seem an intolerable judgment before a word has been spoken. The encounter with an officer who physically moves him aside crystallizes the misery of being treated as an obstacle without the dignity of an antagonist. His elaborate preparations to collide with the officer on equal terms make a small contact of shoulders bear the weight of an entire metaphysics of recognition. He longs to establish that his body occupies space with the same right as the body of a man whose rank makes room for it. The humor is agonizing because the desired equality has been reduced to a gesture that may scarcely register with its recipient.

His reunion with former schoolmates enlarges this collision into a social catastrophe. At Simonov’s rooms, he insists upon joining a farewell dinner for Zverkov, a man whose easy confidence he resents with the intimacy of an old scar. He needs these men to acknowledge his superiority and cannot bear to leave them to their indifference. When the dinner’s changed hour is not communicated to him, an hour of waiting becomes proof of the insignificant place he occupies in their lives. Their eventual arrival briefly relieves the loneliness that his pride has been preparing to denounce. As the evening deteriorates, he drinks and attempts to force the gathering into the drama he has rehearsed. His insulting toast brings ridicule, while his prolonged pacing gives the room a miserable pendulum. Everyone else possesses the terrible freedom to stop thinking about him. He remains, making his refusal to leave an exhibition of the dependence he wishes to conceal. Dostoevsky’s wit here works through duration. We feel how long it takes a man to discover that humiliation can continue after the spectators have become bored.

He follows them to a brothel with revenge still furnishing imaginary scenes, and there he encounters Liza, a young woman whose vulnerability offers him an audience he can command. His conversation with her borrows the moral intensity of sentimental literature. He evokes the tenderness of a family and confronts her with a future of abandonment, making himself the apparent bearer of a knowledge that might save her. Some of the feeling is sincere, which deepens the harm. A person can speak truthfully about another’s suffering while using that truth to establish power over her. He needs Liza’s tears to compensate for the contempt he has just endured, and his borrowed eloquence supplies the instrument. The human body he has defended against rational calculation is now being reorganized under the pressure of his own design. Her destination seems so clear to him that the use of fear to drive her toward it can pass for benevolence. His account of freedom has found a listener whose freedom it can temporarily forget.

Liza’s observation that he speaks from a book touches the apparatus at its most vulnerable point. She has heard the borrowed cadence beneath the apparent revelation. He resents the exposure because his authority depends upon the illusion that these words come directly from a depth inaccessible to other people. Literature has supplied him with a personality he can perform, and her remark briefly separates the performance from the person. Nevertheless, he gives her his address, extending the scene into the prospect of an actual relation. An address is a dangerous thing to offer when one’s grandeur exists mainly in speech. It translates a promise into a place where the promising person can be found. The underground man begins to dread the arrival that his own rhetoric has invited. Liza may come expecting the man who spoke to her, and encounter the room in which that man has never managed to live.

Her visit finds him in the midst of a degrading struggle with his servant Apollon, whose composure has become another provocation to his vanity. The ragged dressing gown completes an exposure that the narrator had anticipated with feverish precision. His fear of being seen as poor mixes with the more intimate fear of being seen as helpless. The rescuer has been discovered in need of rescue, and Liza responds to that need. She recognizes his unhappiness and embraces him. For a moment, something enters the scene that his rehearsal could neither produce nor prevent. Her compassion changes the relation between them without asking him to become impressive first. He sobs, then begins to perceive this reversal as another humiliation. The possibility of being loved in his misery threatens the superiority through which he has imagined love becoming bearable. Care reaches him at the very point where his elaborate defenses have made care seem an insult. To accept it would require allowing another person’s understanding to exist beyond his authority.

He answers by asserting mastery through their intimacy, then presses money into her hand in a final attempt to degrade what she has offered. The gesture tries to assign her a familiar price and restore a hierarchy in which he can remain the purchaser. Here the first part’s language of profit returns with an appalling material exactness. Having defended the human creature against every formula that would fix its value, he attempts to reduce Liza to a transaction the instant her tenderness exceeds his calculations. Her refusal of the money leaves his arithmetic stranded on the table. The banknote has become an object his interpretation cannot successfully spend. We should resist turning this refusal into a tidy victory, since the injury has already occurred and her future remains unknown. Yet it interrupts his dominion over the meaning of the encounter. He cannot make the gift into a purchase merely by deciding that it shall be one. Another will has answered him, and the answer survives without the argumentative extravagance he requires to make his own refusals feel alive.

The episode changes the philosophical stakes of the novel. A defense of unrestricted wanting has met the wanting of someone else, exposing the ease with which liberty can be made into a private license. The underground man can identify the coercion hidden in a utopian scheme while practicing an intimate version of that coercion himself. His failure complicates the defense of freedom without canceling it. Liza’s refusal gives that freedom a form he cannot bear to recognize. The later Crime and Punishment permits a path toward repentance to appear in its epilogue. Here remorse keeps getting recruited into the narrator’s performance, granting him the agitation of a conscience without requiring its obedience. Dostoevsky’s Christianity makes the encounter especially charged. In a March 1864 letter to his brother Mikhail, he complained that the censors had removed material in which he derived “the necessity of faith and Christ.” The surviving text leaves that stated intention without a fully preserved expression. Liza’s compassion nevertheless permits a Christian reading of the encounter, offering an answer to the self’s enclosure that the narrator cannot accept. Love would place him in a relation whose value depends upon neither his triumph nor his abasement. He continues to translate that possibility into a contest, then punishes the person who momentarily made the contest unnecessary.

