Friday, June 22, 2012
I don't know whether there was any interest at all in the idea of this blog - it doesn't really matter if there wasn't, because the intent was to document all of my off-air recordings online just to make sure I have backup copies of everything. Since the Megaupload fiasco, I've lost some of that stuff, but I'll update the links as time permits. If there is anyone keeping an eye out, or has this blog in their feed, note that I have an extensive backlog of relevant material ready to post, and I'll be starting up again very soon. As with my other two posts, I'll be posting as a torrent on Dimeadozen, and then writing an extensive post on the music to accompany the post on this blog.
Saturday, August 6, 2011
Upcoming posts
Sorry for the lack of new content in the past week. The thing is, there's so much great out-of-print and commercially-unobtainable music online that I don't want to run one of those music blogs that bombards you with new stuff to download day after day, to the point that you never have time to listen to any of it. So, although I have been digitizing a bunch of tapes, I haven't posted any of them up yet because I feel it's polite to give the potential downloader a little breathing space.
I have a number of tapes from my collection ready to post. One is a concert by the Esprit Orchestra, and amazingly, even though it was the very next tape I picked out from the pile, it is disconcertingly similar to my first post, to the extent that it has another Chris Paul Harman orchestral piece, and even includes a different performance of *the same Rose Bolton piece*. Imagine that. Another is a marathon performance of the R. Murray Schafer string quartets, played by the Molinari Quartet - including the premiere of the 7th Quartet (he was only up to 7 at the time of broadcast. I have the premiere of the 8th Quartet lurking around somewhere too). There's also Owen Underhill's opera "The Star Catalogues", which is a real rarity. There is no commercial recording, and as far as I can tell it was only performed 5 times in October 1994. This is sadly the fate of most new Canadian operas. It's my oldest tape from this collection - must have recorded it in the late fall of 1994 or early 1995 - and amazingly it still sounds acceptable. I also have a chamber concert from the Montreal New Music Festival in 2003, with works by Linda C. Smith, Sofia Gubaidulina, Serge Provost, Wolfgang Rihm and Jean Lesage. Plus - and this is one of my favourites - selections from the 2000 International Rostrum of Composers, which not only includes a great entry from Canada by Pierre Klanac, but also a fantastic Violin Concerto by Georg Friedrich Haas, who in the years since then has become an international Big Deal, championed by the likes of Alex Ross. I find his more recent work comparatively tepid, but that's another story. I listened to this tape about a hundred times back in the days when I first started smoking a lot of marijuana, so you can imagine the "mind-blowing" experiences I underwent.
Those are all ready to post whenever I get around to uploading them, and there are dozens and dozens of tapes left. I don't know how many I have, but it could easily be a hundred. So, if you are one of the 5 or 6 people who checks this blog once in a while to see if anything new has been posted, don't fret. I could keep this thing going for years.
Any requests? When I posted the NMCE show on Dimeadozen, surprisingly enough, a few people asked for specific Canadian composers. There are some real rep hounds out there. I love it. Not all of the Two New Hours stuff I have is Canadian - and I reserve the right to violate that mandate whenever I feel like it - but if there's a Canadian composer you want to hear, let me know, because there's a pretty good chance that I have something of theirs.
I have a number of tapes from my collection ready to post. One is a concert by the Esprit Orchestra, and amazingly, even though it was the very next tape I picked out from the pile, it is disconcertingly similar to my first post, to the extent that it has another Chris Paul Harman orchestral piece, and even includes a different performance of *the same Rose Bolton piece*. Imagine that. Another is a marathon performance of the R. Murray Schafer string quartets, played by the Molinari Quartet - including the premiere of the 7th Quartet (he was only up to 7 at the time of broadcast. I have the premiere of the 8th Quartet lurking around somewhere too). There's also Owen Underhill's opera "The Star Catalogues", which is a real rarity. There is no commercial recording, and as far as I can tell it was only performed 5 times in October 1994. This is sadly the fate of most new Canadian operas. It's my oldest tape from this collection - must have recorded it in the late fall of 1994 or early 1995 - and amazingly it still sounds acceptable. I also have a chamber concert from the Montreal New Music Festival in 2003, with works by Linda C. Smith, Sofia Gubaidulina, Serge Provost, Wolfgang Rihm and Jean Lesage. Plus - and this is one of my favourites - selections from the 2000 International Rostrum of Composers, which not only includes a great entry from Canada by Pierre Klanac, but also a fantastic Violin Concerto by Georg Friedrich Haas, who in the years since then has become an international Big Deal, championed by the likes of Alex Ross. I find his more recent work comparatively tepid, but that's another story. I listened to this tape about a hundred times back in the days when I first started smoking a lot of marijuana, so you can imagine the "mind-blowing" experiences I underwent.
