Classical

Meredith Monk: Dolmen Music (ECM New Series 1197)

| Tyran Grillo

ECM 1197

Meredith Monk
Dolmen Music

Meredith Monk voice, piano
Collin Walcott percussion, violin
Steve Lockwood piano
Andrea Goodman voice
Monika Solem voice
Paul Langland voice
Robert Een voice, cello
Julius Eastman percussion, voice
Recorded March 1980 and January 1981 at Tonstudio Bauer, Ludwigsburg
Engineer: Martin Wieland
Produced by Manfred Eicher and Collin Walcott

Like much of Meredith Monk’s work, the atmospheres on this album are as foreign as they are familiar and comprise a vivid testament to the staying power of her compositional talents. When I first heard Dolmen Music as a teenager, I thought of it as folk music from lands that had yet to be discovered (admittedly, this interpretation was shaped by an oft-cited description to the same effect). Listening to it anew, I prefer to think of it as music that comes from a place so deep within, so familiar, that we tremble to hear it blatantly exposed. Monk’s music is all about the voice: it extends from the voice, begins and ends in the throat, reveling in its elasticity, its pliancy, its fragility.

Gotham Lullaby
Over a sparse layer of four-note arpeggios, Monk sings and squeals, tracing her swan song in the dust. Sustained tones hover in the background just out of reach as her voice ebbs and flows along a wordless coast. This is a lullaby of trees, if not for trees; a dream of darkness between branches and the decay of leaves falling past the city’s edge; a place where the wind can still be felt…

Travelling
This little journey springs to life with a rollicking piano laced with ritualistic drumbeats. Monk carries full weight in her confident ululations. The emergence of a rain stick adds an air of ceremony, where the piano becomes our circle and Monk the medium who channels voices of the dead in a semblance of life. Words dissolve, wetted by the trickling of monosyllables, grunts, and cries. Monk converses with her self, as if the piano were not another voice but a landscape in which the voice has found purchase. She casts her lot into the chasm at her feet as one other voice takes up the call, floating like a severed head in the ether, its mouth agape to expel the song of its birth and its death.

The Tale
A thread of piano and mouth organ supports a series of vocal beads in which we get our first and only discernible words. Over this conformist backdrop, she proclaims:

I still have my hands.
I still have my mind.
I still have my money.
I still have my telephone…hello, hellooo, hellooooo?

And between these seemingly innocuous interjections, she riddles our attention with rhythmic laughter against the sound of breaking glass, the detritus of the living.

I still have my memory.
I still have my gold ring…beautiful, I love it, I love it!
I still have my allergies.
I still have my philosophy.

This is not the voice of the insane, despite what its many disjunctions might have us believe. It is the voice of a larger social body gone awry rather than that of a single individual corrupted by its oppressive infrastructure.

Biography
This is the most emotional composition on the album and makes me stop what I’m doing every time it comes on. It is a keen in reverse that scrapes the interiors of our lungs. Peeking out from the deepest recesses of articulation, Monk sings as if in mourning. Her utter abandon allows her access to divine control through the very lack of her desire to control. In doing so, she looses the strictures of emotional conduct, shedding the outer walls of her physical makeup. She cries as she sings, intoning and droning. Her register strays into animal territory, as if intent on communicating to any and all creatures that might be listening. She runs through this vocal catalog, as it were, as a way of rearticulating the nature of her supposed loss and the comportment of its breathing remnants. This piece in particular rests on a razor’s edge, seemingly content on lying back and letting the world press down until it is cleaved in two. She wakes and walks, a divided self, into the night.

Dolmen Music
The last 24 minutes of the album are dedicated to its title piece, and what an epic journey it is. Dolmen Music unfolds liturgically, as delicate as it is persistent. A cello breathes into our ears with soft harmonics: introit. Women’s voices evoke the fundamental phonemic underpinnings of language. This language is not primitive so much as formative, spreading its vocabulary across space and time. Male voices process, lilting with “Ahs” that degenerate into a sort of ritualistic aphasia constrained only by time signatures. The cello returns: communion. The congregation partakes of a musical host and drinks vocal wine. And in the ecstatic peace that follows, Monk’s voices gather energy and speed with evangelical fervor. The voices work in canon, floating even as they crash into the limits of meaning.

With this album Monk reinvigorated the linear song, the sole/soul singer, the monophonic performer. With the barest resources, she and her highly trained ensemble gave us an eternity of sounds. Dolmen Music makes a stunning addition to any music collection not only for its audible dimensions, but also as an art object, for it boasts one of the most perfectly suited covers in the entire ECM catalog.