The closing reflections on embodied life bring this failure into a stranger register. “We’re stillborn, and have long ceased to be born of living fathers,” he writes, extending his condition into an accusation against a humanity ashamed of possessing its own bodies. His “omni-men” pursue an existence purified of the vulnerability through which an actual person can be reached. Such a creature could possess every possibility while never enduring the irreversible smallness of one life. The underground man’s continual revisions enact the seduction of that fantasy. Each version of himself can be exchanged for another. But Liza has entered the record with a body he can hurt, and this body prevents his plurality from remaining an innocent intellectual abundance. His freedom of interpretation cannot travel backward into her experience and undo it. Time has preserved something his rhetoric would prefer to keep negotiable. A life has consequences even when its author refuses to settle upon a character.

Perhaps this is where the novel’s deepest unease passes beyond its humble cast of characters. His final wish to speak for everyone gives us reason to look toward the person he has struggled to make into an explanation of himself. Liza’s departure opens a space he cannot fill without further invention. We know almost nothing of the life that might await her, and the temptation to furnish it with a redemptive destiny would repeat his assumption that her existence owes us a useful meaning. Her suffering need not educate him in order to matter. Neither must she remain forever at the point where his cruelty left her. The thought becomes difficult precisely where it becomes generous, asking us to imagine a future while surrendering possession of its contents. Somewhere in that unclaimed possibility, the stillborn argument loosens its hold upon the living. There may be a room in which his voice has never sounded, where no sentence requires her to become the heroine of his unhappiness. We can grant her that room without furnishing it. The door remains hers.

Mediavolo: Live at the Novomax

| Tyran Grillo

Filmed on October 26, 2024, at the Novomax in Quimper, France, Mediavolo’s intimate return to the stage brings songs separated by years into bodily proximity. Guitarist and band composer Jacques Henry, keyboardist Fabrice Duhamel, drummer Lionel Prigent, and bassist David Carquet give compositions that invite solitary absorption in the studio the immediacy of people listening to one another as they play. Older material absorbs the experience gathered since its creation, while songs from Away Within find unexpected ancestors among earlier recordings. Throughout, Géraldine Le Cocq’s voice inhabits the delicate interval between a character’s predicament and her own emotional knowledge, drawing nourishment from both.

The concert begins where 2011’s Modern Cause begins, with “Dan,” though its position here gives the song a second threshold to cross. Its family estrangement grows from recognizable intimacies into an imagined future in which affection has become inaccessible to those who assumed it would endure. Small differences accumulate the mineral weight of an accusation; a familiar gesture returns bearing the seal of a foreign government. Gé enters that emotional jurisdiction with striking immediacy. Personal experience supplies the protagonist with a history that feels lived without demanding literal autobiography. Jac’s guitar and Prigent’s drums press against the vocal line, giving the estrangement a physical resistance.

That question acquires a technological complication in “Disembodied Vision” (Away Within, 2024). The severances running through its parent album turn toward the prospect of delegating human uncertainty to an intelligence promised as a cure for human limitation. What becomes of suffering when its supposed healer has no wound through which to recognize it? Duhamel lends the problem an insinuating beauty, his keyboard harmonies so persuasive that surrender briefly seems reasonable. The indictment travels through the seductiveness of its surface, beneath which unease gathers around the fantasy of infallibility. We have emptied so much of ourselves into our inventions that their answers can carry the authority of stolen organs. Yet Duhamel’s playing remains tethered to his bandmates’ responsiveness. The next chord still depends on a human decision, made within earshot of another person’s breath.

“Up Ahead” (Modern Cause, 2011) reopens the relationship between anticipation and remembrance. Its beauty has a peculiar temporal ache, moving forward while the chorus turns toward a life that cannot accompany it. Cocteau Twins affinities shimmer through the guitar, yet the emotional center belongs to Gé. She gives room for longing to develop its own logic, each phrase negotiating the distance between what can be imagined and what can be reached. Memory acquires a future tense, an impossible grammar the music makes briefly usable. A retreat into the band’s beginnings follows with “Wh/Amphibious Oblivion” (Soleil Sans Retour, 2003). Prigent’s skittering drums disturb Jac’s ostinato without dislodging its pull, and the harmonies spread a submerged luminosity. Carquet adds a gentle insistence beneath this aquatic reverie, touching the body before interpretation can intervene. Gé’s voice enlarges the water imagery into a condition of being that loosens its terrestrial obligations and articulates an existence without the hard punctuation of a shore.

Such permeability becomes harder to sustain in “Unbidden Truth” (Away Within, 2024), which reveals the cost of mistaking our field of vision for the dimensions of existence. Unexpected key changes alter the chorus’s proportions from within. A wall believed to be structural suddenly admits a passage, and the heart must revise its floor plan. The music’s insistent brightness brings responsibility, if only because seeing farther means acknowledging how much we have organized around a restricted view. Freedom requires the uncomfortable labor of revising oneself. “Rage” (Away Within, 2024) then enters a more obstructed interior. Duhamel’s spiderwebbed keyboards catch language before it becomes intelligible; the struggle to understand turns inward, loosening the masonry of certainty. Gé’s additional guitar increases the pressure until the arrangement seems to contain more force than its architecture can house.

