To gain access to the CD in the case of Ave Maria is to go on a small pilgrimage. The design enacts the mystical experience of veiling and revealing. Hand-folded laser-cut card-stock paper unfolds in a sequence: first a flap opens out to the left, a second to the right, another down and the last folds up. Each layer is like a panel. The outermost is cut in an intricate pattern like the grating between a penitent and a confessor. Another holds the booklet with Carolyn Chen's liner notes. The last two have oddly criss-crossing strands of paper in front of an image printed on the back of the CD: the words ‘AVE MARIA’ in a heavy block type have been removed, spelling out by their absence. Parts of the lettering are held together with a thread of paper mere millimetres wide. One must be cautious when handling this item; it is precious. Designer Jacob DeGeal has produced an extraordinary item.
But CD cases were always fragile. Even a small amount of accidental torquing would snap the tiny plastic hinges at the top and bottom; the teeth in the centre holding the disc in place would only last a few times removing and replacing before breaking. The changes in the music industry over the previous several years have led distribution networks away from physical media towards streaming. A movement in favour of physical media has since emerged in reaction: CDs and especially vinyl records have experienced a resurgence in popularity. Some boutique labels even put out cassette tapes. At the time of writing, bandcamp is really the home for such boutique labels and consumer choices. Because any purchase includes digital copies of the music, issues of scale can be set aside in favour of obsolete formats and stylised, arguably impractical designs. This particular CD is part of a limited run: only 50 were produced. I received number 38.
The CD has one piece, a set of variations on a theme by Giacinto Scelsi, composed by Power in 2008–2009. The theme comes from the Three Latin Prayers (1972), for solo female voice. Listeners familiar with the Quattro pezzi and Anahit will be surprised: tempered diatonic pitches set the text of the Ave Maria prayer with intoning ritualistic quarter notes. Twenty phrases begin and end the same way, describing an inverted arch shape like the cabling on a suspension bridge. B♮, like a pylon, is followed by a descent, reaching back up. But every time the interior structure of the melody shifts ever so slightly: even as the melody is revealed, the specific nature remains veiled. A very compelling musical discourse is woven out of extremely simple materials – with no score to follow, the music is always barely past the edge of comprehension. Power has orchestrated it for singing pianist: the instrument accompanies the pianist's voice in unison. It is a texture familiar to any musician who has worked with singers: ‘plonking’. Pianist Anne Rainwater is not a trained singer, and that is clearly intentional. The high note of the melody is not too high for her, but it's close.
Immediately the variations commence: Scelsi's melody is slowed and now harmonised beneath with rich and dissonant chords. It is a texture like certain chordal music in Messiaen's work but without such a rigid adherence to the ‘mode of limited transposition’. At a certain point the melody becomes bass line. But was it both top and bottom the whole time? Has some subtle transformation been guiding the discourse? The extremely delicate weighting of each chord is paramount for this effect to come across, a real testament to Rainwater's artistry. A final chord is caught in the sostenuto pedal; the last few notes of the theme sound in hollow octaves.
Variation II opens the discourse up with a high repeated B, accelerating and slowing, flickering like a light. The melody, in the tempo of the theme, sounds in octaves below. As the music unfolds, the stratum of flickering light shifts higher and lower, and the melody grows in intervallic complexity.
A massive chord of blinding intensity begins Variation III. A second one follows, then a third, tracing out and dissonantly harmonising the first three notes of the theme. A low cluster like a distant rumble punctuates the truncated end of the phrase. Past the halfway point, a new layer enters: the theme not in complete phrases but somewhere in the middle, unharmonised, quiet and humble among the explosive chords. A final low cluster has an aftershock like a halo or a cloud, tremolando and pianississimo.
Variation IV returns the ‘plonking’ with singing directly from the theme, but this time with a halting second voice – only in the piano, repeating a G – insinuates itself into the texture like a commentary. Gradually it grows into a more and more full modal harmonisation. Choral-like, the harmonisation sounds now with halting vocals ‘a − ve’. It is absolutely gorgeous music.
The interlude interrupts variation IV and upsets the flow of variations. Leaving the ‘on the keys’ music of pitch, the felted metal and wooden joints mechanically clunk in a regular pattern, and a gong-like muted B slowly pulses out: an EKG. It comes across, at least to my ears, as a crisis. Not only a crisis of form and material but a crisis of faith. There is an agitation animating the material stasis, a music of waiting.
According to the track list, variation IV is resumed: the only obscure formal relationship in an otherwise very clear structure. The steady pulse from the interlude vanishes; the contrapuntal second voice from variation IV briefly wanders alone.
In a sense, the epilogue combines elements of the previous four variations into a single texture: a high repeated pitch, martellando chords dissonantly harmonising a truncated statement of the theme. But I'm left with a much more powerful impression: the crisis of faith prolonged and intensified. The high repeated pitch is an insistent gesture and not once is it answered. There is no resolution.
This is extraordinarily well-crafted and well-composed music - without a doubt the best music I've yet reviewed for TEMPO. Rainwater has brought a sensitivity to performance and interpretation absolutely essential to this deceptively simple music. Similarly, recording engineer Murat Çolak has brought an extraordinary transparency and beauty to the audio image.
The question of the piece is: how do you handle a crisis of faith? There is no answer, but the music presents a shockingly powerful image in the epilogue: the struggle of doubt and penitence. It is a deeply human feeling of powerlessness over the fates and fortunes of one's life, and a desperate pleading for mercy.
Once the four panels have been folded out, one can see the actual item: a CD one side of which digitally encodes 31 minutes of music composed by Giacinto Scelsi and Ian Power. On the reverse there is a picture in black and white, taken by Power himself. A human is bowing, forehead to the earth in prayer.