<< Thomas Demenga/Heinz Reber: Cellorganics (ECM 1196 NS)
>> Steve Eliovson: Dawn Dance (ECM 1198)

Keith Jarrett: Arbour Zena (ECM 1070)

| Tyran Grillo

1070 XKeith Jarrett
Arbour Zena

Keith Jarrett piano
Jan Garbarek soprano and tenor saxophones
Charlie Haden bass
Mladen Gutesha conductor
Recorded October 1975, Tonstudio Bauer, Ludwigsburg
Engineer: Martin Wieland
Produced by Manfred Eicher

The moment I lie in bed and begin listening to this album in my dorm room for the purposes of this review, my suitemate launches into a volatile argument with his girlfriend. As their loud verbal match breaches the gap under my door, I trace its implications across the geography of Arbour Zena. I think about the fallibility of relationships, about the trials and rewards of a musical life, and about the often contrived ways in which we attempt to validate our own experiences through the art of others.

Against a backdrop of accusations of infidelity, “Runes” blooms to quiet life with a slow orchestral tremolo. Jarrett disturbs the crystalline stillness with shafts of light and the bass falls like thick droplets as the orchestra turns to the morning sun, treading lightly upon the water so as not to disrupt its surface tension. The piano fades, leaving Haden to amble along the banks, skirting the limits of our visible world. Jarrett returns as if back from a foraging expedition, peering carefully into the scene laid before us as he unfurls a background of epic dimensions. He then pulls the orchestra in a new direction, leaving the bass to contemplate the fate of its own path. At first, we aren’t sure if the two are even connected. Perhaps they will join again, we wonder. Jarrett’s intimate piano improvisations dip their toes into waters familiar to fans of his solo work. Yet for all the music’s scope, we don’t so much travel as burrow deeper into the recesses of indecision until Garbarek’s entrance wakes us. In its own strange way, the music does resolve itself as these disparate voices achieve harmony over time. Where Luminessence was a conversation, “Runes” feels more like a narrative that jumps from one character’s head to another. It is also very difficult to picture the music, for Jarrett works in emotions here rather than in images. These aren’t simply the antagonistic ramblings of a polemicist, but rather the careful scripts of one whose relationship to determinacy is as complex as life itself, fragile as the flutter of breath over reed that ends the piece.

“Solara March” draws its plaintive curtains back to reveal an orchestra and bass. This is but the preamble to some stunning passages in which the piano touches off a lush tripping of orchestral sound while the bass seems only to meander, as if content to face an oncoming storm. As Jarrett plays a linear melody on the keyboard’s higher register, the bass continues to murmur in the background, as if unaware of its own critical potential. Garbarek injects some liveliness halfway through the “March.” With a characteristic buoyancy, Jarrett nudges us toward an opulent climax. The music finds its stride and renders worthwhile our disjointed path to getting there.

The third and final piece, entitled “Mirrors,” reflects a keening orchestral introduction, segueing into an extended meditation for piano and strings. As improviser over his own orchestral writing, Jarrett draws from the same threads and with the same colors, whereas his other improvisers mix their hues on an entirely different palette, if on the same canvas. With Jarrett leading the way, Garbarek has a much easier time fitting into the constantly shifting puzzle of the former’s evocative presence: the din of a distant flock of birds conveyed by the wind from an unseen field, or perhaps the sound of waves flitting in and out of our audible range. The lack of bass here is somehow comforting, leaving Jarrett and Garbarek to glide ever more assuredly across the album’s opaque surface. During this movement my suitemate’s girlfriend shouts, “That’s it! We’re through,” leaving behind not only a silent partner, but also emptiness in what would otherwise be a Saturday evening filled with laughter and sounds of lovemaking bleeding through these hollow walls.

This album is strangely recorded. The orchestra is given very little breathing room while Haden stands aloof, sounding as if he were recorded in a separate room and eased in later at the mixing board. In many ways, the bass is our mediator, our interpreter between languages and worlds, operating as it does a subliminal space. The music on Arbour Zena is diffuse, composed of blurry snatches of memory. There is nothing incredibly arresting about it. It doesn’t invite the listener and only barely acknowledges that it is being heard, playing not even for itself. It is like a dance missing a few steps, a garden with a trampled flowerbed and only a few unblemished specimens holding fast to their roots. It is the liberation of desire from the trappings of its own desire to be desired. Jarrett’s fellow musicians are rather well suited to this project, for to provide such continual commentary must be a challenge to even the most skilled.

Since writing this review, I am happy to report that my suitemate and his girlfriend have gotten back together, and I have taken to listening to Arbour Zena anew as an expression of hope—a musical talisman of emotional harmony in an unsympathetic world.