My history with the band began with “Misunderstanding” (A Secret Sound, 2006), which I encountered through a Cocteau Twins station on Pandora while attending to some forgettable task. Whenever it returned, I stopped working. Each interruption asked for an attention my routine could not accommodate. Eventually, the task became incidental and the song part of my life. Hearing it live revisits that encounter with the knowledge of everything it opened. There is a pleasing complication in remembering that an automated recommendation delivered me to music whose human particularity has remained indispensable. The listener I was has somewhere to meet the listener I have become, and neither can pronounce the other finished.

The exacting construction of “Dr Quayle” (Unaltered Empire, 2008) brings another human experiment into view. Its compositional precision heightens the writing’s laboratory atmosphere, where intention blurs into the desire to control its consequences. Jac’s solo cuts across that precision with exposed anguish, and Gé’s powerful upper register carries the final stretch toward a startling vulnerability. Gothic and darkwave associations gather around these textures, though the performance gives such categories little time to settle. Wide musical appetites have always made Mediavolo open to grand stylistic possibilities, and the band’s precision keeps that breadth coherent. In “Walk Out” (Away Within, 2024), the dreamy guitar admits a brighter expanse whose openness unsettles memory’s authority. Experiences once held as certainties become translucent under the weight of living. Departure requires a body to move before the mind has ratified every reason, and the music honors the dignity of that delay.

With “Mass Anaesthesia” (A Secret Sound, 2006), public circulation enters the concert’s private anatomy. The echoing guitar opens a channel into the flanged congestion, where traffic acquires the troubling grandeur of a civilization rehearsing its own numbness. Gé floats above it with an aerial detachment that makes the ordinary uncanny. The anonymous procession contains countless interior lives, each passing beyond the observer’s reach. Every vehicle carries an unspoken argument with existence. The song’s eventual viral reach adds another dimension: a recording from 2006 traveled through contemporary networks to become an entrance to Mediavolo for listeners far removed from its release. The live version’s more upbeat, urgent energy gives that belated arrival a pulse. For those brought here through its wider circulation, recognition becomes a return to somewhere they have only just discovered. My encounter with “Misunderstanding” finds a counterpart in theirs. Our routes meet at the same improbable address via music that made room for us before we knew to look for it.

“How Does It End” (A Secret Sound, 2006) poses the concert’s most openly philosophical question. Carquet’s circling bass motifs invite us inward, while Jac and Duhamel lend liquid contours to the invitation. Prigent supplies enough traction for the changing harmonies to remain bodily intelligible. In this balance between seduction and footing, Mediavolo’s songcraft becomes especially vivid. Sparkle has weight; gloom admits motion. Gé gives the question a human duration, letting its implications gather within the time it takes to sing. Fear emerges as a possible organizing principle of a life, sustaining arrangements whose necessity we may never have examined. An answer would have to account for our pleasure in structures that also confine us.

The dulcet axis of “Fanciest Scheme” (Unaltered Empire, 2008) turns that difficulty toward the right to remain different. Its melodic grace accommodates an inward gravity that cannot be tidied into general agreement. Consciousness breaks into dots and dashes, sending imperfect signals between people, gaining force where understanding remains incomplete. After a concert so attentive to estrangement, this closing gesture makes fellowship a demanding proposition. Gé’s embodiment of other lives and her bandmates’ exchanges supply a practical measure of it by receiving another’s experience without requiring it to duplicate one’s own.

I find myself thinking of an undeciphered inscription. Centuries of attention may fail to recover what someone entrusted to a surface, yet the marks retain the fact of an address. A hand once pressed meaning into matter and left it for another consciousness. We might destroy the inscription by polishing it until it resembled an alphabet we already know. Something comparably fragile moves through Mediavolo’s music, especially when Gé gives breath to a life whose circumstances remain distinct from her own. Listening places us before another person’s opacity and asks what care can survive without the reward of complete understanding. There is tenderness in allowing the unknown to retain its markings.

Another ECM book…?

| Tyran Grillo

Dear readers,

I’ve been thinking about writing a new book about ECM. Before deciding what shape it might take, I’d like to hear from those of you who have made Between Sound and Space part of your listening lives.

My main concern is finding something new to say. There are already books that approach ECM from various perspectives, including my own, and I don’t want to repeat myself or revisit familiar ground without a compelling reason. I’d like a new project to fill a gap by exploring something you’ve wanted to read about but haven’t yet found, or to ask questions that deserve more sustained attention.

What kind of book about ECM would you like to see? Are there musicians, collaborations, or parts of the catalog you feel have received too little attention? Would you welcome more conversations with artists, stories behind particular recordings, or a closer look at how the music enters and shapes our lives? Perhaps you have something entirely different in mind.

I’d be interested in hearing what you feel is missing from the existing books. A question, a subject, or even a wish for a different approach would give me something to think about.

This is still an idea rather than a definite announcement. For now, I’m all ears, and I would be grateful for your thoughts in the comments below.

Thank you, as always, for reading and listening alongside me.

Tyran

Christy Doran Review for All About Jazz

| Tyran Grillo

Christy Doran’s history with ECM traces a restless path through the guitar’s expressive possibilities, from OM’s combustible blend of rock and free improvisation on sister label JAPO to the intimate experiments of his later collaborations. Throughout, his playing reveals an ear equally attuned to abrasion and delicacy, finding unexpected colors where acoustic resonance meets electronic transformation. A quintessential example is Red Twist & Tuned Arrow, recorded with fellow guitarist Stephan Wittwer and drummer Fredy Studer: a music of intricate exchanges and sudden openings, whose adventurousness carries an unmistakable sense of joy. That spirit continues in his latest record, Disambiguation, a collaboration with tabla player Imran Khan. I have just published my review on All About Jazz, and I invite you to read it and discover where Doran’s ever-curious imagination has taken him next. Click the cover below.

