Joan Tower: Chamber and Solo Works

This recording, another excellent release by Composers Recordings Incorporated (CRI), which existed for about a half century from 1954 to 2003 to promote the work of modern classical music composers, is a great compendium of the work of Joan Tower (b. 1938), who is still with us and whose most recent performed piece was from about five years ago.

The album includes eight recordings spanning almost a decade from 1972 to 1981 and featuring the Da Capo Chamber Players, which the composer/pianist helped form in 1969 and which is still active, and the sextet Collage, as well as three soloists from the ensembles, clarinetist Laura Flax, violinist Joel Smirnoff and flautist Patricia Spencer, this latter still with Da Capo.  Tower performs with Da Capo on three pieces, "Amazon" and the two "Breakfast Rhythms."

Tower wrote in the liners that she was inspired by Stravinsky's ballet Petroushka and captivated by paired figure skating for "Petroushskates" and she noted that "the figure skating pairs became a whole company o skaters," or musicians, for what she calls "a sort of musical carnival on ice."  For "Wings," the composer envisioned a falcon soaring high in the sky without much movement before "the bird goes into elaborate flight patterns that loop around, diving downwards, gaining tremendous speeds."

The composer spent part of her childhood in Bolivia and credits her learning of that nation's music and playing percussion there for much of her approach to rhythm.  For "Amazon," the great South American river, with its "consistent background flow" and change in width and speed is reflected in the variations of the work, of which there is an orchestra version II.  "Platinum Spirals" is dedicated to her father, who as a  geologist and mineral engineer and the piece draws on platinum's flexibility and malleability in its score for the violin.

The instrumentation in "Breakfast Rhythms" and "Noon Dance" are the same and the second follows the other, with the second a comment on the ties between dance and chamber music, especially in following and leading.  The first was motivated by Beethoven's approach to contrasts in rhythm and texture, with an emphasis on patterns of pitch in the harmonies and melodies, as well as a focus on how the clarinet's "lyrical passages . . . lend at-home and away-from-home feelings."

Spencer's flute is spotlighted in "Hexachords," the title referring to the harmonic components of "a six-note unordered chromatic collection of pitches" where vibrato and rhythm in different registers "creates a counterpoint of tunes" to hold the listener's attention through five sections that Tower says "are most easily differentiated by a sense of either going nowhere or staying somewhere."  

The complexity of Tower's writing is both modern and, as another part of the notes suggest, still has "an accessible, tangible quality."  This listener is hardly well-tutored on the finer points of music, but it seems that the way she develops and works with harmony and rhythm and especially how she uses color with the instruments in the ensemble amply provides this quality.  This is compelling and immersive music that never fails to hold the attention and is beautifully played and well-recorded.

Harry Partch: The Bewitched

With his system of monophony and its 43-unit "microtone" set leading him to build his own instruments to play the strange and wonderful music he created, Harry Partch was a musical iconoclast of the highest order.  He was also remarkably contrarian, dismissive of the "abstract" practices from the Middle Ages onward that tore music away from dance and drama as was and is still done in other societies, and not at all shy about condemning those who differed from his views.  Still, while he worked largely in obscurity, Partch had a small devoted coterie of supporters, followers, and musicians who did what they could to present his music where possible when he was alive and do so today nearly a half-century after his death.

In 1955, when The Bewitched was completed and soon performed at a music festival at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, it would hardly be expected to be on the radar of all but the most devoted of alternative music lovers.  65 years later, it would certainly sound bizarre and out of tune to newcomers, but, with some exposure to the music of other parts of the world, including gamelan from Bali, so-called "Peking opera" from China, and so on, what Partch was doing does make more sense.  

