Day 29: April 15 - Community Spread, Vol. 1
A new weekly divergence, Community Spread will focus on music made by living artists.
Theresa Wong - Letters to a Friend
Composer, cellist, improviser, and inter-disciplinarian Theresa Wong is very comfortable playing with sound. Letters to a Friend semi-methodically showcases the wide palette of the wind quintet through an unfolding hocket texture. There is both a scientific rigor and a very effective rhetoric that unfolds in this piece, giving it both a sense of fascination and of narrative. Performed here by Splinter Reeds
Eva-Maria Houben - Janela. Ein Fenster - Fur Zwei
“If you would ask me for a statement to composing, to my composing, I would answer: listening becomes the awareness of fading sound,”
German composer, musicologist, and organist Eva-Maria Houben is part of the Wandelweiser collective, a group of artists and musicians who often make thrilling and moving works with the softest sounds. Houben’s Janela. Ein fenster - fur Zwei (Janela, a window - for Two Players) fits this remit. An oscillation between two fragile and beautiful sonic objects, this work highlights the complexity within a seemingly simple thing. Listen to the graininess and the hidden notes, the soft whistles, that reveal themselves within the sounds. Performed here by violinist Erik Carlson and percussionist Greg Stuart.
Dan VanHassel – Epidermis
American composer and technologist Dan VanHassel crafts some lively, fascinating textures in this work for bass clarinet, percussion, and electronics. The acoustic duo weave tight rhythms through this shifting sonic landscape. I’m amazed by how VanHassel’s ability to create these sonic illusions, blending almost imperceptibly the electronic noise and bass clarinet’s air noises and multiphonics. VanHassel’s rhythmic sense is incredible as well, maintaining this off-kilter groove throughout that just bops tbh. Performed (phenomally) by Transient Canvas.
Alex Hills – OutsideIn
The longest piece by far comes from English composer Alex Hills. Clocking in at over a half-hour, OutsideIn is inspired partly by E.A. Abbott’s idea of Flatland, in which 2-dimensional beings must reckon with the sudden appearance of a third dimension. In this work for violin soloist and string ensemble, that narrow, 2-dimensional world consists of the harmonic series, a complex sonic world hidden within pitches. The music continually collapses in on itself for the first section in a series of homo-rhythmic gestures before becoming disentangled rhythmically and melodically, embarking on a spacious and gorgeous exploration of this new world. This work is so wonderfully and colorfully orchestrated. It is not easy to do a ‘simple’ thing like a descending scale. Hills’ application of string techniques creates a brilliant, delightful, playful, and constantly fresh rhetoric that sounds like both science and satire. Performed by violinist Aisha Orzazbayeva with the 12 Ensemble, under James Weeks.