#dawnings

One of the first things we learn in music school involves the cadence, as neatly categorized as commas and periods. Lonsdale turns the notion on its head. In another of those indispensable Another Timbre composer interviews, he describes Constellations, one of the concert recordings, as a mosaic existing in layers creating “an emergent complexity of experience.” I’ll say! Major and minor resolutions overwhelm in their half-step transience, functioning as operators over which all else occurs but shifting before they can even register as the points of rest preconception so often dictates. As if their chromaticism, solidified by pipe organ sonorities, wasn’t enough, a sublimated battery of strings, winds and percussion slide and glide through the microtonal universes they create as dynamics swell and fade. Their ever-so-gradual descent toward a single pitch around the 25-minute mark and harmony’s phoenix-like return is astounding to experience. As Lonsdale observes, the music is extremely simple, and yet, the ensemble Oerknal brings each gesture to life in that completely fluid context. Again, like the single leaf emerging in early spring, a single pitch opens Shedding, an exquisite study of D-major, though, like the forms of life existing below the surface of a beautifully manicured lawn, the last ten minutes foreground what has been an insidious process of decomposition from the beginning. I hear it as D-major, though we begin with the third, and searching for anything as prosaic as tonic is a fool’s errand. Ensemble Ipse performs the piece with splendid precision; their pulsing microtones and stunningly stable fourths and fifths may be among the best around, right up there with Apartment House, who performs the trio of works gracing the first disc.

We are given a solo, a duet and a quartet, all performed to Apartment House’s always high standards and with their unique attention to the various components of tone and timbre far too often ignored. Anton Lukoszeviez ravishing take on the solo cello work Aurora, with its unusual technical requirements as outlined by Lonsdale in the interview, buds and blooms in a way that transforms the cello into duos, trios and beyond. The instrument’s vast sonic and pitch range is freshly contextualized by occasional and deftly placed pizzicati, form as slippery and surprising as the sounds themselves or the silences they frame. Mira Benjamin, Chihiro Ono, Amalia Young and Angharad Davies perform Cloud Symmetries with all of the depth and calm precision one would expect from these four “new” music advocates, right from the warm and open sounds ushering the piece into existence. Clusters guide the foamy harmonies as they float by, coalescing in wisps and soft shards that may resemble the familiar, like the minor sonority at 8:26 whose identity is just as quickly subsumed into something proximate but somehow also distant, Shakespeare’s “rich and strange.” The ensemble makes the most beautiful crystalline sound, and the recording, as is always the case with Apartment House discs, is superb.

The titular piece may be simultaneously the simplest and the most complex on offer. The ternary form, because that’s ultimately how the piece progresses, is played with supreme sensitivity by clarinetist Heather Roche and pianist Kerry Yong, and at times, were it not for the subtle and soothing breath-sounds, they would manifest as one instrument. The sparseness of the music ensures that not only unisons, but all sounds stand in stark relief against the pauses as diatonicism turns toward something like chromaticism and back. Roche’s eventual multi-phonics ensure that these designations are even more tenuous, and so the effect of each gesture is akin to opening a space, each sonority a half-frozen landscape over which to skate. It is the most direct and most subtle in a program rife with similar subtleties, a sometimes unnerving but quietly enriching experience from start to finish.