Modern and Contemporary

LAND SEA SKY for Raj Sen
Experimental Music Unit
Independent (experimentalmusicunit.bandcamp.com)

Experimental Music Unit is a trio based in Lekwungen Territory (located on the southern tip of Vancouver Island) consisting of Tina Pearson (flute, accordion, voice), George Tzanetakis (clarinets, saxophones) and Paul Walde (bass guitar, percussion). EMU specializes in exploratory music and sound practices grounded in ecological studies, focused improvisation and collaboration. Their latest audio project, LAND SEA SKY released as a 38-minute EP, reflects all those interests.

The EP is the musical realization of a text score by Pearson, composed during the winter of 2020-2021. Like so many, EMU was frustratingly isolated during the COVID pandemic. While they could meet remotely through online platforms, most of all they longed to make music together again outdoors. 

LAND SEA SKY was their response. Recording their parts in the studio, EMU however imagined they were actually playing together at Finnerty Cove, a rocky outcropping on the east shore of Lekwungen territory on the Salish Sea. The lapping waves, gulls and other oceanic sounds captured on the field recording eloquently places the trios’ musicking in this site-specific sonic space. 

I found the most magical moments happened when the trio entered into a dialogue with the oceanscape, or when the latter emerged into the sonic foreground – a startling transformation. Starting softly, leisurely, the ever-shifting, subtly articulated interplay between the human trio and the Salish Sea’s many voices reflects EMU’s deep connection with and respect for the place where they “live and play.” 

LAND SEA SKY proved to be more than a purely musical experience: it’s a timely reminder that the root of all human song is in nature.

Samuel Adams – Current
Spektral Quartet; Karen Gomyo; Conor Hanick
Other Minds Records (samuelcarladams.bandcamp.com/album/current)

In the world of contemporary classical music releases, this album is likely to make a splash for its precision, ideas and remarkable performances. Three recent works (two of them world premiere recordings) by American composer Samuel Adams centre around the integration of acoustic and electronic sounds. Adams does not blur the lines between these sounds nor does he try to draw on the complexity of each. Rather, he allows both to coexist, mingle and support the other in natural ways. The music on this album is mostly minimal in nature, and that works in its favour rather than as limitation. There is space to sit”with the sound, to breathe with the colours and build a relationship with what we hear.

The title piece, written for string quartet and snare drums, co-commissioned and recorded by the fantastic Spektral Quartet, is an example of Adams’ creativity at work. Four snare drums are activated by the transducer speakers that are placed atop them, essentially used as the echo-chambers. The sound effect is fabulous; it comes in the form of a variety of timbres, vibrations, pitches and everything in between, the sonic world building at its best.

Equally luminous are a solo piano and electronics work, Shade Studies, displaying tranquil pulsations, gestures and sine waves subtly altering piano tones, and Violin Diptych, a resonant evocation of Bach coupled with the most intriguing acoustically produced delay effect at the end of short phrases. 

Malek Jandali Concertos
Rachel Barton Pine; Anthony McGill; ORF Vienna RSO; Marin Alsop
Cedille CDR 90000 220 (cedillerecords.org)

Syrian-American Malek Jandali (b.1972) effectively combines Arabic melodies, modes and rhythms with Western classical structures. His 36-minute Violin Concerto (2014) honours “all women who thrive with courage.” Jandali identifies four women beaten, arrested or disappeared by Syrian authorities, including his own mother who, with his father, was brutally assaulted after he performed at a Washington demonstration.

In the Allegro moderato, sinuous, plaintive violin melodies, portentous orchestral chords and restless rhythms culminate in an extended, anguished, angry solo cadenza. The mournful Andante follows, the violin singing a prolonged lament over throbbing drumbeats, slowly building to a stirring, hymn-like climax. Nostalgic folk dances animate the Allegretto, but the concerto ends with a slow, sorrowful violin solo and a sustained, darkly sombre final chord.

The 25-minute Clarinet Concerto (2021) was written for New York Philharmonic principal clarinetist Anthony McGill and dedicated “in memory of all victims of injustice.” The music is less overtly Arabic, the emotions more elusive. In the Andante misterioso, the clarinet intones a pensive, wandering melody over percussive punctuations. The misterioso mood continues in the Nocturne: Andante, with brooding, broken clarinet phrases and irregular percussive rhythms. The Allegro moderato features klezmer-like Syrian dance tunes, a virtuoso cadenza exploiting the clarinet’s extreme registers and a final festive dance, a happy ending to this mostly downcast concerto.   

Well-earned applause for violinist Rachel Barton Pine, clarinetist McGill, conductor Marin Alsop, the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra and, most of all, composer Malek Jandali.

Density 2036: Parts VI-VIII
Claire Chase
New Focus Recordings FCR353 (newfocusrecordings.com)

To call Claire Chase a once-in-a-generation flutist may sound to many like speculation. But now, with the release of what is collectively referred to as Density 2036, doubters, naysayers and outright refuseniks have all gone the way of extinct species. There are now three double albums in this series. On the heels of the first two – Density 2036 (2013-2015) and Density 2036 (2016-2017) – comes Chase’s triple-CD Density 2036 – Part VI (2019); Part VII (2020); Part VIII (2021). 

With each CD (numbered serially) Chase and her flutes took us by the hand to lead us into a magical multi-layered landscape. Transcending both time and place, Chase interpreted compositions often written expressly for her in such a manner that the resultant music created its own temporal dimension. This new triple release not only carries on where Chase left off, but in it she raises the proverbial bar on her artistry.

As the music of each part unfolds, so too does a discourse with structure and archetype quite unique to these works. It may even be called a Chase rhetoric, an Orphic dialogue of struggle and release. Each work is a ravishing poetic episode or (in the case of Part VII Liza Lim: Sex Magic) a series of poetic episodes. Every gesture is graced by lyricism and the memorable material is calibrated to create an abstract drama that says precisely all it needs to.

Such is the audacity of Chase’s vision of her instrument that the music which comes in hot evanescent diaphragmatic breaths, the waves of which ebb and flow and penetrate disparate sonic palettes from the palpitating heart (in Phylis Chen’s Roots of Interior for flute and heartbeat), on Part VI. Multiple soundworlds collide on Matana Roberts’ Auricular Hearsay in Part VIII. The centrepiece is decidedly Part VII Liza Lim’s Sex and Magic, a sweeping masterwork evocative of the near mythic life-affirming power of women, redolent of legends, oracles and history woven into a scalp-tingling wonderscape featuring – among other instruments – the death-defying aural majestic sound of Chase’s contrabass flute. 

The Density saga was ignited by Edgard Varèse’s Density 21.5 and its tantalizing three-note key figure. Chase’s ongoing musical work builds an epic musical edifice with a hot breath of musical notes that leap off the page, like whirling dervishes and pirouetting ballet dancers leaping into rarefied air.

Listen to 'Density 2036: Parts VI-VIII' Now in the Listening Room