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RECENT REVIEWS:

John Cage
Cage Performs Cage
Empty Words with Music for Piano / One⁷
Mode 200

This latest installment - the 41st - in Mode's Cage Edition features two of the last recordings the composer made, at SUNY Buffalo in 1991, the year before he died. The first finds him in performing a 30-minute extract from Empty Words (1973-74) - presumably from the work's final section, in which there's little left of Henry David Thoreau's text except for isolated letters - simultaneously with Music for Piano (which one?) (1952-56), performed by Yvar Mikhashoff. For once, Mode's liners, courtesy Rob Haskins, aren't as informative as they might be - details about Mikhashoff's construction and performance practice for this piece would not have gone amiss. It's a (surprisingly?) musical affair, with both men picking up each other's pitches more than you might expect, Cage singing more than speaking, stringing together his disjointed consonants into a kind of ultraminimal folk song from some hitherto undiscovered country.

1991's One⁷, performed in a version for solo voice, is one of Cage's most austere compositions, calling for just ten different sounds (not ten in total! that's Futatsu...) located according to the time bracket procedure common to all the number pieces: the brackets indicate start and end times for each event, but leave the performer free to choose exactly when to begin each sound, and how long to make it last. There's plenty of space between Cage's isolated gurgles and bleats (and unlike Rob Haskins, I find the half dozen cries of "ka!" neither shocking nor "genuinely terrifying") for the mind to wander (if the mind wanders, let it) and sounds of the outside world to come drifting in.
--- Dan Warburton, www.paristransatlantic.com, May 2009


Sirius Respect
The Respect Sextet play the music of Sun Ra and Stockhausen
Mode Avant 06

Just had a pleasant surprise in the mail -- I was wondering why on earth I'd be getting a review copy from Mode Records (great label, but their focus is on the contemporary classical world not jazz), but opened it up to discover the Respect Sextet's latest disc, Sirius Respect. People who participated in my 2nd blindfold test (not the most recent one -- the one before) may recall a long, seriously groovy track on there by these guys, a cover of Fred Anderson's "3 on 2". Anyway, the new one coincidentally gave me flashbacks to a not-so-charmed meeting between the Art Ensemble of Chicago & Hartmut Geerken on a dual tribute to Sun Ra and Mynona (an author previously unknown to me), which had its moments but was really trashed by Geerken (who seems to have decided to chop up the tape to his own satisfaction). As a double tribute Sirius Respect works a hell of a lot better, as you can imagine. I'm no Stockhausen expert -- I have exactly two albums of his music -- but the main thing I'd say, listening to this, is that it really sounds beautifully stitched together, not like they've simply alternated tracks by the two composers. This is largely because they're drawn on Stockhausen's more "open" pieces, including 3 from Tierkreis and one from Aus Den Sieben Tagen (a purely verbal score). Actually, I could have used more Stockhausen here (only 5 brief tracks), maybe some of the more formal writing, though I can understand the band's wanting to make this work as a project, & as jazz. Which it does. -- The Sun Ra covers are really spirited, imaginative reworkings, the kind of thing that sounds like an arrangement that's accreted intuitively over many performances rather than just being decided on top-down. & they pick many of my favourite tunes too, like "Velvet" and "Saturn". Plus "Angels and Demons at Play", which if I'm not mistaken they played at the Toronto gig of theirs I caught a few years back -- it's one of those slow-burn Respect performances, making good use of the band's predilection for "little instruments" and incidental percussion, a 5/4 bossa that fans out softly like moonrays. "Lights on a Satellite" is all gorgeous-melancholy chords, like Gil Evans arranging for the Arkestra.

Incidentally, this has got more of a fusiony aspect to it than other Respect albums I've heard (Red Wierenga plays electric keyboards on many tracks), so I'm thinking that they must be obliquely referencing Miles Davis's interest in Stockhausen in the early 1970s.
--- Nate Dorward, organissimo.org, April 2009


Hans Werner Henze
Musica da Camera
Ensemble Dissonanzen
Mode 202

Henze is best known for bulky stage works, but his catalogue includes much chamber music, of which this disc provides an enjoyable selection. Two items are operatic spin-offs: Ein kleines Potpourris aus der Oper "Boulevard Solitude" is three movements for flute, vibraphone, harp and piano, and is followed by a violin-and-piano Sonatina, based on his children's opera Pollicino.

The sturdily dissonant Toccata mistica, for piano (Ciro Longobardi), is linked to the oratorio The Raft of the Medusa, and Neue Volkslieder und Hirtengesänge, scored for bassoon, guitar and string trio, to music Henze wrote for Oedipus Rex. Carillon, Récitatif, Masque is a glistening little opus for mandolin, guitar and harp.
--- Paul Driver, The Sunday Times (London), 1 February 2009


Cornelius Cardew
Treatise
Mode 205

The older I get the more inclined I am to think that life's not about finding the right answers but asking the right questions. And if you're looking for interesting (musical) questions to ask, you can't do much better than Cornelius Cardew's Treatise. This 193-page graphic score, which occupied the composer for four years, and which performers are encouraged to interpret any way they feel appropriate (though useful tips abound in the Treatise Handbook Cardew published in 1971) is rich, elusive and thought-provoking enough to keep you busy for a lifetime. You ask Keith Rowe. This October 1967 recording of the work - not the complete score, as Petr Kotik's liner notes here make clear (it would have been nice to know which pages were performed...one assumes not the last 50, which Cardew completed in Buffalo earlier that year) - comes from a concert in Prague, and features flautist Kotik with four other members of his QUaX ensemble, tenor saxophonist Pavel Kondelík, trombonist Jan Hyncica, percussionist Josef Vejvoda and pianist Václav Zahradník. The tapes have been carefully restored and remastered, but there's still plenty of vintage analogue airiness to the sound.

It's abundantly clear that the musicians were grappling with something difficult here, and that they'd spent some considerable time preparing their performance. And, although Treatise has often attracted free improvisers, we're definitely not talking anything goes n'importe quoi (I have serious doubts about some of the other available recordings of the work, though); you can hear the players thinking, both in the long stretches of silence and in their explorations on instruments "none of us really knew how to play." It's a huge, sprawling performance, 128 minutes long, with more stumbling and soul searching than flashes of inspiration, but one imagines Cardew would have approved of that (John Tilbury does, in the booklet), though I wonder what he'd have made of Zahradník's cocktail bar comping on disc two. Not so sure I like it much, but, if "every honest utterance makes sense" (Cardew), it certainly has its place here along with Kotik's squeaking trumpet (played with a bassoon reed) and bouncing ping pong balls. All in all, this is a disc to admire and respect more than love - which is fine, because that's just the way I feel about Treatise.
--- Dan Warburton, www.paristransatlantic.com, February 2009


Roland Dahinden
Flying White
Mode 175

Composer, trombonist and improvisor Roland Dahinden, born in 1962 in Switzerland, studied with George F. Haas, Vinko Globokar, Anthony Braxton and Alvin Lucier, and has performed with Brazton and Hildegaard Kleeb. On his third Mode CD, Klangforum Wien String Quartet perform quartets written 2000-04, each dedicated to a visual artist - most notably No. 2 (mind rock) for Richard Long. On a purely sonic level, this is an extraordinary listening experience, which seems relatively unaffected by the fact that quartets three and four were recorded using a binaural system in which headphones are preferred. All quartets share a hushed intimacy, with toneless bowing - a skating or rustling sound - perhaps effected by damping the strings and enhanced by close-miking. The worlds of Cage's 'number' pieces and Christian Wolff's Exercises are in the background, but for Dahinden, sonic beauty enters the equation also.
--- Andy Hamilton, The Wire


George Crumb
Black Angels and Makrokosmos III
Mode 170

George Crumb's often performed Music for a Summer Evening revels in its novel sonorities of exotic percussion and amplified pianos. The evocative titles ('Hymn for the Nativity of the Star Child'), quotations, both literary (Rilke, Pascal) and musical (Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier), and above all, the tempo indications ('Joyous, ecstatic, with a sense of cosmic time') suggest an unhurried approach; but here everything seems rushed, particularly in the final 'Song of Reconciliation', where even the gradual slackening of pulse indicated in the score goes practically for naught.

Black Angels, on the other hand, is a work of frightening intensity, where Jimi Hendrix and Pierrot Lunaire shake hands with the devil. Composed during the height of the Vietnam War, and 'finished on Friday the Thirteenth, March 1970 (in tempore belli)', Crumb's most celebrated work (which inspired the founding of the Kronos Quartet) was originally scored for amplified string quartet whose players are also required to bow glasses, shake a maraca and at a climax strike a tam-tam. It is presented here in a composer-approved 'expansion' for quartet and string orchestra.

Part of the effect of the original, particularly in live performance, comes from watching the players not only negotiate fearsomely difficult effects, such as bowing on the wrong side of the left fingers (creating viol-like tone quality), but also playing their array of percussion instruments and chanting in several languages; that heated atmosphere of intimate frenzy is lost when these labours are divided among a larger group.
--- Howard Goldstein, BBC Music Magazine


Luciano Berio
The Complete Sequenzas and Works for Solo Instruments
Mode 161-163

As a body of works for solo instruments, the series of Sequenzas written by Luciano Berio between 1958 and 2002 is without equal in the literature of late 20th century music. Though not the first recording of the complete Sequenzas - others have appeared on Deutsche Grammophone and Naxos - this four CD set, over ten years in the making, presents for the first time the final Sequenza XIV performed by its dedicatee, cellist Rohan De Saram, and the arrangement bassist Stefano Scodanibbio made of it a year after Berio's death in 2003. In addition to the 19 Sequenzas, the fourth disc also includes nine further works for solo instruments, ranging from the wild two minute harpsichord tour de force Rounds (1965) to the exquisite Chanson Pour Pierre Boulez (2000), recorded for the first time by De Saram, and also features Gesti, a sequenza in all but name written in 1966 for the Dutch recorder virtuoso Frans Brüggen.

