Ten More Albums

Continuing the mini-reviews of ten albums from my collections of CDs, cassettes and vinyl albums. One needs something to do during the orona virus lockdown. As always, comments are welcome, and of course I'll post other topics about music (and art) as they come up.

Banish Misfortune (Malcolm Dalglish and Grey Larsen)
A classic of hammer dulcimer recordings, this collection of folk songs reflects a tenderness and directness of expression often buried under layers of erudition in other genres – yet it is no less complex or effective. As always, a pleasure to listen.

Batak of North Sumatra
Earworms lurk just beneath the surface in this collection of aggressive traditional Indonesian music that has nothing to do with the more familiar gamelan. The melody is as often carried by percussion as by the vocals and the omnipresent double reeds. This stuff rocked for centuries before the invention of electric instruments.

Carmina Burana (The Boston Camerata conducted by Joel Cohen)
Carl Orff fans: this ain’t that. These are songs from the original manuscript, in the Medieval tunes that have been used since the 1960’s (the manuscript itself has very little actual musical notation). These performances use innovations like rainsticks or the re-use of the “Dies Irae” melody – so these are not “authentic” versions – however, Medieval musicians would probably have innovated with what was at hand. These were bawdy drinking songs, after all…

Field Recordings (Bang on a Can All-Stars)
Exploring the noisy demilitarized zone between “new music” and indie-rock. Individual pieces vary from catchy minimalism to guitar-heavy drone metal to happy/comical circus music, almost all based on field recordings of some type. A musical experience, to be sure.

Four Compositions (Quartet) 1995 (Anthony Braxton)
One would expect this manic perpetual-motion machine to wind down at some point, but it keeps morphing and mutating, sprouting variations on its single running line of notes. It is both exhilarating and maddening music – and needs to be heard at least once to either relax you or put you farther over the edge.

Ordo Virtutum (Hildegard von Bingen, played by Sequentia)
This may be the recording that brought Hildegard’s music back into the spotlight after almost a millennium, yet this is a flawed record. The performances are pretty but often seem hesitant, there is at least one easily-audible flubbed tape-splice, and the celestial chorus of the finale is lackluster. The music of this proto-opera itself, though, is fascinating: melodies proceed in directions quite unlike any others (and also quite unlike the Gregorian chant upon which they are based). The instrumental parts provide drones and heterophonic accompaniments that would grow centuries later into the many types of harmony that we know today.

Piano Concertos (Béla Bartók, played by András Schiff and the Budapest Festival Orchestra conducted by Iván Fischer)
A grand explosion of rhythm from the first attack of modernism; Bartók is saying that the piano is definitely a percussion instrument, not the modified harp that the Romantic composers had made it. Concerto #1 is intense, dissonant and modernly “barbaric” in the manner of Stravinsky; #2 is an exciting ride; and #3 is unexpectedly lyrical and expressive – yet taken together, they almost form one large piece.

String Quartets Op. 18 #4, Op. 74 ‘Harp’, and Op. 130-133 (Beethoven, played by the Elias String Quartet)
What more can I say? Nearly flawless performances of some of the most profound music ever written. The “Harp” Quartet seems to have that instrument present; but it is not these “special effects” that fascinate us. It is the sheer range of expression. The slow movements are as serene as a starry night in paradise; the Grosse Fuge (Op. 133) rages against the existential abyss as effectively as much more obviously dissonant modernist music.

Sur Incises, Messagesquisse, Anthèmes 2 (Pierre Boulez)
The grand scintillating apotheosis of all that is post-serialist complexity. It curls around the listener like a diamond rainbow of notes, always changing, yet with no safe places. The three pieces (for 3 pianos, 3 harps, and 3 percussionists; for 7 cellos; for violin with electronics) provide the maximum differences in timbre.

Well-Adjusted (Beanbag)
Grunge rock at its loudest, full of fuzz guitars, fearsome (sometimes metal or rap) vocals, and an occasional microtone. A look at the lyrics shows that this is a socially-aware Christian band full of criticism of the “American dream” and the resulting suffering in other parts of the world: that uncompromising message is very effective when conveyed with this music. Musical innovations include changes of tempi against steady drumming and strident quarter-tones in feedback. The only cover tune is “Army of Me” (originally by Björk), here given a heavy bass-and-drums treatment that really conjures images of invading armies.