Those are all ready to post whenever I get around to uploading them, and there are dozens and dozens of tapes left. I don't know how many I have, but it could easily be a hundred. So, if you are one of the 5 or 6 people who checks this blog once in a while to see if anything new has been posted, don't fret. I could keep this thing going for years.
Any requests? When I posted the NMCE show on Dimeadozen, surprisingly enough, a few people asked for specific Canadian composers. There are some real rep hounds out there. I love it. Not all of the Two New Hours stuff I have is Canadian - and I reserve the right to violate that mandate whenever I feel like it - but if there's a Canadian composer you want to hear, let me know, because there's a pretty good chance that I have something of theirs.
Tuesday, July 26, 2011
The New Music Concerts Ensemble performs Cherney, Harman, Bolton, Komorous, Plamondon, and Carter - Glenn Gould Studio, Toronto, May 26, 2001
This is my first post in my new incarnation as a "music blogger". Here I am, getting into an activity whose vogue has long passed (or at least gone well beyond its zenith of popularity). I've been meaning to do this for a few years, because I'm sitting on a slowly rotting treasure trove of contemporary music recorded from CBC Radio 2's "Two New Hours".
I used to tape this show with a religious fervour, from about 1997 to about 2006, and since the CBC killed it in 2007 after a run of 29 years, I thought it would be a good idea to digitize those tapes and make them available. I mean, I wouldn't want to infringe on any commercial potential they might be able to realize from their recorded legacy, but it seems unlikely to me that anyone at the CBC would think to do anything with all those decades of lovingly-engineered tapes of live performances of our Canada's finest musicians. If you don't even value Canada's "classical" musical culture enough to continue devoting a puny two hours a week to it, carefully shoved away into a late Sunday night time slot to ensure that as few people as possible will be exposed to it, then why would you bother to do anything at all with it?
Apart from maybe burning all the tapes on live television in order to demonstrate to the younger demographic that they covet so much just how anti-elitist the CBC really is.
Enough of that. "Two New Hours" is long dead - but its legacy remains, hewn into the living tape. I've finally gotten around to digitizing some of my tapes, and although I'm seeding some of that material over at Dimeadozen (dot org), I thought I should spread it around more widely. The blog gives me a chance to write in more detail about the music. I can also upload some out-of-print LPs and other off-air recordings that can't be seeded on Dimeadozen for various reasons.
The subject of this first post is a tape that was picked out randomly from the pile in the closet. A lot of them still haven't been labelled, you see. Back then, sometimes I couldn't afford to buy a packet of new tapes in time for the show, so I would tape over something that I knew I could replace, and then I would never get around to writing the correct information on the tape insert. So I'm having a little fun putting on various tapes without having a clue what I'm going to hear. Unfortunately, this also requires a bit of detective work, and since CBC doesn't have the Two New Hours playlists online anymore (nor are they archived anywhere, as far as I can tell), I know at some point I'll run into a situation where I have no idea what is on the tape. This is partly because I usually didn't record Larry Lake's introductions, in an attempt to fit each show on one 90-minute tape.
Having said that, it wasn't a problem getting all the details of this performance of the New Music Concerts Ensemble, recorded at the Glenn Gould Studio on May 26, 2001. Luckily, the NMCE has all of their programme notes for the past ten years on their site (which I've included in the upload). The embarrassing title of this concert was "All Canadian, Eh". For the purposes of the broadcast, this is rendered moot by the addition of two Elliott Carter pieces from a different concert by the same group.