Though the Sequenzas represent benchmarks in terms of technical difficulty and notation, they are by no means exercise in virtuosity for its own sake. The fact Berio used them as a reservoir for numerous spin-off chamber pieces indicates how important they were to him as extensions of his own musical language. The complexity of Darmstadt-dra serialism was just a starting point to explore compositional techniques in Western and non-Western musics past and present. The influence of the Bach Chaconne (in Sequenza VIII for violin) is as important as flamenco rasgado technique in the guitar Sequenzas and Sri Lankan Kandyan drumming (in XIV). The diversity of the music is breathtaking, from the violent post-impressionism of Sequenza II (for harp) to the theatrical antics of III and V, the latter performed by its dedicatee, trombonist Stuart Dempster, and the awesome virtuosity of violinist Irvine Arditti (VIII) and bassoonist Noriko Shimada (XII).

But it's a credit both to Berio's skill as a composer and to the equally of the performers that works once considered well-nigh unplayable, having been tailored to incorporate the techniques of their dedicatees - notably vocalist Cathy Berberian (Sequenza III) and oboist Heinz Hollinger (VII) - can be performed with such precision by others. In accordance with Berio's wishes, each Sequenza is prefaced by a quotation from the poetry of Edoardo Sanguineti, read by Enzo Salamone, and the set includes a thorough essay by Sabine Feisst. An essential release.
--- Dan Warburton, The Wire, August 2006


John Cage
One¹¹ with 103
Mode 174 (DVD)

Something about nothing: John Cage

As new releases of John Cage go, this is probably about as major as it gets. "The first commercial release of Cage's only feature-length film," the back cover trumpets, but, Cage being Cage, this film is about the material of the film making itself. There's no plot or characters - in fact, no human form is seen on the screen for the 90 minutes stretch of its duration. Instead, a cameraman, guided by chance procedures derived from the I Ching, manipulates constantly evolving patterns of light and shade against a fixed backdrop.

Echoing his wisecracking aphorism "I have nothing to say and I am saying it", Cage confirms that his film is about "nothing" in the accompanying documentary. He underlines his central credo that sound should not be representative of anything else other than itself, and transferring these principles to film in 1992 was a natural development. Cage had increasingly involved himself with visual art throughout the 1980s and boundaries became somewhat arbitrary. Why not give instructions to flautists, singers and also cameramen?

One¹¹ begins with a long series of credits and the line that every auteur aspires to see: "A Film By John Cage". The acknowledgements include nods towards Frank Zappa and Dennis Hopper, and the film itself splutters into being like an abstract pre-talkie flick. The black and white grainy quality of the picture allows for a rich palette of tones and textures, and the images are so disarmingly striking that your eyes can't help but listen carefully.

There are extras for the ears, too. Viewers can choose between two different performances of Cage's orchestral 103 (1991) to accompany, and the counterpoint between visual and sound is ample proof of how holistic Cage's vision had become. The sounds are otherwordly and hovering. Occasionally the orchestral monolith melts to allow underlying details sufficient oxygen, or gets broken by thunderous percussion whacks. Cage himself looks frail and died shortly after One¹¹ appeared. But what an extraordinary valedictory throw of the dice.
--- Philip Clark, The Wire, February 2007


John Cage
One¹¹ with 103
WDR Symphony Orchestra Köln/Arturo Tamayo; Spoleto Festival Orchestra/John Kennedy
Mode 174 (DVD)

John Cage explores the visual equivalent of silence

One¹¹ is a visual counterpart to Cage's 'silent' composition 4:33, questioning our concepts of emptiness. 'No space is empty,' he said. 'Light will show what is in it.'

The film is 'about' the play of light on more-or-less plain surfaces, shot in gritty black-and-white: I guess shooting in colour would have made it a film about light and colour, rather than pure light. It's also about the movements of the lights and camera, devised in advance by a computer programme, created in consultation with the random principles of I Ching.

The DVD also contains an interview with cinematographer Van Carlson and director Henning Lohner and a 43-minute documentary, during which Cage indicates the film should give pleasure without having meaning. What makes it art is the meditation of artists. I frequently derive pleasure from watching the play of sun/moon/firelight on the ceiling whilst listening to birdsong or a favourite record, but that surely makes me a slacker, not an artist.

The film is accompanied by two versions of the orchestral work 103, created quite independently of One¹¹, but also lasting 90 minutes and including the same number of 'episodes' (17). The version recorded at the premiere by the WDR Symphony Orchestra is notably more softly-focused than that by the Spoleto Festival Orchestra, but the drifting shapes and the constantly evolving textures of both interpretations help the time pass far more enjoyably.
--- Barry Witherden, BBC Music Magazine, March 2007


Aldo Clementi
Works with Guitar
Musicisti: Geoffrey Morris (chitarra); Elision Ensemble diretto da Carl Rosman.
Valutazione: 3.5 stelle
Mode 182

Works with Guitar si segnala tra le più recenti pubblicazioni dell'etichetta americana Mode per presentare un repertorio quasi del tutto inedito di pezzi con chitarra del compositore catanese Aldo Clementi e per i suoi eccellenti interpreti, d'origine australiana, il chitarrista Geoffrey Morris e l'Elision Ensemble. Frutto di collaborazioni avvenute su molteplici fronti, questo CD è uno dei non più rari casi di "globalitarismo" riuscito nella musica contemporanea.

I pezzi di Works with Guitar, che vanno dal 1978 al 2002, appartengono al cosidetto periodo "diatonico" di Clementi, così piacevolmente lontano da quella prima fase in cui prevaleva lo strutturalismo nel modo di selezionare e comporre, elaborando materiali modali e diatonici ispirati alla Tradizione europea del passato, tanto quello del Novecento che quello molto più antico.

In Works with Guitar si alternano pezzi per sola chitarra ("Dodici Variazioni", "Fantasia su frammenti di Michelangelo Galilei", "Otto Variazioni") a pezzi per ensemble e chitarra ("Serenata", "Albumblatt", "C.A.G", "The Plaint").

Il lavorio sulla tecnica è decisamente pregevole, acuto, sensibile. Le dinamiche, sui forti e sui piani, sono fortemente enfatizzate. Spiccano maggiormente i pezzi dove la chitarra è accompagnata: si delineano varchi dove, in modo sempre controllato, Clementi si apre ad una certa emozionalità. L'impressione generale è che la chitarra sia comunque un timbro, con una sua dinamicità, che si perde tuttavia nella tessitura generale del pezzo. Non domina, nè sovrasta. Osserva, come fosse l'occhio severo di Clementi.
--- Francesca Odilia Bellino, All About Jazz Italia, 7 October 2008


Frank Denyer
Silenced Voices
The Barton Workshop; Elisabeth Smalt (viola)
Frank Denyer and James Fulkerson (musical directors)
Mode 198

Silenced Voices is the second Mode Records disc devoted to the work of English composer Frank Denyer. Like its predecessor, Faint Traces, Silenced Voices features the Barton Workshop, the Amsterdam-based group that Denyer co-founded in 1989. Joined on this new disc by a number of male and female vocalists and some additional instrumentalists, the Barton Workshop presents four recent, substantial works: Woman, Viola and Crow (2004) was composed for, and is performed by, Dutch violist Elisabeth Smalt, who is required not only to execute the most delicate and controlled sustained sounds on muted viola, but also vocalise, shake a set of rattles on her back and produce audible footsteps with special shoes; both Two Beacons (2005) and Tentative Thoughts, Silenced Voices (2002-3) are for ensembles of voices, various string instruments (including Indian sarangi and santur), percussion and offstage 'presences' (male and female vocal ensembles in the former, trumpet in the latter); Ghosts Again (2004-5) is for two sextets, one of homogenous and one of non-homogenous instrumentation.

The four works might be heard as a totality, as one long process; a process that is analogous to that of excavating for fragments of ancient pottery. Single sounds and short-lived sonic microcosms follow each other like a sequence of unearthed artefacts, each at once self-contained and possessed of multiple relationships: relationships with the fragment unearthed last, the fragment that might be unearthed next, all the fragments unearthed in the present excavation, and, ultimately, all the fragments ever unearthed. Sometimes fragments fit together across time to reveal an exquisite tableau, such as the short instances of viola harmonics in Woman, Viola and Crow. Sometimes three or four similar shards of brightly painted porcelain are discovered over several minutes, as in the chorale-like vocal segments that leap out of the texture in Tentative Thoughts, Silenced Voices or the strangely unsettling crow calls that punctuate Woman, Viola and Crow. When one hears the large 'off-stage' male and female vocal ensembles in Two Beacons or the 'off-stage' trumpet in Tentative Thoughts, Silenced Voices, or the frail exhalations of breath in Ghosts Again, it's like coming across an object you recognise from your childhood buried in the topsoil - it's faded, chipped perhaps, but recognisable and charged with memories.

Rich with a multiplicity of counterpoints, the music suggests a multitude of associations - within the music, beyond it and even within the personal life of the listener, as Bob Gilmore suggests in his insightful liner notes. I can only imagine what dimensions would be added to this music in live performance, where the theatre of performance would act in addition to the sounds.

This music calls for immersion, I feel, the way David Lynch's latest film, Inland Empire, calls for immersion. Or the music of late-period Morton Feldman. Although Denyer is quoted in the liner notes as preferring that listeners don't raise the volume when listening to the CD, I still felt the best way to immerse myself in this disc was to turn the volume way up and put my head between the speakers.

Regardless of your volume preferences, though, this disc's sublimely sensitive performances and subtle production will offer a highly concentrated experience.
--- Garrett Sholdice, Journal of Music in Ireland, 2009


Frank Denyer
Silenced Voices
Mode 198

The rattling of a string of shells

The English composer Frank Denyer is the creator of a poetic world full of shadows and spirits, of noises behind walls and rustlings in trees. As a composer he is not widely known, and that is strange. Firstly because his music is very authentic and seems to be distinct from any streams. Secondly because he conjours up a world that grabs you immediately by the collar. Denyer writes hushed music that asks for a special kind of musician - his sounds are often so vulnerable that they only come to life under the right hands. That happens here time and time again. Take Woman, Viola and Crow, wherein top musician Elisabeth Smalt with a vulnerable voice sings along with the sparse tones on her viola. There sound footsteps, the rattling of a string of shells, and the calling of crows. All very miraculous and enchanting. In the other compositions the Barton Workshop plays just as magically, in this creaking wooden house in a nocturnal wood.
--- Anthony Fiumara, TROUW, 22 November 2008 (The Netherlands)


Roland Auzet
Percussion(s)
Mode 189-192 (CD, DVD & Book)

Mode Records boss Brian Brant has always been a man obsessed with formats. He was a pioneer in presenting New Music on DVD and now combines audio, visual and printed matter (the latter provided by the French publisher Tschuann) in a new Mode series called Inactuelles. Each slipcase-box will focus on a composer or theme, and this first installment surveys innovative music for percussion played by French percussionist Roland Auzet.

