2010 in review

2010 was a strange year for me and recorded music. I traveled to some major U.S. left coast cities and visited some world-class record stores, expecting to do some serious CD bingeing. The second trip involved two smaller stores, one of which I visited quite profitably in 2004. Unfortunately, both stores had shifted to fairly small CD displays, having switched largely to vinyl and used items, and the excursions ended up as a letdown. Whether or not as a direct result, I virtually stopped buying CDs for nearly six months, with only eight CDs purchased between the end of May and the end of November. Part of the rationale was that I have a lot of CDs of great music, and that I'd like to spend more time with individual pieces. I see that Richard Pinnell has pledged to listen to the same piece every day and write about the experience of getting to know the piece intimately. I cannot say how much I admire this approach. He selected Luigi Nono's only string quartet, Fragmente, Stille, and while I'd love to follow the same path, although probably not with the same piece, it seems so impractical. I look forward to seeing how Richard handles it.

My overall new music acquisitions were down by 30% from 2009 — if it weren't for emusic, where I refused to let the downloads get swept up at the end of the period, I wouldn't have hardly picked out anything new. Even so, with emusic's revised pricing schedule this year, the same amount of money spent yields only half as much music.

Moving forward with this blog, I need to face up to the reality that I cannot review every promo CD or download that arrives in my mailbox. I publish occasional reviews both here and at furthernoise.org. I have heard some wonderful music from promotional releases, which I most certainly would not have found any other way and for which it was a pleasure to write a review. All of the music I review for furthernoise.org is promotional, but my intent for Classical-Drone was to write about music I liked, including music I already have as well as music I haven't heard yet. In addition, in 2011, I intend to review more netlabel releases. I have a release on a netlabel, and I should do more to promote their vitality. Fortunately there is no shortage of excellent ambient and drone releases, so I'm sure I will have plenty of choices. But a consequence is that I will write many fewer reviews from promotional CDs and downloads in 2011 than I did in 2010.

The unfortunate downside is that some unsolicited CDs that I've already received will go unreviewed. I've never run a label, but I'm pretty sure nobody gets reviews for all of the promos they send out. My sincere apologies if it happened here. If we've been in touch via email, your review is still in the pipeline.

As for my favorite new music of 2010, as in other years, my awareness of release dates is generally low, so I can't say exactly when these albums first appeared. Links are to my reviews, the list is ordered by acquisition date.

• Altus, Winter Embrace III
• Language of Landscape, Memories Fade Under A Shallow Autumn Snow
• Lexithimie, Leontopodium
• Slow Six, Tomorrow Becomes You
• Keith Rowe, Live at Amplify 2008
• Leyland Kirby, Sadly, The Future Is No Longer What It Was
• Valentin Silvestrov, Symphony No. 6
• Francisco Lopez, Amarok
• Nils Frahm, Wintermusik
• Salvatore Sciarrino, Sui poemi concentrici
• Kyle Bobby Dunn, A Young Person’s Guide to Kyle Bobby Dunn
• Balmorhea, Constellations
• Ben Frost, Theory of Machines
• Pisaro & Stuart, July Mountain
• Ludovico Einaudi, Nightbook
• Celer, Dying Star
• Goldmund, The Malady of Elegance
• Michael Northam, Solar Night
• Peter Adriaansz, Waves
• Jean-Claude Eloy, Gaku-No-Michi (complete)
• Scott Cortez, Twin Radiant Flux
• Ann Southam, Simple Lines of Enquiry
• Cornford & Rodgers, Zinc [extracts]

A Life Unfinished, Finished

Christmas morning I finally finished John Tilbury's Cardew biography, Cornelius Cardew: A Life Unfinished, having saved the final, political years for my third extended session with the book. In the 1970s, Cardew turned away from the avant-garde music that had gained his reputation, and began writing more populist music that would be useful in mobilizing the troops for the imminent revolution. Most of his energies during his final decade were for the Communist Party of England (Marxist-Leninist), a Maoist organization (despite its name) until Mao's death and almost immediate repudiation in 1976. He wrote songs for the Party and fielded a couple of big commissions to exercise his compositional muscles, but otherwise his musical efforts were directed to performances at party congresses, rallies, and strikes. Tilbury speculates that Cardew had reached the highest levels of a revolutionary group whose threat was taken seriously by the British government. Enough suspicious and unresolved details about his death in 1981 from a hit-and-run accident remain for Tilbury plausibly to suggest an assassination.

