Canadian composer Anthony Tan made Susurrus (GENGSENG RECORDS GS004) almost entirely with a single grand piano – admittedly with some digital treatments and I think a certain amount of layering. I can’t think how else he managed to achieve a “thirty-seven chord palindromic sequence”, but he’s evidently an exceptionally gifted musician. From this acoustic instrument, exploiting all of its “resonating body” qualities, Tan creates everything from tiny wind chimes and percussive tinkles, to bass drum rhythms and alien tones we’d never dream of associating with a piano. Quite compressed work, too; the whole album lasts but 25 minutes. One hesitates to clutch at the “minimalism” word; there’s just too much detail and activity going on in these elaborately-structured works. Minus one star for inserting a James Joyce quote from Ulysses on the cover.
Not sure if the classical audience has been crying out for an update on the music of Joseph Haydn, but here come Boyd McDonald, Joseph Petric and Peter Lutek stepping up to the plate with a double CD, Heretic Threads (ASTRILA RECORDS), of the music of this 18th-century Austrian. Joseph Petric does it all on his accordion on the second disc; we heard him doing contemporary music on Seen (from July 2023), and as before I’m feeling all the technical accomplishment of this gifted player, with none of the spirit or personality. Might be worth waiting for ‘Sintering’, where he’s joined by the piano of McDonald and the digital electronic manipulation of Peter Lutek; not especially radical or challenging as experimental music, but at least it’s an antidote to the rest of this rather twee and banal set.
On Souvenir (REDSHIFT RECORDS TK528) you can hear a sample of compositions by the Vancouver composer Christopher Butterfield, who studied under Rudolf Komorous and Bulent Arel. Seems to have followed an unpredictable path and remained open to all forms of modernism and many forms of music in his career, including a composition inspired by the poetry of Dadaist Kurt Schwitters (not here), and also the ideas of Walter Benjamin and John Cage. If anything can be said to unite these four diverse pieces from 1995, 2013, 2012 and 2001, it may be something to do with controlled chaos; the title rack, for instance, makes use of improvised music, and electronic equipment going slightly haywire. Likewise in ‘parc’ the composer is pleased with the way that this percussion piece “keeps falling off the rails”, as if he realises that our attempts to impose order on the world are doomed to failure. The John Cage dimension is confined to ‘Frame’, and though you might expect to find an interest in chance and random methods, in fact it’s based on a very specific compositional approach to do with “vertical attacks”. ‘Port Bou’ is even more ambitious, attempting to weld together the two forces of serial composition and chance procedure in a single work. These ideas sound good on paper, but I’m not very excited by today’s spin; the music just seems disjointed, mannered, dry, and pointless. The players are the Aventa Ensemble led by Bill Linwood, while Rick Sacks tackles the percussion piece with his vibraphone and pieces of wood. Hopefully, future listenings will do more to uncover the complexities of this respected composer.
All three Canadian items above from 28/02/2023.