I'm a fan of all of the composers on this programme. I don't think it's possible to talk about a Canadian aesthetic in "classical" music (or "art" music, "concert", "contemporary", "nonpop" - they're all unsatisfactory), but I do think there is a tendency towards transparency of texture and spare gestures. I also think that with a lot of Canadian composers this transparency, or maybe I should say reserve, has an effect of leavening the use of extended techniques, weird structural ideas, microtonality, and often a lack of pulse, or very irrational-sounding counter-rhythms, to produce a kind of phantasmagorical soundworld that is nevertheless pretty easy to listen to. I guess it's a type of postmodernism, except that I associate postmodernism with a desire to highlight clashes of style instead of producing the impression of a coherent aesthetic.
The first work on the concert, Brian Cherney's "Entendre marcher un ange" for flute and percussion, obviously has a heavy Eastern influence, although I'm not familiar enough with the various Asian music traditions to identify it as (let's say) Japanese or Balinese. Cherney avoids creating any forward momentum with a series of succinct, very clear melodic ideas (both for flute and for percussion), balanced oddly against each other and spaced out with a lot of silence and near-silence.
Instead he creates a still, almost stagnant atmosphere that evokes the feeling of an impending storm (this is a very superficial interpretation, but come on, listen to it and tell me you don't hear distant thunder). And after I wrote the preceding, I had a look at Cherney's programme note and sure enough - I was right. It's a storm. Nailed it.
Chris Paul Harman is one of the Canadian composers I've followed most eagerly. Each of his pieces that I've heard seem to show an ability to come up with new ideas - structural, melodic, textural - without being particularly avant-garde. Having said that, I do find his music deeply weird in a way. One of the things that fascinates me is that his music is (to me) extremely evocative and coolly sensual in the sense that, say, Ravel can be, but at the same time it has an emotional distance that intrigues me. I'm never sure exactly where he's going with a particular idea. And the thing is, his ideas usually don't go on for very long. I remember him describing his compositional process on Two New Hours, saying that instead of trying to deal with the usual classical music syntax of a long single piece that develops over time, he prefers to gather together short, discontinuous pieces separated by short silences. His point wasn't that this is the better way to write a long piece; if I recall, the idea was to get away from the typical Western classical ideal of thesis and development, shake the listener's expectations up a bit, and get them to focus more on what's going on from second-to-second.
I don't know if he's still doing that nowadays, but during the period that I was taping a lot of his music off the radio, the short episodes technique seemed to be his focus. The other thing that stuck in my mind about Chris Paul Harman is that he claimed never to come up with his own material for a composition. Apparently he couldn't "trust" himself to think up original ideas, so instead he would take material from other composers (I remember him mentioning Bach, Debussy, and the case of "AMERIKA", Bernstein as sources of various pieces) and deconstruct it so much that you would never know he had done so unless he told you. He has various inflexible formulae that he applies to the material, thus altering it so much that nothing of the original music is at all recognizable. (I'm reporting from memory things that I heard him say on the air 10 years ago or more, so it's quite possible I've gotten some of this wrong.) I listened to "AMERIKA" a few times while putting this post together, and until I read the programme note in the NMCE PDF just now, I never realized it took "West Side Story" as its source. And really, the source material is the least interesting thing about this music.
The piece opens with a jaunty rhythmic motif that proceeds haltingly, developing into a motoric 8-note line reminiscent of Messiaen (Harman suggests in his note that the early sections recall faintly the cha-cha rhythm in "America" from "West Side Story"). This material is transformed through numerous brief sections (some only a few seconds long), fast and slow alternating unpredictably. Most of these sections have a ghostly atmosphere, with ringing notes from the vibraphone, piano and tubular bells that surround the lines played by the rest of the ensemble with a mysterious haze. One of my favourite sections starts around 7 minutes in - it's simple, just a succession of chords passing through different groups of instruments, but there's one amazing sonority that gets to me when a gong chimes in adding the final note to one chord. (I'm not sure of my ear, but I think Harman uses some spectral techniques to derive some of the peculiar harmonies.) As the piece progresses, the sections tend to be slower and more haunting, until it ends with a beautifully spare passage starting around 11:00. The piano plays a series of two-note motifs as string harmonics ricochet off of each note, as if the strings are ripples echoing out from the piano chords. After a pause, the piano continues on its own for a few more seconds, playing the motif from the beginning at a glacial tempo.
