Month: June 2010

Walter Fähndrich: Viola (ECM New Series 1412)

| Tyran Grillo

Walter Fähndrich
Viola

Walter Fähndrich viola
Recorded November 1989, Kirche Blumenstein, Switzerland
Engineer: Peter Laenger
Produced by Manfred Eicher

The name of Walter Fähndrich is not likely to provoke many nods of recognition. This is unfortunate, given that the Swiss composer and violist has been a fervent artist for nearly four decades. A teacher of improvisation and designer of sound installations, Fähndrich seems to prefer the indeterminacy of real-time human interaction over recordable media and gives us this rare glimpse into his open reach. The album consists of four pieces in five tracks, each simply demarcated in Roman numerals. A swaying rhythm dominates a beautiful string of overtones in “IV.” “II” distinguishes itself by its daunting 24-minute length and rapid arpeggios that work their way into a glorious spiral. Occasional passages played sul tasto (i.e., over the fingerboard) are particularly striking for their almost bell-like quality. The overall effect is nothing short of meditative. Fähndrich scrapes at the strings in “III” to produce a veritable symphony of avian peeps and insectile chirps in the album’s most organic diversion. “VI” a call-and-response of harmonics and fuller notes. To end, Fähndrich reprises “IV” in a longer take. Yet rather than closing a circle, it seems to open itself to the enchanting uncertainties of indeterminacy.

One could say that Fähndrich has done here for the viola what Paul Giger has done for the violin, if in a more “secular” vein. Whereas Giger’s cogitations soar, those of Fähndrich crawl into subterranean caverns where a neglected beauty echoes unseen. Like Giger, he makes use of extended techniques, albeit far more minimally. His bowing is precisely controlled and full of infectious energy. This was never an easy album to come by in the States, and I only got my copy during a sojourn to Vienna in the winter of 2002. Thankfully, advances in online ordering have solved that problem, which means that an entirely new generation can explore these uniquely pensive sounds.

<< John Abercrombie: Animato (ECM 1411)
>> Edward Vesala: Ode To The Death Of Jazz (ECM 1413)

Karlheinz Stockhausen: MICHAELs REISE (ECM New Series 1406)

| Tyran Grillo

Karlheinz Stockhausen
MICHAELs REISE

Markus Stockhausen trumpet
Suzanne Stephens bassett-horn
Ian Stuart clarinet
Lesley Schatzberger clarinet, bassett-horn
Michael Svoboda trombone, baritone horn
Kathinka Pasveer alto flute
Andreas Boettger percussion
Isao Nakamura percussion
Michael Obst synthesizer
Simon Stockhausen synthesizer
Karlheinz Stockhausen sound projection
Recorded December 1989, Nedeltschev Studio, Cologne
Engineer: Jan Erik Kongshaug

Karlheinz Stockhausen’s MICHAELs REISE (Michael’s Journey) makes up the second act of Donnerstag aus Licht (Thursday from Light), the first opera in the German composer’s 29-hour Licht cycle, and follows the archangel Michael as he treks across this mortal coil. In this 1984 version for soloists we are treated to a more reductive, though no less effective, take on what was originally a larger orchestral affair. A percolating opening statement from a varied brass section introduces the potency of Stockhausen’s highly mathematical approach. From this cacophonous opening we get a string of drones, pulled like taffy until it slowly sags into the yawning mouth of oblivion. A muted trumpet raises its hand to be recognized, breaking the surrounding silence with affirmation. We find ourselves in a street where the signs have been forgotten, a place where language no longer applies, and only the numerically inclined may press on—and indeed, at key points the musicians offer whispered numbers to the ether. There is anger in the air, but its source is long extinguished; smoke where there was never a fire. The journey seems infinite but is over in the blink of an eye. Cobblestone streets overlap with skyscrapers and uninhabited tundras; children fade into wolves, village elders, and back into children; music becomes one with speech and time. And throughout this melding of dimensions, every instrument holds on to its equation as if it were a secret to be coveted.

