Modern and Contemporary

Melia Watras – String Masks
Various Artists
Planet M Records PMR003 (planetmrecords.com)

American composer and virtuoso violist Melia Watras’ latest album String Masks primarily features her sensitive playing and several string instrument-centred compositions – with a brief detour to a delicate unaccompanied song with Icelandic lyrics. The dramatic exception is the 23-minute title track which also includes singers, actors and instruments invented by the iconoclastic American composer and music theorist Harry Partch (1901-1974), by far the longest and most complex work here.

String Masks opens with Watras’ Kreutzer for string trio, explicitly eliciting Beethoven’s well-known sonata for violin and piano of the same name, as well as borrowing from Janáĉek’s String Quartet No.1. Michael Jinsoo Lim (violin), Watras (viola) and Sæunn Thorsteinsdóttir (cello) perform the four-movement score with restrained eloquence and passion. 

Watras has been captivated by the Partch Instrumentarium ever since they arrived at University of Washington, where Watras serves as professor of viola. She includes three of them in String Masks, the narrative-based work in which she echoes Partch’s manner of using his microtonal instruments to reflect the cadences and phrases of human speech, and to set an idiosyncratic mood. She effectively uses Partch’s Harmonic Canon (44-string zither with microtonal tunings), Bass Marimba (with organ-pipe resonators) and Cloud-Chamber Bowls (14 large hung glass carboys) in addition to violin, viola and voices.

The composer writes that the “otherworldly sounds of Partch’s inventions” are used to set the aural stage for a “fantastical vision of an underworld inhabited by string-playing legend[ary musician]s from the past. Read by three actors, each is evoked in the text, the narrative forming the metaphoric backbone of the aptly titled String Masks.

Andy Akiho – Seven Pillars
Sandbox Percussion
Aki Rhythm Productions (andyakiho.com)

Critically acclaimed new music composer Andy Akiho has created a captivating and powerful commission for the Sandbox Percussion quartet in the form of Seven Pillars, the collaboration a labour of love between friends spanning eight years. 

Written as a multimedia chamber work, even without the intended video presentation included, the music is mesmerizing from the instant it opens. The complexity of the work belies the relative simplicity of the acoustic percussion tools at hand: bottles, glockenspiels, drums, wood blocks, metal pipes, sandpaper, marimbas, kick drum. Akiho takes full advantage of the skill and inventiveness of the individual performers by dedicating solo tracks to each, so that he can explore the nuances and textures of the simple objects. It is in the delivery that the writing takes flight. The remaining seven movements are for the full quartet, showing off not only the compositions but the slick performance and tight comradeship of the group. 

Akiho and Sandbox Percussion commissioned 11 video artists to create original films for Seven Pillars – one film for each movement of the work – however the hard copy of the CD makes no mention of this. It does however include a complex insert, a complicated paper cutout designed almost as a stage setting in lieu of the visual films. These took some studying, slowly revealing explanations of the form of each movement in relation to the work as a whole, and spelling out the instruments used (“brake drum” for instance). But the cards can’t quite replace the brilliance of the collaborative videos that encompass the worlds of dance, animation, experimental narrative film, time-lapse and more. They are also a lot more fun, as you can see here: youtube.com/watch?v=EXHORWr6xQ8.

Dana Lyn – A Point On a Slow Curve
Instrumental Ensemble
In A Circle Records (inacircle-records.com/releases)

It took eight years for experimental visual artist Jay DeFeo to complete her mixed media painting The Rose in the 60s. The Rose is over ten feet high and weighs more than one ton. It is this impressively textured and radiant work that drew American composer and violinist Dana Lyn to start her own eight-year compositional journey. The result is A Point on a Slow Curve, a nine-movement sonic poem parallelling the creation of The Rose. 

Scored for female choir, violin, clarinet, cello, bassoon, vibraphone, bass and drums, A Point on a Slow Curve is experimental in nature, sometimes wild and chaotic, sometimes angelic. The improvisatory sections are tightly connected with contrapuntal writing, depicting the long process of artistic creation. In each movement, Lyn matches the textures of the painting beautifully. She creates endless interconnected lines but somehow the work remains austere and symmetrical in its expression. It is precisely this combination of chaos and uniformity that reflects the scale of The Rose. As the painting illuminates everything from its centre, so does Lyn’s music. That is especially obvious in three movements depicting major drafts of the work in progress – Death Rose, White Rose and, finally, The Rose.

The ensemble playing is exemplary and it includes the composer herself on violin. Lyn’s unconventional music really benefits from the musicians’ improvisational skills, as well as from their imagination.

Maija Einfelde – Violin Sonatas
Magdalēna Geka; Iveta Cālīte
LMIC SKANI 129 (skani.lv)

Every now and then there is an album that is simply captivating, the music so powerful that one feels the need to go back to it over and over again. This particular album of sonatas by senior Latvian composer Maija Einfelde (including world premiere recordings of the third sonata and a solo work) had that special effect on me. The three sonatas for violin and piano and one for solo violin were written over the span of the last 20 years of the 20th century. They do not feature any exuberant contemporary violin techniques (though the imitation of the clay bird whistle sounds in the second sonata is delightful) but rather share some similarity with the musical language of Messiaen. What they do feature is an abundance of darkness, shades of deep sonority, profoundness of the life lived and an encompassing artistry. 

This music is supremely focused, there is no note that is unnecessarily placed, and maintaining this sort of conceptual intensity requires both fortitude and heart from the performers. Violinist Magdalēna Geka and pianist Iveta Cālīte have both. These two powerhouses delve deeply into the music of Einfelde, as if their lives depend on it. Geka’s tone is so resonant, so intense and clear (especially in the high register), that one feels its reverberations in the body. What is most impressive is that both artists found a way to add another dimension to Einfelde’s music – joyful, triumphant moments between the waves of darkness. And this is the way that magic happens.