ALBUM REVIEW: Marc Mellits’ ‘Smoke’ ft. New Music Detroit

Posted on September 12, 2018 by maestrobeats

“Moderately funky” is not usually a tempo marking you see on a classical music score—unless it’s the music of Marc Mellits.

Mellits has a gift for animating his chamber music with funky grooves and driving beats. Sometimes called a miniaturist, he frequently uses small, contrasting sections to create one large, dynamic work with a rich emotional palette.

In his newest album, Smoke, all of this works together to create lively and diverse additions to the classical genre. Featuring the adventurous ensemble New Music Detroit, the album unfolds across 23 tracks, most just short movements of one to three minutes each. As a collection of diverse musical snippets, Smoke creates the effect of meandering through a city of street performers and finding yourself captivated by the wide range of musical worlds.

Encompassing eight short movements, the title piece is scored for saxophone, guitar, marimba, and percussion. Smoke explores the timbral possibilities of the ensemble as it traverses through wide-ranging genre influences: funky saxophone grooves, distorted electric guitar, circling marimba motives that create a soundscape ambience. This makes for a piece that is dramatic, complex, at times jarring, but always accessible.

The same could be said for Red, a six-movement piece for two marimbas. The intricate interlocking patterns—impressively complex for just two players—create a colorful array of harmonies and textures. While it’s no surprise that the bright, gentle timbre of the marimba lends itself well to a peaceful aura, Mellits also manages to generate suspense and mystery with dark harmonies and driving rhythms.

New Music Detroit.

Mellits’ String Quartet No. 3 is subtitled Tapas and, like Spanish appetizers, each of its eight movements offers a quick burst of distinct flavor. Though this piece harkens back to traditional classical influences more so than the rest of the album, Tapas also finds ways to subvert expectations. Starting with simple motifs, it rearranges and layers these patterns to create intriguing composite rhythms and lush harmonies. The quartet introduces different bowing and plucking techniques over time to create unusual timbres, adding to the rich texture. Like the rest of the album, Tapas is highly emotional, but difficult to interpret: as it alternates between dark and hopeful themes, distinctions begin to blur, yielding a powerful and bittersweet combination.

Prime—scored for bass clarinet, baritone saxophone, two percussionists, and piano—unfolds in one long movement that traverses through wildly different sound worlds. Percussion and baritone saxophone take the lead in the beginning with a suspenseful, funk-influenced theme, but the piece transitions on a dime into a soft, slow, and melancholy piano interlude. Mellits bounces back and forth between the disparate musical styles but eventually, the ideas begin to integrate; the sultry sax and clarinet mingle with the delicate, gloomy piano and percussion theme to create a beautifully unorthodox mix of moods and timbres.

Smoke is a fascinating experiment in construction and integration, piecing together works with short, contrasting movements and diverse musical influences. Yet each unique flavor unites to create a delectable whole: the complete and complex palette of Marc Mellits.

ALBUM REVIEW: Spektral Quartet’s “Serious Business”

Posted on February 8, 2016 by maestrobeats

by Maggie Molloy

Photo Credit: Drew Reynolds

In Medieval times musicians were essentially court jesters—entertainers who performed music, told jokes, and did tricks to entertain the nobility or to make money at fairs and markets. But somewhere along the long and winding road of the Western music tradition, music became much more serious.

Fast forward to the 21^st century, where opera houses and concert halls protect and preserve a canon of “serious” classical works. Audience members dress in suits and gowns, sit quietly in their seats, read expertly-crafted program notes, stick their noses in the air and, most importantly, never clap between movements.

Or at least, that’s how it feels sometimes. But the Spektral Quartet is here to dispel that classical concert-going stereotype and inject a little much-needed comic relief into the classical music realm.

Spektral’s new album, titled “Serious Business,” is anything but serious. The album comprises four different perspectives on humor through the lens of classical music, featuring three new works by living composers and one classic from that late, great father of the string quartet, Joseph Haydn.

But don’t let the lighthearted humor fool you—these guys are no classical music newbies. Comprised of violinists Clara Lyon and Austin Wulliman, violist Doyle Armbrust, and cellist Russell Rolen, the Spektral Quartet performs music from across the classical music spectrum. The group is committed to creating connections across the centuries and providing a discourse between the traditional classical canon and the, well, not-so-traditional contemporary classical canon.