A perusal of the instrumentation is enough to give one a sense of the tonal colors to be expected, and I can only hope the above describes the feeling of the recording more than its sound. Stockhausen, sadly lost to the world in 2007, has been accused of being many things: everything from brilliant (“One of the most important composers of the twentieth century”) to overly ambitious (“A 29-hour opera cycle?!”) to utterly self-indulgent (see, for example, critical reactions to his Helicopter Quartet). For me, his risks were always supported by a steady dedication to his craft, turning seemingly gimmicky conceptual arrangements into acts of wonder. True to his aleatoric roots, Stockhausen never failed to pursue a line of thought to its most logical conclusion. His son Markus, who would go on to create a handful of inventive albums for ECM, is cosmic here on the trumpet. Then again, as the center of such an astrologically oriented piece, one would almost have to be. The same goes for his “teammates,” each of whom exhibits an intimate understanding of the composer’s great vision. Anyone unsure of how to approach Stockhausen’s music from the outside in may wish to start here, from the inside out.

<< ECM New Series Anthology (ECM 1405 NS)
>> Shankar: Pancha Nadai Pallavi (ECM 1407)

Meredith Monk: Book of Days (ECM New Series 1399)

| Tyran Grillo

Meredith Monk
Book of Days

Robert Een voice, cello
Ching Gonzalez voice
Andrea Goodman voice
Wayne Hankin voice, großer Bock, hurdy-gurdy, bass recorder
Naaz Hosseini voice, violin
Meredith Monk voice, keyboard
Nicky Paraiso voice
Nurit Tilles piano, keyboard, hammered dulcimer
Johanna Arnold voice
Joan Barber voice
John Eppler voice
Toby Newman voice
Timothy Sawyer voice
Recorded June 1989 at Clinton Studios, New York
Engineer: James Farber
Produced by Manfred Eicher

“I work in between the cracks, where the voice starts dancing, where the body starts singing, where theater becomes cinema.”
–Meredith Monk

Meredith Monk is generally described as an avant-garde artist of many talents. Of her many talents there is no question, but what exactly makes her “avant-garde”? The Random House Dictionary defines the term as meaning “of or pertaining to the experimental treatment of artistic, musical, or literary material.” This raises another question: What does it mean to be experimental? The same dictionary gives us: “founded on…an act or operation for the purpose of discovering something unknown or of testing a principle.” At the risk of reading too much into semantics, I would venture to say that Monk is anything but avant-garde, for she is interested neither in discovering the unknown nor in proving suppositions. Rather, she reveals that which has been obscured by, as well as changed by, history. She interrogates the subjective over the empirical and its effect on the flow of intercontinental relations. Thus do we get Book of Days (1988), a marriage of music and moving images that covers such broad yet related topics as nuclear holocaust, AIDS, eschatological wonder and trepidation, and the cyclical nature of time. The idea for Book of Days came to Monk one afternoon in the summer of 1984, when she was overcome by a black-and-white vision of a young Jewish girl in a medieval street. This same figure would become the locus for much of the film’s traumatic crossfire, amid which the girl has visions of her own, only for her they are of a grave and violent future. She soon encounters a madwoman (played by Monk herself) and discovers in her that one kindred spirit in a world headed for annihilation.

The film’s soundtrack was later reworked into the studio version recorded here and scored for 12 voices, synthesizer, cello, bagpipe, hurdy-gurdy, piano, and hammered dulcimer. The music of Book of Days also wavers between past and future, rendering the present all but graspable. These temporal concepts are accordingly reflected in the arrangements of each itinerant section. A triptych of monodies (“Early Morning Melody,” “Afternoon Melodies,” and “Eva’s Song”) mark the passage of the sun in the sky, the contrast of dark and light. This diurnal atmosphere is further underscored with the hurdy-gurdy-infused “Dusk” and the smooth braid of vocal beauty that is “Evening.” This chronology culminates with the delicate “Dream,” an all-too-brief reprieve from the threat of Armageddon, before opening into “Dawn.” The five scattered pieces that make up “Travellers” constitute time as diaspora, each its own lilting pseudo-canon of both hummed and open-mouthed syllables. The fourth section, subtitled “Churchyard Entertainment,” fleshes out the thematic core of the entire work in its most fully realized form. In a similar vein, “Fields/Clouds” unfurls an ethereal carpet of synthesized organ for a procession of contrapuntal voices, with Monk soaring above all like a predatory bird riding a thermal. Time’s fragility is expressed in “Plague,” a rhythmic chant of whispers, hisses, tisks, and heavy breathing: the universe in a pair of lungs. Encompassing all of this is “Madwoman’s Vision,” a masterpiece of composition and performance that flits nimbly from creaking aphasia to elegiac commentary. The album fades to black with “Cave Song,” alluding perhaps to Plato’s shadows and the illusory nature of our attachments.