<< Kenny Wheeler: Gnu High (ECM 1069)
>> Tomasz Stanko: Balladyna (ECM 1071)

Keith Jarrett: Luminessence (ECM 1049)

| Tyran Grillo

ECM 1049 CD

Keith Jarrett
Luminessence

Jan Garbarek tenor and soprano saxophones
Strings of Radio Symphony Orchestra Stuttgart
Mladen Gutesha conductor
Recorded April 29 and 30, 1974 at Tonstudio Bauer, Ludwigsburg
Engineers: Kurt Rapp and Martin Wieland
Produced by Manfred Eicher

Having come to know Keith Jarrett primarily through his astounding improvisatory skills and classical interpretations, this recording marks my first time encountering him as composer proper. On the one hand, I feel as if setting Jarrett down on paper somehow limits his potential (note, for instance, his understandably longtime reluctance to publish a score version of the lauded Köln concert). On the other, Jan Garbarek is given such free reign of the icy territory into which he is deployed on this recording that he is able to channel Jarrett’s essence to its fullest. It’s difficult to imagine Jarrett’s music being any other way.

Any work for soloist and orchestra may be likened to a conversation in which the former introduces topics for the latter to work through “verbally.” At some point this dialectical relationship begins to take on a life of its own in the recording process. Yet in listening to Jarrett’s compositions one gets not conversation but conversion, a real-time transfiguration through which music implodes rather than expands. Garbarek doesn’t engage with the orchestra so much as traverse it, lifting and dropping his weighted feet across its rosin-dusted expanse. If there is dialogue to be found here, it’s entirely internal.

“Numinor” eases its way into the listener’s field of vision, across which Garbarek uses mournful reedwork to draw a series of jagged constellations. The orchestra sometimes bleeds, as if it were a cloth sheared by the edge of these gritty ruminations. Garbarek shouts with his instrument, treating it more as an extension of his voice by which the placement of his fingers articulates syllables in lieu of notes. Although we might not recognize the language, something intelligible comes through. In spite of some inspired solo passages, the music remains decidedly horizontal: every step forward is countered by one step sideways. There is, however, an incredibly moving scene in the final passage of “Windsong” where the saxophone blends into its surroundings, sharing an intimate moment of continuity made all the sweeter for its unexpected cessation. The title track, which closes the disc, is playful and romantic, slaloming its way through triadic signposts. The mood is contradictory, Garbarek engaged in two entirely different dialogues in a semblance of one.

Overall, I find Luminessence to be a challenging listen. Not because the music is particularly modernist, but because Jarrett makes so visible the often hidden dynamics of authorship we come to take for granted. As one who is continually enlarging the notion of musicality in everything he touches, Jarrett provides us here with an unabashed document of the compositional process. It is the audible equivalent of looking at the master’s sketchbook. I also find this album to be quite dark in spite of its glowing title, like a hidden shadow beneath the unturned page. It is an album that erases as many words as it inscribes, a memoir of images rather than prose. All of this makes for an effective, if threadbare, project. There are very few motives to speak of, which is liberating, as one is never subjected to the often-dominant reprise, nor to the subservience of secondary themes. Notes are sustained in ways they couldn’t have been sustained before, ending as abruptly as they began. This process is illustrative of the title’s clever play on words, a symbiosis of color and opaque desire.

<< Paul Motian: Tribute (ECM 1048)
>> Keith Jarrett: Belonging (ECM 1050)

Steve Reich: Tehillim (ECM New Series 1215)

| Tyran Grillo

Steve Reich
Tehillim

Pamela Wood voice
Cheryl Bensman voice
Rebecca Armstrong voice
Jay Clayton voice
Bob Becker percussion
Russ Hartenberger percussion
Garry Kvistad percussion
Steve Reich percussion
Gary Schall percussion
Glen Velez percussion
Virgil Blackwell clarinet, flute
Mort Silver clarinet, piccolo
Vivian Burdick oboe
Ellen Bardekoff English horn
Edmund Niemann electric organ
Nurit Tilles electric organ
Shem Guibbory violin
Robert Chausow violin
Ruth Siegler viola
Chris Finckel cello
Lewis Paer bass
George Manahan conductor
Recorded October 1981 at Tonstudio Bauer, Ludwigsburg
Engineer: Martin Wieland
Produced by Manfred Eicher

Human languages are contrived, insofar as they have undergone extensive sociopolitical reshaping. In Steve Reich’s Tehillim, however, words take on a self-sustaining feel, deeply rooted as they are in the nutrient-rich soil of the composer’s instrumental configuration, and serve to dictate the rhythmic and dynamic flow of a seminal shift in American “minimalism.” Being the first document of this new path in Reich’s personal and professional development, this recording matches an endearing trepidation to every practiced gesture. The music therein, says Reich, may be “heard as traditional and new at the same time,” as it was both a way for him to explore his Jewish roots while weaving a fresh brand of secularism into the many liturgical threads at his feet. At just under 30 minutes, Tehillim is but a fleeting unraveling of that very fabric.

