John Snijders: Transatlantic Swing

Muzyka Współczesna
premiera polska: 2008-10-02
seria wydawnicza: NOW SERIES
kontynent: Europa
opakowanie: Triplefoldowe etui
opis:
Editor's info:
Transatlantic Swing is a CD of music rich in elusive connections. Some of the music is 'transatlantic' because it's music by Europeans influenced by the Americas, some because it's music by an American played by a European. In some way all the music 'swings', but no two pieces swing in the same way. There's also a network of friendships between the composers represented here, although together they don't represent any one tendency in contemporary musical aesthetics.And there's a network of shared preoccupations in the music here - the balance between process and fantasy in musical form, the dynamics of sound and silence, the reconfiguration of popular music - but not all these preoccupations occur in every piece.
What does clearly connect all this music, however, is its composers' recognition that the piano is an instrument which, for all its size, is hard to pin down. At one moment it can seem to offer only black and
white, at the next an extraordinary range of colour; the sense of the effort necessary to make so many
notes sound with such force can be overwhelming, but we can also hear its sound as physically remote; piano notes can be pitched abstractions, or their sound can arrive weighed down with the instrument's history. So each composer here is working not just with the sound of the piano but with what the piano has been. Richard Rijnvos's Study identifies itself with the tradition of the piano 'étude' - more specifically he describes it is 'a study in the threehand technique of Busoni' - and Luca Francesconi's Mambo pays tribute to the great jazz pianist Lennie Tristano. Nevertheless Francesconi argues that this music has 'nothing in common with postmodernism or collage'. For him, and I suspect for all the composers here, each composition is located 'in a kind of micro-history of music', a 'polyphony of languages fused within a fundamental code'.
How to begin? Like this CD one can begin with something very familiar, the pounding handfuls of notes which were the trademark of the 1950s rock- 'n'roll star Jerry Lee Lewis (the title 'relliK' reverses Lewis' nickname, 'Killer') and gradually hear it transformed into something less familiar. Or one can begin as if from nothing. James Rolfe describes how his Idiot Sorrow (1989-91) 'reveals itself grudgingly: pitches are few and static, and durations and dynamics come in black and white, although tones of grey appear towards the end'. Luca Francesconi also begins his Mambo (1987) quite grudgingly, a note at a time, but there's an almost immediate sense of an inexorable momentum at work, a progressive filling up of musical space.Yet Mambo is like lliK too in that it derives ideas and energies from American popular music; instead of lliK's libidinous Bible Belt rock'n'roll Mambo is inspired by Lennie Tristano's 'Turkish Mambo', the extraordinary multitrack experiment first heard on the Tristano album of 1955. Or one can set off in more than one direction: Richard Rijnvos's Study in five parts (1986/7) kicks off with energy bouncing back and forth between different figurations of the same harmony - this first part, as Rijnvos says,'a kind of compressed preview of what is going to happen later in the piece in a far more crystallized way'. Or one can start beyond music. Idiot Sorrow takes its title from Rimbaud's Les Illuminations:'en hurlant son songe de chagrin idiot' (yelling his dream of idiot sorrow). Ivo van Emmerik's Polyphon gefasstes Weiss (1989) takes its title from a watercolour by Paul Klee and, according to its composer,' contains as many segments as the painting contains surfaces'. But Polyphon gefasstes Weiss is also inspired by Wittgenstein's Remarks on Colour, equating visual qualities with sound:'white' with 'silence','transparency' with 'resonance'. Fittingly this music from beyond music also goes beyond the piano, juxtaposing isolated notes picked out by the pianist from a celesta to set beside the resonating space of the piano.
How to go on? Polyphon gefasstes Weiss unfolds gradually, an organic growth sustained by extensive use of the technique whereby groups of notes are depressed silently so that their strings act as selective resonators for other notes. James Rolfe says he composed Idiot Sorrow 'by trial and error' and the music holds us with its tentative progress, feeling its way forward, a step forward, a step to one side, a pause, a step back. In lliK the pianist's hands follow the sorts of patterns ('licks') that Jerry Lee Lewis used but in ways that he might not recognise.There's a break, then relliK pushes the clock forward from the rock'n'roll 1950s to the techno '90s for music with a more systematic continuity, sampling and looping fragments of lliK.Whereas lliK offers a fragmented commentary on verse-chorus form, relliK is a monolith, albeit a monolith broken by bursts of manic chant.
In Mambo too there are dramatic interruptions, surprises along the way to keep us guessing, but the overwhelming trajectory is towards ever denser music in which one, two and eventually three polyphonic layers are in play. Francesconi has talked of his fascination with the poly-rhythms that Tristano generated in 'Turkish Mambo' as he dueted with a recording of himself and then later added a third over-dub; Francesconi hears parallels with the music of the pygmy peoples of Africa, as well as with Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring and medieval European music. Rijnvos's Study stops and then starts again, each successive re-start at more and more of a tangent to what has gone before, creating a complex polyphony across time as well as in time. Rijnvos insists that the work is one Study in five parts, not Five Studies, but he also suggests other bi-partite divisions: 'the first four movements against the last, in dynamic, velocity and density', or the two 'one minute parts' (parts 2 and 4) which have the same tempo and layering idea and do not change in tempo' against the parts 1, 3 and 5 with their more complex structure of tempi, 'one after the other or on top of each other'.What makes this music so fascinating to follow is that its progress seems logical and yet the final vista which opens as the work closes is an outcome unimaginable when the music began.
How to finish? Inevitably, magically, dal niente, abruptly.
Christopher Fox, June 2002

muzycy:
John Snijders: piano

utwory:
1. Christopher Fox: lliK (1991) 8:14
2. Christopher Fox: relliK (1993) 10:46
3. Ivo van Emmerik: Polyphon gefasstes Weiss (1989) 18:52
4. Richard Rijnvos: Study in five parts for piano (1986/87) 14:25
5. James Rolfe: Idiot Sorrow (1990) 15:40
6. Luca Francesconi: Mambo (1987) 9:09

wydano: 2008-08
more info: www.hathut.com