The earlier observed thematics of Virtue and Morality reach a culmination in Cardew's work writing songs for the Party. The interplay between warring tendencies in his aesthetics, music as individual creation or music with a specific purpose, is a central theme of the last decade. When Cardew first became involved with the CPE (M-L), the Scratch Orchestra was still active, and Cardew and others in the group wanted to use performance occasions to further a revolutionary cause. The debate over to what extent music should be subservient to the Party line eventually led to songs with lyrics whose political line made no concessions to poetry, or even singable diction. But to proclaim the primacy of individual creation is to fall back to bourgeois ideals, promoted by capitalism to ensure that any opposition is diffuse and ineffective. Cardew combated this tendency in his art music by composing to a strict agenda, even in his art music. The large piano set of the Thälmann Variations, for example, was programmatically based on the life of proletarian hero Ernst Thälmann, and Cardew considered diverging opinions to be pointless rubbish. "You've got to get to the heart of things and find out what actually is the case. And when I play this music I'm saying to you what actually is the case.... Nobody is going to tell me any different" (850). If it were generally true that only the composer's intention mattered, I'd probably stop listening to music. The Party's struggles to accommodate Beethoven are at once illuminating for an example of its Jesuitical tendencies and opaque for what the discussion revealed about Beethoven.

Composer's intention, form vs. content, and especially music's relationship to external events, all of these aesthetic discussions were dominated by Marxist-Leninist politics. As the Party sought to understand, and eventually to manipulate, how music affects people, Cardew actively engaged these issues, and the choices he made in response carried life-altering consequences, both for himself and for people in all walks of life, not just other musicians. Tilbury was Cardew's contemporary, born the same year and sharing many of the same musical and political activities, making him perfectly placed to observe and report. Both men grappled with their aesthetic choices, with all of the ambiguities that come with the long-term engagement that is our lives. Tilbury expresses the uncertainty of the turbulent times that he shared with Cardew, writing entire paragraphs in the interrogative, seeking perspectives on the correct line to take on whatever issue was at hand. The ambivalence comes from a fellow traveler, the sense of companions growing older together, the intertwining of Tilbury's trajectory with Cardew's. Tilbury articulates the ambivalence without judgment, accepting with respect the individuals involved, the different strata of emotions that place us on our specific path. He identifies his own inner relationship to Cardew and the Party being neither stable nor consistent over the decades that he worked on the book, and thankfully he didn't try to make them all conform in a final grand stroke of editing. Tilbury is an ideal chronicler, close enough to the subject to have traveled many of the same roads, yet able to maintain a distance, sometimes ironic, always sympathetic. The detail and reflection together give the book its heft, but I have read no other book that describes what it means to be a musician as well as this biography.



The Party's struggles with Beethoven start on page 860. Tilbury's meta-reflection starts on page 978.

Sound toward the light

René Daumal was a mystic and writer in interwar France, a fertile time for the imagination even if it was highly unstable economically and politically for most of Europe. Born in 1908, his early years most famously included a bit of drug experimentation, specifically inhaling carbon tetrachloride, which gave him a glimpse of a higher reality. Although he later renounced external stimulants, he spent the rest of his life searching for the spirit that he glimpsed in his trances. In the late 1920s, he and a few friends created a literary group, Le Grand Jeu, parallel to the surrealists but eventually diverging over Daumal's more spiritual aspirations versus Breton and surrealism's engagement with Marxist politics. After exploring several religious traditions, Daumal found a home with Hinduism, learning Sanskrit well enough to translate some of the sacred texts into French. His spiritual work eventually led him into the circle around G. I. Gurdjieff, whose disciples were Daumal's teachers until his death from tuberculosis in 1944. In addition to many poems and essays, Daumal also published a novel in 1938 entitled A Night of Serious Drinking and left a second novel, Mount Analogue, unfinished. Published posthumously, it later became one of the sources for Alejandro Jodorowsky's allegorical film The Holy Mountain.