Rose Bolton seemed to get played on "Two New Hours" a lot back in those days. "Incidental Music of My Mind" (which has very the rare privilege of at least one other performance on another 2NH broadcast - this is a country where, if you can ever get a second performance of any piece, it means you've really arrived as a composer) is much more interesting than its programmatic title would indicate. It opens with a fairly undistinguised 4-note motif in 4th - boilerplate for a 20th century piece - but she doesn't really develop the mofit so much as use it as a background to weave a lot of rapidly changing orchestral textures in and out of each other. There is a lot of very subtle "klangfarb" going in this piece, and I'm impressed by how much contrasting colour Bolton gets out of a fairly small ensemble. It certainly has the intended effect of reflecting a succession of fleeting states of mind, both conscious and unconscious - to the extent that, as with a dream, it was difficult on first listening for me to retain what was going on in the piece. The playing of the NMCE and Robert Aitken's conducting skills are praiseworthy here, because - particularly in the last movement - there are a *lot* of constantly shifting polyrhythms, and it sounds like they pull them off. Obviously I can't be sure how accurate the playing is, but a piece this complex usually sound like a mess if it hasn't been rehearsed adequately. That last movement is probably my favourite, although the slow one that precedes it has some beautiful moments too.
I couldn't include the next piece in the Dime torrent because it may be the same performance that was released on a CD on the Artifact label in 2004. Since my off-air source is sufficiently different from the CD (and since it might not even be the same recording for all I know), I'm going to risk putting this track up. (If you enjoy the piece (and I can't imagine that you won't) I would strongly recommend buying any of the available recordings of Rudolf Komorous' music, especially "WU", a lengthy piano piece performed by Eve Egoyan, or the CD "West Light" by the Vancouver New Music Ensemble, which features "Rossi". Or pay for the download on Emusic, the "Strange Sphere" CD is fantastic.)
Anyway - obviously I'll take this down if there's any trouble. "The Many Sides of Maxine's Silver Die" comes across as not exactly a concerto, but a dialogue between the ensemble and the piano. It opens with a succession of dissonant piano chords, alternating with a very spare flute melody, to which the ensemble gradually adds its own interjections. After a few episodes, spaced out by brief silences, the piano gets into a run of fast 16th notes in 6/8, mostly on its own, spanning the entire keyboard, with an insane-sounding violin gibbering a couple of times at the end of a long phrase. This is followed by a weird succession of slow, stately melodies and fast Prokofievan "jazzy" bits. There are many changes of mood and style, but despite the odd humourous moment, the piece is utterly consistent and coherent. This may be an undervalued quality in a contemporary composer, but Komorous has a sharply-honed melodic gift - his lines so clear and free of cliched phrasing or patterns, with a brilliant talent for avoiding sentimentality that reminds me of Stravinsky. Simplicity is clearly the basis of his aesthetic, but he somehow manages to make everything sound stranger and more complex than it really is, certainly in terms of emotional impact anyway.
The final piece on the "All Canadian EH" programme is, to me, formally the most daring (and that's not to take away from any of the other composers - in terms of bravado, they're all up to par in my book). Yannick Plamondon, as you will see from his overwrought programme note, takes himself pretty seriously. This is unusual in a small, marginal musical community that tends to emphasise modesty and self-deprecation rather than emphatic conviction. I don't know how well "NorthEaster" communicates Plamondon's anger about the Exxon Valdez spill and the corporate takeover of civil society, but it has an atmosphere unlike much other music I've heard. It carries on throughout with several terraces of musical material stacked on top of each other. There is a slow, irregular pulse initially played on the piano that is eventually taken up by different instruments - essentially a bass line that runs throughout, but it sometime becomes the primary melodic material. Meanwhile, an unearthly spectral combination of violin harmonics (combined with a clarinet playing in a very high register?) continually witters away. A rather beautiful long-breathed melody ensues, and while harmonically this material is fairly simple - possible more influenced by pop music than by concert music - the continuing presence of the other two layers produces a weird disorienting effect. About a third of the way through the trombone takes the lead, playing slightly bluesy lines that run through a series of strange harmonies and contrasted with a counterpoint line in the woodwinds. The pace picks up after the midway point, and the polyrhythms become more and more disjointed - and here is another occasion to praise Robert Aitken for keeping the ensemble together so well, and making the various counterpoint strands so clearly audible. Eventually the trombone, still in the lead, takes up the bass line as the winds and piano play idiosyncratic filigrees.