The markedly instrumental approach to the human voice embodied by this ensemble lends itself beautifully to the subject matter at hand. In choosing to eschew words entirely, Monk peers more deeply into the oracular interior of her music. Relying on nascent phonemes such as “na” and “la” in lieu of recognizable vocabularies, she complicates the linearity of her effected nostalgia. Book of Days is all the more haunting for reducing that nostalgia to a liquid state and scooping up as much of it as possible before it seeps out of sight through those very cracks where her music is born.

<< Charles Lloyd: Fish Out Of Water (ECM 1398)
>> Keith Jarrett: Paris Concert (ECM 1401)

Bach: Goldberg Variations – Jarrett (ECM New Series 1395)

| Tyran Grillo

Johann Sebastian Bach
Goldberg Variations

Keith Jarrett harpsichord
Recorded January 1989, Yatsugatake Kōgen Ongakudō, Nagano, Japan
Engineer: Peter Laenger
Produced by Manfred Eicher
Harpsichord (1988) by Tatsuo Takahashi
(Double manual Italian/German style)

Although the original 1741 title page of the Goldberg Variations reads, “Composed for connoisseurs, for the refreshment of their spirits, by Johann Sebastian Bach,” one need hardly be a connoisseur of any kind in order to feel one’s spirits refreshed by this superb collection, the informal conclusion to the composer’s so-called Klavierübung, or “keyboard exercises,” which also includes the Opus 1 partitas. For his own rendition of the Goldberg, pianist Keith Jarrett has made an admirable decision in opting for the harpsichord, just as he did with his ECM recording of Book II of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier. Unlike the many piano recordings of these significant miniatures, all of which of course have their own merits, the harpsichord lends a certain quality of immediacy and uncompromised revelation to Bach’s music that is otherwise impossible to elicit. The opening Aria glows with the benefit of experience, a long look back at a full musical life that continues to burst forth with ever-inventive ideas, and sets the stage for the thirty variations to follow. The first of these immediately injects energy into the theme with effervescent syncopation. The fifth variation is a lively miniature in which the right hand remains centered at the keyboard as the left leaps back and forth across it. The seventh is a lively gigue in the French style, and the eighth mesmerizes with its stepwise chromatic flair and little waterfalls of thirty-second notes that close each section. The fugal tenth circles like a merry-go-round of trills and regular punctuations. For the thirteenth variation, a quaint sarabande, Jarrett makes clever use of the buff stop in the left hand, drawing out the piece’s inner gentility all the more. With its descending trills and gorgeous contrapuntal resolutions, the fourteenth overflows with an electrifying energy. The grandiose sixteenth is like a series of temples that keep getting torn down before they can be completed, but which remain standing just long enough to etch the firmament with their majesty, while the twentieth blossoms in a sweeping toccata of virtuosic proportions. A ring of arabesques lays the foundation for the twenty-sixth, which gives a harder pull on the collection’s red thread. The variations end with a recapitulation of the opening Aria, bringing the music full circle in its infinite wisdom.

Jarrett’s fingers are as committed as always, navigating the music put before them with practiced dexterity. The recording is somewhere between internal and external, capturing the nuances of its Japanese-built harpsichord with all the respect they deserve. Ultimately, the Goldberg Variations are more about affect than effect—which is to say they find permanence in their expressivity rather than in their emotional consequences—and the Jarrett/ECM partnership has produced yet another fine recording of music that should never go out of style.