Sound artist Michael Northam's most recent release, Solar Night on C40 cassette from the Malaysian label Mirror Tapes, is directly and overtly inspired by Daumal. This isn't the first time Northam has cited Daumal for his music. More than ten years ago, Northam's collaboration with John Grzinich The Absurd Evidence was named after a book of Daumal's essays. The album included as an epigraph "tem gwef tem gwef dr rr rr," the unpronounceable word that Daumal heard in his mystical trances immediately preceding the recognition of eternal truths. On Solar Night the significant quotation is from one of Daumal's early prose poems, given in French on Mirror Tapes' site and recited in English in the music. The texts are set in a passage describing the reversal of the speaker's perceptive faculties, which enables him to see the true world that lies hidden behind the encircling daylight existence.

In many works Northam's primary source material is field recordings, and so with Solar Night. In addition, some of the sound sources are from Northam's live performances during the summer of 2010. I imagine Northam's performances to be similar to Jeph Jerman, who performed in Tucson last winter, and years ago with Northam, and — small, natural objects, rattling and rustling into intricate environmental textures. Remarkably, when I listen to Solar Night, I hear the spontaneous performances, rooted in active and direct communication, quite clearly amidst the various layers. In fact, I thought that there was less processing of the individual layers here than on most previous Northam works. The field recordings, such as the ferocious weather in Bathing in the Golden Wrapper, were detailed and crisp. Other layers seemed to have a more human agency behind them, so I could imagine that it was produced live, in real time. Inevitably, some layers resisted such anthropomorphic fantasies, but I listened to them all the more attentively for the ambiguities.

Solar Night is released only on cassette, with two tracks making up the episodes that comprise each side. Episode A opens with the aforementioned Bathing in the Golden Wrapper, the stormy field recordings subsiding into a watery swamp, getting its complexity from the layering. The first Daumal quotation leads into the second piece, Mask of the Sun, a gentle resonant drone, full of delicate bells and flutes, boundaries between natural and processed completelly blurred. But there's a fire crackling away in the background, more or less audible throughout the whole piece — here we are, sitting around the campfire in the woods, enveloped in Northam's unearthly performance.

Episode B opens with a walk through a Tunnel passing through environments both natural and perhaps not so much. Accompanied by birds and insects, flutes and bells, the walker's steps parallel Daumal's spiritual journey, toward the light. Insect sounds are especially prominent, dancing through the field that needs to be heard on headphones to be truly appreciated. The last piece, Sonorous Skin, sets up a watery nocturnal environment that provides the background for an intense electronic loop, the most alien sound on the tape so far. The album closes with a second Daumal reading, "i am the seer of the night an auditor of silence a silence dressed in a sonorous skin."

Although all four pieces work with shimmering, continuous textures, Northam ends them fairly abruptly, with little twists that open the pieces outwards rather than simply drifting back into nothingness. These endings give the pieces a lift, leaving the listener more suspended and aware. Like Daumal, Northam is embarked on a spiritual journey, for which Solar Night is not only a demonstration, an immersive invitation to find the light behind the natural world.

Solar Night is available directly from Mirror Tapes. Daumal's portrait illustrates this online translation of one of Daumal's essays.

Captain Beefheart, RIP

Sad news today that Don van Vliet, aka Captain Beefheart, passed away. I was a Zappa fan, and Beefheart sang Willie the Pimp on Zappa's first solo, Hot Rats, which rapidly became my favorite song on the album. Zappa had also formed two labels, Straight and Bizarre, and I picked up everything they released. One of earliest releases was Beefheart's monument, Trout Mask Replica. If this was Straight, I couldn't imagine what was released on Bizarre. Even Beefheart's other albums don't sound anything like this one.

December at Furthernoise.org

The December 2010 issue of Furthernoise.org was published today, and it includes two of my reviews, both featuring Australian music. The first is a review of Gail Priest's Presentiments From The Spider Garden, an extended web of unanticipated exotic territories formed into a long suite. The second is an overview of the first four releases on the Melbourne label Vicmod, which together show off the possibilities of modular synths old and new.

Piano and classical drones

When I set up this blog nearly four years ago, I envisaged the Classical and the Drone as twin poles between which I would concentrate my humble observations. The intersection of these two worlds certainly exists, for example La Monte Young and Alvin Lucier, but the last time the two came together around here was about a year ago with Sunn O)))'s drone metal combined with classical instruments. I have recently discovered Peter Adriaansz, a younger composer from Holland who's also the artistic director of The Hague Percussion, firmly in the classical world, whose work in the past couple of years combines piano and drones in a way that I find inspirational for my own music.