This edition of 2NH ended with a couple of performances of Elliott Carter, partly to fill up time, and partly to point toward the following week's show, which also featured some Carter. Anyway, I'm not going into any detail about the Carter pieces - for one thing, it's kind of useless to try and describe what happens in his music because his whole aesthetic is of rapid, continuous change. Both of these pieces are fantastic and beautifully performed - I'm not sure why they haven't been issued on CD, because the NMCE already has a great Carter CD on Naxos that you should definitely buy if you haven't already. "Luimen" is particularly appealing because of the presence of guitar and mandolin, two sounds that Carter hadn't used all that often up to that point.
Some links if you feel like exploring any of these composers further:
Chris Paul Harman has a grand total of one CD to his name - it's great, and it's pretty cheap from the Canadian Music Centre:
http://www.musiccentre.ca/apps/index.cfm?fuseaction=search.dspItemDetails&buyItemsID=145
There's also this disc with an orchestral piece he wrote at the age of 20, combined with some pieces by some of the titans of Canadian music (Schafer, Freedman, Anhalt) - only $6.00!! What are you waiting for?
http://www.musiccentre.ca/apps/index.cfm?fuseaction=search.dspItemDetails
buyItemsID=523
Rose Bolton has a couple of CDs of her own music, such as:
http://www.musiccentre.ca/apps/index.cfm?fuseaction=search.dspItemDetails&buyItemsID=1432
I haven't heard this one, but it's bound to be pretty good.
As for Yannick Plamondon, I have this CD, and it is fantastic:
http://www.musiccentre.ca/apps/index.cfm?fuseaction=search.dspItemDetails&buyItemsID=700
Get Volume One in the same series while you're at it:
http://www.musiccentre.ca/apps/index.cfm?fuseaction=search.dspItemDetails&buyItemsID=8
As for Rudolf Komorous, I very highly recommend this one:
http://www.musiccentre.ca/apps/index.cfm?fuseaction=search.dspItemDetails&buyItemsID=37
And here are the links to "Strange Sphere" and "WU" which I recommended above:
http://www.musiccentre.ca/apps/index.cfm?fuseaction=search.dspItemDetails&buyItemsID=1348
http://www.musiccentre.ca/apps/index.cfm?fuseaction=search.dspItemDetails&buyItemsID=1475
Elliott Carter - you definitely need this CD if you don't have it yet:
http://www.naxos.com/catalogue/item.asp?item_code=8.559614
And you can hear "Luimen" in a marvellous performance on Bridge:
http://www.bridgerecords.com/catpage.php?call=9111
"Con Leggerezza Pensosa" is on this absolutely essential CD, also from Bridge:
http://www.bridgerecords.com/catpage.php?call=9044
There are download links for iTunes and Amazon for most of the above, and alternate sources to buy them too - I'm just being lazy because it took me such a long time to write this post.
Anyway. Hope you like the music. The links are in the comments.
I used to tape this show with a religious fervour, from about 1997 to about 2006, and since the CBC killed it in 2007 after a run of 29 years, I thought it would be a good idea to digitize those tapes and make them available. I mean, I wouldn't want to infringe on any commercial potential they might be able to realize from their recorded legacy, but it seems unlikely to me that anyone at the CBC would think to do anything with all those decades of lovingly-engineered tapes of live performances of our Canada's finest musicians. If you don't even value Canada's "classical" musical culture enough to continue devoting a puny two hours a week to it, carefully shoved away into a late Sunday night time slot to ensure that as few people as possible will be exposed to it, then why would you bother to do anything at all with it?
Apart from maybe burning all the tapes on live television in order to demonstrate to the younger demographic that they covet so much just how anti-elitist the CBC really is.
Enough of that. "Two New Hours" is long dead - but its legacy remains, hewn into the living tape. I've finally gotten around to digitizing some of my tapes, and although I'm seeding some of that material over at Dimeadozen (dot org), I thought I should spread it around more widely. The blog gives me a chance to write in more detail about the music. I can also upload some out-of-print LPs and other off-air recordings that can't be seeded on Dimeadozen for various reasons.