At the heart of this set sits Iannis Xenakis, which seems only proper. The DVD documents Auzet's performances of Psaphha (1976) and Rébonds (1988), and the visuals greatly increase our understanding of how Xenakis's music demands physicality and dainty precision. In the book, Auzet describes Xenakis's importance as a conceptualiser of percussion music as "launching the debate of form and content. Percussion is not rhythmical, not folkloric, is not exotic." In other words Xenakis liberated percussion from being a colouristic effect, and found an approach to pitch and rhythm that matched square pegs with square holes.

The earliest piece included, the 1952 Concerto De Chambre for marimba and nine players by French neoclassical composer Darius Milhaud, desperately tries to slot square pegs into round holes. Milhaud's melodic pomp would have idiomatic purpose on a string or wind instrument, but plods inelegantly against the marimba's brittle attack. But even when Xenakis uses percussion in a more representational way, as in his 1987 Kassandra for bass voice and percussion, an extra scene added to his theatrical piece Oresteia, the thunderous ritual of his writing feels authentic: material and structure are interchangeable.

Edmund Campion's Losing Touch (1994) for vibraphone and electronics begins with an electronic treatment of the vibraphone that transforms its wobbly tones into tiny glissandi figures that are put into a duologue with the 'live' vibraphone. Karen Tanaka's Metallic Cristal (1995) also involves electronics, this times deployed to transform base metal percussion into kaleidoscopic timbres; other composers like Carlos Roque Alsina and Yoshihisa Taïra, use conventional techniques. Most intriguing, however, is Pierre Jodlowski's Mecano (2004) which embeds motors and metronomes inside a battery of percussion instruments. The music ticks like a faulty mechanical object as the real-time percussionist adds a humane dimension - the grain of percussion redefined.
--- Philip Clark, The Wire, December 2008


Iannis Xenakis
Kraanerg
Mode 196 (CD & DVD)

Kraanerg stands as the longest stretch of non-stop music Xenakis ever composed, and has historically been his most problematic piece. The backstory is that Xenakis was approached to create a ballet score for the inauguration of Ottowa's National Arts Centre in 1969. Despite a new university post and work on another commission, Xenakis accepted the challenge to produce a 75 minute score in six months. The director of the first production infuriated him by slamming an interval in the middle of his fastidious architecture; most contemporary critics agreed that the music was superb, but regretted the stilted staging.

All these decades later a paradox hangs awkwardly: despite Xenakis designing Kraanerg specifically as a dramatic stage work, the music never quite touches on the levels of innate drama he achieved in 'pure' orchestral and instrumental works like Pithoprakta and Eonta. Those pieces pursue a particular technical consideration to its logical end game, but without its stage action Kraanerg's episodic structure and frank re-application of techniques from earlier works feels unwieldy.

But the fantastical sound world Kraanerg evokes is irresistible. The ballet has been recorded previously, but this 2006 version performed by the Callithumpian Consort conducted by Stephen Drury is definitive. The National Arts Centre were keen to show off their sophisticated sound system, and Xenakis extrapolated a tape part from treatments of the ballet's instrumental parts for the original performance. The overlap between instruments and electronics is one of Kraanerg's more intriguing aspects, as electronics push towards a refined, aliented mode of expression. Remastered tapes reveal hitherto shrouded high-register brightnesses and sonorous low-end depths; an audio DVD version realised at the same time has surround sound as Xenakis intended it.
--- Philip Clark, The Wire, 2008


Frances White
Centre Bridge: electroacoustic works
Mode 184

Frances White (b. 1960) writes a very precise and personal sort of electroacoustic music, but one whose innate lyricism and humility never allows the technology to show off. She seems to base her practice on the intense aural observation of place, and the absorption of that environment into her very fiber. Out of that osmosis pieces emerge.

The oldest work on the disk (1992) is Walk through "Resonant landscape" No. 2. It was originally an installation that allowed a listener/observer to indicate a point on a computer controlled map, which would in turn lead to a series of sounds keyed to the locations on explored. The results are subtle. At times there are gorgeous, unaltered natural sounds, like a flight of geese. At other times, the natural sounds are filtered into a dreamlike collection of flickers and drones, often transformed so far as to seem purely electronic. This version is a recording of one of these walks, since annotator James Pritchett indicates the technology for the interactive realization of the piece is now completely obsolete.

Centre Bridge is the title of this album, and of two pieces on the collection. It is - as Pritchett's lucid notes relate - a nondescript bridge crossing the Delaware between Pennsylvania and New Jersey. White listened to the drones that emerged from the bridge's structure as cars passed over, combined it with the natural sounds of the water underneath, and from this created a sonic backdrop against which she could draw the lines of the acoustic instruments' parts. The two Centre Bridge(s) are for shakuhachi duo (Japanese bamboo flute) and string quintet, from 1999 and 2001, respectively. The first emphasizes the structural drone, the second the water. Both reach points of gentle rapture, the former as a sort of Japanese expressionism, the latter more in the spirit of French Impressionism. Like the lily (1999) suffuses the music for its string duo with aspects of the plainchant Alleluia: Justus germinabit. As it proceeds, the electroacoustic part brings the sweeping sounds of wind and rain into the texture, and the effect is truly dreamlike and refreshing. The fit between the acoustic and recorded sounds is unexpected, and yet totally right. A veil barely seen (2000) is an extended rhapsodic meditation for viola over the sound of water, and latter of which is slowly unmasked to reveal ever more rich and dramatic sounds. It is as though a percussion ensemble slowly materializes from the mists.

This sense of a music derived from the environment suggests the approach of composers like Annea Lockwood or Pauline Oliveros, but White is also still very committed to sweeping, more traditionally lyrical musical gestures. So one ends up with a very personal and uncategorizable blend of the classical and experimental in her work. Some may feel the blend isn't pure enough for their taste, but I love the way it stretches across these boundaries. And everything is guided by a very sure and focused taste. It's scrupulous. And it also bespeaks much tenderness.

The performances all seem exquisite. I can't help but give particular praise to the shakuhachi playing of Elizabeth Brown, who plays both parts of the duo via multitracking; she's one of the real American virtuosos of the instrument, and as anyone who might reference earlier reviews I've written of her own music in Fanfare will note, a comparably strong and original composer.

Ultimately this is a release that brings deep pleasures, but they sneak up on you. White is a voice from which I'll anticipate future releases.
--- Robert Carl, Fanfare, September/October 2008


Alvin Lucier
Ever Present
Mode 178

L'aspetto performativo è il grosso limite dei documenti sonori che si limitano alla registrazione del dato musicale senza considerare quello che si muove attorno al suono. Il compositore americano Alvin Lucier (nome da accostare a quelli di Robert Ashley e Gordon Mumma) attribuisce a molte sue composizioni un senso gestuale con scarni rimandi "concettuali", analogamente a molti suoi conterranei come Laurie Anderson: ciò che si sente (e si vede), è. Il mezzo è il messaggio, anche in musica (o almeno secondo un certo modo di intenderla), anche se il messaggio è davvero essenziale.

In Lucier il dispendio di mezzi è quindi assolutamente minimale e la finalità sembra la ricerca di una consapevolezza del puro suono. I possibili referenti non mancano.

Ampliando con alcune composizioni degli anni duemila (a parte un'eccezione) la produzione forse più nota di Lucier, quella uscita per la nota Lovely Music, questa raccolta dimostra l'assoluta essenzialità dei mezzi messi in campo.

Con Piper si prende ad esempio il bordone armonico di una cornamusa e lo si fa risuonare per un determinato periodo di tempo. L'interprete si muove per una stanza creando un effetto Doppler (reso in verità in modo impercettibile nella registrazione) e altera leggermente i toni del bordone, creando un'accelerazione dei battimenti. In Fan invece il protagonista è il suono di quattro koto giapponesi che vengono intrecciati in un phasing che progressivamente crea urti di semitoni attorno a un unisono abbastanza melenso. 947 prende la sua denominazione dai rapporti intervallari tra una nota fondamentale e la sua nona, quarta e settima. Anche in questo caso lo sviluppo lento e privo di agogica crea una fissità apparentemente immutabile. Con Silver Streetcar for the Orchestra il protagonista è un semplicissimo triangolo che si muove nello spazio, anche in questo caso per creare impercettibili cambiamenti nella grana di un medesimo suono ripetuto. Infine Ever Present, una composizione per piccolo ensemble formato da flauto, sax alto e pianoforte, ispirato dalle forma ovoidale dei vialetti di un giardino. La prospettiva geometrica si rispecchia nei suoni circolari che disegnano un saliscendi di altezze secondo uno schema simmetrico, ovale appunto.

