Modern and Contemporary

Slow, Quiet Music – In Search of Electric Happiness
Instruments of Happiness
Redshift Records TK 497 (redshiftrecords.org)

Formed in 2014, Instruments of Happiness is an ensemble of varying numbers of guitarists, from four to 100. Here the four electric guitarists – artistic director Tim Brady, Jonathan Barriault, Simon Duchesne and Francis Brunet-Turcotte – perform four commissions by Canadian composers. As the liner notes explain, each was asked to write a 14-minute piece reflecting the project concept, synchronized by stopwatches, with the performers placed far apart in a large reverberant space. Originally performed in a church, this was recorded on a large concert stage with great production quality.

Sideways, by Louise Campbell, opens with repeated notes, establishing the clear sonic sense of the widely placed guitarists. Added guitar slides produce an eerie contrast. Mid-piece intensity with sudden low pitches, faster short melodic lines, washes and electric effects return sideways to closing slow-wash fade. Rose Bolton’s Nine kinds of joy features low-pitched held notes, washes, contrasting repeated string notes and slight subtle dynamic variability creating numerous kinds of calming musical joy. Love the unexpected next idea in Andrew Noseworthy’s tightly orchestrated Traps, taboos, tradition in sections with extended guitar effects like slides, plucks, bangs, crashes, rubs and waah waahs separated by brief silent spaces. Lots to listen to in Andrew Staniland’s Notre Dame is burning with the low intense held note drones building in intensity like a slow-moving fire and contrasting comforting higher notes.

Performances are superb, creating a new contemporary wall of electric guitar sounds!

Primavera II: the rabbits
Matt Haimovitz
PentaTone Oxingale Series (pentatonemusic.com/product/oxingale-presents-primavera-ii-the-rabbits)

The awe-inspiring Primavera Project, co-directed by Matt Haimovitz and Dr. Jeffrianne Young, explores the influence and inspiration of music and art. Its six-release series is comprised of 81 world premiere solo cello compositions commissioned for Haimovitz. Each composer was asked to respond to Sandro Botticelli’s enigmatic painting, Primavera, and the prophetic large-scale triptych, Primavera 2020, by world-renowned contemporary artist Charline von Heyl. This second release Primavera II: the rabbits takes its name from the rabbit trilogy motive in von Heyl’s visuals.

Haimovitz’s arrangement of Josquin des Prez’s Kyrie (from Missa Hercules Dux Ferrariae) opens. His conversational four-part contrapuntal playing ranges from moving, to dark singing tone colour above full harmonic chords. This is followed by 13 new works, each lasting under ten minutes. It is so fascinating to hear each composer’s own musical perception of the visuals. For example, Missy Mazzoli’s Beyond the Order of Things (after Josquin) has a contemporary orchestral storytelling sound with rhythms, pitch slides, fast runs and sudden atonal held notes. Tomeka Reid’s energetic Volplaning is an intense response to the paintings. Sudden loud single-line phrases and rhythmic detached notes add to the running and bouncing rabbit sensibility. Gordon Getty’s Spring Song is a slow, calming Romantic-style-influenced work, clocking in under the two-minute mark. Plucks, repeated notes and upbeat rock strings have the rabbits bopping in a bar in David Balakrishnan’s Theme and Variants.

Haimovitz understands and interprets each diverse work, playing all lines in stunningly beautiful, must-listen-to passionate performances.

Cage
Quartetski
Ambiances Magnétiques (actuellecd.com)

In the last years of his prolific creative life, iconic experimental composer John Cage (1912-1992) composed some 40 number pieces. For titles, he coined a unique system in which numbers indicate the number of performers or the number of instrumental parts in each work. Superscripts were added when compositions shared the same number of performers.

Cage’s notation of these pieces features two time-based categories: fixed and flexible “time brackets.” Fixed-time brackets indicate when the musician/s should precisely begin and end a tonal event. Flexible-time brackets however, allow musicians choice in the matter, admitting into the performance, a) chance and b) the anarchic harmony of sounds and silences simply co-existing, two key Cagean notions. 

Both works on this album belong to that corpus. One7, “For any pitched instrument able to play sustained notes,” is the seventh piece in a series of compositions for one musician. Except, in this performance the polished Montreal group Quartetski have decided to interpret the open score with all four member musicians: Isaiah Ceccarelli (percussion, synthesizer), Bernard Falaise (electric guitar), Philippe Lauzier (bass clarinet, synthesizer) and Pierre-Yves Martel (electric bass, sine waves). 

Four6, also for unspecified forces, also lasts a leisurely half hour. The four musicians are asked to “Choose 12 different sounds with fixed characteristics (amplitude, overtone structure, etc.)” producing a mellower soundscape than the dramatic musical moments generated in One7.

Quartetski’s nuanced realization of these two autumnal Cage works admirably animates the scores, imbuing individual character which belies their apparent abstract appearance. Marked by attention to timbral richness well-represented by this refined recording, the quartet displays a spirit of sonic discovery that’s aurally refreshing while respecting the composer’s musical aesthetics.

Golden Dolden Box Set
Paul Dolden
Independent (pauldolden.bandcamp.com)

In 1988 Canadian electroacoustic composer Paul Dolden (b.1956) started creating Below The Walls of Jericho – the first instalment of a three-part series that invoked the biblical story of Jericho, whose walls crumbled from the sheer power of sound. Though a number of Dolden’s earlier pieces – notably Veils (1984-5) – also employed multi-layered swarms of studio-recorded acoustic instrumentation, this was his first work to display an explicit preoccupation with sonic excess. Many of Dolden’s ensuing pieces also exhibit varying degrees of fascination with loudness, density, and velocity – enough for detractors to label his music, brazen or over-the-top.

It might therefore seem fitting that his latest offering occupies a similarly massive scope. Golden Dolden, is a career-spanning digital compendium featuring ten hours of music (including seven unreleased works), 34 scores, six hours’ of lectures, and a generous serving of text. The virtual box-set’s reverse-chronological avalanche may indeed be overwhelming, but immersing oneself in it reveals the depth of Dolden’s vibrant, utterly singular vision. He does often favour thick, saturated textures comprised of hundreds upon hundreds of active layers, but this vast collection is full of contrast, contradiction, imagination, and, yes, beauty. 

Even at its most claustrophobic (such as on the aforementioned Jericho series) his music’s prevailing drive seems more inquisitive than destructive. The composer’s liner notes may be dismissive of his early catalogue’s underlying nihilism or postmodern posturing, but the swirling microtonal maelstroms are always projected through a radiant sheen of awe and wonder.