The subject of this first post is a tape that was picked out randomly from the pile in the closet. A lot of them still haven't been labelled, you see. Back then, sometimes I couldn't afford to buy a packet of new tapes in time for the show, so I would tape over something that I knew I could replace, and then I would never get around to writing the correct information on the tape insert. So I'm having a little fun putting on various tapes without having a clue what I'm going to hear. Unfortunately, this also requires a bit of detective work, and since CBC doesn't have the Two New Hours playlists online anymore (nor are they archived anywhere, as far as I can tell), I know at some point I'll run into a situation where I have no idea what is on the tape. This is partly because I usually didn't record Larry Lake's introductions, in an attempt to fit each show on one 90-minute tape.
Having said that, it wasn't a problem getting all the details of this performance of the New Music Concerts Ensemble, recorded at the Glenn Gould Studio on May 26, 2001. Luckily, the NMCE has all of their programme notes for the past ten years on their site (which I've included in the upload). The embarrassing title of this concert was "All Canadian, Eh". For the purposes of the broadcast, this is rendered moot by the addition of two Elliott Carter pieces from a different concert by the same group.
I'm a fan of all of the composers on this programme. I don't think it's possible to talk about a Canadian aesthetic in "classical" music (or "art" music, "concert", "contemporary", "nonpop" - they're all unsatisfactory), but I do think there is a tendency towards transparency of texture and spare gestures. I also think that with a lot of Canadian composers this transparency, or maybe I should say reserve, has an effect of leavening the use of extended techniques, weird structural ideas, microtonality, and often a lack of pulse, or very irrational-sounding counter-rhythms, to produce a kind of phantasmagorical soundworld that is nevertheless pretty easy to listen to. I guess it's a type of postmodernism, except that I associate postmodernism with a desire to highlight clashes of style instead of producing the impression of a coherent aesthetic.
The first work on the concert, Brian Cherney's "Entendre marcher un ange" for flute and percussion, obviously has a heavy Eastern influence, although I'm not familiar enough with the various Asian music traditions to identify it as (let's say) Japanese or Balinese. Cherney avoids creating any forward momentum with a series of succinct, very clear melodic ideas (both for flute and for percussion), balanced oddly against each other and spaced out with a lot of silence and near-silence.
Instead he creates a still, almost stagnant atmosphere that evokes the feeling of an impending storm (this is a very superficial interpretation, but come on, listen to it and tell me you don't hear distant thunder). And after I wrote the preceding, I had a look at Cherney's programme note and sure enough - I was right. It's a storm. Nailed it.
Chris Paul Harman is one of the Canadian composers I've followed most eagerly. Each of his pieces that I've heard seem to show an ability to come up with new ideas - structural, melodic, textural - without being particularly avant-garde. Having said that, I do find his music deeply weird in a way. One of the things that fascinates me is that his music is (to me) extremely evocative and coolly sensual in the sense that, say, Ravel can be, but at the same time it has an emotional distance that intrigues me. I'm never sure exactly where he's going with a particular idea. And the thing is, his ideas usually don't go on for very long. I remember him describing his compositional process on Two New Hours, saying that instead of trying to deal with the usual classical music syntax of a long single piece that develops over time, he prefers to gather together short, discontinuous pieces separated by short silences. His point wasn't that this is the better way to write a long piece; if I recall, the idea was to get away from the typical Western classical ideal of thesis and development, shake the listener's expectations up a bit, and get them to focus more on what's going on from second-to-second.
I don't know if he's still doing that nowadays, but during the period that I was taping a lot of his music off the radio, the short episodes technique seemed to be his focus. The other thing that stuck in my mind about Chris Paul Harman is that he claimed never to come up with his own material for a composition. Apparently he couldn't "trust" himself to think up original ideas, so instead he would take material from other composers (I remember him mentioning Bach, Debussy, and the case of "AMERIKA", Bernstein as sources of various pieces) and deconstruct it so much that you would never know he had done so unless he told you. He has various inflexible formulae that he applies to the material, thus altering it so much that nothing of the original music is at all recognizable. (I'm reporting from memory things that I heard him say on the air 10 years ago or more, so it's quite possible I've gotten some of this wrong.) I listened to "AMERIKA" a few times while putting this post together, and until I read the programme note in the NMCE PDF just now, I never realized it took "West Side Story" as its source. And really, the source material is the least interesting thing about this music.