<< AM 4: …and she answered: (ECM 1394)
>> Misha Alperin/Arkady Shilkloper: Wave Of Sorrow (ECM 1396)

Thomas Demenga plays Bach/Carter (ECM New Series 1391)

| Tyran Grillo

Thomas Demenga
plays works of J. S. Bach and Elliott Carter

Thomas Demenga cello
Hansheinz Schneeberger violin
Philippe Racine flute
Ernesto Molinari clarinet
Paul Cleemann piano
Gerhard Huber percussion
Jürg Wyttenbach conductor
Recorded October 1988 and April 1989, Zürich
Engineer: Peter Laenger
Produced by Manfred Eicher

In this, the first of Thomas Demenga’s Bach cycle for ECM, the ever-adventurous cellist pairs one suite of the Baroque master with the works of a master of a rather different sort: the American composer Elliott Carter.

We begin with Bach’s Suite Nr. 3 in C-Dur für Violoncello solo, BWV 1009, a crowning jewel in solo instrumental literature. The Prelude glows with an improvisatory spirit, which Demenga captures with his usual tasteful flair. The Allemande dances lithely through a hall of contrapuntal bliss, while the Courante skips and slides like an exuberant child without a care in the world, leading us into a lilting Sarabande. The double Bourée is one of the most beloved moments in the Bach suites and blurs here with vivacious speed. The closing Gigue weaves is mercurial song with expert care, leaving us fully prepared for the imminent journey through the world of Carter.

Esprit rude, Esprit doux (1983) for flute and clarinet is a playful romp in distorted fields, where unfinished phrases grow in place of flowers and the wind blows only erratically. Enchanted Preludes (1988) for flute and cello trills and plucks its unsteady way through a wide open sea. Riconoscenza per Goffredo Petrassi (1984) for solo violin, now part of the Four Lauds, is as robust and neoclassical as the music of the Italian composer to whom it is dedicated. But the real treat here is the 1983 Triple Duo, a more formidable and complex work than the rest combined, for combine them it does, and then some. Scored for three duos—comprised of flute/clarinet, piano/percussion, and violin/cello—this piece is classic Carter. Its wily acrobatics twist and twirl with the grace of an intoxicated gymnast. The effect is like the striations of earth visible in an archaeological dig: what appears to be a random zigzag of tones and materials takes on a staggering unity in the larger context of time. One motif is quickly usurped by another, even as a third has already come and gone. This game of hide-and-seek continues for twenty minutes, ending as uncertainly as it began. As with much of Carter’s prolific output, we are left with more questions than answers, yet we never feel cheated, given as we are a veritable stockpile of musical information to sift through to our great delight.

The recording here is meticulous as always. The Bach is awash with warm reverb and sounds spectacular, while the Carter invites the listener with a more pressing immediacy. One can speak the world of Bach, but Carter’s music is surely not to be overlooked. Its fluidity and inextinguishable verve always make for a refreshing experience. Like the most intuitive sketches, it just manages to hold its shape in a jumble of possibilities. Which brings us back to Bach. “What’s the connection?” we might ask. Rather than attempt a feeble answer, I leave you with the words of Heinz Holliger, whose open letter says it far better than I ever could:

Although BA and CA coexist so peacefully beside each other in the alphabet, I am afraid that when the first jagged flashes of flute and clarinet rend the serene C major skies of Bach’s Gigue, your hand will rush to switch off the record player. I hope my plea does not come too late to stop this from happening. It would be such a shame if one fateful turn of the knob were to close off the new and fascinating sound-world just opened to you by those first flashes. Lie back and relax, listen, look, feel and remember the future; try to foresee the past. Let Zeus throw down from the new Olympus those shattering bolts of sound. Let the purifying spiritual storm (not just Esprit rude, Esprit doux) rage around you. You will be richly rewarded.

<< Abercrombie/Johnson/Erskine: s/t (ECM 1390)
>> Keith Jarrett Trio: Changeless (ECM 1392)

Stephen Hartke: Tituli / Cathedral in the Thrashing Rain (ECM New Series 1861)

| Tyran Grillo

 

Stephen Hartke
Tituli/Cathedral in the Thrashing Rain

The Hilliard Ensemble
David James countertenor
Rogers Covey-Crump tenor
Steven Harrold tenor
Andreas Hirtreiter tenor
Gordon Jones baritone
Michelle Makarski violin
Lynn Vartan marimba, cymbals, shaker, cup bells, wood block
Javier Diaz marimba, cymbals, shaker, cup bells, wood block
Donald Crockett conductor
Recorded February 2003 at Mechanics Hall, Worecester, Massachusetts

Cease now, my mother, to torment yourself
in vain sobs of wretchedness all the day,
for such grief has not befallen you alone:
the same has befallen mighty kings as well.