Il mondo di Lucier potrà sembrare anche molto sobrio, ma possiede un'indubbia capacità: quella di farci concentrare sull'elemento primario suono, attraverso fonti molto scarne. Non a caso gli strumenti scelti enfatizzano una qualità timbrica che ricerca il suono più puro: quello dell'onda sinusoidale che in natura invece non esiste. Paradossi della contemporaneità.
--- Michele Coralli, altremusiche.it, February 2008


Chris Newman
Piano Sonatas Nos. 1, 4, 6, 10
Mode 201

Chris Newman was born in London in 1958 and now lives and works in Berlin, where his activities include painting, writing (poetry and prose), installation and performance art. According to the potted biography in the liners, translating the poetry of Mandelstam and Khlebnikov was "an experience that proved important for his later work", though the names that are more likely to spring to mind on listening to these piano sonatas are Clarence Barlow, Misha Mengelberg and maybe even John White (a reminder that a decent release of some more of White's piano sonatas - how many are there now, 131? - is long overdue). "I was using conventional tonality literally but in a non-conventional way," writes Newman of his first Sonata (1982), "using historical styles in a non-historical way, putting them to the forefront - preclassical / Janacek / Ives / homemade Beethoven." A few years ago, this stuff would have been described as "postmodern", but since postmodernism has now been with us longer than modernism and the term has been bludgeoned into meaninglessness through overuse, maybe we should find some kind of substitute, not that I can think of any. Newman repositions the left and right hand parts of a CPE Bach sonata in his Sonata No. 4 (1990) ("a way of fucking up the chronology to put it into a kind of solid-state with itself"), combines material from his own Third Symphony with Beethoven's Op. 90 (Sonata No.6, 1997) and incorporates rhythms from Varèse's Amériques and pitches from Schubert's Winterreise (Sonata No. 10, 2004) not as exercises in "quotation or cultural reference [..] but [because] they provide the best material for the job, i.e. to build models for existential phenomena." Fair enough, but whether you call it quotation or not, taking your musical raw material from a repertoire people are so familiar with is a risky business. There's always an element of irony involved, on the part of both composer and listener. We find Barlow and Mengelberg's "wrong" notes funny because we know from experience what the "right" ones should be, but Newman's non-resolving chord sequences, disappearing trills and sudden stops, aided and abetted by Michael Finnissy's splendidly deadpan reading (someone should persuade him to record some Satie) soon lose their power to amuse - not that amusing the listener is what he purposefully set out to do - and listener fatigue soon sets in. This is a disc to dip into, a sonata at a time, rather than play from beginning to end.
--- Dan Warburton, www.paristransatlantic.com/magazine, Autumn 2008


Tim Hodgkinson
Sketch of Now
Mode 164

I once got into trouble with Fred Frith by comparing one of his recent pieces (not all that favourably, as I recall) to his old stuff with Henry Cow. He had a point. So if you pick this up expecting it to be another one of those colourful knitted socks, forget it. Clarinettist / composer Tim Hodgkinson has come a long way since "Nirvana for Mice" - or rather, gone a long way, as he's spent a lot of time out in the wilderness of Siberia researching shamanic music and ritual. More recently he's been dusting off his improv chops in the trio Konk Pack, with Thomas Lehn and Roger Turner (what happened to Konk Pack, by the way?), and, as this splendid debut on Mode reveals, concentrating on his composition. Three of the six pieces on Sketch Of Now were recorded in Romania, with Iancu Dumitrescu and Ana-Maria Avram's Hyperion Ensemble. Hence the Romanian translation of the title track Aici Schiteaza pe Acum, a scary nine minutes of "accumulation and discharge" of sonic energy for ensemble and tape. Hodgkinson plays the solo clarinet (and bass clarinet) parts himself in Vers Kongsu II and Fighting / Breathing, the former an energetic tussle with the Romanians (plus Vinny Golia, making a guest appearance on bass clarinet), the latter a sparring match with pre-recorded percussion. The split-second timing and fresh unpredictability of Hodgkinson's music owe much to his skill as an improviser, but he's got a sharp ear for orchestral timbre too, and puts it to impressive use. It's not easy listening though; Fragor, for computer-modified cello and electric guitar (both performed by the composer, it seems - there's no mention of personnel in the booklet) is what my mother would call "nasty modern music". In fact she calls just about everything written after 1950 "nasty modern music", with the exception of a few Benjamin Britten things, but in this case she's got a point - De Yoknapatawpha is a thorny affair, brilliantly executed (I use the word deliberately) by Jacques di Donato and Isabelle Duthoit on clarinets and pianist Pascale Berthelot, but hard to love. But they used to say that about Henry Cow, too.
--- Dan Warburton, www.paristransatlantic.com/magazine, October 2006


John Cage
Atlas Eclipticalis with Winter Music
Mode 3/6

Originally released as a 4LP set back in the early days of Mode Records, the first two discs of this 3CD set document the two live performances of Cage's 1961 orchestral work Atlas Eclipticalis played simultaneously with 1957's Winter Music (in a version for three pianos) recorded at Seattle's Cornish Institute on December 11th 1983. Disc three presents what the label rather grandly describes as an "all-star" recording of all 86 instrumental parts of Atlas Eclipticalis, (the first of its kind) recorded under the composer's supervision at the John Cage At Wesleyan festival in 1988 - the "stars" include the Arditti Quartet, Alvin Lucier and Christian Wolff - and an version of Winter Music directed by Stephen Drury, overdubbing four pianists five times to get the required 20-piano result. As ever, the CDs are accompanied by an erudite and comprehensive set of liner notes, including, amongst other things, facsimiles of Cage's handwritten performing instructions and essays on the works by the composer, Matthew Kocmieroski, Don Gillespie and Stephen Drury.

While not questioning for a moment Gillespie and Drury's assertion that Atlas was the major Cage work of the 60s (like Concert for Piano and Orchestra was for the 50s and Sonatas and Interludes for the 40s), the Seattle performances are still a tough listen. One wonders whether it is really necessary to sit down and concentrate furiously all the way through, or let the mind wander ("if the mind wanders, let it", as the composer once famously wrote). But even if you choose to spin this while you busy yourself with other more mundane activities such as picking mushrooms or consulting the I Ching, the occasional fortissimo percussion crashes will soon shake you out of Ambient mode. The fuller textures on the 1988 86-part version are more engrossing, though for my money the late orchestral number pieces 103 and 108 are more satisfying. The 20-piano version of Winter Music is much more fun, its multitracked jagged clusters and pointy staccatos getting almost funky. Cage completists who missed out on the earlier LP box set (me!) can rejoice; it's a thrill to see this sitting on my shelves, even if I wonder how many times I'll return to it in the years to come.
--- Dan Warburton, www.paristransatlantic.com/magazine, April 2007


Jason Eckardt
Out of Chaos
Ensemble 21, conducted by Jeffrey Milarsky and Paul Hostetter
Mode 137

JASON ECKARDT clearly rejects the argument, made with increasing frequency, that the mid-20th-century atonalists were working toward a musical dead end. Harmonically and rhythmically his music thrives on complex, constantly changing relationships, but like many composers under 40 (he was born in 1971) he tempers the more prickly, jagged elements of the post-tonal style with humor and eclecticism. What holds your attention in his music is not its ingenuity but its relentless energy and drive.

He also has a knack for defying expectations. Drawn to Minimalist sculpture - Richard Serra's "Tilted Arc" adorns the CD cover, an allusion to the opening work, "After Serra" (2000) - he resists using the Minimalist musical vocabulary to evoke it. That resistance eventually evaporates, at least partly. The final four minutes of the score is an eerie stasis of slow textural shifts and quietly scampering solos over sustained tones. But that comparative serenity is hard won, coming after 10 minutes of vigorous, high-energy counterpoint. The most ambitious work here, the 2-movement, 27-minute "Polarities" (1998), also begins with an eventful, virtuosic opening section that gives way to quiet spareness. But the proportions are reversed; here the slow, introspective writing is the center of gravity.

The musicians of Ensemble 21 play this music sizzlingly. Particularly striking in "Polarities" is Jean Kopperud's fluid, feisty clarinet playing, which bounces between klezmerlike note bending and assertive multiphonics that evoke John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman. Taimur Sullivan, on soprano saxophone, makes "Tangled Loops" (1996) into a vivid character piece. And Marilyn Nonken's sharply focused and often athletic pianism, Rolf Schulte's lyrical violin playing, atmospheric percussion by Thomas Kolor and a rich cello line from Christopher Finckel, enliven the involved textures of "A Glimpse Retraced" (1999).
--- Allan Kozinn, The New York Times, Arts & Leisiure, July 28, 2008


Lou Harrison
Por Gitaro - Suites for Tuned Guitars
John Schneider, guitars
Mode 195



Por GitaroIn response to the hegemony of equal temperament tuning in Western music, which he saw as a paragon of drab uniform compromise, Lou Harrison began in the early fifties to compose music in Just Intonation.

In this tuning system the intervals are built out of proportions of whole numbers (so an octave = 2:1, a fifth = 3:2, a tone can equal 10:9 or 9:8 etc), not out of multiples of the same basic interval as in equal temperament. The qualities of the intervals are much more idiosyncratic, less homogenised in Just tuning systems, and the basic colour of the music is rich and eclectic in comparison with examples of equally tempered music (which albeit allow much greater fixity and systematisation of sound).

A nice visual analogy of this contrast exists in the frets of guitars. The conventional fretting system replicates the fixed standards of equal temperament tuning. A guitar organised with respect to Just Intonation is fretted quite distinctively, with the usual dull leaden boundary standards replaced by a more playful, more beautiful discreteness (see picture below). The visual contrast is maintained into the realm of sound, as demonstrated on this rather radiant and charming release, where the guitar is subtly revivified as a bearer of the most sumptuously resonant sound.

The highly respected contemporary guitar specialist John Schneider, a collaborator of Harrison's during the composer's lifetime, assembled and arranged for Justly tuned guitar (with the composer's blessing) much of the work on this disc, which in the main originated as harp or harpsichord works. He performs it likewise. The exceptions are the opening Serenade suite and much of the Ditone Set, both of which Harrison wrote in response to Tom Stone's invention of a guitar with removable fingerboards. Harrison had ipso facto planned to compose five guitar suites, in five different Just Intonation tunings, but other commissions got in the way and the composer managed just these two.

John Schneider with Just tuned guitars, As is typical for Harrison the musical style of the works is highly referential. It mixes an open and potent directness of expression (manifest in the cyclic repetitive structures, the simple melodic ideas, the bare textures and the sonorous tuning), with very clear formal and gestural reminiscences from medieval and baroque European music, and from Eastern folk forms. The guitar is accompanied throughout by simple percussion accompaniment. This accompaniment most often underlines the rhythmic accent of the line, but from time to time takes part in the resonant soundscape of the piece, as for example the gongs do in the Air from the Serenade, or the (Justly tuned) gamelan does likewise in the typical melange of In Honour of the Divine Mr. Handel.

Schneider realises everything here with loving attentiveness to the composer's idiom. Eastern modes are sinuously brought forth, whilst the lyric sentiment of much of the writing is always gracefully imbued. The guitarist also though instils a real sense of idiosyncratic playfulness to the music, especially to the middle eastern tinge of for example the Jahla from the Suite for National Steel Guitar, the formally baroque but musically worldly Sonata from the Serenade, or the tango in the first Suite.

Schneider wrings a lovely tone from his guitar in the moving and intimate Music for Bill and Me from that first suite, and his sensitive handling of the resonating Solo from the Suite for National Steel Guitar brings all the richness of the tuning to the fore. He is capable also of technical intricacy, as shown in his limpid readings of the Estampie from the Ditone Set and the two Jahla. The guitarist is alive to the baroque clarity required in for example the Infinite Canon of the Serenade, and he shows himself continually capable in creating a sounding poetry of medieval longing, as in the Adagio, arioso from the Second Suite.

