author: Gavin Borchert is a critic for the Seattle Weekly.
Gavin Borchert is a critic for the Seattle Weekly.
Northwest Triptych: New Music for Orchestra
Present Sounds Recordings (www.presentsounds.com)
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Seattle’s reputation in the world of classical music recording is dominated by the prolific Seattle Symphony and its devotion to the mainstream American symphonic tradition. Northwest Triptych, the debut disc on the Present Sounds label, seems to deliberately challenge this reputation by spotlighting orchestral works from adventurous local composers rather than from conservative East Coast ones. It includes two works played by the Seattle Creative Orchestra conducted by Roger Nelson, and a concrete piece made up of orchestral sounds.
Christian Asplund's half-hour Symphony No. 4 is cinematically episodic, a suite of "hooks," a series of little obsessions, in each of which Asplund sets up ostinatos and keeps them percolating much longer than a less courageous composer--one with less faith in the intrinsic interest of his or her material--would dare to. How good it is to hear musical ideas allowed to have their full say, especially in an age in which orchestral composers are preoccupied with "accessibility," a doctrine that usually indicates an insulting distrust of a listener's attention span. Only composers whose aural imagination is less rich than Asplund's (paper bags as percussion instruments!) have to worry about this. Asplund is also known for his music-theater pieces, reflective and unconventional works unapologetically designated "operas." Asked about his use of this term in an interview, he responded, "That's part of the reason I chose it, because it's so loaded. . . I'm always interested in reclaiming things that have become useless." Thus, too, his use of the term "symphony," with all its cultural baggage, for this idiosyncratic work.
There's a similar pomo irony in Chris DeLaurenti's title, a familiar nomenclature: _____ _____s for Orchestra, in this case Three Camels, as others have used Two Movements, Four Etudes, Six Pieces. This recycling spirit (to be expected from environmentally-conscious Seattle composers?) extends into the music; Three Camels is a dense, fast-moving, rather lurid tape collage of sounds. Among the fragments of other recordings heard here, bits from Mozart's Symphony No. 40, Adams' Harmonielehre, Rhapsody in Blue and the waltz from Swan Lake leap out, in addition to the E-minor chord, a split-second long but unmistakably recognizable, that opens Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms. The listener’s challenge is not to let the Name-That-Quote game distract from DeLaurenti's brilliantly skilled control of pacing and texture. The piece ends with a compilation of endings--climactic final notes from other pieces that tumble over each other like exploding fireworks.
In Tom Baker's Negative Space, the solo guitar (Michael Partington) and the instruments of the orchestra float back and forth through a sonic void, creating uneasily, constantly shifting contexts for each other—a sense of mutual distance not just spatial but psychological. This effect is most chilling at the work's end, as the solo guitar noodles woozily along, ignoring the melodramatic orchestral screams which collapse out of exhaustion into convulsive shudders.
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