Modernism in classical music tends to be associated with craggy dissonance, total serialism, and academic composers writing pieces with pretentious titles followed by Roman numerals, like Concurrences IV, Fractals VII, and so forth. In other words, it’s music to be respected rather than enjoyed. Yet it’s far easier to embrace such works when programmed and executed with the care, imagination, and prowess that Alan Pierson and Alarm Will Sound bring to this disc. The pseudo 1940s sci-fi thriller cover art doesn’t hurt, either (“Eek, the Modernists! Run for your lives!”).
The program begins with composer Matt Marks’ remarkable acoustic realization of The Beatles’ musique concrète experiment “Revolution 9”, originally constructed from pre-recorded musical and spoken samples and tape loops. Somehow Marks was able to translate the complex and occasionally chaotic textural layers (including musical fragments reproduced backwards) into standard notation and specific instrumental sonorities. Density and spontaneous combustion are replaced with clarity and calculation. Whether or not that’s a good thing, one must credit Marks’ audacious ambition and radar-like ears.
In the context of “Revolution 9”, the concentrated idiom and structural rigor of Charles Wuorinen’s Big Spinoff sound positively Baroque. The music’s constantly shifting instrumental combinations and lilting energy hold continuous interest. That’s more than I can say for Wolfgang Rihm’s Will Sound. But if you like stock-in-trade modernist devices like crescendos on long sustained tones and sudden nebula-like outbursts of notes, Rihm replicates mid-1950s Stockhausen better than anyone in the business.
I find the overlapping sung and spoken lines and tensionless atonality throughout Augusta Read Thomas’ settings of two Wallace Stevens poems decidedly unappealing, though earnestly crafted. John Orfe’s Journeyman abounds with chatty Ivesian clutter like persistent percussion, swooping brass, and infectious dance rhythms that get stuck in the mud. Orfe’s music may be all over the place, but it’s so much more alive and generous in spirit than the Wuorinen, Rihm, and Thomas selections.
Call me a heretic, but Evan Hause’s acoustic instrumental realization of Edgard Varèse’s Poème electronique conveys a timbral warmth, harmonic richness, and a sense of forward motion that the Varèse original lacks. I say this having only heard the original multi-track Poème electronique via conventional two-channel playback mode.
You’ll be well sated when the disc ends, and you won’t feel shortchanged by its relatively meagre 41-minute playing time. But let’s be honest, people are going to check this disc out for one reason and one reason only: “Number nine, number nine, number nine…”
