Simon Reynell's Another Timbre label has been around for ten years now and has released 118 CDs (so far) of some of the most innovative present-day composition and improvisation. In addition to its regular new releases, it has started to reissue some of its older albums. Amongst the first is one of the label's most celebrated early releases, Lost Daylight, in which John Tilbury plays a collection of piano works by Terry Jennings and John Cage.
This is apparently Jennings's entire oeuvre for solo piano: five brief pieces written between 1958 and 1966. Because of his association with La Monte Young, Jennings is usually remembered as a minimalist, but if anything is minimal about these pieces, it is the presence of sound itself. The characterisation made of Morton Feldman's music at this time – ‘organised silence’ – is more particularly pertinent to Jennings here. While Cage and Feldman talked of letting sounds be themselves, Jennings uses sounds to create a space for listening. Each piece is slow and quiet, with the sustain pedal in constant use. Traditional harmonies are repeated in varying patterns, distinct from the New York School's determined atonal abstraction.
Piano Piece 1960 is made out of an A@, expanded into octaves, or clusters spread over three octaves, in the same manner Feldman used in his late works. Tilbury plays the piece's 17 chords or single notes in four minutes. Jennings's guidance in the score suggests it could even be played a little slower. Tilbury emphasises the coherence of the work as a single statement, small but clear, however isolated its constituent parts may appear.
It's pernicious to think of musical history as a lineage of influences. This CD's affirmation of Jennings's early music serves to show that contemporaneous composers such as Cage, Feldman and Christian Wolff were not outliers or exceptions to the rule who could thus be safely excluded from discussion of late twentieth-century music. Jennings's acceptance of the slightest of sounds, set in silence, as sufficient music is comparable to Cage's Music for Piano series, in which Cage used imperfections in the paper as noteheads, lightly scattered across the page. With music as ephemeral as this, the composer is not organising sound, but how people hear. Chance determines not just the content of the music, but that the music happens to exist at all.
John Cage's 1964 composition Electronic Music For Piano looks similarly slight on the page: a photostat of single sheet of hotel notepaper on which Cage has jotted down some comments referring to a piano performance given by David Tudor, using amplification and other electronic means of modifying the piano's sound. As with many Cage scores, realising the piece seems an unpromising prospect, offering so little opportunity for creative interpretation without lapsing into an indulgent free-for-all.
The choice of an electroacoustic piece by Cage at his most musically permissive seems an incongruous pairing with Jennings, until the piece begins. The track starts with the faintest of crackling, like surface noise or tape hiss, sound that would typically be considered as ‘silence’ in imperfect recording conditions. As the sound changes and augments, it immediately becomes clear that this is part of the music itself. The means may be different, but both Jennings and Cage composed with an understanding of music as activated silence.
Tilbury, in collaboration with Sebastian Lexer handling the electronics, have created a piece that is both bold yet hard to pin down, shifting back and forth between sounds that are piano and not-piano. Lexer has said that they wanted to do more than simply add electronic effects to the piano, and they used computerised technology to extend Cage and Tudor's conceptualisation of the piano as a site in which sounds may be produced and observed. Taking cues from the score, the electronic processing follows a chance-determined score created from star charts for location of microphones and pickups, mixing and timing of events. Tilbury uses the piano to produce isolated sounds, drawing his material from Cage's Music for Piano.
In addition to Lost Daylight, Another Timbre released four new CDs in November. John Tilbury is joined by Philip Thomas, Catherine Laws and Mark Knoop for a performance of Cage's Winter Music. The 1957 composition for 1–20 pianos may be heard alone, or in simultaneous performance with the orchestral work Atlas Eclipticalis. In the latter configuration, the piano(s) act as punctuation, with isolated chords articulating a context for the web of contrasting instrumental sounds.
Despite the greater complexity of the score, Winter Music sounds like an extension of the Music For Piano series. Cage insists that every aggregate of sounds on the page, no matter how simple or complex, must be played as a single ictus. The focus again is on isolated sounds, deprived of continuity. It is a music of stasis, harking back to Cage's conception of winter's role in the seasons, as heard in his ballet suite of the same name and particularly in the third part of his String Quartet in Four Parts, with its unvarying material.
The dry, forbidding qualities of the score are belied by Cage's reference to nature, and the recording by the pianists here comes across as fully mindful of this connection. Each prepared their own parts separately, and this recording captures their first performance together. There has been a recent tendency in many interpretations of Cage to focus on the quiescent, ambient qualities of the music, even verging on the new age, using him as a reflection of our own tastes and times. This new performance captures Cage's music as reflecting nature in full force. The succession of irregularly overlapping chords may at first seem tranquil, but can turn at any moment into something violent, ugly, shocking, then empty. Whether brutal or tender, each sound appears with the sublime indifference of a natural phenomenon. Ambient noise is present but does not intrude, giving greater depth to the detailing of space between the four pianos.
Another Timbre has dedicated a number of recordings to Jürg Frey's music and the new double CD Collection Gustave Roud contains two of his most powerful recent works. The 40-minute piano piece La présence, les silences was written between 2013 and 2016. Here, it is played by the composer and Frey collaborator Dante Boon. In Frey's music, as with his predecessors discussed here, size does not necessarily imply significance: time becomes a dimension of the listening space. La présence, les silences feels like a successor to Frey's two pieces titled pianist, alone – the first about 90 minutes long, the second around 30, each equal in scope, a journey inasmuch as each piece wanders, explores with ‘purposeful purposelessness’.
The new album collects pieces Frey wrote under the influence of the poet Gustave Roud: ‘Every day he went out, not with an easel, but with his notebook, and he wandered through the landscape as a flâneur, observer … . For me his work constitutes a kind of “field recording”, not with a microphone and sounds, but with his soul and body, recording his environment in the broadest sense’. The impression of landscape pervades La présence, les silences; spare, gently voiced cadences and harmonic progressions appear here and there, recalling nineteenth-century pastorals. At other times, the music is reduced to a single, repeated note, lingering before moving on.
These repetitions appeared in Frey's earlier work, giving him some degree of notoriety. At first, they seemed a provocation to the listener. In the first pianist, alone and Klavierstück 2, Frey's repetitions came with a sense of stasis, of impasse. In the later pianist, alone they provide a sense of continuity, working through affect more than dialectic argument. In La présence, les silences they are further developed, with the repeated notes gaining occasional harmonic colouring or articulation in the bass, enhancing the sense of movement.
Having been most closely associated with the Wandelweiser group, Frey's recent music is now imbued with a quiet sophistication – the sort that doesn't need to display its radical nature or its erudition. Where it was once necessary to make statements, it is now possible for these values to be affirmed as a given. Sound is now given the foreground over silence, but those silences remain equally important. It accepts, accommodates and transforms cultural heritage. La présence, les silences may well be Frey's Hammerklavier, or, more appropriately, his Concord Sonata.
If there's a parallel to be drawn between Frey and Cage, it's in the presence of transcendentalism in their music – moreover, that it is expressed through the materials of their medium, sound and silence, over the literary or philosophical interpretation of those sounds.
