“Playing the Edge: Music for Violin & Percussion” = MICHAEL DAUGHERTY: Lex; LOU HARRISON: Concerto for Violin and Percussion; CRAIG WALSH: Pointing Out Your Ruse; KEVIN PUTS: And Legions Will Rise – Mark Rush, violin & electric violin / Norman Weinberg, percussion /Jerry Kirkbride, clarinet / Arizona Percussion Ensemble/ Norman Weinberg and Gary Cook – Troy TROY1199 [Distr. by Albany], 61:32 ****:
“Venus Notorious” = ZACK BROWNING: Profit Beater; Execution 88; Blockhouse; Venus Notorious; Flute Soldier; Thunder Roll: Night Attack; Thunder Roll: Day Attack – Kim McCormick and Chih-Hsien Chien, flute/ Jee-Ean Kim, Julie Gunn, and Edward Rath, piano /Sunjin Kim, violin /William Moersch, xylophone/ Ricardo Flores, drum set/ Mark Eichenberger and James Price, percussion /Samuel Carroll, timpani/ McKormick Percussion Ensemble/ Robert McCormick and Mei-Fang Lin – Innova Recordings innova 769, 69:11 **:
If I had listened to these two CDs all the way through end to end, I would surely be eligible for combat pay. Heard one at a time, the first constitutes a stimulating listening experience, and the second represents a serious workout for your sound system, if nothing else.
Playing the Edge brings together some familiar and some not-so-familiar names. I have my favorite from each category. From the “familiar name” category, Lou Harrison is a composer that I don’t regularly seek out when I’m in the collecting mood (which is always), but when I do run across a piece of his, I’m usually impressed. No exception here. Concerto for Violin and Percussion was labored over a good many years; the notes give the dates as 1940-1959. The notes to the recording, by the way, are supplied by the composers themselves and make interesting and sometimes frustrating reading. Harrison’s notes are both. I want to buy into Harrison’s claim that the music is “immediately a romantic one. . .noticeably inspired by the Berg Violin Concerto,” but I find his second claim more reliable, that the piece “finds its solid groundwork and foundation in world music.” I mean, that’s what we come to Lou Harrison for, isn’t it? Not Berg knock-offs.
The music is typical Harrison, but here, as he says, Harrison’s East-meets-West aesthetic is even more pronounced as he pits “a modern European instrument as soloist” against a “mixture of ‘junk’ instruments with standard ones.” Junk instruments? You bet. These include wash tubs, coffee cans, wind chimes, and brake drums, among other brick-a-brack. The resulting mix of sound, however, resembles a punkish gamelan orchestra, as often happens in Harrison’s music. And perhaps the purported influence of Berg is not so far-fetched after all. There is drama and pathos a-plenty in the Maestoso opening and the Largo second movement, at least in the often-beautiful violin part. Backing it up with an orchestra of junk is pure Harrison. I love it.
My other favorite work is by a not-so-familiar name, Kevin Puts. He studied at Yale, Eastman, and Tanglewood with a virtual who’s who of American composers, including Jacob Druckman, Christopher Rouse, and William Bolcom, none of whom he sounds remotely like, on the evidence of And Legions Will Rise. As I listened, John Adams came to mind, but I mention Adams only to give a point of reference; Puts is very much his own man with a successful and satisfying approach to thematic development. In And Legions Will Rise, Puts builds an increasingly elaborate structure from an initially small germ of musical ideas in a way that recalls the ripples formed by a stone tossed into a pool. Successive rings of sound seem to radiate outward, building to the climatic ending of the work. Puts states that his music is “about the power in all of us to transcend during times of tragedy and personal crisis.” He adds, “While I was writing it, I kept imagining one of those war scenes in blockbuster films, with masses of troops made ready before a great battle.” A heady description of music scored for the slim forces of violin, clarinet, and marimba. Whether this piece suggests a similar program—or any program—to you, it’s eminently listenable and attractive stuff.
Lex by Michael Daugherty is an evocation of Superman’s nemesis Lex Luther. It’s scored for the aggressive mix of electric violin, four percussion players, timpani, synthesizer, and electric bass. Later orchestrated, this became the first movement of Daugherty’s popular Metropolis Symphony. Daugherty writes, “Marked ‘Diabolical’ in the score, this movement features a virtuoso violin soloist (Lex) who plays a fiendishly difficult fast triplet motive in perpetual motion, pursued by a percussion section that includes four referee whistles placed quadraphonically on stage.” It’s fun, but as Daugherty’s description implies, it would probably be much more fun in a live performance. [Or in hi-res surround on a SACD…Ed.] Heard on a standard disc, it outstays its welcome a bit and doesn’t invite many return trips.
But Lex is far more stimulating than Craig Walsh’s Pointing Out Your Ruse. Walsh is a composer of acoustic and electro-acoustic music who, responding to a commission from the Astrobiology and the Arts Program (!) at the University of Arizona, turned his hand to conventional instruments (though any piece that pits a violin against an array of percussion including bongos, tom-toms, break drums, and tam-tam is hardly conventional). I’m afraid it all sounds like most electronic music I’ve heard: mechanistic, lacking in profile, ultimately unmemorable.
However, this is the only miss on the disc. Overall, Playing the Edge offers real listening pleasure, Mark Rush’s highly virtuosic violin playing certainly not the least of the pleasures herein. Very good sound as usual from Albany/Troy, but only And Legions Will Rise fully exploits the possibilities of stereo placement. Much more could have been done to simulate the quadraphonic effects Daugherty alludes to, for example. But then all of this music cries out for hi-res treatment.
It may not be hi-res, but Venus Notorious will certainly put your system to the test. It’s stereo to the max, and that bass drum in Profit Beater and Thunder Roll shook everything in my listening room that wasn’t nailed down. As a matter of fact, the two Thunder Roll pieces are my favorite earfuls on this disc. Written in 1975, more than thirty years before the other works on the program, they represent a different aesthetic entirely, one that seems influenced by the driving rhythms and off-rhythms of Bartók and his groupies. Zack Browning, emeritus professor of music at the University of Illinois, would probably say these pieces represent a time in his career before he found his true musical voice. That voice—conveyed in pieces like Venus Notorious—is, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, “way-cool in attitude.” Call me way-uncool, but to me they don’t have a hell of a lot to say.
Browning explains that “Since 1995, I have written several works that belong to an original series of experimental music compositions that incorporate planetary magic squares, ancient Chinese magic squares and feng shui as compositional models. A magic square consists of a series of numbers arranged so that the sum of each row, column, and diagonal is the same amount. Routes through the square are mapped onto a musical structure that uses the properties of the square as a compositional model.”
Sounds profound, doesn’t it? But the music itself sounds like a Steve Reich record stuck on a single three- or four-note riff that keeps repeating and repeating ad infinitum (or at least for ten or fifteen minutes, which is about as long as Browning’s pieces last). Some of it sounds like a Jacques Louissier Trio record stuck on a single three- or four-note riff that keeps. . . . Well, you get the idea. If, as The Irish Times states, Zack Browning brings “together the procedures of high musical art with the taste of popular culture,” then I guess I don’t know high musical art from a Chinese magic square. And don’t want to. [I once got a record store to take back an early Philip Glass LP, saying it stuck…It didn’t…Ed.]
– Lee Passarella