Tehillim, meaning “praises” and referring to the Hebrew Book of Psalms from which it borrows its texts, is more than a remarkable work. It is also a work of remarks. The scoring is deceptively simple, built around a core of drum and clapping before introducing a female voice doubled by clarinet. This opens into a series of four-part canons against a backdrop of electric organs and maraca. Each melodic line—human and instrumental alike—moves distinctly, unaffected by the trappings of vibrato or other flourishes, as an imitative counterpoint works its way into the smoke of this short-burning votive candle. Part II carries the women’s voices into higher elevations in which the passage of time is marked by a light interplay of drums. Part III is the slowest of the four, ebbing and flowing with a breath’s involuntary precision. Like the most engaging of Gavin Bryars’s ensemble pieces, this section pulses with the quiet splendor of a deep-sea organism. The final part opens our eyes again to sunlight. With the barest assortment of auditory keys, it unlocks just enough doors to usher us into a more personal understanding of exultation. It can be no coincidence, then, that the derivation of the title—Hey, Lamed, Lamed (HLL)—also forms the root for “hallelujah.” And so, when the hallelujahs that close the piece spring up like so much plant life, they seem to forage even deeper into their origins. Tehillim is the Tree of Life feeding off itself, bathing in the spores of the Word made flesh.

Jean-Luc Godard: Histoire(s) du cinéma (ECM New Series 1706-10)

| Tyran Grillo

Jean-Luc Godard
Histoire(s) du cinéma

As one of the world’s most distinctive and important filmmakers, Jean-Luc Godard has not only an amazing eye for images, but also an astute ear for sounds. I first encountered the work of Godard in the singular experience that is Je vous salue, Marie (1985). Having now seen the film dozens of times (it remains one of my most cherished), aside from its unflinching tongue-in-cheek narrative, intimate atmospheres, and visual parallels I am always struck by the film’s innovative deployment of sound. Godard’s splicing of the Dvořák Cello Concerto simply makes sense. Like a rapid-fire commentator, he throws in descriptive snippets wherever and whenever appropriate, never afraid to cut them off at their most soaring moments. This technique has continued to dominate his subsequent work, and nowhere is it more fully realized than in his Histoire(s) du cinéma. What separates Histoire(s) from its predecessors and followers alike is an unequivocal sense of time and image. It is far more than a developmental exposé of the art form, twisting itself as it does into an utterly personal Möbius strip. With his characteristic rough-hewn grace Godard skirts the line between the sacred and the profane, holding a floodlight behind every palimpsestial theme to reveal the ravages of sight and the idolatry of retrospection.

After seeing Godard’s Histoire(s) I felt my view of the imagistic world forever changed; not because what he was doing was particularly revolutionary, but because it was so honest. Whatever one may think of Godard, one can hardly fault him for laying himself bare in every project he takes on. Histoire(s) is so unabashedly mitigated that it becomes translucent.

The ECM enthusiast will already know Godard, whether having seen his films or not, through the occasional visual borrowings manifest in a representative spread of album covers (Voci, Trivium, and Asturiana, to name a few). Regardless, the stereophonic intertextuality of Histoire(s) is obvious. More than just a thoughtfully arranged ECM greatest hits album, this complete soundtrack slithers through a provocative obstacle course sculpted and collaged from a vast archive.

Godard hammers his thoughts into the ether with his automatic typewriter, and its steady rhythm provides a pedal point to Chapter One as he calmly sketches the divisive nature of cinema, upholding its founders while reviling its abusers. Cinema was forged in black and white, he asserts: that is, in the colors of mourning. This is not to say that film was already dead the moment it was born (even if it was never alive to begin with), but that it has always been interested in that which is lifeless. Indeed, Godard believes the only two viable stories of the cinema since its inception have been sex and death.

“that which has passed through cinema
and been marked by it
can no longer get in anywhere else”

The sounds represented on this collection, slip-cased in minimal beauty, are as much something to behold as they are to be held. We may read the words, flipping through their corresponding pages with the careful patience of a novice, and yet we can never disassociate their orality from the visual cultures they describe. The cinema has already taken shelter in our heads by the time its music finds us. Godard is more literary than literal, undermining our wonder for celluloid in favor of the patchwork that is its constructedness.

“if George Stevens hadn’t been first to use
the first sixteen millimetre colour film
at Auschwitz and Ravensbrück
there’s no doubt that
Elizabeth Taylor’s air of wellbeing
would never have found a place in the sun”

By no means is Godard drawing a direct correlation here, luring the nascent viewer with the smoldering promise of self-destruction. Elizabeth Taylor flickers with all the iconicity of a votive candle, unspooling from her reel with a single expulsion of breath. She cannot last like death, and yet that is precisely the dichotomy we fervently hold dear. The march of cinema is a march of faces, each one more clearly disassociated from its body than the last, and serves to ritualize the art of viewing to the point of absurdity.

“technicians will tell you
it’s not true
but it’s worth remembering
that the nineteenth century
which invented all the technologies
also invented stupidity”

Such pronouncements remind us of our own complicity in the ethical vacuum of the cinematic enterprise. In the same way that every film is edited, so too do we clip our lives and adhere them back together in a series of lies and convenient elisions. That being said, I see no reason to believe that Godard is trying to be antagonistic. He is certainly not on a mission to open our eyes, for clearly they are already observing his work in tandem with its message. Rather, he seems to desire nothing but the recording of his desire. He doesn’t make films to be seen, but makes films to be read. With his hands hidden, revealed only by their periodic contact with an ever-present cigar, Godard is able to reform himself with the deceptive real time of his narration.

