Within my own tight menagerie of favorites – the albums lovingly bejeweled with fingerprints and dog-eared booklets – Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s name appears on more CD spines than any other living composer. I’m not being hyperbolic when I admit that I need to hear her music no less often than I need to revel in the night sky. This music unlocks something about human-ness on a more visceral, fundamental level than even the Thich Nhat Hanh passage that once redirected my life, or that Terrence Malick scene tattooed inside my skull. Maybe this is resonating with you, too, and fellow Thorvaldsdottir acolytes, I tell you without reservation that Anna has reached a true inflection point with the scores and performances represented on this record.
I’ve been invited to write these liner notes due to some expectation of expertise: I’ve advocated in print for Anna’s music for over a decade, breathed the same rehearsal room air with her while workshopping her first quartet, and have similarly witnessed, first-hand, Sono Luminus sound engineer Daniel Shores cajoling microphones and mixes to mystically make “it” sound like “it” sounds in my head.
And yet, when I’m deep in the trance of Anna’s oeuvre, the question of “What does it mean?” is noticeably (and mercifully) absent. When Spektral Quartet presented our Thorvaldsdottir commission Enigma to audiences, we were uncharacteristically brief in contextualizing what everyone was about to experience, leaving it to something along the lines of, This music is simultaneously colossal and microscopic – the scale is both universal and sub-atomic. You’ve no doubt noticed that Anna herself avoids fertilizing proscriptive notions of how one should consider what they hear, gently insisting that this is our world to explore. And yet, these sounds awaken a rare species of curiosity, don’t they? There’s a (hopefully) forgivable compulsion to ascribe environmental reference points or even an attempt at obliging the composer to unpack why we seem to be vibrating at some alien frequency when we listen.
So where does that leave us, here?
Read MoreThe sepulchral secret that no best-selling parenting book, well-intentioned prenatal physician, or so-called best friend will divulge as one enters parenthood is: a fateful day will soon arrive when finding a children’s book or film that doesn’t suck becomes an impossibility. Look, I agree with you that The Neverending Story, The Goonies, and The Dark Crystal are maybe the three greatest movies ever made, but when one of them is on rotation number seventeen and the kid hasn’t even reached their third birthday, one begins to realize the necessity of diligent rationing, given the paucity of satisfying options.
More specifically, I’m talking about a book or film that isn’t condescending to both you and your child. This is what makes the Hayao Miyazak-directed Studio Ghibli movies so exceptional – the Choco Taco to Disney's frostbitten green popsicle on this particular ice cream truck we call life, if you will.
By this point you may be wondering whether or not you’ve accidentally started streaming some variation on Baby’s First Ferneyhough or whatever. No, Robert Honstein’s Lost and Found is not a record promising to balloon grey matter in children, but among many other things, it is a convincing reconstitution of life before adulting, as poured through the twin sieves of imperfect memory and an astonishing organization of sounds. It contains all the potency of a scent memory, an experience far more eloquent and persuasive than anything that mottled cardboard box of self-labeled VHS’s in the basement can provide.
Read MoreIf you would, coax your mind back to a time when you believed ducking your head beneath the covers was ample defense against the bogeyman. Do you remember, in the haze of half-sleep, seeing something or someone in your room that didn’t belong? As you breathlessly flicked on the light, you were relieved to find it was only a chair lopsided with laundry, or a vacuum propped against the doorframe. That faint halo of light, surrounding this once sinister and now innocuous object, that is the penumbra – that permeable border between light and dark. This is the space where Enigma lives.
We’ve all been living in an in-between of sorts for the last year, haven’t we? Nothing quite as poetic as the blend of blinding light and unfathomable dark one encounters with an eclipse, an early touchstone for this composition it is worth noting. But we’ve done quite a bit of living in the grey area, which is maybe broader than we thought. The thing is, traveling to Virginia to record this album was in some ways the first glint of hope on the horizon...well...that there was still a horizon.
Read MoreThis album will never be heard the same way twice. Do you remember the Choose Your Own Adventure books? “If you approach the mysterious stranger, turn to page 48...If you duck into the forbidden cave to avoid them, turn to page 136,” etc. There was a thrill to the equal possibilities of adventure or capture, friendship or deception, renown or obscurity.
Experiments in Living is the musical analog, and one where your listening experience will change profoundly based on the choices you make at each fork in the road. While routes through the record can be ever-changing, this double album flows along two currents often segregated in concerts outside our own. Part One pursues three historic innovators and singular voices circumventing the entrenched rules of their time – Johannes Brahms, Arnold Schoenberg, and Ruth Crawford (Seeger) – while Part Two pitches through passageways of music motivated by jazz, improvisation, and experimentation by way of composers Anthony Cheung, Sam Pluta, Charmaine Lee, and George Lewis. Finding the provocative connections between them is what defines our work together.