The Tallis Scholars: Live in Venice (ECM New Series 2732/33)

| Tyran Grillo

The Tallis Scholars
Live in Venice

The Tallis Scholars
Peter Phillips director
Recorded in concert July 14, 2017
Basilica di San Marco, Venice
Production: Controcampo Produzioni srl, Venezia
Director: Pierandrea Gagliardi
Cameramen: Paolo Bassi, Claudio Panighel,
Beniamino Fenzi, Pierre Girardi
Video/Audio recording: Flavio Piva,
Antonio Loriga (Waterloo SAS, Milano)
Lighting: Antonio Loriga
Color grading and video editing: Stefano Codin
Audio editing and mastering: Diego Bergamini
Project idea and supervision: Minas Lourian,
Centro Studi e Documentazione della Cultura Armena
Cover photo: Juan Hitters
An ECM Production
Release date: October 9, 2026

My soul doth magnify the Lord,
And my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour.
–Luke 1:46-47

Some music carries its architecture within it; other music waits for a building to reveal the full shape of its thought. In the Basilica di San Marco, every note enters a space crowded with memory, where gold mosaics hold the afterimage of vanished liturgies. The Tallis Scholars’ concert there on July 14, 2017, begins with Palestrina’s Magnificat primi toni. His counterpoint discovers chambers that masonry alone could never contain. Each vocal line retains its identity while yielding part of its solitude to the others. Peter Phillips founded the ensemble in 1973, beginning a relationship with Renaissance polyphony that helped reshape modern hearing of this repertoire. Under his direction, precision serves the music’s spiritual purpose. San Marco’s reverberation gathers the voices after the singers release them, and the building appears to continue the Magnificat on its own.

Issued as a CD/Blu-ray set, Live in Venice captures the exchange between human expressivity and consecrated space. The film establishes the basilica’s scale, while the recording follows sound into its temporal depths, and the beautiful photography of Juan Hitters (used here with his permission) zooms in on artful details. Palestrina’s radiance narrows into Arvo Pärt’s Nunc dimittis, composed in 2001 and based on Simeon’s words after he has held the infant Christ: “Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace.” A single interval seems to contain the old man’s relinquishment, with mortal fatigue resting beside fulfilled promise. The Tallis Scholars honor Pärt’s restraint, allowing every note to cross a wide interior distance before the next appears. Simeon cradles eternity in perishable hands; the choir ushers his farewell in breath that must vanish.

The program marked the 450th anniversary of Claudio Monteverdi’s birth in 2017. Phillips describes it as a meeting of “old favourites and some very new ideas,” though the sequence coheres by its tracing of sacred expression across changing musical languages. Monteverdi stands at the threshold between Renaissance counterpoint and Baroque drama. His Messa a quattro voci da cappella, SV 190, arose during his tenure as maestro di cappella at St. Mark’s, although its date and intended occasion remain unknown. Published posthumously in 1650, the Mass uses the stile antico while admitting the expressive flexibility of a newer age. The singers here reveal that tension without turning the work into an exhibition of control. The Gloria pulls praise upward; the Sanctus opens the upper register into lucid fire. Through the Agnus Dei, harmony searches for the Lamb it already names. Monteverdi preserves the language of liturgy by allowing it to change from within.

Gregorio Allegri’s Miserere mei, Deus carries the program into a penitential theater governed by distance. Composed in the 1630s for the papal choir’s Holy Week services in the Sistine Chapel, this setting of Psalm 51 became famous through a performance tradition whose ornaments were guarded more closely than the written page. Repeated formulas based on the tonus peregrinus alternate plainsong with polyphonic groups placed apart from one another. Allegri’s falsobordone keeps the text clear, giving contrition the severity of a wound without disguise. In San Marco, the separated choirs seem divided by the distance between sin and forgiveness, yet the psalm repeatedly crosses that abyss. Soprano Amy Haworth’s high C arrives as a vertical disturbance, a needle of brightness through the building’s shadow. The note belongs to a version shaped by oral transmission and later reconstruction, rather than a precise preservation of Allegri’s score. And while many people’s reference, including my own, has long been the Tallis Scholars’ recording encountered through the 1980 US release on Angel Records, this rendition possesses a startling immediacy.

Two works by Komitas Vardapet alter the concert’s spiritual geography. Born Soghomon Soghomonian, Komitas was an Armenian priest whose work as a composer and ethnomusicologist preserved his people’s musical inheritance. His music is included in solidarity with Venice’s Armenian community and heritage. Surp-Surp, his setting of the Sanctus from the Armenian Divine Liturgy, draws on the modal contour of chant and surrounds the inherited melody with lucid choral harmony. A droning foundation supports the upper voices as they lift the word “holy” toward a realm beyond possession. Sirt im sasani, or My Heart Trembles, pivots inward. This 13th-century hymn for Maundy Thursday contemplates Judas’s betrayal of Christ. Komitas surrounds the chant with spare, dark-hued harmonies, preserved here in all their tenderness. Christ kneels before the feet of the man who will sell him, suspending judgment within an unbearable act of humility. Komitas brings Armenian sacred memory into the basilica as a living claim upon Christian attention, asking whether worship can approach a wounded past without making suffering decorative.