“THIS ALBUM IS NOT FUNNY,” reads the first page of the album’s liner notes, in bold black and all caps. True, the music is not ha-ha funny per se—it’s not going to get you on the floor laughing, crying, or rolling around gut-busted and teary-eyed. But the music is, however, full of humor, tricks, subtle charm, and clever wit.

The first piece of “Serious Business,” composed by Sky Macklay, is not-so-subtly titled “Many, Many Cadences.” Suffice it to say, the piece has a lot, A LOT of cadences. Each instrument pings rapid-fire back and forth between the stratosphere and the lowest note in its pitch range, creating a twitchy, glitchy sound mass of tonal cadences clangoring up, down, sideways, and across like a pinball machine.

“Heaping nothing but cadences on top of one another is a little like an America’s Funniest Home Videos highlight reel of dads getting head-butted by waist-high toddlers,” violist Doyle Armbrust writes in the liner notes, “Which is to say, it’s all payoff.”

But that payoff doesn’t come easy—it takes a seriously talented group of string players to perform a tangled nine-minute mess of interwoven and overlapping melodic fragments, brain-frying base-jumps, and constant cadences.

Five short movements and some existential poetry comprise the next piece on the album, David Reminick’s “The Ancestral Mousetrap.” An absurdist macabre text by poet Russell Edson serves as the libretto for this musical phantasmagoria—and the string players themselves are the singers.

“The five-movement timbral kaleidoscope opens with a preposterous slide and ends with a scurry up the fingerboard,” Armbrust writes, “But for what happens in between, you are on your own.”

Yes, in between you are on your own in a thrilling and nightmarish hallucination of operatic horror, deranged pitch collections, melodic dissonance, asymmetrical meter, and the occasional four-part vocal harmony. In fact, it’s so unapologetically macabre that it borders on pulp—and therein lies the humor. But in all seriousness, the sheer skill it takes to perform a kaleidoscopic string quartet while also singing four-part harmonies is pretty incredible—and it’s on full display in this macabre musical mashup.

Spektral reels it back in with a performance of Haydn’s String Quartet Op. 33 No. 2, “The Joke.” From toying with key signatures to tongue-in-cheek codas and trap-door endings, this classic crowd favorite is filled with musical subversions to charm and amuse audiences—and Spektral doesn’t miss a beat. It’s a lighthearted homage to one of the greats, a charismatic and jovial joke reminding us classical music buffs never to take ourselves too seriously.

The album ends with a performance of Chris Fisher-Lochhead’s “Hack,” a sprawling 22-part piece composed on the transcribed vocal deliveries of standup comics. The source materials for each part vary in length from four seconds to three minutes, and the comics featured encompass a wide range of comedic styles and historical periods.

(Second Inversion was thrilled to present the video premiere of this gem a few weeks ago)

“Some are truculent, some are reflective,” Fisher-Lochhead said of the comedians. “Some use the stage as an arena for withering social critique, some for personal confession, some for ritualized transgression. Each section treats a single comedic bit by a single comedian; the source material is not always clearly foregrounded—it is often submerged, dissected, amplified, deconstructed, or otherwise transformed.”

The piece features impeccably nuanced string quartet transcriptions of 16 comedians ranging from Robin Williams to Sarah Silverman, Robert Pryor to Kumail Nanjiani, Dick Gregory to Sam Kinison. But here’s the funny thing: the piece removes the words from the formula of the joke, leaving us with just the humor of the comedic cadences.

It is sonic anarchy. “Hack” is an obstacle course of screeches, swoops, and sputters, breakneck tempos and unison outbursts, gauzy glissandi and meter changes. But for being a piece about comedy, it’s actually quite serious in scope and subject matter: it is an exploration into the music of American speech and the way that language, laughter, and music connects us all.

Because in the end, that’s what the entire album is about: finding the humor and charm in classical music, making a joke, sharing a smile, and maybe, just maybe, accidentally clapping between movements.

ALBUM REVIEW: Eighth Blackbird’s “Filament”

Posted on October 7, 2015 by maestrobeats

by Jill Kimball

Forget J. S. Bach: Philip Glass is the new granddaddy of music…or so sayeth eighth blackbird in its latest album, Filament.

This new release from the Chicago-based contemporary music supergroup cleverly connects the groundbreaking repetitive structures in Glass’s music with American folk tunes, contemporary compositions, and poppy vocals. The album’s name is meant to conjure a mental image of musical threads linking all its performances, new and old.