Schneider has a clear command of the Justly tuned guitar, and of the possibilities of the tuning system in general, which allows him to bring these pieces forth with a degree of fluency that means they can be judged solely in terms of pure sound. They are not waylaid by theoretical baggage, and they sound all the fresher because of that. The starkness and simplicity of some of the music may not be to everyone's liking - the percussion in particular can often be overly literal, though the Just Strings ensemble never cloud the guitar's presence too much in this. But for anyone interested in the intersection of Middle Eastern, medieval, baroque and relatively contemporary experimental music style, particularly with reference to the sort of poetry of longing that runs through all of them, this release comes highly recommended. It offers a unique and valuable opportunity to experience a disc full of direct illustrations of some of the richness that inheres in Just Intonation tuning systems, as realised through the highly sympathetic form of the guitar.

Look out for more reviews of recent Mode releases, a label that specialises in the best of contemporary experimental music, on our site in the near future.
--- Stephen Graham, MusicalCriticism.com, 7 November 2008


Lou Harrison
Por Gitaro
Mode 195

Performance:
Sound:

Although he did not hold grudges against instruments, the standard classical guitar was not one of Lou Harrison's favorites, although he had used it effectively as early as 1942 in his classic percussion piece Canticle No. 3. Its system of fixed frets indivisibly wedded it to equal temperament, a compromise of tuning that Harrison -- and many others -- regarded as a conspiracy on the part of the West to deprive music of its depth of color. In 1977, guitarist Tom Stone designed a guitar with removable frets and contacted Harrison, who excitedly launched a series of suites for the new instrument. By 1978, the pressures of external commissions and Harrison's need to compose music for his gamelan orchestra sidelined these projects; however, guitarist John Schneider volunteered to facilitate them according to Harrison's plan, using the music already composed and selecting pieces from Harrison's works for other instruments. Schneider completed his work just before Harrison died in 2002, and mode records has recorded this important cycle of pieces with Schneider inside the specially built, environmentally sensitive straw bale house Harrison designed and lived in just before his death. Por Gitaro -- the title given in Harrison's favored language of Esperanto -- is the result, featuring Schneider in a loving and dedicated performance of the five suites Harrison authorized, plus an arrangement of the piece In Honor of the Divine Mr. Handel (1991) that adds the HMC American Gamelan under Bill Alves. Also included is an informative three-and-a-half-minute conversation recorded between Harrison and Schneider in 1981, in which Harrison comments "it is agreeable to me to have my music arranged."

Schneider utilizes a standard guitar with refitted frets for most of the performances; however, he also employs a National Steel Guitar for one suite, and its slightly nasal tone adds a special bite to Harrison's preferred temperaments. The interior of the straw bale house also contributes a warm and earthy ambience to the proceedings, though it is used only in the solo works; the guitar and gamelan piece was recorded at Pomona College. If one has little or no familiarity with Harrison's compositions, this is a wonderful sample; the compass of movements making up these suites range from Harrison's entire compositional career, from 1934 to 2002. Schneider's playing is skillful and sensitive, and he is an effective interpreter of Harrison, who, in his mature music, emphasized clarity of texture, tonal color, and melodicity over almost all other considerations. This has led many academics and "serious" scholars to dismiss Harrison's music, though there is no denying its immediate appeal, communicativeness, and vaguely spiritual properties. In Schneider's capable hands, both the "serious" and "smiling" aspects of Harrison's music come to the fore; Por Gitaro is a beautiful recording and is definitive in regards to the literature included.
--- Dave Lewis, All Music Guide, 2008


Lou Harrison
Por Gitaro: Suites for Tuned Guitars
Serenade; Suites Nos 1 & 2; Suite for National Steel Guitar, etc.
Guitars: John Schneider
Mode 195

Lou Harrison (1917-2003) is well represented by recordings and these two discs range widely amongst his diverse interests, far from the mainstream classical concert world.

It is all easy listening, but not too simple, and conveys a captivating joie de vivre.

The new MODE disc of guitar music explores Harrison's interest in the variety of tuning temperaments, which are of course comonplace for early keyboard music, but impossible with fixed fretted instruments.

John Schneider has explored many alternative guitars, with adjustable frets. He also uses steel strings for one of his instruments. At the least, it will sharpen your ears!

A must for young guitarists keen to widen their horizons.
--- Peter Grahame Woolf, Musical Pointers online magazine, March 2008


Giacinto Scelsi
The Orchestral Works 2
Mode 176

Mode's Scelsi series reaches Volume 6 with three recordings made live at the Wien Modern festival in November 2005, featuring the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra, Concentus Vocalis and Wiener Kammerchor conducted by Peter Rundel and Johannes Kalitzke. Scelsi junkies will probably already have their copy by now, as the disc features the world premiere recording of the epic cantata for chorus and orchestra La nascita del Verbo, which was written between 1946 and 1948 and first performed a year later at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées in Paris (where, you will recall, Stravinsky's Sacre provoked a legendary riot at its premiere) conducted by Roger Desormière. It's an impressively weighty piece, the composition of which apparently plunged the composer into a period of creative crisis, but one whose orchestration and material - there's even a fully-fledged double fugue - looks back to the sprawling early 20th century choral works instead of forward into the brave new world of microtonality and "spherical sound" that the composer subsequently explored. The quintessential Scelsi orchestral masterpiece, Quattro Pezzi (su una nota solo), which dates from barely a decade later, is in another galaxy altogether. This remarkable work still sounds amazing nearly fifty years after it was written, and its exploration of microtonal and timbral nuances paved the way for Grisey, Murail and Radulescu (and I don't agree with Jean-Noël van der Weid that musique spectrale is an inept name for their music) and is one of late 20th century music's greatest treasures. I'm not sure the work has ever been recorded as well as it deserves to be - I don't know how many mics the Viennese techies had at their disposal but some of the myriad nuances sound a little far back in the mix - but Peter Rundel's reading of the piece is certainly as sensitive to detail as the other available recording of the work in my collection, conducted by Jurg Wyttenbach, which featured the orchestra and chorus of Polish Radio in Cracow. Without wishing to cast aspersions on them and the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra on this new recording, it'd be great if one day the work could be recorded by a truly major league outfit with a huge budget - and no audience: sorry to come across all Keith Jarrett-like, but the coughs and splutters, not that there are many of them, are somewhat distracting. As Joëlle Léandre (quoted by van der Weid in his liners) rightly states, your perception becomes so intense when performing and listening to Scelsi's music that you actually become sound itself, as it were, and the bronchial spasms of the Viennese concertgoers do tend to break the spell a bit. Still, I'm not complaining. Especially since the disc also includes Uaxuctum (1966), subtitled The Legend of the Mayan City which they themselves destroyed for religious reasons, another monsterpiece for ondes Martenot, seven percussionists, timpani and 23-piece ensemble. In terms of both its scoring (chorus, ondes Martenot) and Mayan inspiration it makes for an interesting comparison with Varèse's 1934 Ecuatorial - was Scelsi familiar with the earlier work? van der Weid makes no mention of the piece in his essay - but where Varèse's setting of the Popul Vuh was taut and wiry, Scelsi is grim and dramatic, all sinister pedal points and rolling timpani thunder. Oddly enough, it seems to have dated a little more than the Quatro Pezzi, and though its harmonic language is far removed from the world of La nascita del Verbo, it shares with the earlier work a strong sense of theatricality ("horror movie music!" my eight-year-old described it, enthusiastically). Since Scelsi's oeuvre was taken up enthusiastically by a younger generation of self-proclaimed tone scientists it's been all too easy to overlook its raw gut power. This fine disc serves as a timely reminder how overwhelmingly emotional his music is. Here's to Volume 7.
--- Dan Warburton, www.paristransatlantic.com/magazine, February 2007


Giacinto Scelsi
The Orchestral Works 2
Mode 176
AND
The Works for Double Bass
Mode 188

The quintessential Quattro Pezzi (su una nota sola) lay bare Scelsi's techniques, aims and concerns. While Schoenberg, Boulez and Cage brought to the 20th century new organizational strategies, Scelsi sidestepped their advances through a fundamental reappraisal of pitch and instrumental color. Webern's Klangfarbenmelodie may have arrived there first, however Scelsi went to an extreme by devoting entire movements to a single pitch. A primal force exhorts the Quattro Pezzi's F, B, A-flat and A towards purity as 25 musicians, predominantly winds, snake though gouging harmonic shifts and microtonal distemper. His precisely notated scores explicitly specify quarter-tone inflections, types of vibrato, mutes, dynamics, etc. Crisp unisons materialize but are soon abandoned for eviscerating tremolos and detuned shrieks, thus avoiding the security of harmonic completeness.

Intended or not, this mode orchestral release hangs heavy with the pallor of sickness and death. La nascita del Verbo preceded Scelsi's mental collapse in the late 1940s. He cured himself, so the story goes, by continuously playing the same piano note for days on end. Oriental philosophy filtered in as well. Quattro Pezzi represents his recovery's culmination. The anguished Uaxuctum's subtitle, The Legend of the Mayan City which they themselves destroyed for religious reasons, perpetuates the obsessions.

In their Quattro Pezzi, Rundel and the Vienna Radio Symphony position us cautiously at the abyss' edge. The live recording enshrines coughs and shuffling, the effect of which diminishes choral aspirations in the eruptive Uaxuctum whose five movements careen towards destruction. After Quattro Pezzi Scelsi permitted himself a greater array of pitches, always handled with meticulous care. Uaxuctum writhes in the presence of death, its wailing ondes Martenot a stern sibyl. These DVD-Audio recordings possess the best clarity around, vastly superior to Hans Zender's cautious 1978 Quattro Pezzi on cpo 999 485-2 or even Jurg Wyttenbach's classic yet overly reverberant Quattro Pezzi and Uaxuctum on Accord 200612.

This first recording of La nascita del Verbo suggests truculence. Its intoxicating jumble of expressionism, Wagnerian bluster and complex canons aligns it with similar creation myths by Leifs and Langgaard. Grandiose and colorful passages compare with Scriabin and Messiaen, with strange chorus murmurings suggesting B-movie sound effects. Beyond the work's fervency, it's hard to find the mature Scelsi, suggesting rather that he wasn't quite all there.

