Gloria Coates is an American in Munich (since 1969) that has the honor of being the most prolific woman symphonist we have today. She also studied with Alexander Tcherepnin and has been a tireless advocate for American music overseas and at home, where she also maintains a residence. Kyle Gann, the author of the notes to this release, has served as an advocate for many years, and his excellent notes attempt to explain her music, but it is quite difficult to categorize. One might say that she remains at the forefront of “modern” music, and one cannot approach her work in a traditional manner. She relies heavily on string glissandos, and if you heard only one of her pieces you might think it mere gimmickry. However, the technique is found everywhere in her work, and so the conclusion must be that there is something about it that she feels really expresses something deep down.
Her latest symphony (No. 15) is a good example, with the first movement immediately introducing us to this construct, and after patient and not-easy listening you can actually begin to understand her fascination with glissandos and the fact that she has adopted the technique as a means for expression almost as another composer adopts major triads. Not that those are missing from her work either, as there is a Alfred Schnittke-like obsession with emerging tonal ghosts from other periods of time floating through much of her work. Both the Symphony (fallaciously called “homage to Mozart”) and the Transitions for chamber orchestra explore this concept, the latter piece eventually turning into her Forth Symphony. The music is static for most of the time, occasionally with some slow motion, and she is not averse to incorporating literal accounts of aspects of music from other periods, as when the chaconne bass line from “Dido’s Lament” in Dido and Aeneas by Purcell serves as the unifying factor in the first movement of Transitions.
The most interesting piece is the Cantata da Requiem (originally titled Voices of Women in Wartime) written when she toured the concentration camp in Dachau at the time of the Vietnam War and the Olympic terrorist attack. It is set for voice, strings, piano, and percussion, and cleverly uses a variety of German and English texts from the poetry of Marianne Moore to a wartime BBC weather report to a poem from a 1943 Bavarian newspaper. I found the work subtle and affecting, words I cannot use about the two other pieces here, perhaps because the setting of words force the composer to be more direct in expression than the abstract titles that litter the other pieces.
Performances do the music credit, and the sound is very good in all three works. I can’t say I would buy this CD, but if you like the manners and wiles of the modernists, Coates is certainly one of the more interesting ones.
— Steven Ritter