In this case, “old” is a relative term. The nexus of Filament is “Two Pages,” written by Philip Glass in 1968. It’s a classic illustration of Glass’s signature repetition, a mind-bending 16 minutes of subtly changing patterns. The piece famously sounds meditative and nightmarish at the same time. It’s notoriously difficult for performers–the liner notes compare it to walking a tightrope “with no net below”–but the expert musicians here meet the challenge admirably, almost making it sound easy. Performing this piece alongside the sextet are organist Nico Muhly and guitarist Bryce Dessner (of The National), and it’s no coincidence that both of them are also featured composers on Filament.

In fact, the album opens with Dessner’s multi-movement piece Murder Ballades, inspired by folk songs about real and imagined killings that were passed down through many generations. The murder ballad tradition began in Europe, but Dessner’s piece focuses on the maudlin stories that originally come from early settlers in New England and Appalachia. Dessner chose to arrange three real ballads, “Omie Wise,” “Young Emily,” and “Pretty Polly,” all of which tell stories of love affairs turned violent. Imagine if someone took the music from a Ken Burns documentary and gave it a little edge, and you’ll have an idea of what these movements sound like. The other four ballads in the piece are Dessner’s original compositions, still clearly inspired by early Americana but more deconstructed and intense. In these four movements, Philip Glass’s repetitive, meditative influence is clearly felt.

Composers featured on Filament. Clockwise from top left: Nico Muhly, Philip Glass, Bryce Dessner, and Son Lux.

Nico Muhly’s piece, Doublespeak, is so closely linked with Two Pages that it’s as if Muhly managed to burrow directly into Philip Glass’s midcentury brain. Muhly wrote this piece for the composer’s 75th birthday celebration, so it’s fitting that he chose to salute a decade when “classical music perfected obsessive repetition,” as he puts it. You’ll hear snippets of 1970s staples like In C and Violin Phase flit in and out as the piece alternates between a fast-tempo frenzy and a slow, dreamy state.

As if there weren’t already enough threads connecting these three pieces, eighth blackbird rounds out Filament with a pair of works by Son Lux. The legendary pop-classical electronic composer took sound bites from the album and mixed in Glass-inspired vocals by Shara Worden, aka My Brightest Diamond. The result is a half-ambient, half-catchy five minutes that nicely break up the album’s studied repetition, which can be a little mentally taxing.

It goes without saying that the performance quality on this disc is top-notch, no less fine than any of eighth blackbird’s past albums. You’re luxuriously free to focus solely on the compositions themselves, all of which are worth contemplating at length. In an age when most albums’ connecting filaments are somewhere between ultrathin and nonexistent, it’s a pleasure to listen to a set of pieces with such close ties.

ALBUM OF THE WEEK: Dublin Guitar Quartet Performs Philip Glass

Posted on September 15, 2014 by maestrobeats

by Rachele Hales

Riddle me this: how is it possible that a woman who doesn’t enjoy minimalist music can fall so hard for Philip Glass? You’ll find the answer in the forty nimble fingers of the Dublin Guitar Quartet. They’ve taken the music of Glass, transcribed it for guitar (a feat in and of itself – even Glass has never dared to try), and from minimalist compositions created such richness of sound that at times I forgot I was listening to only four instruments. What pours out of their guitars sounds near-orchestral. This depth is due in no small part to masterful audio engineering that offers each plucking string a crispness that allows you to really appreciate how flawlessly in unison these artists are.

The album is replete with technical perfection, but my favorite moments are the pockets of sweet, gentle, understated pieces like “String Quartet #5 – Mvt. 1” that make you feel young again. Like, really young. Like you are a sleepy child being lulled to slumber by the sweetness of your mother whisper-singing in your ear except her voice is like a quiet harp. The piece practically glows! It’s beautiful.

Even the moments of wild strumming, like in “String Quartet #2 – Company Mvt II,” have a distinct delicate and lyrical quality. It’s easy to forget you’re listening to four guitars and not one.

Each selection on this disc was transcribed with care, played tightly, and packed with emotion. It’s a true celebration of the composer and perfectly highlights the immense skill of the performers. How does a chamber group manage to make four guitars sound simultaneously orchestral and singular? Clearly there is magic in the hills of Ireland.

Want this album to be yours? Hop on over to iTunes.