Scelsi solo and chamber pieces routinely stretch individual limits by requiring non-standard techniques from tapping to vocalization. On the surface, the works' short lengths suggest miniatures, and yet, because Scelsi abandoned traditional forms and edged closer to improvisation, his works are expansive despite their brevity.

The two-movement Nuits (C'est bien la nuit and Le Réveil profond) emerges as an abstract, somewhat traditional bass solo. Black's riveting performance delivers floor-rattling low notes, the full-throated upper range betraying none of the nasality of Joëlle Léandre's 1993 hat release (hat ART CD 6124).

Ko-Tha requires that the bass be lowered to the ground and treated percussively. Black employs bassist Fernando Grillo's arrangement of these Three Dances of Shiva, originally scored for guitar, to be played across the lap. In 1988, percussionist Maurizio Ben Omar used an amplified guitar on INA M�moire Vive 262009. Black's realization is darker, less attributable to a stringed instrument. Grillo's 1976 performance on the second disc of col legno's 50 Jahre Neue Musik in Darmstadt (set: WWE 4CD 31893; single disc: WWE 1CD 31895) seems preoccupied with exotic sound production and sits closer to works by Lachenmann, Xenakis and Cage in the same release (it's also a single 7:13 track whereas Black clearly delineates three: 8:14, 2:19 and 3:44).

Two duets receive their first recordings: the cello and bass Dharana and the double-bass duet Kshara. Titled in Sanskrit, both course slowly though quarter- and eighth-tones under precisely specified vibrato. Practically a palindrome, Dharana represents the initial stage in deep meditation. A delicately warped unison occupies Kshara's center. Scelsi cleverly applies scordatura so that some notes resonate while others pass dully. The cello-bass duet Et maintenant c'est à vous de jouer... soars through long double-stops.

Black's gutteral cries in Maknongon will startle. Specified for "any low instrument or voice," some performers take the less satisfying non-vocal route: Michel Tavernier on bassoon (ADDA 581 189), Uli Fussenegger on double bass (Kairos 0012162KAI), Giancarlo Sciaffini on bass tuba and Nicolas Isherwood's bass voice (both on hat ART CD 6124). This latter hat release has a third realization, bassist Joëlle Léandre whose deep groaning unfairly suggests Yoko Ono.

Scored for an odd trio of mistuned and amplified harp, bass and tam-tam, Okanagon clings to indeterminate nether regions recalling Mahler's "Der Abschied"'s lugubrious halting opening. A central tapping episode reinforces Scelsi's "heartbeat of the earth." The set closes with the melodic Mantram which swirls both jazz and oriental languors.
--- Grant Chu Covell, La Folia online review, March 2008


Margaret Leng Tan / Evans Chan
Sorceress of the New Piano; The Maverick Piano
Mode 194 DVD

George Crumb called Margaret Leng Tan a sorceress of the piano and Evans Chan's two films on her show why. The first presents her in a wide variety of situations: concerts, with a theater group, with composers, other artists, and friends, and in family photographs or at home with her four dogs. We not only see her with Crumb and John Cage (who with Henry Cowell make up her "three Cs"), and with Somei Satoh, Ge Gan-Ru, Joan La Barbara, and other composers she champions, but we hear their music, although often as background. We also hear from three critics who admire her work (if not always the music) and get to see Merce Cunningham and three dancers in 1944 in all-too-brief fragments from Four Walls.

It's a compelling portrait of a musician, Juilliard-trained in the classics, who has preferred to create her own niche as an essential artist pushing boundaries well beyond the usual realm of the piano recital. As she says, "As long as it's not a gimmick and you put your heart and soul into it, then the world will listen."

In Maverick Chan has created a visual tapestry to accompany Leng Tan in full performances of six works used in Sorceress: Cage's "In a Landscape," "In the Name of the Holocaust," and "Music for Piano No. 2," Ge Gan-Ru's "Gu Yue (Pipa)," Satie's "Gymnopédie No. 3," and Toby Twining's "Satie Blues." Evocative and at times even dreamlike, the film imaginatively supports the music without ever losing the necessary focus as Leng Tan not only plays the piano (conventional, "prepared," or "toy") with her hands and forearms, but plucks, strokes, or even bows the strings. Thus the two films together make up a much fuller portrait of this multifaceted artist.
--- George Dorris, Ballet Review, Summer 2008


Margaret Leng Tan
Sorceress of the New Piano, The Artistry of Margaret Leng Tan
Works by Beethoven, Cage, Cowell, Crumb, Distler, Ge, Glass, Klucevsek, Montague, Satie, Satoh, Tan, Twining & Vierk.
Mode 194 DVD

We all know about the three Bs (Bach, Beethoven and Brahms). But as experimental pianist and toy piano specialist Margaret Leng Tan explains in the opening moments of this DVD, she has moved on to the next letter of alphabet: 'I'm interested in the three Cs - Cowell, Cage and Crumb,' she proudly asserts. They're her 'holy trinity' of composers who have moved the language of the piano forward.

This generously packed DVD anthologises two films about Tan by director Evans Chan. Sorceress of the New Piano, made in 2004, is essentially Tan's Life and Times, from her Singapore childhood to her arrival in New York City to study at Juilliard as a 16-year-old. Her sister is on hand to explain Tan's difficult childhood as a 'highly strung' teenager who suffered from manic insomnia and whose life changed upon discovering the piano. Tan's story continues to be one of discovery - meeting John Cage licensed her already existing hunch that it was indeed possible to express an Asian sensibility through Western means. For Tan, there's BC and AC - Before and After Cage.

The film is filled with examples of Tan's performances, including a superb version of Cage's The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs with soprano Joan La Barbara and prepared piano music; Henry Cowell's clustery The Tides of Manaunaun and inside-the-piano The Banshee also receive impressive workouts. The last part of the film focuses on Tan's discovery - that word again - of the toy piano, and her faith in it as a fertile mode of expression is touching and inspiring. The other film on this DVD, The Maverick Piano, was filmed in 2007 and includes complete performances across the entire spectrum of Tan's enthusiasms, from the conventional piano set-up of Cage's In A Landscape to toy piano works, via the prepared piano. The Tan life in a nutshell.
--- Philip Clark, International Piano Magazine, July/August 2008


Margaret Leng Tan
Sorceress of the New Piano, The Artistry of Margaret Leng Tan
Two films by Evans Chan
Mode 194

Margaret Leng Tan: Sorceress, Maverick, Dog Whisperer?

The two films collected on this Mode DVD explore the multifaceted career and fascinating life story of new music pianist Margaret Leng Tan. Sorceress of the New Piano is a biography, while The Maverick Piano presents Tan performing some of her signature repertoire by composers John Cage, Erik Satie, Toby Twining, and Ge Gan-ru. Mode tends to favor this double-barreled type of presentation, and for good reason; hearing the works discussed in a bio subsequently performed in their entirety is far more satisfying than having to settle for sound bites.

Tan is best known for her work in two distinct areas: prepared piano and toy piano. Both are given ample coverage here. Tan expounds about the "Three C's" of contemporary piano music: Cowell, Cage, and Crumb; she demonstrates their hallmark techniques and eloquently discusses the aesthetics of each. Ample footage is featured of her rehearsing and conversing with both Cage and Crumb, who are clearly delighted by her dedication and formidable performances. The pianist was particularly close with Cage, who encouraged Tan in her quest to transform herself into someone with unique talents to offer to new music.

Cage's Suite for Toy Piano (1948) inspired Tan to champion the diminutive instrument, expanding its repertoire with commissions and transcriptions. She suggests that the toy piano has far more capacity than the novelty instrument or "gimmick" status to which it has previously been relegated. That said, Tan is not above using the toy piano as an agent provocateur, as one can see in her performance of Raphael Mostel's "Star-Spangled Etude #3." Dressed in a foam "Statue of Liberty" headdress, Tan brings a pistol, whistle, and siren onstage, using Mostel's simple piece incorporating patriotic tunes to craft a performance artwork about post-millennial militarism.

The DVD includes interesting biographical information, detailing Tan's long struggle with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. The pianist acknowledges that the perfectionist mindset which has made her such a compelling performer and new music advocate are byproducts of this challenging illness. Another intriguing aspect of Tan's life is her work with animals; she took a hiatus from performing early in her career to prepare helper dogs for the hearing impaired. Sorceress/Maverick is a compelling document; like Tan, it seems capable of winning over even the most conservative listeners to the wonders of the avant-garde.
--- Christian Carey, sequenza21, 29 June 2008


Margaret Leng Tan
Sorceress of the New Piano, The Artistry of Margaret Leng Tan
Two films by Evans Chan
Mode 194

The Singaporean-born pianist Margaret Leng Tan lives in a sound world like no other - a world entirely of her own choosing, and which she inhabits to the near-exclusion of all others. When at 16 she was awarded a scholarship to the Juilliard School in New York, she was headed for a traditional career as a concert pianist. No-one can have dreamt of the career she has had instead. The first woman ever to be awarded a doctorate by Juilliard, she has now long enjoyed a worldwide reputation as the foremost pianistic champion of the (mostly) American avant-garde, being particularly associated the music of what she calls 'The Three Cs', Henry Cowell, John Cage and George Crumb, the last two among her closest associates. In this consistently interesting, engaging and artfully constructed film, we hear much from her about her life, perspectives, ethics and instruments (including a fleet of toy pianos), and much informative and insightful commentary from composers, critics and colleagues. Not the least of her gifts his her capacity to win over sceptics - critics and otherwise. We see much of her in performance, both in and out of the piano, as it were, we learn a good deal about the music, including why not to dismiss it, and glimpse a distinct but not extravagant theatricality which may prove off-putting to some. The composers represented include, in addition to three Cs, Philip Glass, Tan Dun, Stephen Montague, Ge Gan-Ru and Raphael Mostel, as well as Beethoven and Satie (on toy piano). Tan's seriousness (untainted by solemnity and leavened with gentle humour) is self-evidently genuine. Her significance - and more importantly, perhaps, the significance of the music she champions - is likely to remain controversial.
--- Barrie Staines, Piano magazine, July-August 2008


Joe McPhee and John Heward
Voices: 10 Improvisations
Mode avant 05

This superb pairing of two top-flight improvisors reminds me of why I listen to this music. It's not about 'music', it's about sounds and their making. It's a given that these two can really 'play'. McPhee established that in the immediate post-Coltrane era, and Heward - while I know little about him except that he's also a visual artist who recorded a duo album on Avant with Steve Lacy - I'm sure he can really whack those tubs. The point, however, is that they don't 'just play', they also listen - and they refrain from playing.