Chapter Two draws an implicit parallel between the development of recorded sound and recorded imagery. While the former preceded the latter, the two would require decades to synchronize. Godard is perhaps addressing the cinematic turn to melodrama, all the while lamenting over his slumber within, and painful awakening into, the whirlwind of moving-picture production. In human grasp, such a marriage is unavoidable and inviolably tethered to defaulted outlets of mass entertainment.

“to me, big history
is the history of cinema
it’s bigger than the others
because it’s projected”

In this sense, history is not the token of its own achievement, but the extant scar welted from centuries of picking and contortion. The master narrative in which we are schooled turns out to be nothing more than a flat image—there is none of the dimensionality we so readily accepted in our youth.

Time cannot be the sustenance of reason.

Chapter Three is a measured attack on the atrocities of European conflict. It is a scathing about-face related in a half-whisper, caressing the facts with self-reflexive pauses and audible punctuation. Politics ooze into a diatribe on the nature of their unraveling. The traversed border becomes the broken sentence, spilling its meaning like an inkblot across the map. Godard’s musical selections here are especially attuned to his subject matter, mimicking the mass media effect upon history: the dramatization of tragedy via the juxtaposition of graphics and sound bytes. It is the mise-en-scène of everyday life splashed against a backdrop formatted to fit our television screens. Our feelings are led down the aisle, wedded as we are to the didactic interpretations spun for our supposed protection, only to realize too late that the moving image is, at heart, motionless. If we accept Godard’s famous idiom that film is “truth 24 times a second” and that “every cut is a lie,” then the only way we can accept the truth of film is to package it in a lie. The editing room becomes the kill floor.

Chapter Four presents us with a critique of individualism through a visually marked conception of time. The filmic medium is no longer just a tool, but a way of life, a means of extending the reach of oneself beyond the world as one knows it.

“Alfred Hitchcock succeeded
where Alexander, Julius Caesar, Hitler, and Napoleon
had all failed
by taking control of the universe”

Cinema is not the key to conquest, but is one way in which we can visualize conquest and thus ensure its permanence. It allows us the luxury of repetition, the illusory mastery of time. And if the only mediation between an audience and the event depicted is the film itself, then the director has essentially offered him- or herself as a living replacement of the cause, in effect of the forces of nature.

“perhaps there are ten thousand people
who haven’t forgotten Cézanne’s apple
but there must be a billion spectators
who will remember the lighter
of the stranger on the train”

Although film, in Godard’s estimation, evolved out of painting, it has also destroyed the highly wrought image with the illusion of movement. Suddenly we can relate, seeing connective tissue where it had atrophied before. Like the film noir detective, we flit in and out of shadow—in and out of existence—as much in life as on screen. And so, whereas the museum piece reminds us of our transience by visually foregrounding an object that will outlive us, at least in cinema we find a kindred spirit willing to share in our self-deception to the point of death. Yet its indifference keeps us coming back for more:

“the cinema doesn’t cry
it doesn’t comfort us
since it is with us
since it is us”

Godard’s video essay is polyglottal and non-linear, a watershed composition for and of the twentieth century. Listening to the film on CD, however, I find that it speaks more directly. While the accompanying stills allow me to reenact the full experience as I see fit, I almost find them distracting when approaching Histoire(s) as a purely audio experience (assuming this is even possible). Godard’s voice becomes one of many, stripped of its paternalism through the concrete approach of his pastiche. We are implicated, imbricated, and insulated at every moment. Histoire(s) is inescapable. And yet, we can never be its prisoners, for the cage is honed in our very flesh.

<< Louis Sclavis Quintet: L’affrontement des prétendants (ECM 1705)
>> Kim Kashkashian: Bartók/Eötvös/Kurtág (ECM 1711 NS)

Heinz Holliger: Beiseit/Alb-Chehr (ECM New Series 1540)

| Tyran Grillo

Heinz Holliger
Beiseit/Alb-Chehr

David James countertenor
Elmar Schmid clarinet
Teodoro Anzellotti accordion
Johannes Nied double bass
Klaus Schmid clarinet
Paul Locher violin
Marcel Volken Schwyzerörgeli
Markus Tenisch Schwyzerörgeli
Oswald Bumann bass
Recorded 1992/1993, Schweizer Radio DRS, Studio Zürich (Alb-Chehr)
March 1994, Psychiatrische Klinik, Münsterlingen (Beiseit)
Engineer: Peter Laenger
Produced by Manfred Eicher

