Day 34: April 20 - Cross-Contamination
Keen listeners will notice I did not post over the weekend. This series takes a surprising amount of research time to ensure I provide you interesting tunes with proper context. As such, I will be only doing QuaranTunes Monday to Friday from now on. I deeply, humbly apologize to anyone whose weekends depended on these silly little blogs. I suggest Tiger King instead. It’s as, if not more, enlightening.
Today’s music seeks to combine two traditions. As we struggle with not being able to meet each other, this music reminds us of how beautiful and wondrously varied and inventive exchanging ideas can be.
Natalie Joachim - Lamize pa Dous
Brooklyn-Born flutist and composer Nathalie Joachim celebrates her Haitian heritage in this incredible work. An evening’s worth of traditional Haitian songs and music by female Haitian musicians interspersed with recordings of Joachims’ grandmother. The music is fun, rhythmic, and moving with Joachim presenting with great care and impact a beautifully seamless integration of Haitian music and history within this contemporary classical setting. I love this album and really rate it as a sign of how classical music can progress and integrate both deeply personal matters and other musics while still creating an engaging, interesting, and audience-facing work. Lamize pa dous was made famous by Haitian singer, activist, and icon Toto Bissainthe. This creole song, whose title translates to poverty is not sweet, is about a sick woman lamenting her poverty and saying she will go seek a better life somewhere else. It seems fitting for Bissainthe herself, who had to flee Haiti during the reign of dictator Francois Duvalier. This track is characteristic of the album, arresting and rhythmic, bubbly and solemn, with playful string writing and bouncy beats underneath. The opening solo is gorgeous. Played here by Joachim herself with the Spektral Quartet.
Krar Collective - Guragigna
When I first heard this, I was entranced by that bright, twangy, supple guitar tone. That funky guitar, turns out, was a Krar harp, a sort of hand-held harp that is strummed and churns out zestiness. This has that same sort of rough energy as in early Arctic Monkeys (comes from that Krar tone and the upbeat, incessant tunefulness). Guragigna refers to groups of people in Southern Ethiopia who speak a group of languages, Guraginya (Guragigna). I rate this song definitely, as well as the rest of their songs, which bop with the same infectious energy.
Ge Gan-Ru - Four Studies of Peking Opera: IV. Clown Music
Ge Gan-Ru grew up in the middle of the Cultural Revolution in China, which, among many other atrocities, saw a cleansing of Western art and ideas from cultural discourse. In 1974, two years before the end of the Cultural Revolution, Gan-Ru started his education at the Shanghai Conservatory, whose president had been tortured and humiliated for advocating the music of Debussy. Gan-Ru would have been taught Chinese instruments and the Party line that art must serve the People, not for its own sake. After Shanghai, Gan-Ru came to Columbia in New York and created a body of work which integrates modernist Western techniques with Chinese traditional soundworlds. The result is amazing, with gestural, seemingly programmatic rhetorics built from wackily stunning colors. This work, for Piano Quintet, sounds nothing like your traditional piano quintet (go listen to another Frenchman, Gabriel Faure’s piano quintets as a conservative baseline). In Four Studies of Peking Opera, Gan-Ru creates a sonic palette based from Peking Opera: one of bright, buzzing percussion and quick, dramatic gestures anchored in a meandering pentatonicism. Peking Opera is a multi-sensory delight full of brightly colored actors and singers whose actions are highlighted by a battery of bendy percussive sounds. This whole work is wonderful, especially Aria, which builds to a climax similar to Debussy’s string quartet in dripping sentiment. Performed here by the Shanghai Quartet with Kathryn Woodard
Chthonic - Battle of Bu-Tik Palace
Across the strait, Taiwanese metal group Chthonic incorporate traditional instruments in a less abstract, more aggressive way. A standard metal set up, though with the addition of an erhu, a bowed single-string instrument, Chthonic’s epic, symphonic music often tells the stories of Taiwan: folk tales, histories of soldiers in World War II, and songs that address the imperial actions of China towards Taiwan. The album, Bu-Tik, explores the history of violence in Taiwan, centering around the 228 massacre, in which the Nationalist government under Chiang Kai-Shek killed thousands of protestors in 1947. It’s a blistering track, which jumps directly into an erhu-driven assault. Taiwanese opera star, Meiyun Yang, who brings an ever more epic badassery to this barrage.
Toru Takemitsu - Distance for Oboe and Sho
A sho is a Japanese mouth organ which often plays complexes of notes, sort of like a more complex harmonica. Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu finds a western analogue for that in the complex oboe. Both share a reediness in tone and the oboe, under skillful hands, is capable of fascinating multiphonics, those really ugly, complex sounds at the beginning. There is beauty in their complexity, in the interactions between these notes which don’t normally exist in instruments. Takemitsu harnesses that blending of complex beauties into a mysterious and wondrous work. Into this soundworld, Takemitsu incorporates the Japanese concept of ma, which refers to negative space, an empty distance (seeeee). The performers are standing in a line on stage, rather than seated next to each other, choreographically showing this ‘distance.’ The music itself shows ma, with its long refractory periods interspersed with accumulative, gestural flourishes. Played here by oboe mythical being Heinz Holliger and Sho player Tadamaro Ono.