Antonio Lotti, another maestro di cappella at St. Mark’s, extends the Venetian tradition into the 18th century. His Crucifixus à 8, drawn from a Credo in F major, sets the account of Christ’s crucifixion and burial for eight independent voices. Overlapping entries and chromatic movement build pressure across the choir. Suspensions tighten, then resolve only far enough to make the next dissonance more intimate. Lotti’s evocation of grief takes on disciplined physical force, while resurrection remains beyond the piece’s visible edge. Monteverdi’s Crucifixus from Selva morale e spirituale follows with a harder surface, its syllables bearing the weight of the body named by the Creed. Adoramus te Christe turns toward redemption, and Cantate Domino releases a more buoyant energy. The sequence folds praise back into the memory of the cross, keeping crucifixion and resurrection adjacent without blending them.

The program closes with Lotti’s Crucifixus à 10 from the Credo in D minor. Ten vocal lines create a denser field of imitative phrases and suspensions, but Phillips keeps its inner motion clear. The performance makes audible the Christian scandal that divine glory can inhabit a tortured body and that salvation enters history through an execution outside the city wall. Lotti’s final sonority remains answerable to a fallen world. Across the concert, Palestrina’s abundance, Pärt’s relinquishment, Monteverdi’s liturgical drama, Allegri’s plea, and Komitas’s bruised devotion prepare the ear for this unresolved radiance. The music crosses centuries without smoothing their fractures, gathering difference into communion. San Marco presses itself like an ear against the sealed tomb, where new life begins as a change in the acoustics of the grave, already turning absence into an organ of hearing.

Valeria Luiselli: Beginning Middle End (Book Review)

| Tyran Grillo

Memory has its own methods of excavation. What one generation buries, another may uncover without knowing what it has found. In Beginning Middle End, the soil of Sicily holds a family history whose meanings are still being negotiated: the narrator’s grandmother once worked here on an archaeological dig, and now the narrator arrives with her daughter, carrying the aftermath of a failed marriage. Elsewhere, her mother’s memories are slipping away. Between that loss and the accumulating impressions of a child approaching adolescence, she must reckon with how much of their shared past she can claim to understand. Across four generations of women, recollection moves unevenly, gathering in one life as it recedes from another. The search for origins becomes an inquiry into the stories we entrust to our children, and what happens when they begin to tell them back.

The island brings a different scale to this uncertainty. Its ruins and volcanic disturbances place the women’s lives alongside histories that exceed any family’s capacity to remember, while encounters with migrants and shopkeepers keep those histories tethered to the present. Yet the novel’s intimacy rests in smaller exchanges: a meal prepared together or the shifting allegiances of a chess game. Through these daily negotiations, the daughter begins to exert her own narrative authority. Her questions alter the direction of their travels and unsettle the mother’s account of how they came to be here. The narrator is struck by the permeability of beginnings and endings, and the inarticulability of what comes between. Belonging reaches her as “an echo of someone else’s belonging.” Later, she muses that perhaps the middle is all there is. Her answers remain as fragmentary as her current sense of self, drawing from their new yet ancient surroundings as if strands of memory could still be woven into tapestries for their becoming. As Mount Etna erupts in the backdrop, a looming threat and a point of fascination, the mood proceeds in curls and thermals.

In many ways, the novel is as much about the machinations behind its own creation as the story it seeks to create. “Why is the language of fiction writing so full of real estate?” the narrator asks early on, bringing a valid concern to our penchant for thick description. The question also exposes the possessive grammar of storytelling: to establish a setting can become a way of claiming it; to explain a daughter can become a way of occupying her future. Her resistance to journalists and critics who draw a straight, unbreakable line between her life and her words belongs to this same inquiry. “I have, of course, used slivers of my own life,” she admits, because “I wouldn’t know what else to write with.” Lived experience becomes the building material of fiction, retaining edges that can cut the hand arranging it. As she contemplates how her daughter, now ripped from the master narrative of family life, must learn to navigate the world anew, her own position as a daughter passes beneath the distorted magnifying glass of retrospection.

The novel, accordingly, unfolds in a strangely beautiful vignette style, each passage carrying its own title while flowing into the larger story taking shape in real time. Their separateness gives uncertainty room to breathe. An image can arrive before its significance becomes apparent; a thought may find its consequence several pages later. Many of these images suggest the universe and its natural phenomena, sometimes surreal and distant, because a solar system in need of a new name is forming between mother and daughter. They are trying to reinvent their lives in a home away from home, learning the pull of a changed relation without knowing where its orbit will lead. The daughter’s questions exert a force the mother can neither calculate nor keep outside the story. What appears to be fragmentation gradually reveals the gravitational field of another consciousness entering the composition.

The narrator quickly realizes that there are things she would rather withhold from her daughter, or reveal only through the lens of obfuscation, where the author’s art takes over in service of life. Invoking Greek theater, she observes that “the violence happens backstage.” Concealment becomes a problem of form, asking us to consider what an omission protects and what it allows to continue unchallenged. The daughter’s desire for a Polaroid camera, whose images eventually make themselves metaphysically known at the back of the book, establishes a nuanced reciprocity between what one observes and what one makes of the observation. Her photographs give another gaze a place within the broader account, preserving evidence she cannot entirely explain. All the while, they are caught up in moments of inconspicuous portent: a mosquito crushed on a pillow; a ladybug occupying a wall. A plume hangs in the sky in the wake of Etna’s wrath, the residue of a thought too large for the earth to contain.