So each of these ten pieces is like a little jewel of sound that two guys built out of powdered glass in the afternoon sun and then blew away. I could listen all winter for how they did it, and be none the wiser; and yet wiser for contemplating it - because sometimes questions teach more than answers. These two guys have recorded before, in a trio. Here, the absence of a rhythm 'section' allows the sound to float. Heward is free to play the drums rather than just hit them, an impression heightened by his frequent use of kalimba. McPhee makes liberal use of pocket trumpet as well as alto sax, extending his technique peripherally with valve sounds, and a bowl of water. The results are analogous to natural sounds, as if we could rely on a squeaking door to know which part of the hinge makes the most engaging groans. That's a door I could listen to all day.
--- Bruce Russell, The Wire, July 2008

Joe McPhee and John Heward
Voices: 10 Improvisations
Mode avant 05

Voices: 10 Improvisations, like Bare Essentials, has a surreal quality. In "Improvisation 1," American saxophonist Joe McPhee, who has performed with Brötzmann on several occasions since 1998 in quartets and the mighty Chicago Tentet, uses the pocket trumpet to create noises that sound like rain on a rooftop or fingers drumming on wood. McPhee then switches to soprano sax in "Improvisation 2" and Canadian drummer John Heward chimes in on the kalimba. The result is enigmatic and beautifully ethereal. These two songs lend versatility to the rest of the album, which manages to sound atmospheric and worldly.
--- Ivana Ng, All About Jazz, 19 July 2008


Joe McPhee and John Heward
Voices: 10 Improvisations
Mode avant 05

Being able to speak a language well implies a command of its syntactical dimensions. A fearless approach to maximizing the expression of ideas within language signifies creativity. Common to both a command of language and creativity is the principle of voice, which distinguishes itself from all similar practice. In music, voice simply, unquestionably, identifies how the musician and instrument mix.

Voices: 10 Improvisations, featuring brass and reedman, Joe McPhee, and percussionist John Heward, opens with the minimal yet profound "Improvisation 1." McPhee's pocket trumpet is extremely close to the microphone, the sound bubbly, full of breath and life-forming - a signifier of Beginning. From there, the musical concepts grow and expand. The pocket trumpet slowly wakes up and sharpens its personality.

Applying himself in the same way, Heward introduces himself on "Improvisation 2" with the kalimba (thumb piano). The dullness of the kalimba contrasts with the resonance that occurs when McPhee blows the pocket trumpet with precision. At the turning point in this track, Heward switches to the drum set, as McPhee leaves the melody, launches into abstraction, and returns to a recapitulation of the theme to close. McPhee engages his pocket trumpet to a point where his breath can push forth no more sound. He then takes up the soprano sax to create the next stirring voice.

A dynamic of difference between the two players prolongs the exploration of how best the two instrumentalists can speak their language. Both musicians take their instruments to their extremes but not in an explosive sense. Peaks are touched briefly and subtly within the limits of the instruments, as each musician meets the needs of the other.

The dry quality of the snare played with hands instead of sticks, the non-resonance of the kalimba, mallets on the tom and the slightest cymbal sibilance is pitted against the way in which the soprano flares with a liquid ring of tremolos, unabashed arpeggios and the squeal that is emitted as the reed meets the tongue for an elegant melody. In "Improvisations 8" and "Improvisations 9," the sax and drums fully unwind and unravel in continuous motion.

Considered as a whole, the recording possesses proportion, with the music moving forth as a discussion. There are very few repetitions of a horn phrase or drum riff. Both players, either singly or in relation to one another, take steps that are unique. The solos are few; neither musician allowing the other to monopolize the musical space. The rhythm circulates within the boldness of statements rather than being exposed outright. Bent pitches, split tones and dissonance on the saxophone creep in only towards the conclusion of the recording.

The purity and range of tone emanating from the pocket trumpet and soprano give this recording presence, notwithstanding the design of Voices, which itself glows with integrity. Integrity that is cultivated from diversity, invested with purpose and substance, and evocative of whatever the next moments offer.
--- Lyn Horton, All About Jazz online, May 18, 2008


Iannis Xenakis
Xenakis Percussion Works
Mode 171/173

A few years ago the music of Iannis Xenakis suddenly became radically chic, thanks to the well-intentioned efforts of the likes of DJ Spooky and other Deleuze-toting hipsters. More recently a younger generation of fun lovin' noiseniks have been singing the praises of pieces like Bohor and Persepolis as if they were the latest offerings from Merzbow, Prurient and Sickness. But this attraction to the visceral, violent side of the composer only addresses half of the Xenakis enigma, as percussionist Steven Schick makes clear in his informative and eminently readable liner notes to this 3-CD set. There was also Xenakis the mathematician, master of the impenetrable FORTRAN, creator of UPIC. Any of you out there read Formalized Music (me neither - I got as far as page 100)? It's easy to thrill at the swarming glissandi of Metastasis or succumb to the apocalyptic intensity of Kraanerg, but without the serious theoretical underpinning, those extraordinary works wouldn't sound the way they do. And without the background and years of study, none of the distortion pedal abusing wolf-eyed teens currently tearing round the alt.music racetrack will ever get remotely close.

As Schick points out, the striking contrast between the brutally impersonal world of advanced mathematics and symbolic logic and the spine-tingling raw emotion is no more evident than in the body of works Xenakis wrote for percussion (with or without added instruments): Persephassa (1969), Psappha (1976), Dmaathen (1976), Pléïades (1979), Komboï (1981), Kassandra (1987), Rebonds (1988) and Oophaa and Okho (1989). No recording could possibly capture the sheer power of this pieces in performance - I caught Pléïades in Paris shortly after its premiere, and can still remember the utterly devastating experience of being surrounded in the Auditorium of Université Paris II Assas by six sets of sixxen (specially created instruments consisting of tuned metal plates) - but until you get a chance to see and feel it in the flesh, you could do no better than get hold of these excellent recordings by Schick and the red fish blue fish percussion ensemble (lowercase intended.. Dr Seuss plays Xenakis, dig it).

Schick is also joined by Philip Lanson (baritone and psaltery, on Kassandra), Jacqueline Leclair (oboe, on Dmaathen in the most thrilling double-reed / percussion battle to come my way since Kyle Bruckmann went the distance with Weasel Walter on his Musica Genera album) and harpsichordists Shannon Wettstein (on Komboï) and John Mark Harris (Oophaa). Not all the pieces are as spectacular as the percussion ensemble pieces Persephassa and Pléïades - the rather plodding Okho once more raises the question as to whether the composer was losing his touch a little in his final years - but that's one of the risks you take when you release a complete set of anything. This one's worth the price of admission alone for the spectacular ending of Persephassa, in which Schick and his crew use multitracking to realise, for the first time on disc, the ferocious near-impossible complexity of the score's final pages. I say near-impossible, because, as Aki Takahashi once wryly noted, "if Xenakis's music is truly impossible, why are so many people playing it?"
--- Dan Warburton, www.paristransatlantic.com/magazine, January 2007


Iannis Xenakis
Xenakis Percussion Works
Steven Schick, Red Fish Blue Fish
Mode 171/173


Iannis Xenakis's music is elemental, antiRomantic, architectural, ritualistic, dispassionate. It is also deeply poetic, its emotional power vast, as the nine works recorded here testify. For ensemble, there's the raw, aggressive drama of Persephassa (1969) and the static, beautiful Pléïades (1978). For solo percussionist, there are the complex, thrillingly technical challenges of Psappha (1975) and Rebonds (1989). Perhaps most impressive of all, there's the ritual drama of Kassandra (1987), where the voice of Philip Larson conveys an increasingly furious frustration. All is driven by the energy and musicianship of Steven Schick, who plays the solo pieces and directs the six percussionists of Red Fish Blue Fish.
--- Stephen Pettitt, The Sunday Times, 11 February 2007


Iannis Xenakis
Xenakis Percussion Works
Mode 171/173

"It is not an exaggeration to say that for many contemporary percussionists, learning how to play has meant learning how to play the music of Iannis Xenakis," declares percussion master Steve Schick in his introduction to this triple CD set of the great Greek composer's complete percussion music. Ever since Xenakis's friend and mentor Edgar Varèse scandalized a New York audience in 1933 with his percussion ensemble work Ionisation, the profile of the onetime subservient percussionist has risen. John Cage and Lou Harrison's 1940s works stepped the percussion project up a gear; Karlheinz Stockhausen's Zyklus (1959) gave percussionists a meaty one-off display piece. But no other composer defined a fresh syntax and potential-fuelled modus operandi for percussion music like Iannis Xenakis.

This set is much needed. In the Xenakis Primer I wrote for The Wire 259, I expressed doubts about his percussion works, but I now see that my quibbles were caused by recorded performances which sometimes haven't made the grade, and which have suffered from dubious fidelity. Mode never deal in anything less than impeccable sound and, alongside Schick himself, the San Diego percussion ensemble Red Fish Blue Fish play with a devotion to detail and inner fire.

Writing for percussion is a daunting challenge for any composer. An authentic engagement with the character and DNA of percussion takes time to accomplish, and too many pieces deal in splashes of decorative colour or register as stiffly notated transcriptions of Buddy Rich solos. Xenakis sidestepped both issues by simply deciding they weren't of significance to him.

The earliest work he wrote for persuccion was Persephassa in 1969 (could there be more perfect Xenakis title?), and already he was writing with certainty about how he wanted percussion to sound. Stretching out over a near 30 minute canvas, Persephassa is written for six percussionists, each of whom sits in what Xenakis defines as their own "sieve". At the start of the work the sieves provide each player with their own rhythmic terrain, and allow Xenakis to create infinitesimal degrees of rhythmic displacement. The opening passage dances in your head with the force of dense polyrhythmic boulders plunging down a mountainside, each part proudly proclaiming its own independence while enigmatically jammed into the whole.

A key intrigue in all Xenakis's percussion music in his strategic doublebacking between rhythm and pitch; here he incorporates swirling sirens and whistles into the flow. If the sirens might sound like they're referencing Var�se, actually their feral microtonal inflections relate more to the trademark string glissandi of an early Xenakis orchestral work like Metastaseis.