From the First Punic War in Tituli (1999) to the dawn of World War I in Cathedral in the Thrashing Rain (2000), the music of American composer Stephen Hartke is firmly rooted in the intersection between the spatial and the temporal. It is about the vicarious presence of bygone eras engendered by their ruins; it is language as architecture, and architecture as history.

The Old Latin and Etruscan fragments of Tituli (scored for five solo male voices, violin, and two percussionists) were inscribed on pre-Imperial Roman artifacts: oracular and sacred law texts, cryptic offerings, and even a Palermo shop sign pass the Hilliards’ lips in a deft melodic oratory. In the opening “Lapis Niger,” every word rolls over the next with the perpetuity of an incoming tide. “Columna rostrata,” an account of Rome’s first major victory in Carthage, is the most dramatic section and rises like its titular structure into an audible testament of a fledgling empire. The tenderest moments are to be found in “Elogium parvuli,” an epitaph written for a six-year-old boy named Optatus, and for whom the music works its way darkly through every powerful sentiment in a beautiful twelve-minute lustration. The music of Tituli traces the contours of every word with archeological care. Violin and percussion make careful appearances, never intruding upon the texts at hand, and leave their deepest traces behind in the final two sections.

Cathedral in the Thrashing Rain for countertenor, two tenors, and baritone takes its direct inspiration from a poem by Japanese poet and sculptor Takamura Kōtarō (1883-1956), and appears here in a striking English translation (with some duplicate lines in Japanese) by the inimitable Hiroaki Sato. When I saw the Hilliard Ensemble live in 2004, they closed with this piece, leaving the audience spellbound. The concert began with a motet by Pérotin, which was written to be sung inside Notre-Dame, whereas here the sentiments are of a secular artist seeking shelter from the elements in the cathedral’s looming magnificence. Takamura cannot help but think of his homeland: “Storms are like this in my country, Japan, too,” he muses. “Only, we don’t see you soaring.” The chromatic flavor of Hartke’s setting surprises at every turn, treating each stanza as its own compositional bead on a long poetic necklace.

I have been a great admirer of Hartke since I first heard Michelle Makarski and Ronald Copes’s spirited rendition of the blues-inspired Oh Them Rats Is Mean in My Kitchen on New World Records. His acute and colorful music is resilient like a tightly knit sweater and just as comfortable to try on for size. His choral music represents a big development in a mostly instrumental oeuvre and these landmark performances are so precise and well recorded that one can almost smell the patina of age they wear. The Hilliards sing with unbridled conviction and even do a competent job with their Japanese enunciation, while the instrumentalists play with a subdued electricity all their own. This being ECM’s first Super Audio CD (SACD) recording, it practically begs to be listened to on the right equipment. Either way, its energy comes through just the same, taming our desire for the old and the new in one go.

Heinz Reber: MNAOMAI, MNOMAI (ECM New Series 1378)

| Tyran Grillo

Heinz Reber
MNAOMAI, MNOMAI

Thomas Demenga cello, viola
Terje Rypdal guitar
Jon Christensen drums
Tschin Zhang vocal
Ellen Horn vocal
Recorded October 1990, Rainbow Studio, Oslo
Engineer: Jan Erik Kongshaug
Produced by Manfred Eicher