The piece opens with a jaunty rhythmic motif that proceeds haltingly, developing into a motoric 8-note line reminiscent of Messiaen (Harman suggests in his note that the early sections recall faintly the cha-cha rhythm in "America" from "West Side Story"). This material is transformed through numerous brief sections (some only a few seconds long), fast and slow alternating unpredictably. Most of these sections have a ghostly atmosphere, with ringing notes from the vibraphone, piano and tubular bells that surround the lines played by the rest of the ensemble with a mysterious haze. One of my favourite sections starts around 7 minutes in - it's simple, just a succession of chords passing through different groups of instruments, but there's one amazing sonority that gets to me when a gong chimes in adding the final note to one chord. (I'm not sure of my ear, but I think Harman uses some spectral techniques to derive some of the peculiar harmonies.) As the piece progresses, the sections tend to be slower and more haunting, until it ends with a beautifully spare passage starting around 11:00. The piano plays a series of two-note motifs as string harmonics ricochet off of each note, as if the strings are ripples echoing out from the piano chords. After a pause, the piano continues on its own for a few more seconds, playing the motif from the beginning at a glacial tempo.
Rose Bolton seemed to get played on "Two New Hours" a lot back in those days. "Incidental Music of My Mind" (which has very the rare privilege of at least one other performance on another 2NH broadcast - this is a country where, if you can ever get a second performance of any piece, it means you've really arrived as a composer) is much more interesting than its programmatic title would indicate. It opens with a fairly undistinguised 4-note motif in 4th - boilerplate for a 20th century piece - but she doesn't really develop the mofit so much as use it as a background to weave a lot of rapidly changing orchestral textures in and out of each other. There is a lot of very subtle "klangfarb" going in this piece, and I'm impressed by how much contrasting colour Bolton gets out of a fairly small ensemble. It certainly has the intended effect of reflecting a succession of fleeting states of mind, both conscious and unconscious - to the extent that, as with a dream, it was difficult on first listening for me to retain what was going on in the piece. The playing of the NMCE and Robert Aitken's conducting skills are praiseworthy here, because - particularly in the last movement - there are a *lot* of constantly shifting polyrhythms, and it sounds like they pull them off. Obviously I can't be sure how accurate the playing is, but a piece this complex usually sound like a mess if it hasn't been rehearsed adequately. That last movement is probably my favourite, although the slow one that precedes it has some beautiful moments too.
I couldn't include the next piece in the Dime torrent because it may be the same performance that was released on a CD on the Artifact label in 2004. Since my off-air source is sufficiently different from the CD (and since it might not even be the same recording for all I know), I'm going to risk putting this track up. (If you enjoy the piece (and I can't imagine that you won't) I would strongly recommend buying any of the available recordings of Rudolf Komorous' music, especially "WU", a lengthy piano piece performed by Eve Egoyan, or the CD "West Light" by the Vancouver New Music Ensemble, which features "Rossi". Or pay for the download on Emusic, the "Strange Sphere" CD is fantastic.)
Anyway - obviously I'll take this down if there's any trouble. "The Many Sides of Maxine's Silver Die" comes across as not exactly a concerto, but a dialogue between the ensemble and the piano. It opens with a succession of dissonant piano chords, alternating with a very spare flute melody, to which the ensemble gradually adds its own interjections. After a few episodes, spaced out by brief silences, the piano gets into a run of fast 16th notes in 6/8, mostly on its own, spanning the entire keyboard, with an insane-sounding violin gibbering a couple of times at the end of a long phrase. This is followed by a weird succession of slow, stately melodies and fast Prokofievan "jazzy" bits. There are many changes of mood and style, but despite the odd humourous moment, the piece is utterly consistent and coherent. This may be an undervalued quality in a contemporary composer, but Komorous has a sharply-honed melodic gift - his lines so clear and free of cliched phrasing or patterns, with a brilliant talent for avoiding sentimentality that reminds me of Stravinsky. Simplicity is clearly the basis of his aesthetic, but he somehow manages to make everything sound stranger and more complex than it really is, certainly in terms of emotional impact anyway.