Both his later percussion sextets, Pléïades (1978) and Okho (1989), were originally conceived for Les Percussions De Strasbourg and find Xenakis going ever deeper into the percussion zone. Pléïades splits the ensemble up into skins and keyboard percussion, and includes a section for the self-invented 'sixxen', a 19-note microtonal metal keyboard instrument designed to highlight the clashing harmonic overtones between notes. The overtones generate shimmering waves over the ensemble, and never have they been captured with greater clarity on CD, Okho adds the brittle tones of djembes - West African hand drums - to Xenakis's palette.

By the time of Okho Xenakis's contribution to the percussion repertoire was unassailable. The same year he also produced Rebonds, which has been recorded many times previously.

Familiarity makes it easy to take it for granted, but Schick's performance is a reminder of its nuanced subtleties and power. Pitched drums are locked into a dialogue with chattering woodblocks. At the start, Xenakis provokes the two into a testy, dissonant irrational rhythmic relationship that sets up enough tension to power the music onwards through its ten minute duration.

An earlier solo piece, Psappha (1975), is more problematic, as Xenakis tosses percussionists the impossible challenge of playing up to 25 'hits' a second at the climactic point. According to Schick, some players have concocted multiple-headed sticks to help them cope, but Xenakis's aspirations for performers to stretch beyond the possible has historical precedent in Beethoven's cello writing in his Grosse Fuge and the 20-fingered mutant hand presumably required to play some of Ives's block chords on the piano. Schick quotes pianist and Xenakis specialist Aki Takahashi: "If Xenakis's music were truly 'impossible', why (are) so many of us playing it?"

Xenakis continues to be a central figure because, like other 20th century 'outsider' such as Satie, Ives and Varèse, he dealt in material and not with idiom or style. The extraordinary falsetto vocal writing he devised for his voice/percussion duo piece Kassandra (1987) is unheralded and yet rooted in something deeply humane. Similarly, Dmaathen (1977) for oboe and percussion at first sound like curious, snake-charming music. Then mallet percussion and oboe refract their material through each other - gestures become elongated, and instrumental textures are obligated to buckle into obstreperous multiphonic screeching, so that macro meets micro. Two scores for harpsichord and percussion - Komboï (1981) and Oophaa (1989) - are fastidiously worked through so that their rhythmic and pitch qualities fuse to create a 'third' hybrid instrument. It's a fitting analogy - harpsichord, that most ancient of Classical hardware, running up against Xenakis's mind-expanding exploration of the possibilities of percussion.
--- Philip Clark, The Wire, January 2007


Amy Rubin
Hallelujah Games
Hallelujah Games; Whose America?; Trifocals; Cry of the Mothers; Journey; Chant; Obsession; Two Train Toccata; Aftermath; Windows; Mallet Cycles
Amy Rubin (piano); William Trigg (marimba); Christine Schadeberg (soprano); Kathleen Nester (flute)
Musicians Accord
Artistic Quality: 7
Sound Quality: 8
Mode 79

New York composer-pianist Amy Rubin writes chamber music spiked with blues, jazz, African drumming patterns, and Latin dance rhythms. Sometimes she packs too many idioms into one piece. "Cry of the Mothers", for example, vacillates between a plaintive jazz ballad and a Latin dance. "Hallelujah Games" for marimba and piano is inspired by the drumming patterns Rubin learned in Ghana (not surprisingly, it resembles Steve Reich's Ghana-influenced hocketing music), and the "games" involve performer choices. As pianist on this album, Rubin proves herself to be the best advocate of her own music. Her intricate passagework spins out like a nimble improvisation, and her playing sometimes manages to wield more power than the compositions themselves. Soprano Christine Schadeberg, flutist Kathleen Nester, and marimba player William Trigg join her as magnificent partners. Rubin's music is appealing and often playful, and if she occasionally veers toward sentimentality, she's not the first composer to succumb to tonal ardor when expressing political concerns.
--- Sarah Cahill, www.classicstoday.com


Amy Rubin
Hallelujah Games
Christine Schadeberg, Amy Rubin, Musicians Accord
Mode 79

Just how important is stylistic continuity? Not very, when you're Amy Rubin, and you're good at just about everything. Hallelujah Games, the opening work in the identically named release from Mode, is a bang-on post-minimal post-pop essay for marimba and piano. While the piece is meant to address "the ongoing effects of colonialism in Africa," it is no surprise that the sounds bespeak of her familiarity with Reich's muse: the music of Ghana.

Whose America?, on the other hand, has an earlier African/New Yorker melding in mind. These texts "The Farewell of a Virginia Slave Mother to her Daughters Sold into Southern Bondage," "Brother of the Ku Klux Klan," and "Grandma's Song" mine a updated vein of African-American music which inspired George Gershwin.

Trifocals for flute, clarinet, and bassoon, and Journey for flute and piano are new-music marriages with Caribbean and Turkish music respectively, with emphasis on the new-music. Rubin's short piano works tell of soulful jazz, languid Satie, a cetain almost-cinematic romanticism, and classical dignity. In Two-Train Toccata, Rubin leaves us with a nice minimalist neoclassic puzzle:

Train X leaves San Francisco heading east at a speed of 95 miles an hour. Train Y leaves New York going west a s speed of 110 miles an hour. Where and when will they pass each other?

Is this likely, given that speeds tend to be faster in the West? And what about mountains? Assuming no stops, perhaps the next day in Nebraska. would be a long haul of a piece, that. This is a worth journey that can occupy tracks beside Glass, Honegger, Reich and Villa-Lobos.

Rubin winds up close to where she began, with a brief marimba two-player piece entitled Mallet Cycles. Like Reich, here's another composer who finds that marimba and minimalism go hand in hand, hands on sticks, and hands-down handily.
- Elizabeth Agnew, 21st Century Music, April 2000


From The Mode News Archive:

AKI TAKAHASHI plays Iannis Xenakis (mode 80)
Aki Takahashi has garnered tremendous praise for her disc of the complete piano works of Xenakis, including being honored by French music magazine Diapason's prestigious "Diapason d'or" award. Full reviews will be posted on the mode 80 web page.


Composer KAIJA SAARIAHO (mode 91) was awarded the 2000 Stoeger Prize by the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. Her recent opera, L'amour de Loin received its premiere to acclaimed reviews in Salzburg this August. Saariaho's new disc of chamber music on Mode performed by the superb Belgian ensemble Champ d'Action is available now.


MORTON SUBOTNICK was one of the honorees at this year's ASCAP Concert Music Awards ceremony held at Lincoln Center on May 25th. Mode is currently working with Subotnick on the release of his interactive DVD Gestures, which allows you to compose your own work at your computer, based on the sound materials on the DVD. The DVD will also feature his classic A Sky of Cloudless Sulpher as well as his own, fixed version of Gestures in surround sound.

Subotnick has been getting a great deal of press in the past months, regarding his composing career, and his recent Gestures piece, including features/interviews in The Wire, Tower PULSE!, and even fashion magazines! Subotnick explained how the interactive Gestures works in July's PULSE!: "There are two modes. One is what I call the 'DJ Mode,' where a person can access different moods through different kinds of gestures, change their moods all over the place and access music, which is all over the place. The other mode is the more 'conductorly mode' where you make a first gesture and then that takes you to a piece of music which is most like the gesture you did-like going to the record cabinet and pulling out the record you want to listen to. It'll be a complete piece. If your gesture is a smooth, tender one, maybe 15 percent of the piece will be wild; but the rest of it will be smooth and quiet and tender. All the gestures you make from that initial point on are in the form of conducting it: making it more intense, louder/softer, higher/lower, bringing in voices."


IRVINE ARDITTI plays John Cage
Arditti has now recorded ALL of Cage's works for solo violin as well as violin and piano (with Stephen Drury) for Mode. These will be released on 4 separate discs in fixed periods over the next couple of years. The next release, of both possible versions of TWO4 (with the sho performed by Mayumi Miyata and with piano performed by Drury), will be issued in October on mode 88.


NEW SCELSI SERIES ON MODE
Mode is excited about its new series devoted to the intriguing Italian composer Giacinto Scelsi. Among the first wave will be :

• a disc of piano music by Canadian pianist Louise Bessette (mode 92, due in November). This is the first volume in what is projected to be the complete traversal of Scelsi's piano works. Other performers in the piano series will include Aki Takahashi,
• a disc of orchestral works along with excerpts from the Canti di Capricorn with The Carnegie Mellon Philharmonic conducted by Juan Pablo Izquiredo (their follow-up to the tremendous Xenakis/Varese disc on mode 58), and
• a disc of works of solo clarinet along with duos for flute and oboe, performed by clarinettist Carol Robinson (also on the Nono disc, mode 87) along with oboist Kathy Milliken (also on the Skempton disc, mode 61) and flutist Clara Novakova. Ms. Robinson's performances are authoritative because she had the unique experience to work with Scelsi on these pieces.

• Elliott Carter: Piano Quintet; Quintet for Piano and Winds; Fragment for string quartet (with Ursula Oppens and The Arditti Quartet); and Syringa (with Ensemble Sospeso conducted by Jeffrey Milarsky). The disc will also include a video interview with Carter, Ursula Oppens and Irvine Arditti led by Sospeso's Joshua Cody. (96/24 audio; plus surround sound option for the Piano Quintet)


• Lydia Kavina, Theremin. Follow up to her successful first disc (Music from the Ether, mode 76), the DVD will contain music featured in her recent Lincoln Center debut program. Ms. Kavina is joined on the disc by Ensemble Sospeso conducted by Charles Peltz:
  Percy Grainger: Beatless Music for 6 theremins
  Olga Neuwirth: Suite from "Bahlaams Fest"
  Miklos Rozsa: Suite from "Spellbound"
  Howard Shore: Suite from "Ed Wood"
  Christian Wolff: Exercise 28 for theremin, french horn, violin and double-bass
  The Neuwirth, Shore and Wolff pieces were created especially for this event. (96/24 audio, surround sound option for the Grainger, video interviews with Kavina, Shore and Wolff).


• Morton Subotnick: Gestures; A Sky of Cloudless Sulpher (please see Subotnick article above for more information). (Interactive DVD-ROM plus both works presented in surround-sound, and video interviews).