I originally encountered Adriaansz through Xavier Pestova's repertoire list of music for piano and live electronics. His score for Waves 1-4, for piano, ebows, sine waves, and live delay, was posted on his site, a fascinating and thought provoking excursion which led me to my local guitar shop for my first ebow. Since that time, I reviewed Richard Lainhart's recent CD Cranes Fly West, which uses a grand piano and nine ebows (Adriaansz, in this score, only calls for three), which increased my interest level. And earlier this year, the Dutch Ensemble Klang released a CD of seven of Adriaansz's Waves, including one of the solo piano works and six further excursions into drone piano in combination with reeds, trombone, percussion, violin, and electric guitar. As far as I can tell, it's the first CD release of any of his music, hopefully a harbinger of future installments.

Adriaansz's works page contains thirteen Waves, divided into four sets, and two of the four sets are performed here in their entirety, each movement recorded in a single take. Waves 5-7 open the album and were written for the Ensemble Klang during a period where Adriaansz had done some work with microtonality and was now furthering his investigations into vibration and resonance. Wave 5 divides the ensemble into generating and responding instruments. The piano and ebowed guitar generate tones that are further sustained and modified by the reeds, brass, and percussion. Wave 6 devolves around a single pitch, adding microtonal variations of specific proportions on either side, generating elusive beating harmonies, especially at a fairly good volume. Wave 7 sets up a quiet ebowed drone before it's interrupted by monumentally deep bass notes on the piano, trombone and low reeds. The low fundamentals elicit lots of overtones, making this one a very rich sound world. Higher partials are added explicitly as the piece progresses, with the piano articulating slow octave arpeggios that provide a faint rhythmic anchor in the harmonic blaze.

The second complete set is Waves 11-13, originally written for Peter van Bergen's Loos Ensemble, and played here by two reeds, percussion, guitar, ebowed piano, and violin. Adriaansz has put up a sample score for Waves 11-13, so it's a little easier to see what's going on, and Adriaansz has also posted article with a fair amount of detail about the pieces. Waves 11 is all sustained sounds, dreamlike with surges but no attacks. Waves 12 is highly punctuated with dissonant piano chords and resonant gongs, whose overtones are carried by the sine waves and other sustaining instruments. And in Waves 13 the piano chords are spread out into individual notes stretched across three octaves, spawning subtle moving harmonies.

Between the two sets of Waves, the ensemble programmed a set of three miniatures written in a more conventional style, Nu descendant un escalier. They reminded me strongly of the classic Hat recordings of the Maarten Altena Octet, so I was little surprised to see in Adriaansz's work list that three of his pieces were in fact commissioned by and written for Altena's ensemble (sadly unrecorded as far as I can determine). The album closes with one of the first set, Waves 3 for amplified piano, sine waves and live delay.

Work in microtonality often leads to electronic solutions, and Adriaansz has developed an unusual hybrid of live electronics with the Klang Ensemble. The album has a guest credit of Juan Parra on live electronics on these three sets, and it sounds like it includes a long digital delay to prolong the already stretched tones. Several of the Waves include a part for fixed and moving sines, which further color the harmonies. In practice, the sines draw out an emphasis in the overtones of the acoustic instruments and contribute a sheen to the harmonic overtones. In addition, the acoustic instruments are amplified, which provides another opportunity to place them into an overall context.

As a glance at his scores will demonstrate, Adriaansz has discovered new ways to communicate his microtonal works through an open notation that focuses on the essential chromaticism that he seeks, while deferring specific timbres and entrances to the performers. One of its ancestors is Cage's time bracket notation, where an event is simply given a range of time in which it occurs. Adriaansz uses the metaphor 'live sculpting,' which suggests a mobile, shifting perspectives over a fairly sparse sonic field, but provided a freedom to the musicians to create the complete sound in its own time.

In addition to the usual sources, Waves is available through the Ensemble Klang's web shop where, powered by Bandcamp, all the tracks are available for streaming in their entirety. The sales blurb says that the CD comes with a booklet, which encouraged me to purchase the CD rather than the download. However, the download that came after the CD purchase had a PDF of the booklet in the zip file, but I don't know whether it's present on the download alone purchases. The booklet is all in English and includes an article about Adriaansz written by Bob Gilmore, an interview between Adriaansz and the Ensemble Klang's Artistic Director and fellow composer Pete Harden, and short bios of the composer and the ensemble. Adriaansz writes about the Wave series in an article in English, How I Became A Convert, on his use of microtonality.