Staying in the apartment of the mother’s lover, a pianist and collector of Greek and Roman classics, they begin reading through the works from which the novel’s section titles are taken. The warrior mythos of the Odyssey brings its troubled promise of return, while the destruction of the Aeneid presses loss into the service of a future homeland. Between these monumental arrangements, the unrest of Trojan Women exposes the lives left beneath heroic accomplishment. The myths hover as a constant pool beneath the action, into which the characters may dip a hand or a foot and emerge with something substantial to hold in the present moment. Reading becomes one of their daily negotiations, with the daughter’s presence changing what can be asked of an ancient text. An epic opens differently when a child is there to question the account it gives of survival.

One day, mother and daughter attend a performance of Trojan Women, with incidental music by Greek composer Eleni Karaindrou. Brief as it is, the sequence feels strangely intimate and private, reducing the novel to a single kernel of curiosity from which it seems to sprout all over again. Euripides’ tragedy, first performed in 415 BCE, attends to the captive women after Troy’s destruction, granting the aftermath of conquest its devastating duration. The scene in Luiselli’s novel is also the scene of an earthquake, shaking experience to its foundations and drawing the act of witnessing into the instability of the ground beneath it. What the spectators encounter onstage passes into their bodies.

In my earlier review of Karaindrou’s Trojan Women, I heard its choral odes as vertebrae of story and music and traced the way its related themes changed their instrumental clothing from one visage to another. Returning to those impressions through Luiselli, I find a new resonance in that fluidity. The family’s stories also acquire different bodies as they pass between women, each voice altering the weight of what it carries. Karaindrou’s chorus gathers suffering into a shared utterance, opening a space beyond the solitary narrator’s reach. Within the novel, that possibility matters acutely: the mother must find a form that can hold her anguish without requiring her daughter to become its instrument. Music lends this difficulty a tangible melodic beauty, allowing what cannot yet be articulated to enter the room.

When the pianist returns to his apartment and works his way into their lives, he creates another ripple in that water. His words also cut theirs short, however, introducing a disruption that cannot hold its own in their orbit. The room’s borrowed hospitality begins to reveal its conditions. Read alongside the narrator’s question about fiction and real estate, this disturbance makes possession painfully immediate, entangling the right to speak with the right to inhabit. As mother and daughter plan their escape, things turn inward and outward simultaneously. Their departure gives their relation room to continue, even as it requires them to leave the shelter where it has been taking shape. The road carries them toward family history while allowing the daughter’s questions to travel beyond the acoustics of someone else’s home.

The narrator wants to “write a reverse catastrophe: from the end of the world to the beginning of it; from the loss of memory to the first image of the world imprinted on a big brown eye.” As details of her lineage emerge, whether through an archaeological discovery or a shipwreck, we find places in which to fit our own. Their road trip begins returning a piece of genetic history to its origins, and the geography without becomes less important than the border crossings within. Yet the first image belongs to an eye the mother cannot see through. When the daughter picks up the proverbial pen and finishes the story, the direction of inheritance changes. Beginnings and endings take another shape through the people to whom we pass slivers of ourselves, our identities blurring in the watering eyes of humanity writ large. The mother’s longing for an origin must make room for someone else’s beginning.

The book ends with postcards and photographs, its archival images standing beside the daughter’s Polaroids. These materials extend the transfer of narrative authority into physical margins. The older photograph carries the burden of having outlived its occasion; the instant image is already separating from the moment that produced it. Neither supplies the whole life we might ask it to recover. Their incompleteness asks us to attend to the distance between evidence and invention, looking closely without converting every surface into an explanation. The daughter’s images preserve the freedom of an attention that has wandered beyond the mother’s prose. At the edge of the frame, something remains in motion, declining the stillness we have mistaken for understanding.

There is also a sonic parallel to the novel in the form of recordings made on site in Sicily and the Aeolian Islands by Charles de Montebello and Ricardo Giraldo. Alongside raw field recordings, 12 sound mixes form “constellations” between locations. A timeline follows the novel’s structure, while a separate soundscape offers its sonic environment without narration. The daughter’s postcards can be read and heard; photographs accompany videos. Whether immersing oneself underwater at Basiluzzo or in the evening ambience of Caltagirone, there is much to be felt and heard. The more one explores these places, the more they reveal the people who live and work there, whose lives intersect ephemerally to become part of the landscapes they inhabit. This is palpable in Catania’s fish market, but even in the absence of flesh, humanity can be felt in the winds of Scopello and the eruptions of Mount Etna. The assembled portrait lets the setting exceed its description, occupying the ear with pressures that have no obligation to become a plot.

That possibility returns us to the narrator’s reverse catastrophe, now turned toward a future she cannot arrange. Perhaps the daughter will one day listen to these waters and think of no one in her family. A sound her mother associated with loss may enter her life under an entirely different sign. The thought hurts precisely where love has mistaken remembrance for its only means of moving on. Beneath the sea, an unheard movement passes through stone; above it, a child is growing into the right to forget. The strands woven into the tapestry of her becoming may loosen without destroying it. An inheritance might endure most fully at the moment it ceases to point toward the person who gave it. The hand opens, allowing something loved to escape the duty of returning.

