Review: Ekmeles Performs Martin Iddon, Alvin Lucier and David Lang

The Ekmeles vocal ensemble presented a program entitled "Resonances" on January 11th at The Tank. The concert featured works by Martin Iddon, Alvin Lucier and David Lang, composers whose unique aesthetics formed an engaging and surprisingly coherent triptych.

The evening began with Iddon's Αμαδρυαδες (hamadryads) (2010) for five voices and glass harmonica. The singers, 3 men and 2 women, were seated at a long table facing the audience. Each was amplified and equipped with three water-filled crystal glasses. Director and ensemble member Jeffrey Gavett explained that hamadryads involves the transformation of intervallic content from Josquin's Deploration sur la mort d'Ockegehm. After one hearing, I was most struck by the instrumental quality that persists throughout. Slow vocal glissandi coupled with the sustained tones of the wine glasses produce a string-like sound. Occasional hard consonants break through, reasserting the presence of voices. A somewhat limited dynamic range (primarily between mp and f) and a mercurial yet stable texture add to the atmospheric quality.

Prior to the Ekmeles concert I was unfamiliar with Iddon's works and searched online to learn more about him. I highly recommend visiting this site to view pdfs of his hand-drawn scores. As you can see from the picture of Danäe for string trio (each with two bows) at right, the beauty and inventiveness of Iddon's notation is striking. Additional audio samples are available here.

The second work on the program was Alvin Lucier's Theme (1994) for four voices and sonorous vessels. Each performer recites John Ashbery's poem of the same title into an amplified vessel (vase, bottle, etc.) producing a lulling counterpoint of noise, pitch, inflection and of course, text. I can't think of a better environment for this wonderfully strange poem. The first stanza reads:

If I were a piano shawl
a porch on someone's house
flooding the suave timbre...

I could read that stanza over and over again. It is difficult to imagine "setting" such a poem in the traditional sense. Thankfully, Lucier does not. In fact, speaking the text into various vessels further enlivens the already musical act of recitation. Each word activates the resonating frequency of its "tank" and thus the receiving space colors and even overwhelms the words. (If you have an Rdio subscription, you can listen to Theme here).

The spacious quality produced by the Lucier was followed by David Lang's the little match girl passion (2007), a work that draws upon the Hans Christian Andersen story as well as the passions of J.S. Bach. It was interesting to hear how this piece, the most conventional on the program, seemed to complement the mood of the Iddon and Lucier works. One reason may be that all three involve highly focused, slow-moving sound worlds. And like hamadryads, the little match girl passion requires the ensemble to play as well as sing. Ultimately, the repetitive nature of the little match girl passion strikes me as a bit tiresome. Nonetheless, Ekmeles' performance was quite convincing. 

Overall, Ekemeles performed with great sensitivity and precision. This is not an easy feat given the inherent challenges of functioning as instrumentalists and singers. Especially commendable is their aforementioned ability to highlight the unique aesthetic qualities of each composer while maintaining a sense of programmatic continuity.

Ekmeles will perform John Cage's Song Books along with pianists Vicky Chow and Randy Gibson and trombonist William Lang on February 12th as part of the Avant Music Festival.

Pondering a Page of Morton Feldman's Rabbi Akiba

As the title indicates, the picture above is taken from Morton Feldman's Rabbi Akiba (1963) for flute, English horn, horn, trumpet, trombone, tuba, soprano, percussion, celeste, cello and double bass. I recently happened upon the score and found this particular page to be highly intriguing.

First, there are four quietly articulated, sustained sonorities, each separated by a measure of rest. This seems straightforward.  However, the limited rhythmic activity does not clearly imply a meter or tempo despite the fact that both the meter and tempo change every bar.  And although all of the measures with chords are in 3/2, the changes in tempo ensure that none of them are of equal duration.  Lastly, the note value upon which the tempo is based shifts from a quarter note to a half note in two of the measures.  I think it is safe to reason that if one were to take dictation from a performance of this passage, one's notation would differ from the original just a bit.  To gain a better understanding of why Feldman may have presented the sounds in this way, it is helpful to look at other passages.