The Swiss composer Heinz Reber (1952-2007) cut a fascinating figure in the world of sound. He began his career as a music therapist for psychiatric patients before turning to more public forms of audible expression. Reber would even combine the two in a 1975 play for Swiss radio, the cast of which was culled from those same patients. Such ruptures of identity would characterize his output to come. For the spiraling exegesis that is Mnaomai, Mnomai, Reber assembled a handful of equally committed (no pun intended) instrumentalists and vocalists for an intriguing mélange of sound and spoken word. The word mnaomai (pronounced “mnah’-om-ahee”) appears in the New Testament and means “to bear in mind” in Greek. Reber lifted his title from Jean-François Lyotard’s Libidinal Economy. Although the source texts are interesting in and of themselves—ranging from Beckett to Chinese protest poetry written by Tschin Zhang, one of the album’s vocal performers—they constitute a set of linguistic entities whose orthographic shapes are as equally important as their verbal ones. Thomas Demenga’s viola seems to struggle through its opening while a low groan stretches in the background. Demenga scrounges for phonetic footholds as Zhang’s voice rings out like a light to show the way. Jon Christensen and Terje Rypdal each take their own direct approach, even while Demenga continues to wrestle with his communicative role. Zhang’s voice soars through a field of strings with the surety of a homing pigeon, while that of Ellen Horn creeps in from above, percolating through Zhang’s as if to strip these languages of their semantic egos. Sometimes the voices are present, other times they are distant, but they never stray from their message. Part III consists of a repeated figure on viola, as if Demenga’s instrument has finally found a solid phrase and is reveling in its repetition. This is followed by a final spurt of poetic energy that fizzles out into a delicate cello strum.

In closing, I should like to address a concern I have over a particular way in which this piece has been interpreted. Mnaomai, Mnomai contains a fair amount of spoken Mandarin, and for those of us who don’t speak the language it’s all too easy to over-romanticize Chinese for its rhythms and other idiosyncrasies. This seemingly impenetrable barrier is further strengthened by the addition of Horn’s quieter recitations, of which Steve Lake writes: “When bringing Ellen Horn’s voice into the ensemble, Tschin Zhang’s poem was converted into Norwegian, another ‘alien’ tongue, to keep the text as a pure play of sounds.” But “pure” to whom? Surely, heritage speakers of either language will have a difficult time treating the text as a meaningless, if enchanting, jumble of phonemes. Rather, they will hear a skillful recitation of a heartfelt poem written in a time of great political upheaval. Are they somehow missing the point? I doubt it. In spite of Reber’s supposed interest in the “Far East,” I don’t feel as if he is using the world’s most populously spoken language just for the sound of it. Otherwise, what would be the purpose of using words at all? Chinese is itself no more “beautiful” or “musical” than any other language, and any assertions to the contrary are simply a matter of opinion. In the end, Reber cannot be said to be tapping in to some mystical linguistic core, but rather creating a new and personal juxtaposition of music and speech as a means of teasing out the narrative potential in both. Neither can we ignore that the musicians, and Demenga in particular, are also “speaking” through a multi-instrumental conversation. Still, I think Lake is getting at the heart of this record: namely, that language’s fundamentally arbitrary vocabularies are like composed matter—static and silent until they are enlivened by human rendering. It all comes down to the transparency of the utterance. This is music interested not in its legacy, but in its disintegration, for as the title reminds us, we do well to “bear in mind” that meaning exists only insofar as it holds our interest.

<< Werner Bärtschi: Mozart/Scelsi/Pärt/Busoni/Bärtschi (ECM 1377 NS)
>> Keith Jarrett: Dark Intervals (ECM 1379)

Harald Bergmann: Scardanelli (ECM New Series 1761)

| Tyran Grillo

Harald Bergmann
Scardanelli

Harald Bergmann Buch und Regie
Walter Schmidinger Sprecher

Scardanelli André Wilms
Ernst Zimmer Udo Kroschwald
Lotte Zimmer Geno Lechner
Waiblinger Baki Davrak
Schwab Jürgen Lehmann
Räuber Rainer Sellien
Marie Nathusius Amalie Bizer
Wurm Raimund Groß
Die Maske John Chambers
Dr. Gmelin Günther Weinmann
Tischlergeselle Gottfried Pipping
Zeuge Schwab Heinz E. Hirscher
Zeuge Waiblinger Ernst Specht
Zeugin Lotte Zimmer Gertrud Fritz
Zeugin Marie Nathusius Elisabeth Scheib
Sammler Wolfgang Rin
Erzähler 1 Hans Treichler
Erzähler 2 Egon Schäfer
Gedichte gesprochen von Walter Schmidinger
Recorded 1997-1998

