Modern and Contemporary

Ziggurat
Neal Bennett; Brian Nesselroad
Redshift Records TK433
(redshiftmusic.org)

Matching personality to instruments in the brass section, trumpets are the alphas, French horns are quietly confident team players of generally modest demeanour; near the bottom you find the seeking souls who play trombone. Sensitive by nature, they mask this trait with tough-guy attitudes, fooling nobody. (The tuba runs the show, but nobody wants that to get out).

The last half-century has seen a surprising number of highly gifted sackbut virtuosi, players who turn their unwieldy horns on various dimes to produce striking results. Taking his place among them is Canadian Neal Bennett. His recent release, Ziggurat, offers works for solo trombone as well as a variety of choir sizes. Best known to local fans of new music will be Jocelyn Morlock, who contributed Sequoia for an ensemble of eight trombones and percussion and After the Rain, a solo piece. Scott Good’s Liquid Metal for ten (!) trombones, is a mighty enjoyable evocation of the foundry scene from Terminator 2.

Most of the composers are based in B.C., and his lone collaborator is percussionist Brian Nesselroad. Yes, instead of herding all available and capable practitioners for the multi-bone works (four of the seven tracks), Bennett worked all 34 (THIRTY-FOUR) parts up himself, layering overdub upon overdub. Sink that putt, I ask you.

The material is uneven. I’m nuts about Rob McKenzie’s blues-based Indigo but I feel Roydon Tse’s Continual Awakening, riffing on short-term memory impairment, is more interesting in idea than execution. Theatrics fail to work on a disc as they might on stage in Swedish composer Folke Rabe’s Basta, though the piece serves to highlight Bennett’s virtuosity. Finally there’s Ziggurat, by Farshid Samandari, a gorgeous dialogue with background voices and drums; it evokes the grand structure suggested by the title. A chattering coda ends the disc with a bang.

PEP: Piano and Ehru Project
Nicole Ge Li; Corey Hamm
Redshift Records TK437
(redshiftmusic.org)

The Vancouver duo Piano and Erhu Project (PEP), founded in 2011, is by its very nature a cross-cultural enterprise. It represents the ongoing artistic partnership between pianist and UBC music professor Corey Hamm, a champion of avant-garde music, and the erhu player Nicole Ge Li, the concertmaster of the B.C. Chinese Music Ensemble. She is a virtuoso on that Chinese two-stringed fiddle, the most popular of the huqin family. Moreover, as eloquently evidenced on this album, Li is as much at home in recent Western musical idioms as in Chinese ones.

While the combination of erhu and piano may be novel to most Canadian listeners, it isn’t news in China. There the practice of a pianist accompanying an erhu soloist reaches back into the last century. The compositions which form the backbone of Li and Hamm’s project however, exemplify a more fluid interplay between these two instruments, each an icon of its respective culture. Rather than an inter-cultural vanity project, their collective music-making focuses on polished, musically engaged readings of recently commissioned scores. It’s also a reflection of Vancouver’s rich, ever-evolving, pan-Pacific music scene.

The repertoire on the album all dates from within the last few years. It explores a wide stylistic range, from the alternately sassy, sizzling Blues ’n Grooves (2014) composed by University of Toronto composition student Roydon Tse, to Edward Top’s mysterious, modernist Lamentation (2014), a feast for Li’s expressive mastery in the erhu’s upper range. Top was a recent composer-in-residence with the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra.

A word about the composers; of the ten featured here most are Canadian, including Jocelyn Morlock, John Oliver, Laurie Radford and Mark Armanini. The polished scores they have produced for PEP are all performed with care and élan, and bear repeated listening. With a treasury of over 40 commissioned works by both Canadian and Chinese composers played to high standards, I’m not surprised that Volume 2 of PEP has already been announced.

Nicole Lizée – Bookburners
Various Artists
Centrediscs CMCCD 20514 (CD+DVD)

In 2013, Canada’s government committed what scientists now call libricide, closing seven Department of Fisheries and Oceans libraries. Ostensibly, it was to save by digitizing materials, but that hasn’t happened. Little attempt was made to preserve the materials and precious collections were lost to landfill. It was 21st-century book burning, but without the symbolic theatre.