Christina Rauh Fishburne: The Bridge That Would Not Burn – A Pardonsburg Novella (Book Review)

| Tyran Grillo

In the Washington, DC, of 1880, the past has rented a room upstairs. It descends into the parlor bearing the countenance of a former Confederate soldier, and Charlotte Worthington must decide how much of its troubled eloquence she will admit into her life. Christina Rauh Fishburne’s The Bridge That Would Not Burn makes historical fiction an intimate predicament: preservation acquires a voice, then addresses a woman whose own words rarely survive her hearth. Between them, the distance separating an event from its aftermath begins to buckle. For readers today, accustomed to encountering the past as an argument already furnished with conclusions, such proximity offers a useful discomposure. We enter a room where the consequences are still taking shape. First issued in installments and now fully illustrated, this novella occupies a passage between A Pardonsburg Songbook (Sabr Tooth Tiger Press, 2026) and the as-yet-unpublished Ballad, carrying its unfinished human reckonings into a larger imaginative country.

Charlotte is someone who consigns her words to flames, pressing ink into page but never capitulating to the allure of permanence. There is a curious sovereignty in this practice. Her thoughts may exist without becoming evidence against her, and the fire grants her a privacy that the social world would scarcely know how to honor. She tolerates the hobnobbery of that world only by the skin of her teeth, enduring it for the company of her sole friend. Beneath that impatience resides the difficulty of possessing an inward life while being perpetually available for outward appraisal. Charlotte represents a consciousness trying to reserve some portion of itself from the arrangements made on its behalf. At a magic show, she is taken into new directions of self-inquiry by a diversion beyond the stage: Lieutenant Thomas Atchison, an associate of her father and the lodger upstairs, whose enigmatic presence has landed within orbit more often than she would wish. The performance lends an apt frame to an acquaintance in which attention itself becomes a questionable art.

Not long after, she encounters him reading a book in her home’s parlor, where their conversation assumes the potentially fatal tapdance of predator and prey feeling each other out. Charlotte is both intrigued and severely put off by his countenance. Her misgivings have a bodily intelligence; curiosity, meanwhile, advances with the mortifying confidence of an uninvited guest who already knows where the silver is kept. As she talks to him more, those machinations of interest begin to loosen their hold. Fishburne attends to this yielding without rendering Charlotte’s resistance foolish. The very effort of interpreting Atchison brings her into closer acquaintance with her own desires, whose obscurity may be as vexing as his. Atchison’s speech and mannerisms are just as tactile as Charlotte’s, bringing vivid color to the novella’s already-rich atmosphere. Their exchanges give thought a surface upon which it can bruise.

Little by little, Atchison picks up shards of his traumatic war experiences, turns them in his mind’s hands, and reveals them to Charlotte. His unnamed illness lends further uncertainty to a presence whose legendary past has already preceded him into the room. Yet legend is a poor vessel for the broken particularity of memory. The man Charlotte privately calls the Mysterious Irritant carries experiences that resist the finish of a well-told anecdote, and his revelations disturb the composure with which the household might otherwise accommodate him. His Confederate past gives this intimacy an uneasy historical weight. Sympathy encounters a moral stumbling block here: suffering may invite tenderness while leaving the cause in whose service it was endured answerable to judgment. Atchison can thus be read as an embodiment of history’s troublesome persistence within private affection. Through him, the old war reaches into Charlotte’s present, asking for a response she cannot borrow from the etiquette of the parlor.

Some parts of her hold on to indifference, while others fling themselves into surrender. At one point, we are told, “She tried to read his face, but she never did have an eye or ear for other languages.” The remark catches the strangeness of an intimacy conducted in a tongue neither participant can confidently translate. As Charlotte finds herself knee-deeper in the muck of social propriety, especially during a pivotal Christmas party, the sheer, overwhelming familiarity of her life grows into a massive entity of ennui that threatens to consume her. One imagines its enormous body folded impossibly into the room, feeding upon every gesture that has been performed before. When she shares a dance with Atchison, that life takes on a newness she had previously caught only in glimpses. The movement affords her a momentary experience of possibility, though the question of what that possibility will cost remains suspended between them.

With multiple potential suitors in view, Charlotte has a war of her own to wage across the battlefield of her stubborn heart. Her eventual verbal showdown with Atchison takes on a Bennet-Darcy-esque tit for tat, although the pleasure of their antagonism rests upon more than verbal agility. Each risks allowing the other’s interpretation to become authoritative. Charlotte’s tenacity protects her against that surrender even as it complicates her pursuit of understanding. Emotions continue to stew within as divisions take shape without, until a series of dramatic events, the rollercoaster of which I will leave for the reader to ride, changes the game significantly for both parties and beyond. The widening consequences prevent their courtship, if courtship it is, from becoming a sealed chamber whose occupants can mistake their feelings for the whole world.

The chimney sweep girl accused of stealing from the Worthington home is especially consequential to that widening. Her precarious place beside Charlotte’s more sheltered uncertainty brings questions of credibility into the same house as questions of desire. Who receives the leisure of being furtive? Whose obscurity becomes grounds for accusation? Such disparities lend the historical setting a pressure that readers today can readily recognize, particularly when reputation is allowed to stand in for knowledge. As Charlotte seeks to untangle secrets in the shadows of the world she thought she knew, she begins to realize her place in it. Troubles gather there with arms coiled and ready to strike, serpents inhabiting the dark recesses of an accustomed dwelling. The vagaries of human folly, in some of its most wicked and deceptive forms, leave us wondering what might have been. That speculation also exposes how much of anyone’s life depends upon the stories others have the power to make credible.

