Matthew Rosenblum – Nü Kuan Tzu (1996)

Fascinating, often beautiful piece from a composer I’m surprised I’d never heard of until last week.  Its most obvious precursor is the Berio of the Sinfonia (1969) and Laborintus 2 (1965);  like those two works, Nü Kuan Tzu is a densely layered piece for voice and large ensemble that sets up a collision between European modernism and music of other times and places.  The first section, “Le Départ,” sets the scene, crowding together samples of 9th-century Chinese poetry, restless atonal chamber-orchestra music led by piano and vibes, and two otherworldly, floating female singers whose lines vaguely recall Babbit’s Philomel (1964).  Although the surface activity is dense, the harmonic motion is slow;  the music repeatedly coalesces around particular pitches before becoming diffuse again, and hidden somewhere in the heart of all this sensuous chaos is a melody based on the first three degrees of the major scale.  Rosenblum is as good as anyone I can think of at creating the impression of multiple unrelated rates of motion going on simultaneously.

The piece returns frequently to this kind of dense texture.  But where things really get interesting is in the sections that provide a contrast.  The second, “Automne Malade,” has one of the singers reciting an Apollinaire poem in melancholy Sprechstimme, accompanied by rolled piano/flute/vibraphone chords that fall somewhere between Debussy and Messiaen.  The third, “Interlude 1,” creates a microtonal melody by alternating between a piano and a sampler filled with detuned piano sounds;  it starts out simple and repetitive, an accompaniment to recorded birdsong, but it gradually uncoils, spilling over onto new instruments — whining trombones, pizzicato low strings, blindingly bright winds.  The fourth, “12/11 Pop,” turns the microtonal melody into bizarro world music, with vaguely Indian vocal melodies, tabla-goes-techno percussion, and rhythms that always seem to be on the verge of disintegration.  And the eighth, “Interlude 3,” is a jazz tune stripped down to its skeleton, like Matthew Herbert meets Schoenberg’s “Farben” (1909) on the set of a 60s arthouse film— alternating endlessly between two chords with different orchestrations, only occasionally giving us a bit of flute melody, a descending pizz bass figure, a pandiatonic harmony moving chromatically by step.

I’m not sure yet if the piece works formally.  In particular, I found the denser sections less and less effective as the piece went on, and I’m not sure whether that’s just because my ear got tired of sorting through all the layers or whether “Le Départ” is simply better composed than later sections ike “Han Shao” and “Voyelles.”  Still, the piece has a lot of beauty and invention in it, and I’m glad I discovered it.

Franco Donatoni – Rasch (1990)

Well that was awesome.  My friend Carolyn has been raving about Donatoni for a while, but I’ve only heard two pieces by him, this and the also-awesome Diario 76 (1977).  In both cases I’ve been struck by how little he sounds like any other composer I know.  There’s a certain affinity to Andriessen, in that both composers like blocky sectionalization and dissonant rhythmic unison passages, and if you arranged Rasch for piano, celesta, harp and glockenspiel rather than sax quartet it would probably sound a little like Boulez’s Multiples, but overall the impression I get is that Donatoni spent his time off in his own little corner of the music world.

Rasch starts out with a series of short triple-piano bursts of gray micropolyphonic blobbiness, and gradually takes shape from there.  The blobs come in and out of focus:  some are in rhythmic unison except for the abundance of grace notes in each part, while others mix sixteenths and dotted sixteenths so that the saxophones get out of sync with each other.  Suddenly there’s a shift:  everyone’s playing short groups of thirty second notes, separated by rests, in parallel motion, forming juicy dissonant chords.   The music is now only pianissimo.  The group lengths and pause lengths shift around:  is the basic unit two or three sixteenths?  It’s the same rhythmic ambiguity as in the blobs, but refined, clarified, distilled.  Long chords, sometimes surprisingly tonal ones, break through the rustling;  they crescendo from pianissimo to piano, which in this context seems incredibly loud.  Then suddenly everything explodes — still pianissimo! — and everyone’s offset from each other, like a canon without any literal repetition, a perpetuum mobile split among four instruments so that nobody plays more than four notes in a row without taking a breath.

I won’t give a play-by-play of the whole piece.  Donatoni adds plenty of other elements, from trills to slap-tongues to abrupt accents that pop out of the texture — and yes, he does eventually get to triple forte — but the most important thing is that everything is exciting, visceral, sensuous, dramatic, and never anywhere even approaching dry.  I often think that Italy’s postwar modernist tradition, from Dallapiccola to Berio to Sciarrino, is much more connected to human experience than that of France or Germany or Austria, and the little bit I’ve heard from Donatoni has confirmed that impression.  Still not sure about Nono, though…