Milton wrote that anyone who kills a man kills “a reasonable creature, God’s image; but he who destroys a good book kills reason itself.” The striking cover image (by Todd Stewart) of Nicole Lizée’s Bookburners CD/DVD may assert a similar interpretation. Depicting a skeleton holding a smouldering book, the figure may have sought to burn it, but instead self-immolated, consigning her/himself to eternal damnation, rather than squelching the ideas on the pages. Conversely, a dug-up, laughing skeleton having a good read fits in with the rough-hewn and somewhat nostalgic approach to technology and media that permeates the aesthetic of the five works in this collection.

The music and images tease us into dissecting the materials, reference points and tools; a rich exercise with antennae outside European contemporary music and into pop cultural icons that are the shared knowledge of Lizée’s generation. Prog-rock chord progressions, American minimalist repetitions, post-digital glitch techniques, DJ sound gear and uncommon instrumentations are all there, crashing into one another, but listening exclusively that way becomes so fragmented that it prevents the pleasures of listening to the global textures. When identification of materials becomes second to hearing their blended interaction, the music opens up a bright tableau of complex rhythms and timbres, despite the darker undertones of the titles and subject matter.

On the CD, White Label Experiment, for percussion quartet and electronics, is a joyously warped mashup of John Cage and rave culture, with the turntable as the common denominator. Typewriters peck away, combined with stylus/needle drops, noise timbres and omnichord, while metallic percussion takes you higher, in register and experience. Ouijist continues the attraction to sound hacking and an expansive, low-tech electronic palette built on the bent and the broken. On Son of the Man with the Golden Arms, drummer Ben Reimer’s playing stands out with a crisp tone and light touch, relishing in the complexity of notated beats, which are at times reminiscent of Bill Bruford on the Yes Fragile album.

For the DVD, Lizée brings film into the mix. Hitchcock Études (for piano and “glitch”) works with the Lissajou-inspired credits from Psycho, excerpts from The Birds and other middle-period Hitchcock films, looping them and jarring perception of the familiar into the strange and sometimes menacing. Paradoxically, the glitches are a by-product of digital sound techniques, whereas the film sources she’s working with originate from the silver (analog) screen, meaning the glitch element is obtained by imposing new tech on old media. Bookburners is staged footage of turntablist DJ P-Love and cellist Stéphane Tétreault performing in a freight elevator/loading dock. Like the other pieces in this set, it’s a bit longer than the material suggests, yet achieves its goals more tamely. Without exception, these are excellent performances, artfully combined to express a fresh remix of North American musical mannerisms.

Tetraktys – Contemporary music for string quartet by young Mexican composers
Cuarteto Latinoamericano
Urtext Digital Classics JBCC239

A tetractys is a triangular figure in geometry consisting of ten points arranged in four rows. With tracks such as Fibonacci on the Beach and Triple Point, the term tetractys appropriately represents the ten young Mexican composers featured. Further, common threads intersect each piece stylistically as clear references to popular Latin grooves, rhythms and harmonies are heard throughout.

While each work on the disc deserves mention, three of the ten were particularly successful. First, in the piece Chandrian, composer Mateo Nossa makes excellent use of novel bowing techniques to evoke skeletal tiptoeing amid strong rhythmic play. Use of Col legno bowing conjures a rather danse macabre mood. The title seems to reference a group of seven fairly evil chaps created by American author Patrick Rothfuss in his fantasy trilogy, The Kingkiller Chronicle.

Next, in Ciudades Suspendidas by Jean Angelus Pichardo, glissandi and natural harmonics pass around the quartet creating a seamless ethereal cloud. We are quickly swept into punchy groove-oriented sections with angular melodies. This feature of the nebulous taking shape into a crunchy groove-based section seems to permeate each piece on the disc, a stylistic feature the quartet seems to enjoy.

Lastly, in Roberto Sarti’s  Echoes from the Past, we hear a work that is clearly the most adventurous in terms of texture, harmony and form. Sarti’s use of virtuosic explosions makes for a serendipitous shattering of expectations. The strong imaginative palette of this composer leaves a visceral and pleasantly disturbing atmosphere in the mind of the listener.

It is clear that the members of the quartet thoroughly enjoyed the demands each piece had to offer. This joy of the process can be heard in the bright, crisp and confident expressiveness the quartet offers in this recording.