From: gtaylor@vme.heurikon.com (Gregory Taylor)
Newsgroups: rec.music.classical
Subject: Re: Music by Paul Lansky - an appreciative review.
Date: 22 Dec 92 21:31:18 GMT
Reply-To: gtaylor@vme.heurikon.com (Gregory Taylor)
Organization: Heurikon Corporation, Madison, WI

masjpf@gdr.bath.ac.uk (J P Fitch) writes:
>I recently bought a CD player, and Lansky's record was the first one I
>ordered.  I heard parts of it at a Conference/Festival in Greece last
>summer, and as "Homebrew" is only available on CD I had to change my
>system. 

>I like all the music on the CD, but "Now and Then" is especially moving.

By way of the official "Me, too" (with perhaps a more middlebrow tone
since I'm writing for a very general audience with the intention of 
actually getting them to listen to the recordings rather than sound
authoritative as I always try to do here in r.m.c. ........... :) ),
I'll import a mention of this disc from my recent annual "15 of the top
10 releases of 1992" postings over in rec.music.misc. Since the material
I rated highly (rather than ranked, since I think top tens are a bogus
waste of time, redeemable only as pointers to arrays of interesting
structures) was only partially what one might conclude would be
acceptable in rec.music.classical, I didn't bother to crosspost and
draw all those flames. I'll include the relevant mentions here.
I really *am* giving a number of these recordings as Christmas gifts
to members of my family; they're that much a combination of challenging
and accessible. My younger brother Mark seems quite taken with Mr. 
Lansky, and it's the first foray outside of big band stuff that I've seen.
_____begin excerpt_________
Okay. So I don't actually believe in anything approaching a top ten. I
do, however, end the broadcasting year on my radio show by stringing 
together a number of discs appearing during the previous year which I
think are worthy of some serius consideration. And given that the territory
that I tend to traverse is probably of the *.misc variety, you'd wonder
how it'd be possible to make any judgements on someone free improvised
on an acoustic guitar (or do you say "...making random scratching noises?")
next to a CD of someone recycling mysterious bits of the world's popular
music in a way that radically transforms them anyway. This is, of course,
mine opine only. These things have lived on my player in peace and harmony
for quite some time, and I'm quite sure that I'll be spending a lot of
time with them in the year to come, as well. They are in no order of
rank.

Paul Lansky "Homebrew" [Bridge Records]
Don't you tire even a *little* of the big themes, the grandiose algorithms,
and the gnawing sense that you often have to hunt pretty hard to find a
piece of computer music to play for your aunt Mathilda? What if all those
High Culture computer chops were turned to the task of making music whose
subversion was "sneaky"? Well, here it is: an entire album of computer
music made by a highly respected practitioner in the field [I'm not
sure how long ago, but I think I did a short review of Paul's earlier
disc on New Albion "Small Talk"] that you can actually like. Paul Lansky's
"Homebrew" is a collection of 5 pieces of NeXT-generated computer music
whose roots are solidly in the domain of the "real" world; no

squiggly little cryptohorns careening around what sounds like concert
halls at lunch-launching speeds or the sounds of the carcasses of
some immense and protesting animal being dragged across broken glass
in front of a marching band trained in Tibet here, nosirree. Lansky remains
solidly committed to making music that originates in the everyday world,
and his tools are used in a way which "finds" music rather than invents it.
"Table's Clear" is perhaps the easiest to describe. Paul took a recording
of his kids making noise with the stuff in their kitchen, added a few
little side episodes, fed it into the computer, and then sequenced and
retuned some of the sounds into this huge, cheery wall of Minimalist
tuned percussion. The repertoire involves rapping on countertops, glasses, 
frying pans, and those rude little farting noises made by forcing air 
through your hands that your parents always hollered at you about. It 
is both simple, humourous, and it manages to evoke a more foursquare 
balinese "kitchen gamelan" kind of ambiance. It's great digital fun.
The raw material of "Quakerbridge" takes a montage of shopping mall site
recordings and then feeds them through a bank of tuned filters which
trigger ghostly clouds of twinkly mandolins and choirs, while clearly
retaining the original source material (the soundtrack for Moses looking
across the Jordan River and seeing the Promised Land as a crowded Mall?)
In another piece, Hannah MacKay's wonderful homey bedtime story 
voice creates this peculiar little poststructural fairy tale
populated with nothing *but* time phrases and their implied resolution.
It isn't compelling because of her terrific Sprechstimme technique or
the great huge wads of high-powered processing Lansky brings to bear
on her voice (in fact, the whole of "Now and Then" is very unusual in
light of Lansky's other compositions precisely *for* its simplicity and
lack of all but the most subtle treatment) - it's the connection.
"Night Traffic" takes a simple premise - the sound of periodic evening
traffic processed by the computerin a way that adds a little "chordal" 
material...the passing truck flashes by in D-Minor, followed by another
couple of tonal masses with four wheels on the pavement. And the piece
ends with another use of the "filters excited using plucked string 
algorithms" techniques [even *mentioning* or trying to paraphrase the
method used to make this work makes me cringe. I'm thinking "Gack. No one
will want to listen to if unless I just stick to the way stuff *sounds.*"]
on the sound of clapping - producing a kind of hybrid of something like
Steve Reich's "Clapping Music" with a tuned percussion ensemble. Technology
with a human face - a smiling face.

