Modern and Contemporary

Big Things
Icarus Quartet
Furious Artisans FACD6829 (icarusquartet.org)

There are those who call out “somebody should do [a thing]” and there are those like the Icarus Quartet who just do them. In this case, the thing to do is find a jam where interesting, exploratory music is buoyed by popular or (gasp) commercial music. Big Things is the title track of a three-work disc from this double-duo: two pianos, two percussion. Big sounds and big gestures are what they bring to the party, or perhaps the brunch table. A running gag in the liner notes is the American pancake, in all its fluffy glory. Not sure how it ties to the actual music, but a gimmick’s a gimmick, and they go with it, including the track running times expressed as dollar-and-cent prices on a diner-style menu. 

Fortunately, there’s no gimmick in the performance, for truly, these lads play the s#!+ out of the material. I like track 1 and tracks 3-10 most. That leaves Brad Lubman’s Tangents, track 2, and at over twenty dollars (cough, minutes), you’d want to like it the most. Alas. Michael Laurello’s title track is just over half that price, but beautifully poses two one-word questions in shifty ways: isitorisitnotanostinato? And whenisanostinatonotanostinato? Forgiveme. Buy the disc, you’ll get the answers, or a fun trip towards them. 

Performances of these first two works are just the bomb, as the kids used to say, at some point. Favourite item of all, a bunch of small sides that add up to the second half of this one-hour disc (30 bucks), Paul Lansky’s Textures. Each short section of eight develops a synaesthetic depiction: Striations, Soft Substrate, Granite, just some of the textures conjured in sound; and then Slither, wherein one is reminded that sometimes very LARGE things can slither.

A Series of Indecipherable Glyphs
NakedEye Ensemble
New Focus Recordings FCR338 (newfocusrecordings.com)

Were I to throw a large party, I’d set this new release on random shuffle until enough guests noticed that the tracks were beginning to sound familiar. The selections are alternately stimulating and mesmerizing. NakedEye Ensemble, out of Pittsburgh, have hitched their axes to Frank Zappa’s star, and his legacy. He left so much music still to be explored, it’s high time more groups put together arrangements like track 11, Zappa’s Sinister Footwear II. With the recent agreement between the Zappa family trust and Universal Music, we’ll likely hear more renditions of his extraordinary work.

Rhythmically exacting and full of rapid, jagged melodic passages, shared by multiple unison voices, Footwear is just the right follow-up to a more mysterious and occasionally tiresome work of AI meets improv, Nick Didkovsky’s Amalia’s Secret. I’m allowing some oldster grump when it comes to art that’s in part generated by algorithms. Some of it is pretty cool, but some of it just sounds… mechanical? I imagine my party guests won’t much care about how the ten brief segments were generated. I’ll just go open more wine.

Following are five more tracks, two that drop clocks (yet MORE automatism!!) into the mix. [These Hands] Hold Nothing by Whitney George ticks and tocks, and Dum Spectas Fugio by Rusty Banks clunks and clonks; both beat more or less at 60 per minute, and then Less is More by Molly Joyce (in performance accompanied by a light show) raises the pulse while easing into meditation. They’re all much better pieces than I’m making them sound, and the playing is gorgeous.

Rounding out the disc, Aaron Jay Myers’ Strabimus and Richard Belcastro’s Nepetalactone take up the Zappa-ista torch. The latter title is the psychoactive ingredient in catnip. Fun stuff, well played.

Listen to 'A Series of Indecipherable Glyphs' Now in the Listening Room

Shawn Crouch – Chaos Theory
Various Artists
Acis APL56620 (acisproductions.com)

Hats off to Shawn Crouch. The tracks on his recent release, Chaos Theory, enchant the ear and engage the mind. Liner notes sometimes muddy the waters, but these (apparently written by Crouch himself) are brief and informative. He’s fond of circles, canons, variations, and games and puzzles too. 

Get right to listening, and give it a twice-over before coming to any conclusions. There are brilliant performances on each track, and there’s a bit of everything in the variety. My favourite is probably the easiest to get inside of: 95 South, a woodwind trio that covers the U.S. Eastern Seaboard in three large leaps. Lake Road; Dublin, NH recalls the scene of a music festival he attended in his youth. 74th and Third; New York, NY must mean he lived in Manhattan for some of his early adulthood. It varies from frenetic to meditative. Bay Drive; Miami Beach, FL is the finale of the piece and the place where parenthood overtakes other concerns. Dedicated to his son, it stands in sharp and welcome contrast to the more angular writing elsewhere.

Not that there’s any problem with the buzzing zigzags of the other pieces on the disc. A lengthy and cerebrally conceived solo sonata for cello is convincingly rendered by Craig Hultgren. A pictogram in the liner notes, probably Crouch’s own work, helps explain the tonic gravitational energy that propels Orbital Variations. This one needs more time to tell its story. I look forward to hearing it again.

It’s so good to hear music that explores new sonic worldscapes while remaining idiomatic, such that the instrumentalist makes use of their strongest technical ability bringing the work to life. Crouch is old school in that regard, proving that solid compositional technique still makes for the most listenable avant-garde music.

Ivanovs – Symphonies Nos. 17 & 18
Latvian National Symphony Orchestra; Guntis Kuzma
LMIC SKANI 141 (skani.lv)

In the March-April 2022 WholeNote, I described Jānis Ivanovs’ Symphonies Nos.15 and 16 as “filled with dark sonorities, propulsive energy and clamorous dissonances,” qualities that reappeared, though less explosively, in his next two symphonies.

The Moderato. Allegro of Ivanovs’ 32-minute Symphony No.17 in C Major (1976) begins slowly, with sombre, portentous music leading to tormented struggle and anguished outbursts, in their wake a haunting, “surviving” solo clarinet. The Allegro turns mysterious, its hollow, black-and-gold sonorities recalling Sibelius’ enigmatic Fourth. The Adagio suggests, to me, an incense-heavy church service, building to a hymn-like climax, followed by a muted recessional. The closing Allegro moderato seems to be marching off to yet another battle, but this time Ivanovs eschewed further violence, the symphony ending in peaceful serenity. 

The 35-minute Symphony No.18 in E Minor (1977) opens with the Moderato. Tranquillo referencing the first bars of Rachmaninoff’s Symphony No.2, also in E Minor. Unsurprisingly, the Tranquillo is soon negated by sinister turbulence, foreboding reinforced in the restless Allegro. Ivanovs, when interviewed about this work, referred to “the young men” who fought in World War II. An extended elegy for those “young men,” Andante. Tenebroso, moves from gloom to nobility, pride and reverence. The martial anthems of the Allegro moderato end the symphony in a burst of patriotic fervour.

Conductor Guntis Kuzma and the Latvian National Symphony Orchestra brilliantly convey the dramatic and emotional extremes of their countryman’s extremely dramatic, emotion-laden music.