Volume 27 Issue 5 | March 4 - April 15, 2022

Light implies the light that shines from
African America music, which has had a
profound effect on my compositions. The
first movement contrasts a driving, aggressive
orchestra with a playful, jaunty response
in the piano.” The slow soul-searching second
movement was inspired by Jewish liturgical
music, while the third by the scat singing of
Ella Fitzgerald set in a combination of orchestral
variation and rondo forms. Featuring
the Philharmony Bohuslav Martinů and
Barnes’ rhythmically and dynamically incisive
solo piano, this is my favourite music on
the album.
Andrew Timar
Melia Watras – String Masks
Various Artists
Planet M Records PMR003
(planetmrecords.com)
! American
composer and
virtuoso violist
Melia Watras’ latest
album String Masks
primarily features
her sensitive
playing and several
string instrumentcentred
compositions – with a brief detour
to a delicate unaccompanied song with
Icelandic lyrics. The dramatic exception is
the 23-minute title track which also includes
singers, actors and instruments invented by
the iconoclastic American composer and
music theorist Harry Partch (1901-1974), by
far the longest and most complex work here.
String Masks opens with Watras’ Kreutzer for
string trio, explicitly eliciting Beethoven’s wellknown
sonata for violin and piano of the same
name, as well as borrowing from Janáĉek’s
String Quartet No.1. Michael Jinsoo Lim (violin),
Watras (viola) and Sæunn Thorsteinsdóttir
(cello) perform the four-movement score with
restrained eloquence and passion.
Watras has been captivated by the Partch
Instrumentarium ever since they arrived at
University of Washington, where Watras serves
as professor of viola. She includes three of
them in String Masks, the narrative-based
work in which she echoes Partch’s manner of
using his microtonal instruments to reflect the
cadences and phrases of human speech, and to
set an idiosyncratic mood. She effectively uses
Partch’s Harmonic Canon (44-string zither
with microtonal tunings), Bass Marimba (with
organ-pipe resonators) and Cloud-Chamber
Bowls (14 large hung glass carboys) in addition
to violin, viola and voices.
The composer writes that the “otherworldly
sounds of Partch’s inventions” are used to
set the aural stage for a “fantastical vision of
an underworld inhabited by string-playing
legend[ary musician]s from the past. Read by
three actors, each is evoked in the text, the
narrative forming the metaphoric backbone
of the aptly titled String Masks.
Andrew Timar
Andy Akiho – Seven Pillars
Sandbox Percussion
Aki Rhythm Productions (andyakiho.com)
! Critically
acclaimed new
music composer
Andy Akiho has
created a captivating
and powerful
commission for the
Sandbox Percussion
quartet in the form of Seven Pillars, the
collaboration a labour of love between friends
spanning eight years.
Written as a multimedia chamber work,
even without the intended video presentation
included, the music is mesmerizing from the
instant it opens. The complexity of the work
belies the relative simplicity of the acoustic
percussion tools at hand: bottles, glockenspiels,
drums, wood blocks, metal pipes,
sandpaper, marimbas, kick drum. Akiho takes
full advantage of the skill and inventiveness
of the individual performers by dedicating
solo tracks to each, so that he can explore the
nuances and textures of the simple objects.
It is in the delivery that the writing takes
flight. The remaining seven movements are
for the full quartet, showing off not only the
compositions but the slick performance and
tight comradeship of the group.
Akiho and Sandbox Percussion commissioned
11 video artists to create original films
for Seven Pillars – one film for each movement
of the work – however the hard copy
of the CD makes no mention of this. It does
however include a complex insert, a complicated
paper cutout designed almost as a stage
setting in lieu of the visual films. These took
some studying, slowly revealing explanations
of the form of each movement in relation
to the work as a whole, and spelling out the
instruments used (“brake drum” for instance).
But the cards can’t quite replace the brilliance
of the collaborative videos that encompass
the worlds of dance, animation, experimental
narrative film, time-lapse and more. They
are also a lot more fun, as you can see here:
youtube.com/watch?v=EXHORWr6xQ8.
Cheryl Ockrant
Dana Lyn – A Point On a Slow Curve
Instrumental Ensemble
In A Circle Records
(inacircle-records.com/releases)
! It took eight
years for experimental
visual
artist Jay DeFeo to
complete her mixed
media painting The
Rose in the 60s.
The Rose is over
ten feet high and
weighs more than one ton. It is this impressively
textured and radiant work that drew
American composer and violinist Dana Lyn
to start her own eight-year compositional
journey. The result is A Point on a Slow
Curve, a nine-movement sonic poem parallelling
the creation of The Rose.
Scored for female choir, violin, clarinet,
cello, bassoon, vibraphone, bass and drums,
A Point on a Slow Curve is experimental in
nature, sometimes wild and chaotic, sometimes
angelic. The improvisatory sections are
tightly connected with contrapuntal writing,
depicting the long process of artistic creation.
In each movement, Lyn matches the textures
of the painting beautifully. She creates endless
interconnected lines but somehow the work
remains austere and symmetrical in its
expression. It is precisely this combination of
chaos and uniformity that reflects the scale of
The Rose. As the painting illuminates everything
from its centre, so does Lyn’s music.
That is especially obvious in three movements
depicting major drafts of the work
in progress – Death Rose, White Rose and,
finally, The Rose.
The ensemble playing is exemplary and it
includes the composer herself on violin. Lyn’s
unconventional music really benefits from the
musicians’ improvisational skills, as well as
from their imagination.
Ivana Popovic
Maija Einfelde – Violin Sonatas
Magdalēna Geka; Iveta Cālīte
LMIC SKANI 129 (skani.lv)
! Every now
and then there
is an album that
is simply captivating,
the music so
powerful that one
feels the need to
go back to it over
and over again. This
particular album of sonatas by senior Latvian
composer Maija Einfelde (including world
premiere recordings of the third sonata and a
solo work) had that special effect on me. The
three sonatas for violin and piano and one for
solo violin were written over the span of the
last 20 years of the 20th century. They do not
feature any exuberant contemporary violin
techniques (though the imitation of the clay
bird whistle sounds in the second sonata is
delightful) but rather share some similarity
with the musical language of Messiaen. What
they do feature is an abundance of darkness,
shades of deep sonority, profoundness of the
life lived and an encompassing artistry.
This music is supremely focused, there
is no note that is unnecessarily placed, and
maintaining this sort of conceptual intensity
requires both fortitude and heart from
the performers. Violinist Magdalēna Geka
and pianist Iveta Cālīte have both. These two
powerhouses delve deeply into the music of
Einfelde, as if their lives depend on it. Geka’s
tone is so resonant, so intense and clear
(especially in the high register), that one feels
its reverberations in the body. What is most
thewholenote.com March 4 – April 15, 2022 | 49