Uncommon Sonorities: The Year in Review
Published by Natasha January 17th, 2008 in Local, Music, Reviews, Guest Blogger.
[From the Ithaca Times; archive photo above of Stockhausen; all text by Aaron P. Tate]
In music’s digital age, year-end surveys and ‘best of’ lists have become simultaneously more popular (e.g., every blogger and music critic has one) and more deficient in coverage. That’s the nature of the beast, one supposes, given the enormous number of releases coming out in all genres, including those that you or I may not have even known existed last year.
In areas as massive as classical composition or as hermetic as, say, electroacoustic improv, it has become virtually impossible to keep up with every release in the genre, and still less possible to evaluate and write thoughtfully about them in a comprehensive fashion. If you were to extend the discussion to include more generally experimental or ‘new music,’ a term that cuts across a number of boundaries, then the prospects for anything but a highly subjective and idiosyncratic survey become even more grim.
That being said, there were many thrilling releases this year for listeners with an adventurous ear and curious mind. Not unlike the world of sports in recent times, Boston continued to dominate experimental music too, including not only but especially contemporary non-idiomatic improvisation, tape manipulation, and musique concrete.
Bhob Rainey, one half of the improv duo known as nmperign (named after the Latin phrase for “unknown through the more unknown,” ignotum per ignotius), curated a collection of pieces by a handful of the most provocative non-idiomatic improvisers working today, many from the Boston community. Titled Music Overheard Volume One (Institute for Contemporary Art, Boston), Rainey’s collection brought vital and spry pieces by the likes of Greg Kelley, Liz Tonne, Sean Meehan, Charles Curtis, and Taku Unami to the public ear, and did so at no expense to the listener, since you can download the release and liner notes (also by Rainey) for free at ubuweb.
It was Rainey’s other project, however, a collaboration with sound artist Ralf Wehowsky five years in the making, that yielded one of the year’s most challenging and rewarding listens. Painstakingly composed, arranged, and edited, I Don’t Think I Can See You Tonight (Sedimental Records) shows Rainey and Wehowsky working in the interstices of musique concrete, non-idiomatic improvisation, modern composition, sound art, and noise, in an utterly relentless and satisfying way.
Well known for his mastery of extended and microtonal techniques on the saxophone, but also for his remarkable conceptual discipline, Rainey’s playing on this release is only one part of a sonic story that includes scrapes, drone, clatter, and hum; and sounds equally as abstract (pure noise) at some points as they are concrete (breaking glass) at others. No matter how complex or beguiling the music may be, the working methods and impeccable standards of these two composers have guaranteed that every sound, smear, and breath have been placed where they occur for good reason — the pleasure on the listener’s part is to unravel the mystery and intensity of the resulting sonic cartography.
Intransitive Recordings is another Boston-based operation that has long favored music that blurs distinctions between field recording, improvisation, found sound, and sheer abstract noise. This year, however, it was the label’s owner, Howard Stelzer, who released a genre-defying collection of collaborative tape manipulation pieces, which were made together with New Zealand sound artist Seht. Titled Exactly What You Lost, the collection is yet another example of a Boston-connected collaboration between two established musical thinkers, the result of which is a work of riddling beauty. The record moves from confrontational noise bursts through extended meditative drone pieces, and explores concepts of duration, circularity, tape degradation, and various sound design techniques in order to create a complex but sonically rich tapestry that rewards repeated listening.
Tying the thread from Boston to Ithaca, our own resident Tim Feeney made what was easily one of the year’s best electroacoustic records, In Six Parts (Sedimental Records), together with one of Boston’s most austere and demanding players, Vic Rawlings. Recorded over the course of an entire day spent in the studio, the version that we have here was the result of the last hour of recording, and you can tell: the music is disciplined, focused, dizzyingly diverse, and relentless in its structural integrity. No better example of the genre was released this year, as far as this pair of ears is concerned.
Forward-thinking music fans of a more classical bent won’t need to have great recordings and performances pointed out to them, since Ithaca College and Cornell University already offer ample resources for keeping up with new music in the classical idiom. In the last season alone Ithaca College presented contemporary music specialist Peter Serkin, while Cornell hosted Zygmunt Krause, Ensemble X, and the extraordinary violist Wendy Richman, who ranks today as one of the finest up-and-coming viola players in new music circles anywhere in the world.
In terms of contemporary classical releases, British composer Jonathan Harvey saw two new recordings appear on the label Soupir Editions, entitled Angels and Choral Music, respectively. Earle Brown’s Tracer came out on Mode. Morton Feldman’s String Quartet No. 1 was published by Hat Art and his Three Voices appeared on Col Legno. Charles Wuorinen’s Cyclops 2000 and A Reliquary for Igor Stravinsky appeared on London Sinfonietta. And last but most certainly not least, Ithaca’s own Steven Stucky had his most recent work, Radical Light (nota bene: title taken from an A.R. Ammons poem), premiered by the L.A. Philharmonic both stateside and throughout Europe. Look for it on iTunes.
One notable news item in the-music-meets-pop-media category from the past year would have to be the publication of New Yorker music critic Alex Ross’ history of 20th Century Classical music, The Rest is Noise, which garnered much attention and praise. Perhaps slightly below the media radar but of equal if not greater interest to classical fans will be the fact that Deutsche Grammophon recently opened an online mp3 shop where more than 600 out-of-print CDs are now available for legal download (more to come, too). Considering that the selections are priced at $1.29 per track, you will be forgiven for wiping a tear of joy from your eye at the news (I did). How long has it been since you listened to your favorite Beethoven Piano Sonata? That favorite Debussy piano piece? Always wanted to hear the entirety of Berio’s Sequenzas back to back but didn’t want to pay for the box set? Well now you can work your way through each of them one by one, effortlessly, affordably, and at your own pace of discovery (or, regarding the latter, catch Steven Stucky discussing the Berio Sequenzas when he hosts the New York Philharmonic’s performance of them during the “Day of Berio” on Feb. 2 in New York City).
No year-end review would be complete without pausing to consider all whom we have lost. The year opened with the unexpected deaths of Alice Coltrane and Michael Brecker in January, and it now closes with the loss of jazz giant Oscar Peterson, who passed away on Sunday, Dec. 23, at the age of 82. Not unlike the manner by which James Brown’s death punctuated the close of 2006 with melancholy and loss, 2007 is now no different, thanks to the loss of Peterson. Add to the list the jazz great Andrew Hill, rapper Pimp C, the senseless loss of reggae singer Lucky Dube (shot to death in a carjacking, in front of his children), and the senseless fatal beating of L.A. microtonal guitarist Rod Poole, and one can see that the year was yet another in which we mourned the passing of far too many of our friends and inspirations.
As far as signposts go, perhaps no obituary marks the end of a stridently methodical modernism than the loss of Karlheinz Stockhausen. If only music and astral transport were linked as closely as Stockhausen always seemed to believe, we might take solace in the face of saying goodbye to so many beloved artists.
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