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Bryn Harrison
A Coiled Form
Another Timbre AT201
Bryn Harrison
Three Descriptions of Place and Movement
Huddersfield Contemporary Records HCR27CD
In his novel Shame, Salman Rushdie describes one of Omar Khayyám Shakil’s mothers as a personality of middles or uncertainties. It would be tempting to cast Bryn Harrison’s music in a similar light if only to categorize its labyrinthine distensions and elongated repetitions, but to do so would be to deny the abundant but ironic concision in its construction. These two long-form pieces present visions simultaneously similar but radically opposed, angular ambiguities often coexisting in reiterative flux.
Three Descriptions of Place and Movement is Harrison’s first string quartet, but even this seemingly facile descriptor loses all stability when the third movement emerges, essentially a triple quartet with the astonishingly gifted Quatuor Bozzini overdubbing all parts. They’re no strangers to Harrison’s work, having performed his epic piano quintet with Mark Knoop several years ago, and Three Descriptions is equally ambitious, lasting an hour. Its form involves something approaching a radical take on theme and variation in that a brief opening movement, containing much of the work’s material in embryonic form, is followed by two extended explorative deconstructions and re-assimilations. While the album should be heard in order, the easiest point of entry is the middle movement, with the motives paired off and the texture relatively sparse, all in a hushed dynamic. Like Jason’s section of Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, relative syntactic simplicity means that the musical argument can be deduced, affording easier access to the rest. Notions of tonality, modality and even of center blur but never completely disappear, as with the boldly etched fifths, fourths, and thirds beginning at 14:43 of the second movement. Just as quickly though, these are subsumed only to return, altered, at 20:59.
Harrison’s take on repetition is more than complex, and violinist Sarah Saviet executes each twist and turn with stunning clarity and invention. Listen, just to cite one example, to her constantly morphing dyad repeated from 19:50 to 20:35 of the 50-minute solo violin piece A Coiled Form. I’m reminded of those early 1990s glitch albums on which broken CD players blur form and structure via similarly fractured repetitions. In an interview on Another Timbre’s site, Harrison speaks of these repetitions as multifaceted, implying a collaborative composer/performer relationship in developing them and expanding the work from an initial five minutes to its present length. Again, as in the string quartet, thematic material exits only to return but in a fashion unpredictable on first listening. Are those arpeggiations at 36:00 related to the minuscule glitchy arc at 20:35? Are the succeeding major-sounding sonorities merely rhythmically similar extensions, and is the glassy timbre really the music’s unifying factor?
In the end, as might be expected with such large forms, familiarity is only achieved through these skewed repetitions. Harrison’s is a music of recurrence in its subtlest manifestation, a kind of static reappraisal of idea and context that nevertheless function in stark tandem. All matters of tonal procedure and whatever its opposite might be become subservient to the seamless blending of form and structure. Beyond even this duality resides a soundworld of staggering beauty, one inhabited completely by Saviet and by Quatuor Bozzini. They traverse each gesture with such obvious commitment that it becomes a portal of discovery, a door opening onto music of seemingly infinite significance and incalculable reward.
–Marc Medwin
Maya Homburger + Barry Guy + Lucas Niggli
Acanthis
Maya Recordings Bandcamp
In the introduction to the first four volumes of his Játékok collection, György Kurtág writes: “Playing is just playing. It requires a great deal of freedom and initiative from the performer. On no account should the written image be taken seriously but the written image must be taken extremely seriously as regards the musical process, the quality of sound and silence. We should trust the picture of the printed notes and let it exert its influence upon us.”
This whimsical but profound description of a process in the molten development of discovery may as well be applied to Maya Homburger and Barry Guy’s newest offering. As on 2005’s Dakryon with Pierre Favra, the duo is joined by a percussionist, this time the now-venerable Lucas Niggli. As with that 18-year-old musical odyssey, both delving into what Guy calls “musical stretching,” the new disc opens with the 9th century hymn “Veni Creator Spiritus,” mellifluously played by Homburger with Guy in resonant sympathy, which then, in Kurtágian spirit, follows the melody’s modal implications toward a decidedly contemporary take on the fiery freedoms of creativity embodied in the text.
The juxtaposition functions as an invocation and as a seed being planted, a pulling together of supposed disparity and erasure of temporal boundaries. This time, instead of the Baroque excursions of the duo’s previous offerings on Maya and ECM, Hungarian composer György Kurtág provides points of engagement for the trio’s exciting and often exquisite forays into arrangement and improvisation. His brief “Hommage à J.S.B.” emerges without pause from the opening invocation, the arrangement electric as Guy’s drones and harmonics sizzle around Homburger’s flowing lyricism. The homage, one of two offered here, ensures that contact with the 18th century, is established after all. The other, “Hommage à Eberhard Feltz,” evokes another and influential partnership. As Guy first reads and then intones Samuel Beckett’s poetry to Kurtág’s music in an arrangement made for this project, shades of Kathy Berberian’s reading from Joyce’s Ulysses and Luciano Berio’s electronic treatment of it come to mind, increasing the web of reference several fold. Kurtág’s dynamic bait and switch, not to mention the jump-cut transitions from sustain to pizzicato, push the treatment far beyond any traditional notions of text-painting.