“Yes, the poems are mine, I wrote them, but this name is a fake. I’ve never called myself Hölderlin, but Scardanelli!”
–F. Hölderlin

German filmmaker Harald Bergmann was born in 1963 in the town of Celle in Lower Saxony, and studied film in Hamburg and Los Angeles. With the exception of his latest film, all of Bergmann’s major work has been dedicated to the life and words of Scardanelli, better known as Friedrich Hölderlin. After the more experimental Lyrische Suite/Das untergehende Vaterland (1992) and Hölderlin-Comics (1994), which chart the poet’s childhood and early adulthood, Bergmann turned to the later years with Scardanelli (2000) to complete his Hölderlin trilogy. This last film explores Hölderlin’s declining mental state under the care of carpenter Ernst Zimmer, and takes great care to reconstruct the latter half of his life solely from extant witness accounts. For 36 years Hölderlin was holed up in Zimmer’s tower in Tübingen overlooking the Neckar River, where he spent his days at piano and paper, producing on both a continual stream of verses, sounds, and images, and it is precisely this creative sustenance the film seeks to capture. Hence the production of this CD, which selectively documents the film’s spoken and non-diegetic soundtracks. Moments of private insanity intermingle with dramatic readings of poetry against a backdrop of music by Mozart, Bach, Schubert, and scorer Peter Schneider. The result is a self-styled “audio book” by which Bergmann pays homage to his eponymous muse. The German-only booklet and dialogue means this album will have a limited audience, and those who don’t speak the language may wish to turn to ECM’s fine recording of the Scardanelli-Zyklus by Heinz Holliger in order to gain a deeper insight into the influential effects of one of Germany’s greatest literary minds.

<< Enrico Rava: Easy Living (ECM 1760)
>> Anders Jormin: Xieyi (ECM 1762)

Tamia/Pierre Favre: de la nuit … le jour (ECM New Series 1364)

| Tyran Grillo

Tamia
Pierre Favre
de la nuit … le jour

Tamia voice
Pierre Favre percussion
Recorded October 1987, Rainbow Studio, Oslo
Engineer: Jan Erik Kongshaug
Produced by Manfred Eicher

Swiss percussionist Pierre Favre and vocalist Tamia combine forces here for their first ECM outing. Through a modest array of idiophones and objects both synthetic and organic, this uniquely synergistic duo makes music that is circumscribed yet wide in scope. Much of the album is cut from the same cloth. “Ballade,” “Yemanjá,” and “Maroua” all feature a thin gamelan-like drone that Tamia threads with a needle’s precision, sometimes in triplicate. Favre’s subtler elicitations bob like a wind chime under water and only occasionally break out into passages of rhythmic abandon. The title track is the profoundest statement this album has to offer. It undulates with an abstract mysticism through which a rare moment of unison is achieved to glorious effect. A bowed gong looms as Tamia’s voice flutters like a moth in darkness. And in this gloomy swell of introspection we find a clouded mirror that might reflect us were there any light to render us visible. “Mit Sang und Klang” mixes a similar concoction, climbing the scales to suspend its high notes from the very stars. “Wood Song” is the most evocative track with its orchestra of sticks, woodblocks, and brushes. Like a congregation of cicadas, the music rattles the leaves with its song. Hand drums and an African thumb piano add a touch of the open plains, aided minimally by Tamia’s histrionic touch.

While this is a difficult album to describe, its effect is anything but. Tamia is clearly at home among Favre’s multicolored sounds. She sings from deep within the chest, producing some of the most skillful ululations I have ever heard. She treats her voice like an instrument, a physical object, in a way that singers rarely do. Her carefully controlled mantras tear the darkness like a frayed seam and waste no time in letting the light in before bringing about their own expiration. The atmosphere is pure magic and as well suited to twilight as it is to a sunrise at dawn.

<< Bach: Das Wohltemperierte Klavier, Buch I – Jarrett (ECM 1362/63 NS)
>> The Paul Bley Quartet: s/t (ECM 1365)