This record is not about drawing a linear path through history. It is a constellation of musical voices – one in which unapologetic personal expression is the unifying theme.
Read MoreDo you remember the time you felt most like a stranger…like a human distinctly out of place?
For me, this moment arrived during the week of New Year’s in 1999, when I awoke in an unfamiliar bed in Bethlehem to the adhan, the call to prayer, jet-lagged to all hell and bewildered by the proximity of a bewitching, undulating voice. The escape from my stupor was delicious, and the reemerging realization that I had joined a local handbell choir back in Chicago just to piggyback on their tour here didn’t diminish my wonderment. Later, out on the dusty street, there’s no question that I was the one seriously out of his element.
Sound was the transportive expedient in that moment.
Edgard Varèse did not have to join a handbell choir to make his way to America, if we are to believe the musicologists. Not to be outdone by the near ubiquitous —amongst successful people, anyway—immigration story of “arriving with just twenty bucks in my pocket….” Varèse went next-level for the benefit of his future biographers by moving to the US only after all his compositions were destroyed in a Berlin warehouse inferno.
Now that’s an origin story.
Read MoreANTHONY CHEUNG’S CYCLES AND ARROWS
In which I bury the lede for a full five paragraphs
Any devotee of sci-fi knows that The Ratio lives somewhere beyond the 1:5,000 range. For every The Left Hand of Darkness (if not there already, get on board with Ursula K. Le Guin, post-haste) there are at least five thousand Battlefield Earths (yep, that’s L. Ron Hubbard, son).
Well, these aren’t the liner notes you were expecting, are they?
Read MoreYippiee ki-yay…it’s Christmas!
A crunch of snow beneath the tires as you pull into the last parking spot for miles, narrowly edging out a gleaming SUV with a driver who seems to be trying to express that you’re…number one?
Eyelids narrow to slits and you tuck head to chin, bracing against icy gusts as you make for a battery of persuasive, brightly-lit store windows. It’s a full week before Christmas–look at you, all on top of the situation, with a carefully considered list of gifts to buy buried in your parka. No eleventh-hour frenzy this year. Tiny platoons of chattering children curl the corners of your frosty lips skyward as the soothing aromas of mulling spices and candied confections drift past. An infinity of sparkling lights showering the trees stirs something inside you. Something lovely, and pure, and radiant.
An inviting cloud of warm air envelops you as you thrust the first door open. Your ears prick up as you are greeted with–
AN EAR-GOUGING MIDI PERVERSION OF A CHRISTMAS CLASSIC THAT TRIPS A WIRE IN YOUR BRAIN, MANCHURIAN-CANDIDATE-ING YOU INTO AN ARSONIST RAGE BEFORE YOU’RE CARTED OFF TO THE STATE PENITENTIARY.
We’ve all been there.
Which is why I am so grateful that this album you’re holding in your hands–or unforgivably streaming on YouTube–exists. Despit
Read MoreTHIS ALBUM IS NOT FUNNY
More accurately, playing this album will not induce the brand of gut-busting, teary-eyed revelry that an episode of Chappelle’s Show or a YouTube clip of Anna Karkowska’s vibrato will. It is funny like the idea of a Rothko turning the stomachs of well-heeled gluttons at the Four Seasons is funny, or how anything Andy Kaufman ever suited up for is funny. It might be a little uncomfortable, rings clear in its truth, and sometimes reveals itself gradually.
Read MoreFROM THIS POINT FORWARD
With eyes closed, chin tilting toward the peeling paint on the ceiling, he whips his hands outward with a velocity suggesting the presence of an adversary eager to out-draw him. The bandoneon surges to life, its bellows gasping in a lungful of air like a man nearly drowned. He careens between tightly-coiled chord clusters before shooting a nod to the string quartet, and all five hurtle forward in a taut rhythmic unison.
Read MoreINTO THE CHAMBER
As you take your seat, a chilled glass frosting your fingertips, you notice first that these chairs form a tight circle around the four stands at the center. Instruments are shouldered and the music unfurls. You are in the chamber with Spektral Quartet. It is a place of great intimacy, where eye contact between musician and listener is inevitable. The breath of the players is audible, their furtive exchange of smiles and smirks, unconcealed. The composer is, undoubtedly, sitting nearby. It is an inviting place, a shared space where sound is immersive.
Read More100 Names – Rebekah Heller
Watching Rebekah Heller dominate a stage and transfix an audience, it comes as no surprise that new vehicles for her virtuosity would be swiftly exhausted. Rebekah is not simply an instrumentalist. She is a red-blooded performer. There is an audacity in her approach to the bassoon that finds a parallel in a project as brazen as constructing a new wing on the bassoon library. This is not a single commission sandwiched into a recital, but five compositional roundhouse kicks carving out real estate in the new music canon.
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