Bernhard Lang's The Cold Trip (Part 1, 2014; Part 2, 2014–15) is the 32nd instalment of his ongoing Monadologie sequence. In each Monadologie, short ‘cells’ of pre-existing music are sampled, processed, subjected to repetition and re-scored to derive new ‘meta-compositions’ that loosely follow the structural course of the model work.Footnote ¹ While Lang's musical starting points span centuries and genres, many use stalwarts of the Austro-German canon: in the case of The Cold Trip, Schubert's Winterreise. Schubert's late music is well represented in Lang's series: the three Monadologies entitled …For Franz I, …II (2012) and …III (2015), use other staples of Schubert's late oeuvre, the two piano trios and the string quintet. Perhaps this abundance has something to do with Schubert's own long and lovingly documented propensity for repetition, each of these late works offering Lang loops to loop and repeats to repeat.

The Cold Trip is divided at Winterreise’s halfway point. Part 1, for voice and guitar quartet, and Part 2, for voice, piano, and laptop, were commissioned, premiered, and recorded separately; each half is self-contained and has been performed as such, but heard together they form a provocative whole. Part 2 is flanked by a Prologue and Epilogue, the music material for which is drawn not from Schubert but from a landmark stationed earlier in the wintry walk through music history: the ‘cold song’ (‘What power art thou’) from Purcell's King Arthur, famous for its melancholy chilliness and its broken-syllabled repetition. Again, Lang is choosing material already rich in repetition, and here, Purcell's faltering, obsessive repeating of John Dryden's words (‘Let me, let me, let me freeze again’) resembles the breaking apart and re-stating of Schubert and Müller that dominates the surface of The Cold Trip.

The textual and musical material of The Cold Trip is derived in parallel from Müller and Schubert, one song treated at a time to create a ‘meta-composition’ that clearly follows the sequence of Winterreise’s songs. The new poems are simple and punchy, rendered in English and rarely straying from existing imagery; rhymes ricochet around the songs’ close quarters of repetition (‘I walk the street / with sluggish feet / this busy street’). It is instances of simple word-switching and brazen updating that are most memorable, which are more prominent in Part 2: ‘Mail’ (from ‘Die Post’) meditates upon the modern anxieties of the inbox, the song progressing from the condition of ‘new mail’ to that of ‘no mail’; later, what was once ‘Mut’ becomes ‘Speed’, a visceral tale of snow, singing and snorting that sets the scene for the gently hallucinatory ‘Three Sun Vision’ that follows.

Schubert's music weaves its way through The Cold Trip in more complex ways. Most songs begin with a distinctive rhythm, melodic fragment, or accompanimental figure plucked from the original song, distorted but still discernible. Further reminiscences appear as songs progress – there are doubtless transplanted ‘cells’ present that evade even the shrewdest Schubertian ear – and the vocal parts often slip into a familiar line at moments of structural importance. Other songs unbind their ties as they continue. For instance, ‘River’ opens with a twanging guitar accompaniment immediately evocative of ‘Auf dem Flusse’, which seems to invite the kind of ‘plastic listening’ that Peter Szendy advocates in his writing on arrangement: the ear can happily flit between Schubertian and Langian iterations of the distinctive falling bass line.Footnote ² The guitars are soon joined by a gentle diatonic vocal melody that isn't allowed to develop: the texture becomes increasingly atomised, and the song ends with obsessive repetitions of short rhythmic motifs. At another extreme of Lang's spectrum of distortion, the ‘Crow’ of Part 2 is as much an exercise in characterisation as musical transformation; Lang's broken chords are forcefully articulated on the beat, moving like a creature that does not circle overhead but hops malevolently underfoot.

The abrupt change of instrumentation between tracks 12 and 13 might remind those who listen with Schubert in mind that Winterreise, like The Cold Trip, had a bipartite gestation, first comprising 12 songs before being expanded to include settings of Müller's remaining 12 poems. In both Lang's parts, the voice-piano lied configuration (along with its hallowed aura of ‘intimacy’) is disrupted, the piano supplanted or shadowed. The wooden bodies and many strings of the four guitars isolate individual constituents: stripped of hammers and keys, the piano has been subjected to a process similar to the one Lang enacts upon the notes of Schubert's score. The second half is quite different, closer to Schubert's ensemble but with the laptop acting as an intrusive and unapologetically modern third-wheel, a sonic metaphor for the most basic of processes inherent to Lang's modus operandi – the transplanting of pre-existing music into a distinctively ‘new’ idiom. The Aleph Guitar Quartet bring to Part 1 a typically precise and vibrant rendition of the score's extended techniques; in Part 2, Mark Knoop is sensitive and fiercely rhythmic while maintaining control over the piano's laptop-shadow. Sopranos Sarah Maria Sun and Juliet Fraser deliver compelling performances in Parts 1 and 2 respectively, as confident in transient passages of lieder-like lyricism as with the Schubertian wanderer's twenty-first-century trappings. In particular, both handle their many repeating fragments thoughtfully, sometimes subtly varying vocal inflections, sometimes stonily and powerfully monochrome; each persuasively embodies the many psychological and historical states of the protagonist. For instance, Sun is tasked at points in her score to sing in a ‘ghost voice’, ‘Renaissance voice’, and ‘cold voice’; Fraser's voices are more specifically evocative, and all memorably achieved: ‘Purcell’, ‘whining Bob Dylan’, and perhaps best of all, ‘crow’.

Kairos's online marketing for this premiere recording, released in August 2017, describes it as ‘a new Winterreise: to rewalk an ancient pathway, overwriting it with new trails’. Lang's brief note in the liner booklet states that ‘the voice in both parts traces the lost lines of the songs, sometimes touching them if remembering’. The metaphors that pervade these descriptions (of remembrance, trace, loss, overwriting, overwalking) are common to compositional engagements with the musical past, each making historical points by reinforcing temporal gaps – Lang's account of ‘creating palimpsests of Schubert's original textures’ compounds this further. There is a danger here of narrowly conceiving The Cold Trip as a mediation between Schubert as ‘past’ and Lang as ‘present’, and of forgetting that Schubert's endlessly popular Winterreise remains very much the music of ‘today’. Fortunately, The Cold Trip does much more. While this review has relied on the Schubertian perspective, there are certainly other fruitful modes of interpretation: a listener with little or no knowledge of Winterreise is likely to experience Lang's composed response very differently to those who listen through the lens of familiarity, but the score implies no hierarchy and there is no reason to impose one. Lang has constructed a song cycle on a parallel plane that is both intrinsically indebted to and happily removed from its Schubertian origin; the images, sounds, and dramatic arc are captivating regardless of added context. To use another landscape metaphor, The Cold Trip might be understood on its own terms as Lang's winter journey, tagged with Schubertian graffiti that can be sought out, studied, appreciated, noted, or simply passed by; it may enhance, frustrate, or be wholly removed from the listening experience.Footnote ³