Volume 26 Issue 7 - May and June 2021

into a vast, single-movement work for piano
and wave oscillators. He is no stranger to such
endeavours, having staged past live performances
running up to 12 hours in length. Here,
Horvath (via Lucier) offers a sprawling brand
of listening experience, supported by “slow
sweep pure wave oscillators.” Only single
acoustic piano notes are struck throughout,
echoing for minutes at a time over a backdrop
of acoustic beating. (Two pure waves move up
and down with a range of four octaves. The
beats are directed by the piano tone’s proximity
to pitches from the oscillator.)
While the resulting soundworld is undeniably
retro, such creations can reward the
assiduous listener. This aesthetic urges a
holistic mode of attentiveness. One has to
empty the ears of preconceived notions of
structure, melody – and even of texture. These
tones and beats sear through a vacuum of
space on their own sort of photon, commingling
and naturalistic: unhindered sonic
spectres that speak truly. In what realm
could such sounds move us most? Imagine
that we’re listening amongst the cosmos,
unbounded and flung loose into the stars.
Adam Sherkin
In Your Hands
Lavena
Bright Shiny Things BSTC-0145
(brightshiny.ninja)
! Another stellar
offering from the
label Bright Shiny
Things, American
cellist Lavena’s
debut album
already feels like
a veteran project.
Lavena champions powerfully through one
perfect piece after another – a diverse and
colourful collection, each as interesting and
compelling as the next.
Beginning with Gemma Peacocke’s
Amygdala (“an exploration of the way in
which anxiety comes in waves…” – oh, how
timely!) this work for solo cello and electronics
perfectly delivers its description.
The duos by Jessie Montgomery, for cello
and violin, and Ted Hearne, a powerful and
dynamic setting for cello and percussion, are
outstanding compositions beautifully delivered.
In between is in manus tuas, a rich
and melodic composition in Caroline Shaw’s
classic multi-layered chordal style for singing
cellist, based on a 16th-century Thomas
Tallis motet.
The piece Tusuula, by the brilliant and
multi-talented American composer Bryce
Dessner, anchors the album’s solo content.
Written in 2015 during the week Dessner
spent as composer-in-residence at Finland’s
Meidän Festivaali, Tusuula is destined to
become an outstanding addition to the solo
cello repertoire. Lavena leaves no doubt of her
commitment to every note.
Tender and yearning, My Heart Comes
Undone, a valentine gift to the artist from her
composer husband Judah Adashi, inspired
by Björk’s Unravel, gently closes the album.
In this iteration it’s played by solo cellist
with loop pedal. This is an adventurous yet
cohesive mix of compositions that manages
to remain totally accessible to the contemporary
newbie.
Cheryl Ockrant
Leo Chadburn – Slower/Talker
Apartment House; Quatuor Bozzini;
Gemma Saunders
Library of Nothing Records CD06
(leochadburn.com)
! The wild card
of the British
contemporary classical
music scene,
composer Leo
Chadburn (aka
Simon Bookish)
widens the scope
of his musical experimentation with this
remarkable new release. Featuring performances
by Quatuor Bozzini (Canada) and
Apartment House (UK), and the voices of
actress Gemma Saunders and Chadburn
himself, the album combines minimalism
with spoken word in a way that is symmetrical
in form, yet inquisitive and uninhibited
in its expression.
The six compositions included on Slower/
Talker span a decade of the composer’s work.
All explore the relationship between found
text and its instrumental counterpart, made
up of mostly strings and keyboard instruments.
The text’s subjects are comprised of
lists of a kind – names of moth species (The
Indistinguishables), topographical features
encircling London (Freezywater), a lexicon of
words used in the fragrance industry (Vapour
Descriptors) or a stream of consciousness
and properties of chemical elements (The
Halogens). The words are spoken theatrically
or in a musical way, always with restraint.
Some are sung, understatedly, such as words
of Mao Zedong in X Chairman Maos. The
instruments are interweaving in and out,
mostly supporting, sometimes questioning,
making up meanings of their own. The
textures created are beautiful in their sparseness.
The result is a floating dialogue that is
hypnotizing and luring, stripped of drama,
smooth, as if outside of this world.
Slower/Talker engages the listener in
a subtle way. It is a sonically explorative
journey, one worth taking.
Ivana Popovic
Ghost Light
Akropolis Reed Quintet
New Focus Recordings FCR292
(newfocusrecordings.com/catalogue)
! I was thinking
about the Crash
Test Dummies’ The
Ghosts that Haunt
Me, when the
eerie, first moaning
microtonal chord
from the Akropolis
Reed Quintet’s
Ghost Light sounded in my headset. Spooky!
This fantastic group of woodwind players
from Detroit explores life and death at the far
end of the musical spectrum; toe-tapping,
mysterious, in tune and in synch. The cover
art of the disc brought to mind the Dummies’
release from long ago. Look carefully, there’s
purpose to the whimsy.
All the music was commissioned. Unusual?
No, but the instrumentation is: two clarinets
(soprano and bass), plus an oboe, a bassoon,
and… saxophone! Here is range, here is agility
and grace, here are complementary colours,
never the cloying homophony of a saxophone
quartet or worse, clarinet choir. Listen to the
blends intentionally exploited by Michael
Gilbertson in the brief and chipper Kinds
of Light.
That opening moan is from Rites for the
Afterlife, a four-movement work inspired
by ancient Egyptian rituals guiding the
soul from this world to the next. Composer
Stacy Garrop’s unearthly timbres of microtonal
clusters, executed with clean precision,
draw the listener into the mystery. Unpitched
whispery effects evoke reed beds by a river.
Styx or Nile?
Iranian Niloufar Nourbakhsh based Firing
Squad on the greatest opening sentence in
literature, from Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s
One Hundred Years of Solitude. This melancholy,
melodic one-movement work explores
mortality and memory.
Jeff Scott, French horn of the Imani Winds,
wrote the disc’s most substantial work:
Homage to Paradise Valley. This is activist
music, composed to poems by Marsha Music,
commissioned to commemorate the destruction
of Detroit neighbourhoods and landmarks
taken from the African American
community during the mid-20th century, in
the name of urban renewal.
Max Christie
thewholenote.com May and June 2021 | 43