Richard Carrick's "lanterne" Released on New Focus Recordings

by Ted Gordon on Oct. 6, 2020, 2:38 p.m.

Richard Carrick has often felt most at home composing music for intimate spaces. In his chamber music, Carrick brings his own sense of virtuosity and structure to the interaction between nimble performers, adding his own meticulous artistry to the act of small-scale musical performance. As a performer himself, and as co-director of the Either/Or Ensemble, Carrick seeks out the precarious nuance and subtlety of live performance, writing works for small instrumental forces that focus both performer and listener to the present moment. 

lanterne, Carrick's latest release with New Focus Recordings, brings several of his works together on an album that celebrates this kind of small-scale intimacy in a time when so many people have been forced into social isolation, and in a time when the reflection made possible by his music is all the more valuable. Though this album was conceived well before COVID, Carrick's music takes on even more meditative power. In the titular composition lanterne, for example, Carrick explores the intricate possibilities of the bass flute, creating a kind of "wall of sound" that emerges from its lower register and climbs rhythmically throughout the instrument's harmonics and even the performer's own voice. The gasping, breathy sonorities of lanterne also emerge metaphorically in Carrick's 2018 string quartet Space:Time, which imagines the physical barriers of space travel—from the claustrophobia of the interior spaces for humans, to the pull of gravity and acceleration "into the light", as its coda is titled. 

Like many composers, Carrick often works with the musicians for whom he has written many of the works on lanterne both in person and remotely—this latter method involving correspondence including scores, recordings, videos, and voice memos. The ability for Carrick and his collaborators to share sketches, ideas, and sounds together, even though they are not in the same space, enables Carrick to compose works that evoke liveness and virtuosity through careful craft and technique. Carrick often draws inspiration for this refinement of performative gesture from gugak, the traditional music of Korea, which often features highly controlled yet wildly expressive sounds generated on instruments intended for small spaces. On lanterne, three works explicitly incorporate structural and sonic elements from gugak: Danga, Seongeum, and sandstone(s), the last of which incorporates traditional Korean instruments put into timbral dialogue with flute, violin, and cello.  

Recorded before the current crisis, but mixed and mastered in the isolation of a global pandemic, Carrick's lanterne is a prescient reminder of the possibilities of smallness and intimacy that emerge from the interaction between composers, performers, carefully crafted as scoee and recording—even in a time when we all must remain physically alone. Check out an interview with Carrick by New Focus Recordings below.

Christopher Cerrone's "Liminal Highway" Released as Album and Film

by Ted Gordon on Aug. 21, 2020, 11:53 a.m.

Back in 2016, Christopher Cerrone continued his innovative exploration of new possibilities for musical composition with a work for the flautist Tim Munro: Liminal Highway, for flute and electronics. Originally co-commissioned by Miller Theatre & New Music USA, this work continued to develop into more than a work for live performance: in 2018, Cerrone and Munro teamed up with Four/Ten Media to produce a film of the piece, shot aboard the decaying SS United States—a decomissioned ship that lives in the Philadelphia harbor. 

Like many of Cerrone's works, Liminal Highway takes inspiration from a poem: "Liminal Highway," by John K. Samson, known for his work with the indie-rock band The Weakerthans. In conversation with the Classical Post, Cerrone and Munro discuss the making of the piece, including Cerrone's amateur explorations of the flute, taking inspiration from the world's longest reverberation, and the process of "fixing" a piece in recorded media. In addition to the film, Liminal Highway is also released as an audio recording on New Focus Recordings. Liminal Highway joins many other of Cerrone's works as hybrid works that are simultaneously fixed and open, existing in multiple media yet also begging to be performed live. 

All five movements of Liminal Highway are now streaming on Bandcamp, where the album is also available for sale:

Weekly Playlist: Scott Wollschleger

by Ted Gordon on Aug. 4, 2020, 1:36 p.m.

Scott Wollschleger has long been interested in the end of the world—or a world. The processes of ending, transformation, and becoming are enacted in many of his works, which often bear witness to the subtle transmutation of musical material through slow, meditative interactions between musician and instrument. In a recent interview with Steve Smith about his longstanding collaboration with pianist Karl Larson, Wollschleger says: 

But world is a created idea, and I get inspiration from the feeling of not holding onto this idea of the past, in a certain way. So when I say I write music for the end of the world, it’s more of a letting go of these things, that structure, the world that we hold onto from the past. I’m looking for a way to make a structure of the world that’s not determined on something from the past. 

Some of Wollschleger's works are more explicit about this new structuring, such as 2015's Bring Something Incomprehensible Into This World!—whose title is excerpted from an essay by Heinrich von Kleist. But others are more mutable in their worldmaking. This week, we celebrate recent performances of Wollschleger's works that investigate such sonic possible worlds. 

1. Lost Anthems, Wollschleger's 2019 work for viola and piano, composed for violist Anne Leilehua Lanzilotti's multifaceted 20/19 commissioning project. The UK premiere performance, at the Turner Contemporary (alongside commissions by Andrew Norman and Anna Thorvaldsdottir), was filmed by Will Dutta, and is now available to stream:

2. Dark Days, a 2017 work for solo piano written during the early tenure of America's current president. This work was recently performed by pianist/composer Timo Andres, paired with Aaron Copland's Story of Our Town, for the Metropolis Ensemble's House Music Series, which feature intimate performances at home during our current dark days. 

3. American Dream (for piano, contrabass, and percussion, 2017). This work, commissioned and premiered by the trio Bearthoven, was recorded and released in 2019 on Canteloupe Music, and was more recently performed at the Avaloch Farm Music Institute. Wollschleger and the members of Bearthoven (Karl Larson, Pat Swoboda, and Matt Evans) were interviewed by Avaloch's Michael Compitello, and their discussion of this work can be seen here.

4. We Have Taken and Eaten, a 2015 monodrama for solo percussionist. This heterodox work places a percussionist—Kevin Sims—as the protagonist of an operatic work, in which, Wollschleger writes, "I tried to construct a musical language that was composed of sound materials that might have been left over in the dustbin of history." As featured on NPR's "Arts & Letters" program, We Have Taken and Eaten "attempts to create a new narrative for ourselves as we move into an uncertain future."