While Guy has the lion’s share of compositions, Niggli’s two solo contributions are among the finest percussion recordings to have graced my speakers. Each malleted cymbal is miles-deep and crystalline in its beauty, while subterranean rumble defines “Harbor Song.” Guy points out Niggli’s perfectly judged placement of timbre and tone, citing “Rondo For Nine Birds” as a case in point. When he plays time, as on the lettered returns, it’s difficult to say which is more admirable, his flexibility or his timbral pallet. As the string players blur compositional and improvisational lines, matching pitch and tone color with breath-taking accuracy, Niggli’s multivalent interweavings might just as well have been composed, so perfectly do they fit their contexts.
The disc can be heard as a series of connected miniatures, but it’s so much more. Each composition is rendered with all the vitality any composer could desire, and every framework invites a seamless blend of spontaneity and rigor. As always, musicianship is of the highest order, as is the production. Acanthus now takes its place as one of the crown jewels in the Maya Recordings catalog.
–Marc Medwin
Roland Kayn
Infra
Reiger-Records-Reeks KY-CD2201-03
There are bells, easily heard bells of indeterminate size but definite semiotic provenance. They seem a simple enough place to begin, and they repeat asymmetrically, both reverberant and delayed as their pitch warps. There is also a brass motive, also sometimes bent beyond recognition. Atop it all is the chirped delicacy of bird or cricket, but again, no tone is steady, and these are just the surface issues attendant to “Nastie,” one movement of the three-disc symphony that is Roland Kayn’s Infra, now reissued on his reactivated Reiger Records Reeks label. The 1978-1979 epic is merely one of several large-scale works Kayn released on the Colosseum label during that fertile period, along with the slightly later Tektra, also now reintroduced to the catalog in 2021.
Kayn is nothing if not enigmatic. It isn’t simply that his compositions eschew facile categorization. Their unifying factors occur along a different path. Rather, they are very easily heard, exhibiting sonic traits so immediately identifiable as to be unmistakable even in the first moments. As with consciousness and the limitless oceans beneath, the mystery resides at a deeper level involving the complex relationship between what is easily and linearly perceived and the vast reservoirs and tributaries of conglomeration underpinning the whole. In Kayn’s work, there is the sparse surface, those constantly shifting points, slashes and dotted planes of sonic structure, like the jump-cut 8:15 into the second part of “Formantes” or the piercingly high pitch interrupting what sound like dystopian birds 1:01 into “Randoms II.” These surface formants are integral to the progress of Kayn’s corpus, later taking on the sudden and dizzying speed-change of obvious tape manipulation. Of course, such structural shifts can also impact formal perception, as when the shards and fragments of “Formantes I” coalesce and later re-fragment, anticipating the second installment of “Ready-made” from a few years later. They are symptomatic rather than causal, Kayn’s doffing of the hat to the conventions of Musique Concret to which, like Jean-Claude Eloy, he never fully subscribed. What might be the sounds of instruments emerge and submerge again, brief fragments of voice, tone or nearly recognizable environment make themselves known only to fade into an impalpability they never actually left.
Beyond the serialized events comprising the top layer, an uncharted territory beckons, shimmering and morphing areas of foam, glass and melting concrete that it would be clumsy to shove into the flimsy and inadequately sealed containers we label as drone and harmony. Those functions do not describe, or nowhere near completely, the progression of even one movement. Returning to “Nastie” at its deeper levels exposes a subterranean rumbling that can be heard as harmonic, or at least triadic, but which is in constant flux. Each tone wavers even as it coheres to the others, and each is so rich with overtone that any attempt at isolating pitches becomes futile. Like AMM’s late 1960s forays into similarly protean sonic complexes, the underlying unity is simultaneously a backdrop and a foundation. The sound sources remain unclear; is that wavering sonority comprised of tape, electronics or a combination? The track’s glacial movement preempts both concern and stereotype as dynamics prove equally malleable, the whole swimming by in a symbiosis of aquatic undulation and orchestral dance, rippling around the edges like minuscule waves masking their fathomless depths. While the surface events here are easily audible, they are much more completely integrated as the Gargantuan low-register sustains and steamy industrialities of “Formantes” second section etch their slow-burn circuitous shiftings on the ear and in the memory.
If all of the above looks overly academic, any attempt on my part to explain the cybernetic processes determining Kayn’s composition would fare even worse, especially as Kayn observes, repeatedly, that there is always an improvisational element to the procedure. None of it—no listing of sonic signifiers or exegetical explication of compositional teleology—could account for the music’s power and subtle grace. Listening to its macrocosmic cycles and spirals is akin to exercise or travel to a new place. Each moment tintinnabulates, writhes, groans, thunders or shatters its way into listener consciousness, some elongated past comfort and reason, some only seconds away from annihilation. Sustain is at the heart of it all but of a seemingly endless variety. Nothing is made simple, and no all-encompassing explanation is given in the nonetheless fascinating liners and accompanying interview. Like the music, Kayn seems intent on exposing and revamping fundamental conceptions of thought surrounding music, performance, and technology. Kayn’s is most certainly long-form music of the machine, rendered by and made for the machine age but ultimately coming from a narrative space in which uncertainty and the skewed repetition and crossfade so close to human existence breed an astonishing but immediately tangible familiarity. If given the chance, a passage or timbre will resonate on levels beyond the easily digestible progression from sound A to sound B afforded by most electroacoustic music. The journey ends up being its own reward.
–Marc Medwin