H. Gorecki "Symphony #3 (Symphony of Sorrowful Songs)" [Elektra Nonesuch] 
We start out with a "classical" release that falls into a category that I 
flirt with with some regularity (20th century classical music that's con-
sonant written while lots of other composers were doing itchy and scratchy
stuff I tend to find more intriguing as a rule) but am rarely satisfied
with. A big orchestra, a soprano (Dawn Upshaw), and a composer whose work
I'd only heard before done live by the Kronos quartet at a gig in '88.
I basically ah...have some difficulty listening to the classically trained
female or male voice, preferring the clear and unvibratoed talents or a
Sandy Denny or Virginia Astley instead. The source material for the texts
are also a complete downer - bits of lamentation, letters to a parent 
scrawled by a faithful son on the wall of a place of incarceration; you
get the picture. But the results on this disc probably constitute one
of the most deeply moving experiences of listening to music that I've
had in a decade. It is absolutely beautiful in a way that erases all of
my prejudices about the source material - this huge top-down model in
brass and wood of the 19th century nation state that we call an orchestra
isn't at all ponderous, and Upshaw's voice takes all that technical stuff
that I normally hate and sends all those sad words soaring straight to
wherever I might imagine heaven to be. It's not a jolly evening's CD of
stuff, but to the extent to which art can be said to be transforming,
I think that this is one of that kind of disc.

Carl Stone "Mom's" [New Albion]
What do you call Carl Stone? He is a composer in that he really puts
a lot of work into structuring his compositions - in this sense, he kind
of fits into the Minimalist category's ability to draw worlds of difference
out of the tiniest perturbations. As a composer, he has a keen ear for
source material as the beginning point for his own compositions; one 
hears the polyphony of the Ituri Rain Forst, African pop, and the ghosts
of Balinese music. I suppose that those of you who enjoy Rap's ability to
create music by sampling from diverse sources and styles would also think
of what Carl does as the "ultimate" sampling. There is nothing in most
of his piece *but* samples - but the work isn't in your face, and insinuates
itself very quietly and calmly. His new disc on New Albion seem to me
to be his most focused and compelling collection of the odd kind of
"process" music that only he does. Unfortunately, it's a little difficult
to explain to folks who've never heard the stuff. Imagine this: you've 
got a recording of a Japanese woman singing Franz Schubert's "The
Linden Tree" in English, accompanied by only a piano. Rather than your
average classical voice, the singer's performing style has much more 
in common with the breathy, mannered delivery of someone like Kate
Bush. So you choose the most interesting sounding fragments of the song
and you put them in a loop, where each pass through the loop advances
a little further along in the performance, cutting just a tiny bit off
the beginning as you go. The piano becomes a box full of vibrating 
strings, and the little idiosyncracies of the singing become the 
"subject" of the song. All the while, the source stuff is still completely
recognizeable. *That's* the kind of stuff Carl does, and he does it
better than any other human on the planet. This disc also features a
marriage of some Pygmy singing and a single somber organ that lit the
phone lights like Christmas the first time I played it on my show (more
than one call like "I've never heard anything like that before. It's 
beautiful. Where do I buy it?" is usually a dead giveaway that this might
be cool stuff, insofar as I rely on my audience to provide a corrective
to my programming excesses), and some clattery stuff that probably
started its life as Afropop and no seems like Irish fiddle music played
by a salsa band. Really different, and *highly* recommended.