Throughout Rabbi Akiba moments like the one above are interspersed with unmeasured sections where the rhythmic durations of sustained notes and chords are not indicated. Instead, pitch durations are determined by the natural decay of a given instrument or voice. The rate of decay further informs when the next sound enters.  Feldman writes, "Each instrument enters when the precding sound begins to fade." In these unmeasured sections, consecutive sounds are connected with a broken line (see score example at right).

As a result, duration of pitches (i.e. how long a crotale rings, the amount of time a wind player or vocalist can sustain a note) will vary much like the highly irregular lengths of pitches and rests in the measured page above. Measured or unmeasured, both types of notation successfully avoid pulsation and yet manage to convey a certain coherence and regularity.  Perhaps this relates to Feldman's statement that "I am interested in getting to Time in its unstructured existence.  That is, I am interested in how the wild beast lives in the jungle - not in the zoo."*

Unfortunately, Rabbi Akiba has never been recorded. One can, however, hear how this approach to notation would sound by listening to de Kooning, another Feldman piece written in 1963. Both works alternate between measured and unmeasured sections and are composed for similar instrumentations. (Listen to excerpt of de Kooning below)

Some might hear the results as a sort of loosely tethered klangfarbenmelodie. I personally like the way in which pieces like Rabbi Akiba and de Kooning require the performers to listen very carefully to one another in order to properly connect their own notes with those that are expiring. To a large extent it is the expiration of sounds or rather the dissipation of sounds back into silence that serves as the basis of these pieces. Silence is almost like another timbre, cleansing the palate of the previous sound while providing contrast.  In his essay "The Anxiety of Art," (1965) Feldman writes, "The attack of a sound is not its character.  Actually, what we hear is the attack and not the sound.  Decay, however, this departing landscape, this expresses where the sound exists in our hearing - leaving us rather than coming toward us."

*Quote taken from Feldman's essay "Between Categories" (1969).

Man Forever - A Lengthy Kinetic Outburst

Your humble blogger is taking a trip to the indie music side of things with a look at drummer Man Forever’s (a.k.a. Kid Millions, a.k.a. John Colpitts) recent self-titled LP.  The composer in me is particularly intrigued by this record’s textural density and the absence of a goal-oriented form (Ye of the Academy might prefer the term non-teleological).

The two-part, 34-minute work envelops the listener in a constant, multi-layered flurry of overdubbed drum patterns and highly distorted bass. Ben Sisario of the New York Times describes the resultant sound as “something like free jazz and something like hummingbird feedback.”  In addition to jazz drumming, I hear a number of disparate associations including subtle echoes of Pléïades (1978) by Iannis Xenakis and old school sci-fi soundtracks.  Man Forever cites Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music (1975) as his primary inspiration. 

As mentioned before, this piece doesn’t yield any sort of traditional formal shape.  The constant stream of sound never succumbs to dramatic shifts in tempo or texture, and a somewhat limited dynamic range is maintained throughout (mainly on the loud end of the spectrum). Sounds emerge from and recede into a constant whirl of background activity.  High-pitched snare hits and cymbals that stand out at the beginning soon disappear into the mix.  A chaotic, noisy bass asserts itslef at varying points throughout, sometimes playing single tones while other times offering up short melodic patterns.

From a purely sonic standpoint, Man Forever produces some interesting timbres.  At one point, the bass takes on a gurgling, fuzzy, almost organ-like character.  The change to softer mallets at the beginning of the second part allows for a more resonant quality that deemphasizes the actual drum strikes while elevating one’s sense of pitch.

In the end, this album combines human endurance/virtuosity with heavy use of processing.  The resultant intensity seems attributable in equal measure to both.  Man Forever has produced live performances of the work with the assistance of four or more additional drummers (an audio excerpt is available here).  I hope at some point to attend one of these performances or at least see a video to get a sense of how the real-time version compares to the studio creation.  More specifically, I would be curious to hear if a performance could achieve the broad range of sound qualities without degenerating into a muddy, amorphous sound blob.

Man Forever’s record is available in both LP and digital formats.  It will likely engage those in the art music, jazz and indie camps.