The final piece on the "All Canadian EH" programme is, to me, formally the most daring (and that's not to take away from any of the other composers - in terms of bravado, they're all up to par in my book). Yannick Plamondon, as you will see from his overwrought programme note, takes himself pretty seriously. This is unusual in a small, marginal musical community that tends to emphasise modesty and self-deprecation rather than emphatic conviction. I don't know how well "NorthEaster" communicates Plamondon's anger about the Exxon Valdez spill and the corporate takeover of civil society, but it has an atmosphere unlike much other music I've heard. It carries on throughout with several terraces of musical material stacked on top of each other. There is a slow, irregular pulse initially played on the piano that is eventually taken up by different instruments - essentially a bass line that runs throughout, but it sometime becomes the primary melodic material. Meanwhile, an unearthly spectral combination of violin harmonics (combined with a clarinet playing in a very high register?) continually witters away. A rather beautiful long-breathed melody ensues, and while harmonically this material is fairly simple - possible more influenced by pop music than by concert music - the continuing presence of the other two layers produces a weird disorienting effect. About a third of the way through the trombone takes the lead, playing slightly bluesy lines that run through a series of strange harmonies and contrasted with a counterpoint line in the woodwinds. The pace picks up after the midway point, and the polyrhythms become more and more disjointed - and here is another occasion to praise Robert Aitken for keeping the ensemble together so well, and making the various counterpoint strands so clearly audible. Eventually the trombone, still in the lead, takes up the bass line as the winds and piano play idiosyncratic filigrees.
This edition of 2NH ended with a couple of performances of Elliott Carter, partly to fill up time, and partly to point toward the following week's show, which also featured some Carter. Anyway, I'm not going into any detail about the Carter pieces - for one thing, it's kind of useless to try and describe what happens in his music because his whole aesthetic is of rapid, continuous change. Both of these pieces are fantastic and beautifully performed - I'm not sure why they haven't been issued on CD, because the NMCE already has a great Carter CD on Naxos that you should definitely buy if you haven't already. "Luimen" is particularly appealing because of the presence of guitar and mandolin, two sounds that Carter hadn't used all that often up to that point.
Some links if you feel like exploring any of these composers further:
Chris Paul Harman has a grand total of one CD to his name - it's great, and it's pretty cheap from the Canadian Music Centre:
http://www.musiccentre.ca/apps/index.cfm?fuseaction=search.dspItemDetails&buyItemsID=145
There's also this disc with an orchestral piece he wrote at the age of 20, combined with some pieces by some of the titans of Canadian music (Schafer, Freedman, Anhalt) - only $6.00!! What are you waiting for?
http://www.musiccentre.ca/apps/index.cfm?fuseaction=search.dspItemDetails
buyItemsID=523
Rose Bolton has a couple of CDs of her own music, such as:
http://www.musiccentre.ca/apps/index.cfm?fuseaction=search.dspItemDetails&buyItemsID=1432
I haven't heard this one, but it's bound to be pretty good.
As for Yannick Plamondon, I have this CD, and it is fantastic:
http://www.musiccentre.ca/apps/index.cfm?fuseaction=search.dspItemDetails&buyItemsID=700
Get Volume One in the same series while you're at it:
http://www.musiccentre.ca/apps/index.cfm?fuseaction=search.dspItemDetails&buyItemsID=8
As for Rudolf Komorous, I very highly recommend this one:
http://www.musiccentre.ca/apps/index.cfm?fuseaction=search.dspItemDetails&buyItemsID=37
And here are the links to "Strange Sphere" and "WU" which I recommended above:
http://www.musiccentre.ca/apps/index.cfm?fuseaction=search.dspItemDetails&buyItemsID=1348
http://www.musiccentre.ca/apps/index.cfm?fuseaction=search.dspItemDetails&buyItemsID=1475
Elliott Carter - you definitely need this CD if you don't have it yet:
http://www.naxos.com/catalogue/item.asp?item_code=8.559614
And you can hear "Luimen" in a marvellous performance on Bridge:
http://www.bridgerecords.com/catpage.php?call=9111
"Con Leggerezza Pensosa" is on this absolutely essential CD, also from Bridge:
http://www.bridgerecords.com/catpage.php?call=9044
There are download links for iTunes and Amazon for most of the above, and alternate sources to buy them too - I'm just being lazy because it took me such a long time to write this post.
Anyway. Hope you like the music. The links are in the comments.
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