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.