A seasonal performance

Our first high cultural event of the season was last night at the University of Arizona's UAPresents, violinist Robert McDuffie and the Venice Baroque Orchestra playing the Seasons Project: Antonio Vivaldi's Four Seasons in the first half of the concert, and Philip Glass's second Violin Concerto, entitled The American Four Seasons. McDuffie commissioned the concerto with exactly this pairing in mind, but during the early sketches, McDuffie and Glass differed on which of the concerto's four movements corresponded to which season. Rather than make a statement in the titles, the movements are simply numbered one through four. McDuffie and the VBO are touring the US with this program through November 19, a great opportunity to hear Glass's new concerto in its intended context.

The Venice Baroque Orchestra consists of five first violins, four seconds, three violas and cellos, a double bass, a lutenist, and a keyboard player who played harpsichord in the Vivaldi and a Yamaha MO-8 synthesizer in the Glass. The string players all stand in a semi-circle (except for the cellists, the only ones seated), and there was no conductor for either piece. Everyone was dressed in black, very elegant. Seeing the entire ensemble standing piqued my curiosity and suggested that this concert would have more immediacy and excitement than I usually expect from a classical concert, that the performers approached this in the spirit of a pop concert.

I'm not familiar with the Vivaldi concertos, but the performance was beautiful and most likely a bit idiosyncratic. I thought it was a very romantic performance, more flexible tempi than I expected, even though the VBO is considered a period orchestra and probably plays with more rather than less historical information. It's a typical Baroque convention to mark piano and forte in the score, so perhaps the romantic swells in volume were a contemporary interpretation. The string writing for all parts was masterful, with the sections displacing and complementing each other. I especially liked the solo passages, where McDuffie would start by himself and then be joined by two or three other players. In one passage, the leaders of the first and second violin section seemed to echo McDuffie's melodic lines, slippery little fragments of sound whose shape and timbre seemed centuries ahead of their time.

One of the other common subgroups was a trio with the lute player and the lead cellist. The lutenist was seated front and center, much more prominent and audible from our seats than the harpsichord, so it played a more important role in the continuo, at least from our seats. The lutenist was really having fun, a joy that communicated through all the performers. One of the movements was a song for the lute and strings, and McDuffie pulled out a chair and sat down, stretched out his legs, and listened with a beatific smile on his face.

The individual movements were very dramatic, with the standing orchestra's rhythmic swaying keeping the overall mood light and upbeat. But a side effect was that they would finish a fast movement with a dramatic flourish, which elicited an enthusiastic round of applause. The program didn't break the concertos into movements (although I later gleaned from the notes that each concerto has three movements, fast-slow-fast), so I completely lost track of which concerto they were playing. I don't think it mattered to them, and contributed to the effect that this was more of a pop concert than a classical one.

If everybody was just out having a good time during the first half, the second half was more serious. Gone was the lutenist sidekick, leaving McDuffie alone on center stage. The auditorium did not use a spotlight, and since he was further forward as a soloist in the Glass work, his eyes were completely hidden in shade by the stage lights, which were all overhead. A tall man in black, with no eyes visible, suggestive of the uncanny in his Halloween evening performance! And even in his fast movements, Glass's music doesn't dance the same baroqueries, so the performers body language was more serious as well.

But as beautiful as the Glass concerto was, I missed a conductor, most noticeably during a fast passage in the first movement where the keyboard seemed a bit out of sync with the strings. The orchestra spent much more time making significant eye contact with each other than they did during the Vivaldi, which made me think they weren't entirely comfortable with the piece. Fortunately I never felt an uncertainty after the first movement, so maybe someone was having a bad night. The work is written for strings and synthesizer, but as far as I could tell the timbre of the synthesizer never changed. It sounded like an electric piano, and it was used for punctuation and rhythmic precision, the keyboard music that Glass has written since his earliest work.

Since the concerto has no cadenza per se, Glass wrote a prologue and three songs for solo violin, which can either stand alone or between each movement of the concerto. McDuffie has been playing this piece for a while, and his performance throughout had great depth and feeling. Glass has already released a recording of McDuffie and the London Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Marin Alsop, who played the concerto's European premiere in April 2010. But this tour is a great chance to hear the work live, an unusual opportunity and a great concept. The remainder of the tour is on the US West Coast and then some dates in New England. I encourage anyone close to one of these shows to check it out.