Modern and Contemporary

A Walk to Meryton
Made by Musicbots and Arne Eigenfeldt
Redshift Records TK533 (redshiftmusicsociety.bandcamp.com)

North Vancouver-based composer Arne Eigenfeldt has worked with Artificial Intelligence since the1980s. His musical tool creation Musebots is a modular, interactive system which generates countless musical environments like washes, percussive sounds, held notes, intervals and low to high pitches. Ten pieces with video co-written and generated by Musebots feature genres like contemporary music, jazz, spoken word and electronics. Live human performers John Korsrud (trumpet, flugelhorn), Meredith Bates (violin), Jon Bentley (soprano & tenor saxophones) and Barbara Adler (text/reading) were recorded then overlaid to the Musebots tracks. Each musician was given a generated score with melodies, harmonic progressions and suggestions where to improvise. Adler wrote her spoken texts based on her conversations with Eigenfeldt about walking, Jane Austin, musebots and internal dialogs.

Room for a Moment features tonal, accessible lyricism like electronic clicks, held notes and ringing bell sounds between phrases. Background spoken words and violin mix well to closing comforting sound. Fit As You Are opens with a repeated walking and exercising drum beat. Then a bit slower with intervals and held notes. Spoken word articulation at times matches the generated rhythms. Trumpet and sax fit well but are too soft. In Pleasure to Suffer grim low held notes support higher lines of spoken word, alternating bell like sounds and held notes. Abrupt saxophone trills add interest. 

I am SO surprised and excited by this Musebots generated music. Yes, it still has that “familiar TV/film computer sound” yet Musebot’s lush harmonic tonal to atonal melodies, washes and percussive rhythms combine perfectly with the human performers.

Vanessa Marcoux – Cendres
Vanessa Marcoux; Marie-Christine Poirier; Strings
Independent (youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_m8IULQX12yWqxLhPw-lHI63QGXkhcnHpQ)

This CD comes without any information about Vanessa Marcoux other than that she’s the violin soloist in her own compositions, performing with pianist Marie-Christine Poirier, also heard here, as Duo Cordelia. Also lacking, other than the movement titles, are any descriptions of the music. Searching online, I learned that she’s Québecoise, was born in 1986, studied composition with Ana Sokolović, was a member of the Juno-nominated klezmer band Oktopus and scored the film adaptation of Gabrielle Roy’s novel La riviėre sans repos.

At 28 minutes, Marcoux’s arrangement for violin, piano and string ensemble of her Violin Sonata dominates the disc. In Lento, the violin wails in desperation. The discordant tango of La porte entrebâillėe grows steadily faster and wilder. Improvisation – Le déroute is an extended, vehement solo cadenza. Tempo rubato’s lyricism is tinged with regret; the concluding Molto Aggressivo defines itself.

Petite Suite Aquatique is in two movements. Aquarium features long-lined, plaintive violin melodies over abrupt piano rhythms. In Deep Blue Saloon, a Romany-flavoured dance is followed by honky-tonk ragtime, ending raucously. According to the only description by Marcoux I could find online, it represents “a bar frequented by the motley fauna of the deep sea who have come to witness the burlesque stripping of a wanton octopus.” (!)

The densely-scored Cendres for string quintet begins with agitated propulsion before subsiding to restless songfulness. Although the CD lasts only 48 minutes, Marcoux’s intensely gripping, tempestuous music left me completely satisfied.

Cartografia del Mar
Andre Cabráin; Pedro Mateo Ganzález
Eudora Records EUD-SAC-2307 (eudorarecords.com)

The sea, like amniotic fluid, has the power to join us all, as creatures of consciousness, through the power of music. Cartografia Del Mar (A Map of the Sea) is a deeply stirring international and intergenerational program presented here by accomplished flutist (and Scotsman) Andre Cebrián and eminent classical guitarist (and Spaniard) Pedro Mateo González. The album’s, suites and stand-alone compositions are from Astor Piazzolla, Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Toru Takemitsu, Robert Beaser, Leo Brouwer and Feliu Gasull. 

Up first is Piazzolla’s Histoire du Tango. Lyrical and pungent, heavy with the aroma of Argentinian night life through the past century, this magnificent suite has been brilliantly re-imagined by Cebrián and González. In the first movement, Bordel 1900, the duo explores the bordello as the instigator of the 20th century roots of tango. Light, airy, joyous are all descriptive of this movement. Coy, jejune passages are interspersed with waves of intimacy and pungent secrets as Cambrián and González traverse intrigues of the Buenos Aires night like a single-celled organism. 

Italian icon Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s Sonatina Op.205 is rendered here with exquisite care and skill by both artists, and captures every nuance of this gorgeous, rhythmically varied suite, rife with nearly unbearable beauty. Japanese composer Takemitsu contributes his masterful work, Toward the Sea. In the first movement, The Night, the listener’s skin tingles… all senses are open and awash with an eerie feeling of unseen presences, swathed in mystery… lower flute tones evoke a feeling of isolation, while the guitar is the veritable vapor on which the flute floats. Also of note is the “Mountain Songs” suite by New England-born Beaser. It is a work of pure Americana, stunningly rendered with authenticity by the duo. A magnificent work!

Nancy Galbraith – Everything Flows
Boston Modern Orchestra Project; Gil Rose
BMOP Sound 1096 (bmopsound.bandcamp.com/album/nancy-galbraith-everything-flows-concerto-for-solo-percussion-and-orchestra)

I’ve previously written reviews in The WholeNote praising five different CDs by the Boston Modern Orchestra Project and conductor Gil Rose. Here’s another. These three very entertaining concertos by Nancy Galbraith, chair of composition at Carnegie Mellon University in her native Pittsburgh, were written for, premiered by and now recorded by three “friends and/or colleagues” – violinist-conductor-composer Alyssa Wang, new-music-championing flutist Lindsey Goodman and virtuoso percussionist Abby Langhorst.

Galbraith’s Violin Concerto No.1 (2016) begins with perky percussion and the violin playing buoyant Chinese-sounding melodies. In the elegiac second movement, Eggshell White Night, Galbraith’s tribute to a late friend, the violin laments amid gentle harp and piano arpeggios over solemn, sustained orchestral chords. The finale begins as a perpetuum mobile with headlong violin figurations and ends with grandiose orchestral perorations accompanying the violin’s rapid passagework.

The Flute Concerto (2019) is similarly structured. Two cheerful movements featuring percussion-enlivened Latin American dance rhythms bracket the Nocturne, in which the flute plays plaintive phrases and melodies, electronically echoed and amplified, over gloomy orchestral chords.

A wild barrage of syncopated Latin American rhythms launches the one-movement Everything Flows: Concerto for Solo Percussion and Orchestra (2019), gradually subsiding to a slower, quieter central section that evokes, for me, African drumming and the thumb-played mbira. The concerto ends with a raucous, jazzy jam session. It would be great fun to watch as the soloist becomes a one-person percussion section, playing nearly non-stop on at least 12 different instruments!