It isn't opera, but has a structure somewhat reminiscent of it, with twelve scenes bearing wonderful titles like "The Romancing of a Pathological Liar Comes to an Inspired End" (hmmm . . . ), "Visions Fill the Eyes of a Defeated Basketball Team in the Shower Room," and, my favorite, "The Cognoscenti Are Plunged into a Demonic Descent While at Cocktails."  Instruments included standard ones such as clarinet, piccolo, and cello, though there is also a Japanese koto, as well as Partch's bamboo marimba, or "boo," cloud-chamber bowls, harmonic canon, kithara, spoils of war, bass marimba, and chromelodeon.  Percussion is central to the music here, as in much of Partch's remarkable work.

Here are some excerpts from Partch in the liners about this amazing musical journey: "The Bewitched is in the tradition of world-wide ritual theatre.  It is the opposite of specialized . . . it is a seeking for release—through satire, whimsy, magic, ribaldry—from the catharsis of tragedy.  It is an essay toward a miraculous abeyance of civilized rigidity . . . each of the 12 scenes is a theatrical unfolding of nakedness, a psychological strip-tease . . . we are all bewitched, and mostly by accident: the accident of form, color, and sex; of prejudices condition from the cradle on up, of the particular ruts we have found ourselves in or have dug for ourselves because of our individual needs."  Given that the nation had just emerged from the McCarthy "witch trials" and the "man-in-the-gray-flannel-suit" mentality was very much holding sway, Partch's jeremiad against conformity is striking if not specified.  This 1990 release on CRI (Composers Recordings, Inc., a non-profit for the promotion of contemporary music) is a stimulating, if very challenging, example of Partch's stunning music.

Milton Babbitt: An Elizabethan Sextette/Solo Piano Works/Groupwise/Vision and Prayer

Milton Babbitt has often been criticized for being cold, mechanical, and overly intellectual, with his interests in electronics and twelve-tone composition lacking human elements.  However, a recent read of his Words About Music, a compilation of lectures he gave about his views on Schoenberg's system and other aspects of music, while often very technical and beyond this amateur's understanding, revealed someone who had a quick sense of humor, a way of lecturing to students and others and, more importantly, a total passion for his calling.

It's one thing not to like someone's work because it just doesn't reach you, but it's quite another to dismiss it because of perceptions about a composer's qualities.

This recording, then, is an excellent example of showing Babbitt in a variety of settings, including some beautiful vocal works that amply demonstrate a very human approach to composition.  "An Elizabethan Sextette" is, of course, a series of a half-dozen love poems from the Elizabethan era, including one by the famed queen.  The singing is in six parts, so this sense of polyphony adds to the lushness and captivating nature of the works.

Alan Feinberg's piano work on five pieces, four of which are under 2 1/2 minutes with the last, "About Time" running over twelve, is recorded with great clarity, his performance precise, and the composition compelling.  The piano is inherently an evocative instrument and, whatever views there are about twelve-tone composition, the range of sounds generated in these pieces show, to this untutored listener, a certain warmth, as well as of virtuosity and the interesting combinations and recombinations of twelve-tone technique utilized.

"Groupwise," is a concerto for flute, alto flute and piccolo with a piano and string trio accompaniment.  The flute is almost constantly soloing, but the range of sounds generated by the other instruments in conjunction with the main one is striking and alluring.  The piano has its own sort of sound world, while the string trio has its, as well and then there are duos of violin and cello and what appears to be a viola and cello.  Exploring low and high registers, using pizzicato techniques, and unusual arrays of long and short notes are just a few examples of what this untrained ear can pick out as far as notable sound elements.  Simply put, what's attractive about this is the way the various instrument combinations "speak" to one another within the recombinations of the twelve tone set.

Dylan Thomas's poem "Vision and Prayer" is rendered into a striking piece with Babbitt's use of electronic tape from the classic Mark II RCA Synthesizer at the pioneering Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center (another recently-read book, Electronic Sound, discussed this instrument and center at some length by author and composer, Joel Chadabe) and the now-90 year old Bethanie Beardslee's utterly amazing soprano vocals from a recording many years earlier than the late 1980s ones on the rest of this album. Here is a way for the electronics to mesh with the human voice so it isn't overly harsh or forbidding--unless you just don't like electronic sound to begin with.