#another timbre

It opens with the ten-minute solo piano piece “In a Landscape,” played by Kerry Yong. It’s a light, almost minimalist piece built around some gentle progressions. Quick on its heels is the six-part “Six Melodies” where Yong is joined by violinist Mira Benjamin. The two of them mesh well together here on these quick sketches — they’re all under three minutes — where Benjamin’s violin tackles a range of ideas against Yong’s counterpoints. It shows the young Cage bursting with ideas and starting to come into his own.

The ideas continue on the four-part “Amores” section. They’re neatly split into two, bookended with two pieces for prepared piano with two for solo percussion in the middle. The prepared piano drives home the instrument’s percussive qualities with its flat, deadened notes, while the two percussion pieces counter it by suggesting the range of voices available with tom-toms and wood blocks. The drums skitter, while the blocks suggest a detuned marimba. It’s pretty cool stuff.

The album’s back half opens with “String Quartet in Four Parts.” Here Benjamin is joined by Gordon MacKay on violin, Bridget Carey on viola, and Anton Lukoszevieze on cello. The four parts take on an almost swirling feeling, with the violins sometimes sounding like they’re not quite in harmony, lending it an almost queasy feeling. But at others they all come together in waves, rocking back and forth. It’s an interesting piece, especially in how it anticipates the later Cage seen on Apartment House’s 2021 record Number Pieces.  

The prepared piano is back on “Music for Marcel Duchamp,” a slow, sparse piece where the piano doesn’t just sound like a percussion ensemble but almost takes on an Eastern edge, at times sounding like a koto. The closing performance of “Dreams” takes it a step further: Yong’s back on a regular piano and joined by Lukoszevieze. While the cello plays long bowed lines, Yong’s piano works around some gentle phrases and lets the notes hang in the air. These two pieces mesh well together, letting the album come to a nice, satisfying conclusion.

While Cage can sometimes come across like he’s working in the Research and Development wing of the musical academy, this album shows him as someone who was adept at coloring inside the lines while gently nudging listeners into the avant-garde. The solo percussion and prepared piano might make new listeners feel wary when looking at this record, but nothing here ever is a difficult or challenging listen. It’s just a collection of understated music that rewards close listening while also acting as a way into Cage’s vast catalog. It might not change his reputation, but if you’ve been too intimidated to listen to him it might just change your mind.

Bern's Ensemble Proton offers Lamb the ideal group for this project. The octet includes musicians hungry for the new and experimental with a penchant for playing unlikely instruments. Coco Schwarz's arciorgano — an extinct but resurrected keyboard instrument — might be the rarest and most unusual. The instrument breaks and octave in more than the usual number of divisions. Lamb uses the arciorgano's tonal options as a sort of sonic adhesive, holding the ensemble's varied sounds together. In a context with not only that instrument but also a lupophone, clarinet d'amore, and others, a violin or bassoon could sound downright pedestrian; instead, they sound otherworldly, part of the strange brew that makes up Curva Triangulus.

Lamb writes in her notes, “Elemental concepts around melody and harmony are reconsidered, blurred.” For listeners less attuned to prime qualitative harmonics and the modal challenges developed across “triadic counterpoint” (whoever those people might be), the blur of melody and harmony becomes the most fascinating aspect of the record. Melody remains subordinate to harmonic movement, but in the interplay of sounds and tones, melody peeks through in unexpected ways. The sonic shifts never become linear, but essentially melodic movements arise, occasionally passed between musicians. The lead “instrument,” might be a harmonic instead of a violin, but those structures give shape to musical phrases that cohere into, if not melody, at least melodic sensibility.

The deep concepts of Curva Triangulus make the album's nuances difficult to access, but the album never relies on its intellectual demands if listened to as a straightforward album. The tonal structures and uncommon instrumentation give it a particularly idiosyncratic feel, but everything sorts itself out into a spellbinding aural geometry. When the ensemble hints at a church organ six minutes in, no one will anticipate a turn toward hymnody, but when it drops into alien space informed by triple harp, no one will feel jarred either. Lamb's work provides a series of intellectual tests, but also a memorable stretch of focused wonder.

Quintets with violins are somewhat unusual. In a standard classical piece by Mozart or Schubert, one is more likely to find two violas or cellos. The group of players here — Mira Benjamin, Chihiro Ono, and Amalia Young, violins, Bridget Carey, viola, and Anton Lukoszevieze, cello — play together as if this is the most ubiquitous of instrumentations. Their level of attention to tiny details in the score, as well as their unflagging energy, make this an important document of Feldman’s late music.

The designation of one of the violins separately is significant. Sometimes the first violin will be required to play a solo role, tearing off from tutti ostinato passages to play altissimo high notes and polyrhythms —often five against four — that delineate it from the rest of the group. At others, its upper register sustained notes meld with the string quartet.

Like most of Feldman’s late music, Violin and String Quartet is quite long, well over two hours, and prevailingly slow and soft. The piece begins with verticals that are morphed by small glissandos into rubbery totems. These are contrasted by moments of glassine verticals, played with straight tone. For a stretch two-thirds of the way in, the first violin’s harmonics are set against blocks of enigmatic chords.

Without a linear narrative or break in the action, a piece of such long duration is difficult to summarize. Perhaps that is part of the point. Attention to small details and their variations is rewarded, just as a meditative stance can be a way to contemplate Feldman’s music. In a pre-concert talk about a different piece, Feldman was quoted as saying,”It’s a short three hours!” Approached with an open mind and ears, Violin and String Quartet can feel the same way.