Fishburne’s gift for language seems almost to have arrived from another time. Her words follow the discipline of a fine recipe, balancing umami and proper mouthfeel with the utmost attention to the reader’s palate. The pleasure has substance: the texture of a phrase can make an inward hesitation perceptible before even its speaker has understood it. Historical fiction acquires its relevance through just such acts of attention, restoring uncertainty to lives that hindsight is forever threatening to simplify. Charlotte’s burning pages offer a final, stranger consideration. We ask the past to yield its testimony, yet she claims the right to withdraw hers; her little furnace unsettles our appetite for possession. Perhaps a bridge that would not burn must bear something beyond the weight of remembrance. It might carry the permission to cease repeating what has been inherited, leading toward a country whose absence from every map is its first promise: a future in which our descendants owe us nothing.

Steve Reich: Recordings on ECM (ECM New Series 2890)

| Tyran Grillo

In Steve Reich’s music, repetition is a method of survival. A phrase returns carrying the microscopic damage of having been heard, while attention acquires an unfamiliar capacity for desire. Recordings on ECM brings that reciprocal transformation back to vinyl, gathering the three albums ECM released between 1978 and 1982. Revisiting the collection issued on CD in 2016, this three-LP edition arrives on October 2, 2026, one day shy of the composer’s 90th birthday. Sourced from the original analogue master tapes, the records reproduce their original sleeves; archival photographs accompany Paul Griffiths’s liner notes. Inside the music, strict procedures open improbable apertures, and counting becomes a form of surrender.

The history behind these recordings retains its own dissonance. Reich had developed an unmistakable musical language before the recording industry found a durable place for it. Manfred Eicher brought Music for 18 Musicians, recorded for Deutsche Grammophon but left unreleased, into circulation through ECM in 1978. His intervention gave a public address to an imagination exceeding the available categories. Across the collection, gestures migrate between works, acquiring unfamiliar consequences in changed surroundings. What initially registers as an insistent surface gradually admits depth, until the ear discovers a staircase folded into a single step.

Music for 18 Musicians establishes this permeability with extraordinary clarity. Its opening cycle of eleven chords provides the harmonic material that subsequent sections expand, and the eventual return closes an immense parenthesis. Pianos and mallet instruments sustain a continuous pulse while voices and winds measure phrases through the limits of breath. The mechanical subdivision of time meets the lung’s finite generosity, allowing rigor to develop a vulnerable interior. Wordless singing moves through the instrumental fabric with translucent tenderness; clarinets continue its contours until the boundary between body and instrument becomes difficult to locate. The ensemble’s collective alertness supplies much of the recording’s emotional force. A shifting accent redirects a passage without disturbing its pulse, while the vibraphone’s cues turn communication into audible structure. Individual timbres retain their grain within a beautifully concentrated field. During the work’s nearly hour-long span, our sense of succession loosens. The clock has entered its own reflection and found soil there to grow roots.

The next album changes the proportions of this experience. Music for a Large Ensemble distributes its activity across a broader instrumental field, maintaining remarkable buoyancy amid the layered motion. Strings contribute a vibrating tension; trumpet chords open luminous pockets above the pulse. The vibraphone’s resonance gives the surrounding activity a polished edge without draining its tactile life. Apparent abundance rests on meticulous relationships, allowing the smallest adjustment to alter the lung capacity of the whole. Every entrance renews the agreement holding this intricate structure together, making consistency an active expression of shared musical purpose.

Violin Phase concentrates the inquiry into a more abrasive intimacy. Its repeated figure slips out of alignment with its doubles, generating patterns through the resulting weave. Shem Guibbory’s bow retains a palpable friction, giving the process an embodied urgency. Reiteration rubs the phrase against itself until hidden contours become audible; an interval opens its mouth, and another melody steps through. Where attention lands determines the shape of the encounter. Octet introduces a delicacy of articulation that feels newly spacious. The flute illuminates the texture from within, while clarinet lines give its motion a supple underside. Its abrupt ending leaves the ear suspended, still furnishing a room from which the walls have vanished.

With Tehillim, the voice assumes the authority of language. Reich’s engagement with his Jewish heritage places Hebrew psalm texts at the composition’s center, allowing their rhythms to determine melodic movement. Meaning inhabits the pulse as an ancestral presence. The opening interplay of singing and percussion has a searching energy, and the unfolding canons give that energy increasingly intricate dimensions. Through the work’s four parts, exhilaration gathers a contemplative gravity; the slower third part suspends the forward impulse without extinguishing its inner motion. The performance gives each carefully shaped phrase an edge of discovery. In the closing hallelujahs, praise becomes bodily expenditure, a word passing through the throat until its syllables seem capable of bearing the singer aloft.

Returning to these performances, I continue to hear excess within the supposedly minimal. Reich makes limited materials sustain an astonishing density of experience, and his musicians give that density a human scale. This vinyl edition offers a renewed occasion to inhabit their concentration. Even the necessary interruptions sharpen awareness of what persists after the sound stops. The mind follows a process until following becomes participation; the body answers before interpretation has finished assembling its credentials. Eventually, a pulse reaches some unlit interior of the listener and finds that it has been expected. Within the groove, the future rehearses its first breath.