Canadian composer Monica Pearce here with her Textile Fantasies (CENTREDISCS CMCCD 30322) – she sometimes does opera, but this album is an instance of her chamber music work. She also happens to enjoy the sound of the toy piano, which does feature in places on today’s record.
Each track is a depiction of a different kind of material such as you’d find in a old-fashioned tailor’s shop – so we have ‘Houndstooth’, ‘Silks’, ‘Velvet’ and ‘Damask’, among others. With the opening cut ‘Toile de Jouy’, played by Wesley Shen on the harpsichord, what we hear is pretty much a musical sewing machine; I wondered if the rest of the album would be so doggedly literal, particularly as the booklet notes contain these pedantic Wikipedia-styled descriptions of each selected fabric, its material, and its history. But as the album progresses, it becomes steadily more imaginative and interpretive. It’s very percussion heavy, lots of piano, toy piano, and assorted percussion, plus the TorQ Percussion Quartet on two pieces with what sounds like marimba and/or xylophone. In creating these musical portraits of fabrics, Pearce’s plan is to somehow “join touch, sight, and sound”, as if we were running our fingers over the surface of a quarter yard of denim and evoking a musical experience at the same time.
Nice conceit; occasionally the album yields some slightly unusual sounds, but overall it’s not especially adventurous. I kept hoping for a deeper exploration of the instrumental voices, but Pearce favours a bitty, mosaic-like approach, no space left unfilled with detail. It’s like we’re examining the grain of the fabric up close, staring hard until its pattern starts to change. (21/09/2022)