This earthly offering from Heinz Holliger finds the inimitable composer comfortably at home. As with in the more recent Schneewittchen, Holliger has chosen to set the words of Robert Walser in the whimsical collection of vignettes that is Beiseit (Apart), scored for countertenor, clarinet, accordion, and double bass. Focused, fecund, and delightful, these are highly perceptive pieces delineated in small brushstrokes that are few and far between. While certain sections—most notably “Und ging” (“And Went”)—are gorgeously lyrical, for the most part these pieces allow the texts at hand to dictate their own arrhythmias, thereby allowing an open intimacy to shine through. The performances are uniquely suited to the work (David James’s recitation is wonderful to hear for its stark contrast) and are impeccably recorded—in a psychiatric institute, no less. The epilogue “Im Mondschein” (“In Moonlight”) is particularly evocative, both in word and in feeling:

I thought when the night was deep
that the stars must be singing,
for, roused from my sleep,
I heard a gentle ringing.

But it was a little harp
that pierced the walls of my room,
and through the cold, the sharp
night it rang out like doom.

I thought of vain struggles, vain clinging,
the prayer, the curse breathed away,
and long I still heard the singing,
long awake I lay.

It is an introspective and unabashedly nocturnal coda, leading us out with a wolf’s distant cry.

Alb-Chehr recounts the Valaisan tale of a cowherd’s ghostly encounter and the boorish village cheese-maker whose jealousy and prying ways lead him to a tragic end. The title means “return of the ghosts but also music of the Alps and music of ghosts,” and clearly outlines the divergent personalities of the music to follow. This piece plays like a Holligerian Peter and the Wolf and must have been a joy to compose. I say this not because Holliger is such a modernist that this was just a pleasurable one-off for him, but precisely because such music lies at the core of his process in its directness and unmitigated commitment to feeling.

Holliger is not one to impose his compositional will upon a text, but to become its willing ally. He composes from the heart and it is into the heart that his music directly falls.

<< Prague Chamber Choir: Dvořák/Janáček/Eben (ECM 1539 NS)
>> Edward Vesala/Sound & Fury: Nordic Gallery (ECM 1541)

Heinz Holliger: Scardanelli-Zyklus (ECM New Series 1472/73)

| Tyran Grillo

Heinz Holliger
Scardanelli-Zyklus

Aurèle Nicolet flute
London Voices
Ensemble Modern
Terry Edwards
Heinz Holliger
Recorded September 1991, Inselhalle Lindau, Germany
Engineers: Andreas Neubronner, Markus Heiland
Produced by Manfred Eicher

The rivers are, like plains, the shapes of wildness
Are scattered also, more revealed the mildness
Of life continues, and our cities’ traces
Appear most clearly in unmeasured spaces.
–F. Hölderlin

Scardanelli-Zyklus (Scardanelli Cycle) is Heinz Holliger’s crowning compositional achievement. It is so lovingly crafted that I cannot help but bask in its atmospheres anew with each listen. This was my inaugural Holliger encounter—as either musician or composer—and will always hold a special place in my life for that among other reasons. I first heard Scardanelli-Zyklus when I was sixteen (as many years as it took to compose), and the experience was nothing short of a revelation. To compare it to anything else would be an injustice.

The cycle is a composite work and is comprised of:

The Seasons, three sets of four songs for a cappella choir
Exercises for Scardanelli for small orchestra
comments, mirrors, responses, marginalia to The Seasons
(t)air(e) for solo flute
Excerpts from:
Tower Music for solo flute, small orchestra and tape
Ostinato Funebre for small orchestra

These are squared and shuffled like a deck of cards. Holliger sets vocal passages to the words of famed German poet Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843), and for this has selected poetry from the latter years of Hölderlin’s life, a period of mental instability and obsessive writing and revision. Much in contrast to the free verse at his peak, Hölderlin eventually took to penning rhymed quatrains on rather innocuous subjects, many of which he signed with the nom de plume “Scardanelli” and which he dated with absurd imprecision, sometimes years into the future. In many ways, this is exactly what the music feels like: caught in time against the blatancy of its own transcription.

The Seasons are the glue that holds Scardanelli-Zyklus together. Each is divided into three sections and sprinkled liberally throughout. While Hölderlin tends to opt for traditional seasonal imagery, he occasionally surfaces with rather insightful readings of nature. In Scardanelli’s world, Spring is less about new life than the reinvention of its vocabulary. Peaks graze the sky in order to emphasize the darkness between them, looming over the explicit deference to perfection and valorization of the lowly-wise agrarian. Summer is fittingly presaged by Holliger’s Summer Canon IV, in which precision is no longer mathematical, but emotive. Here, the season is about life, the body in all its fragile stages. It is a landscape of rippling water rife with intimations of unity. Holliger makes sure to leave its surface tension unbroken. Sunlight is reduced to a whisper, no longer a blinding presence. We see the wonders of production and learn to appreciate the harvest all over again. These are hymns of heat waves, hair-thin rays of light woven into audible dimensions. Summer is uneasy, unpredictable, more causal than caustic. Glittering streams feed the valley, made known more by light than sound. Autumn is the brittle leaf transformed into a promissory spirit underfoot. We are treated to a stunning confluence of voices and instruments in Holliger’s arrangements thereof. Each word is given equal weight, gilded by an underlying drone. It is supremely unsettling and undeniably gorgeous. A glass harmonica ushers in Winter, lending an icy repose to deadening voices. Some tremolo is introduced, as if of a thrashing possibility yearning for the distant thaw. It is one incarnation of Winter that ends the cycle, growling and scraping the bottom of each singer’s vocal range.

