Listening lately: AFMM Ensemble
New CDs coming in at Kulas Music Library, so I'm gritting my teeth, taking my work home in my car, and getting to know the collection. :-)
Pitch P-200203, chamber music from the American Festival of Microtonal Music. Stuff all over the map... Julian Carillo's Preludio a Colon is one of the landmark works of microtonality, supposedly, but it basically sucks. There's a microchromatic wordless soprano line with some Rudimentary strings under it, some chords that make no apparent sense (certaily no imitation of ratios of small whole numbers), and it's at least twice as long as it needs to be. Then there's Lou Harrison's At the Tomb of Charles Ives, the only horrible Harrison piece I have ever heard. The worst was the parts for 2 bowed psalteries (an instument invented I am told in the 20s in Germany, and probably later used as a torture device by the Hitlerjugend.).I hate to jump on Lou since, if there were any such think as collective guilt, as an Ohioan I would have had a hand in his death. (Some students were bringing him in a van from the train station for a concert of his music at OSU. They stopped at Denny's and one whiff of the grease was as much as his ticker could stand.) But Reinhard did him no favors by programming this piece. Didn't know what to make of Scelsi's Ko-Lho for flute and clarinet, except that anyone who can make a minor third sound like an eruption into another universe deserves my respect. Xenakis' Anaktoria...well, Xenakis is not my thing. Then there was Ives' Quartet #2 played in extended Pythagorean, Reinhard's pet theory about Ives' perverse spellings. That worked for the Universe Symphony; it melded the bands of sound together. Here, it made the dissonances more consonant and consonances more dissonant. Combined with a "mezzofort-issimo" approach to dynamics, it pretty much killed the piece. Partch's Joyce settings were the best thing on the disc. Not top-flight Partch, but always good to hear other performers do his stuff. With soprano, 2 flutes and Kithara, it was easy to hear that Partch was a better harmonist than anyone gives him credit for. (As Wendy Carlos once pointed out, Partchs' instrumentarium seems at odds with his tuning, not showing it off to best advantage.) And he had ideas.
Which inspires a rant: why is so much microtonal music in general (and Just Intonation music in particular) about the system rather than ideas expressed through the system? I remember hearing something once on the old Tellus anthology I think, some guy just SITTING on this Just hexad."Oh, isn't this a cool sounding chord?" Well, duh, how is that different from Clementi sitting on some 5-limit triad with a diatonic scale over it, "Isn't C Major just so cool?" Compare this to Blackwood's Microtonal Etudes; there are always ideas there, though they can't help but be about the tuning to some extent, given the effort he had to go through to make some of those tunings listenable.
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