02/19/21: Inspired by Folk, Jazz, and Computers
Featuring Bright Sheng, Dan Zhu, Holland Andrews, Benoît Delbecq, Kira Ra!, Martin Suckling, Zimoun, and George Lewis
Happy Friday, and welcome to Keeping Score. This week I have 6 new releases, with a focus on contemporary classical pieces. Let’s dive in.
The Music
Something Lyrical
Chinese-American composer Bright Sheng released Let Fly, Zodiac Tales, Suzhou Overture, performed by Chinese violinist Dan Zhu, the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra and the Suzhou Symphony Orchestra. A celebration of the Lunar New Year, the album continues Sheng’s Bartok-inspired tradition of sourcing ideas from Chinese folk music and mythology.
Listen on Spotify.
Something Varied
New York City-based composer Holland Andrews released Wordless, a short, 20-minute EP. Each track manages to carve out a distinct sound from the rest, from Gloss, reminiscent of Terry Riley’s A Rainbow in Curved Air, to Passage, with its manipulated acapella singing and field recordings.
Listen on Bandcamp or Spotify.
Something Rhythmic
The Weight of Light, released by French pianist and composer Benoît Delbecq, marries jazz improvisation with prepared piano. Dense and rarely accessible, this release asks for a lot of effort from the listener, but the work is rewarded.
Listen on Bandcamp or Spotify.
Something Minimalist
Kira Ra! released their debut album Kira Ra!. The group is composed of Finnish experimental artist Lau Nau, Finnish jazz saxophonist Linda Fredriksson, and Swedish pianist Matti Bye. The album is a blend of jazz, classical, and film soundtrack, as the pieces were recorded “as live improvisations to selected films from The Swedish Film Institutes archive”.
Listen on Bandcamp or Spotify.
Something Orchestral
Scottish Composer Martin Suckling released This Departing Landscape, performed by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra. Records International writes,
A highly original and inventive composer, Suckling writes music that transports the listener to landscapes of tactile, photographic vividness, sensuous and immersive. To this end, he employs techniques that range from emphatic tonality to noise textures, freely blended and juxtaposed with an unfailing sense of color and paradoxical logic and inevitability.
Listen on Spotify.
Something Ambient
Mikroskopien III, by Swiss composer Zimoun, is a 55-minute piece that seems much shorter. The melodies are extracted from “microscopic recordings and sounds” and the width of the sound pulls the listener in, creating an other-worldly experience.
Listen on Bandcamp or Spotify.
Black History Month Composers
George Lewis
This performance of George Lewis’ Voyager comes from the digital festival “The Disappearance of Music”. An “improvised dialogue for two pianos,” the human performer is Magda Mayas, but Lewis’ software program Voyager is the computer performer. Listen and read more at HKW.
The only Black pioneer of computer music, Lewis’ music is experimental and complex, but as mentioned earlier about Benoît Delbecq’s release, the work to comprehend is rewarding. Last July, Lewis wrote a feature on Black American composers in the New York Times, and it’s worth the read during this month as well:
Lifting the Cone of Silence From Black Composers
A cone of silence hangs over the work of Black composers from Africa and its diaspora. It is not that Black men and women have not written music, but too often it has been ignored — and thus assumed not to exist at all.
The work of Black composers is more often heard if they are working in forms thought to exemplify “the Black experience”: jazz, blues, rap. However, as the composer and pianist Muhal Richard Abrams once said, “We know that there are different types of Black life, and therefore we know that there are different kinds of Black music. Because Black music comes forth from Black life.”