The more instrumentally focused works are cue cards signaling new turns in the cycle’s narrative flow: Fragments is a flute-driven explication of the incomplete; Bell-Alphabet features Japanese bells cradling flute and orchestra on a tonal journey through speech unspoken; Paddlewheel revolves until it is the rasping of strings and air; Ice Flowers burgeons slowly into a frosty cornucopia of sound; Ostinato Funebre is a sketched crease in time overlaid with a warped deconstruction of a Mozart motif; The Distant Sound is a stunning instrumental reworking of an earlier Winter section; (t)air(e) is to the solo flute what Holliger’s Studie über Mehrklänge is to the oboe, and then some (taire = keep secret, not to talk; air = air, song, aria, breath; te = you)…a masterful exposition piece for the non-exhibitionist; Ad Marginem, based on a Paul Klee painting of the same name, utilizes taped frequencies thinner than a molecule’s breath to elicit an inescapable effect.

For all of its complexity and ambition, Scardanelli-Zyklus is a refreshingly straightforward work. Voices sing with little trickery (the most adventurous of which merely requires singers to follow the beat of their own pulses) and instruments faithfully follow the mechanics of their titular signposts. This music carries itself neither programmatically nor incidentally. Scardanelli-Zyklus is not only Holliger’s magnum opus, but is also undoubtedly one of the most compelling masterpieces of twentieth-century music. What a joy to have this recording to preserve its existence.

<< Kancheli/Schnittke: Vom Winde beweint (ECM 1471 NS)
>> Terje Rypdal: Q.E.D. (ECM 1474)

Heiner Goebbels: Surrogate Cities (ECM New Series 1688/89)

| Tyran Grillo

 

Heiner Goebbels
Surrogate Cities

Junge Deutsche Philharmonie
Peter Rundel conductor
Jocelyn B. Smith vocals
David Moss vocals
Recorded 1996, Bayerische Rundfunk, Munich / 1999, Frankfurt
Engineer: Peter Jütte
Produced by Heiner Goebbels & Manfred Eicher

As a longtime fan of David Moss, I needed only to learn of his involvement in Surrogate Cities before rushing out to buy the CD. Sadly, at the time I had no idea who Heiner Goebbels was. I couldn’t have asked for a more comprehensive introduction. The reader will forgive my penchant for abstract analogies when I say that Surrogate Cities is like pricking a piece of paper with a pin and shining a metropolitan nightscape through it so that one may connect those rays of light with brittle chalk. Practically speaking, the project is meant to be an ode to the city of Frankfurt in celebration of its 1200th year. As such, it is an amalgam of atmospheres, moods, and sensual provocations. This project unfolds like a massive suite with instruments drawn from architecture and flesh alike. Each section reads like a novella in the grander scheme of its binding.

Suite for Sampler and Orchestra
Preluded by snippets of cantorial singing, computer-controlled voices seek dominance over the imperialistic power of the orchestra in a kaleidoscopic and utterly focused vision of the urban sprawl. Rather than penetrating the city, Goebbels turns it inside out for our inspection. The samples are not so much quotations as they are memories shaken loose from long-neglected nooks and crannies. The digital flick of “Menuett/L’ingénieur” is haunting in its subtlety, appropriated like so much data flowing through the airwaves. The conclusion, “Air/Compression,” is a chamber piece for the overlooked sounds of our post-industrial comfort. Admirers of John Zorn’s Kristallnacht will find themselves on familiar ground here, as the archival instinct is similarly apparent.

The Horatian – Three Songs
Based on words by Heiner Müller, this song cycle relates a conflict between Rome and neighboring Alba. A lot is cast to determine who will fight as representative of each city. A Horatian is chosen for Rome, a Curiation for Alba. During the course of the ensuing battle, the Horatian strikes down the Curiation and does not spare his life. His sister, who is betrothed to the Curiation, weeps upon his return. He rewards her grief by slaying her. Thus is the victor’s valiant heart tainted with murder. According to Müller, Goebbels “proposes a new form of reading, a different, no longer touristic approach to the landscape of a text.” In this sense, The Horatian is far from the bombastic cantata it could have been. Rather, it heaves with the weight of its own moral conundrum. Joselyn B. Smith is superb as the voice of bipartisanship, weaving in and out of its allegiances with the acuity of a practiced raconteuse. She emotes with a confident Broadway twang that is gorgeously appealing against Goebbels’s orchestral backdrop.