John Harle "Saxophone - Nyman/Bryars/Westbrook" [Argo]
Choosing the Argo release I would list here was rough going. For me, one
of the interesting developments of the musical year involves the choice
on the part of the folks who run the Polygram Argo label to seriously
release a body of Minimalist-based work by younger British and American
composers. This current catalog now stretches over the period of 2 years
to a dozen or so uniformly excellent releases, from the 12-handed outfit
Piano Circus' three releases, to the Balanescu Quartet's releases of 
20th century string quartets by composers such as David Byrne, John 
Lurie, and Michael Nyman. This particular disc might help steer you
into these waters; three piece scored by three very different modern
British composers for saxophone and the Bournemouth Sinfonietta. As you
may know, the sax isn't particularly well known as a solo instrument for
small orchestral ensembles, so this is a pretty interesting project.
John Harle (a member of British composer Michael Nyman's band) gallops
at full throttle through "Where the Bee Dances" (some of the reworked
material from Nyman's music for the recent Peter Greenaway film "Prospero's
Books"), romps through a Mike Westbrook (yes, the same Mike Westbrook who
did those great arrangements of Wiliam Blake's lyrics for jazz ensemble)
piece chock full of the blues, and gracefully floats through Gavin Bryars'
"The Green Ray." The playing is really first rate, and its interesting 
to find this broad a range of Minimal and post-Minimal styles on one
disc. Harle's tone on the sax is amazing, and everything just "works"
for me. This is definitely one of those "modern music" discs for those
of you who're still living in a cave with the belief that all modern
"High Art" music is necessarily unlistenable and dissonant; it's a great
way to be proven wrong. 

Arvo Part "Miserere" [ECM]
Not only does this recommendation come solidly into rec.music.misc from
the "Classical" lists, its content is located solidly in the tradition
of liturgical music. And I think that it serves much the same function
for me as the Gorecki Symphony I listed in posting #1. This disc is
interesting for the fact that there's a kind of sombre passion interrupted
by moments of high-volume full-throated howling. It's also a look across
Part's work. The Estonian-born Part, like the British Composer John Tavener
or (in some ways) the Italian Giacinto Scelsi, is one of a small family
of composers who were raised and schooled within the normal traditions
of 20th century 12-tone serialism/experimentation, and then turned to
musics with its roots in very old models of composition and religious
practice [Part's music has its roots in Russian Othodox music, Tavener
looks to the Greek Orthodox mysticism, and Scelsi looks to the practices
of attention and the minimal found in the religions of the far east];
The music has the eerie feel of being old and new at once. This CD
is the usual amazing ECM recording job, and a cast which includes the
early music group The Hilliard Ensemble and percussionist/improvisor
Pierre Favre. There is a setting of the traditional Latin "Miserere"
(it's the same text that you hear the kitchen boy singing during Peter
Greenaway's film "The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover"; Have
Mercy Upon Me/Blot Out My Transgressions...."), a shorter piece for
symphonic ensemble that succinctly lays out Part's particular variety
of Minimalist practice "Festina Lente" and a recording of the piece
that got Part in trouble with the Estonian authorities in the first
place - the first thing he wrote after his "conversion". It's very
simple - scored for a single beating drum and a solo voice which
interrupts the tattoo with these lovel spinning vocal lines. I suppose
that it also shares with the Gorecki piece that ability to superimpose
its own particular emotional/aural environment on the space in which it
is played; this is something I hear a lot from fans of New Age music.
Maybe I'm suggesting that this is a CD of music that *does* this.

And just in case you're mildly curious, here were the NON-classical
listings in NON-order:

SPK - "Zamia Lehmanni (Songs of Byzantine Flowers)" [Mute/Grey Area]
Arrested Development - "3 ..in the life of" [Chrysalis or Charisma]
P-Model "P-Model" Polydor Japan POCH-1128
T-Bone Burnette "The Criminal Under My Own Hat" [Columbia] 
Bill Nelson "Blue Moons and Laughing Guitars" [Caroline]
Derek Bailey "Guitar Solos Volume II" [Incus]
The Orb "UFOrb" [Mercury/Big Life]
Various Artists "Sahara Blue" [Crammed Discs/Made to Measure]
Dome "1/2 & 3/4" [Mute/Grey Area] 
(artists unnamed) "The Tahitian Choir" [Triloka] 

I would, in addition, be interested in hearing what any number of you
found to be the interesting work that crossed your threshold of hearing
during the past year.


--
The law moves quickly in the rain/and chokes the world with memorials./The
courts accept the lowest superstition/into evidence. And we embrace quickly in
the rain,/conceiving a hale infant with hands to wrinkle/the bedsheets toward
it, wave by trough by wave./Gregory Taylor/Heurikon /Madison, WI/608-828-3385