D & C sounds like someone knocking at the outside of a building with no entrance; a book one has been dying to read, but which opens to reveal rain-soaked pages. It is a film noir standing on its head, loose change and candy wrappers falling out of its pockets. The music circles until it loses hope and collapses onto the wet asphalt.

Surrogate, with words by Hugo Hamilton, is the moment I was waiting for during my first listen. Over a lush carpet of piano, Moss runs into the night along with the nameless character of Hamilton’s text. His indulgent enunciation of “surrogate” is priceless, prelude to a tranquil, breathy fade.

In the Country of Last Things
The words here are by Paul Auster. Bleak and morose, they paint a fatalistic picture of urban living. Moss provides the narration here as Smith wails plaintively in the background: “A house is there one day, and the next day it is gone. A street you walked down yesterday is no longer there today…” The city has become the ephemeral soldier, running AWOL from the army of its own becoming. All convictions remain unrequited, leaving the barest puffs of cigarette smoke as the only indications that they ever breathed.

Smith and Moss are the clear winners here. Not to be outdone, however, is the superb orchestra. The presentation is sharp, the sound so crisp you want to teethe on it, and the arrangements fantastically varied. Probably not the best album to play in your greenhouse, but for our psychological biota it does the trick.

<< Veljo Tormis: Litany To Thunder (ECM 1687 NS)
>> Gudmundson/Möller/Willemark: Frifot (ECM 1690)

Shostakovich/Chihara/Bouchard (ECM New Series 1425)

| Tyran Grillo

 

Shostakovich/Chihara/Bouchard

Kim Kashkashian viola
Robyn Schulkowsky percussion
Robert Levin piano
Recorded June and October 1990
Engineer: Jan Erik Kongshaug
Produced by Manfred Eicher

Kim Kashkashian’s third disc for ECM is a curiously mixed bag. Although the liner notes give some delightful anecdotes and insider’s information, I am torn over how much said information enriches my experience of the whole. For example, Kashkashian points to the percussiveness of Shotakovich’s piano writing in his Sonata for Viola and Piano op. 147 as justification for the two companion pieces scored for “actual” percussion and viola. To be sure, this is a fascinating connection, though one that perhaps only the performers can intuit with such immediacy. Either way, the knowledge does guide my listening in new directions and pushes me to burrow into the music wholeheartedly.

We begin with Pourtinade by Linda Bouchard, consisting of nine sections that may be rearranged at will and which are otherwise meticulously notated. Each chapter breeds freshness in this indeterminate order and points to a hidden vitality behind the deceptively ineffectual surface. This is a piece that finds precision in its looseness. Deftly realized, Schulkowsky’s percussion work is porous and minutely detailed like a spiked pincushion through which Kashkashian threads her song.

Next we have Paul Seiko Chihara’s Redwood. Chihara, a film composer who has collaborated with such greats as Louis Malle, was inspired by Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints for this piece largely built around melodic phrases volleying between viola and tuned drums. I doubt that one would ever guess its source from the music alone, and I can’t say for sure whether this really informs the way I listen to it. Nonetheless, the programmatic music has its heart set on something beautiful.

Last but not least is Dmitri Shostakovich’s Sonata for Viola and Piano op. 147. This being his final work, it unfolds like the imminence of death and the timid promise of afterlife. The central Allegretto is filled with concentrated ardor, held back every time it threatens to transcend its cage, and the final 15-minute Adagio is as visceral a swan song as one could expect from such a towering figure in modern music. While this sonata does sound haggard, conserving its energy for selective crescendos, there is a glint of affirmation for every cloud of resignation, so that by the end there is only neutral space.

Even after repeated listenings, I am still not sure how successful this program is as a whole. While the Bouchard and Chihara pieces have their own merits, knowing that Shostakovich is waiting around the corner throws a much different shadow on already obfuscated atmospheres. It’s not that the conceptual approach of the percussion pieces is out of place with the op. 147, but simply that they feel like different languages in want of an intermediary (and, to Kashkashian’s credit, she tries her best to fulfill that role). They rather put me in mind of the stark stop-motion artistry of the Brothers Quay, and would perhaps be better suited to such imagery, crying as they are for visual accompaniment. Nevertheless, all three musicians’ rich talents scintillate at every moment, breathing vibrancy into still notes on a page with oracular fervor.

Knowing the context of a piece biases our interpretation of it. This can be a hindrance, or it can lead to an enlightened understanding. In this case, I find it to be both—hence my complicated reactions to this release. Sometimes the most memorable musical experiences are also the most unexpected. Albums such as this remind us that music is its own reward.

<< Gavin Bryars: After the Requiem (ECM 1424 NS)
>> Paul Giger: Alpstein (ECM 1426)