ACL 2024 - Top Ten Modern Composition

A Closer Listen

When a composer dies, a world falls silent; two of the composers honored below are no longer with us, but their music lives on.  One album stretches back even further to highlight a 9th century princess; another recalls the woman who inspired 1000 peace cranes. One is the score to a dance performance; another an ode to reading, and still another debuted as the score to a sound walk.  Disciplines intertwine and mingle as the composers sew them together like a quilt.  There’s a heft to these works, apparent not only in subject, but in sound.  While listening to these albums, one feels edified and educated as well as entertained.

We hope that you’ll enjoy our selection of the year’s top ten releases in Modern Composition!

Ellen Reid ~  Big Majestic (New Amsterdam) Big Majestic started life as the ambitious Ellen Reid SOUNDWALK, a GPS-enabled piece that imagined public parks as interactive soundscapes. Installed in London, New York, Los Angeles and Tokyo, this work came into its own during the social-distancing era of the pandemic. We haven’t experienced the SOUNDWALK as intended, but it’s pretty easy to download this album, stick on your headphones and stroll around your nearest park for an hour or so. The surroundings become more cinematic; the flowers glow, the clouds disappear, and the birds sing more sweetly (we’re not deafening ourselves here). It is a very effective way of re-imagining the world and reconnecting with what is important in life. (Jeremy Bye)

Original Review

InnerLicht ~ Ingegärd Maxim Kolomiiets released four albums this year, Dragon Songs, Skylines, Black Crystals and Ingegärd. We could’ve picked any one of them for the best modern composition category, as they all are singular and distinctive, but we’ve opted for the latest Ingegärd for its broader scope and reach. While all four albums, released with little fanfare and no liner notes, are highly personal, dealing with heartache and intimate experiences, his latest, takes the story of Ingegerd Olofsdotter, also known as Irene or Anna (1001 – 10 February 1050), as the narrative focus. Olofsdotter was a Swedish princess and the grand princess of Kiev from 1019 to 1050 as well as the wife of Yaroslav the Wise. Her hometown of Sigtuna is located on the shores of Lake Mälaren, which flows into the Baltic Sea through a strait.

As InnerLicht characterised Ingegärd to me,“The salty air of Sweden and native customs make the young princess a romantic yet proud, brave, hardened girl who will become a great princess and rule a huge country in the future.” This might suggest an epic take to her story, but Kolomiiets opts for a more private and spiritual study. The album opens to the sound of waves gently lapping the shore of what could be both the Baltic Sea or the Dnipro river before turning liturgical by introducing us to the dark values of the cathedral of St Sophia in Kyiv founded by Yaroslav the Wise and named after the 6th-century Hagia Sophia (Holy Wisdom) cathedral in Constantinople. Things get off kilter as the narrative progresses, with unrepentant drones giving way to modular music by the fourth track “Lights on Sigtuna”. The strident Peace is restored with the closing track, “…and my lonely boat quietly disappears into the vastness of eternity,” when we return to the shores of the sea and beatitude is attained.

As Kolomiets explains, “I set out to create a hermetic spatial and acoustic world in which any characters’ actions turn into a thousand-year history, leave their reflection in eternity, and look majestically into it.So this album is an imaginary sound story of the life of the ancient princess Ingegärd. The story of her experiences, emotions, and aspirations. The story of her meeting with infinity.”

By looking at the history of Ukraine, InnerLicht taps into issues of cultural identity and formation that are so crucial for the nation at present times. (Gianmarco Del Re)

Ukrainian Field Notes XXXVI

Klangriket & Sjors Mans ~ Origami Birds (piano & coffee) We were big fans of Klangriket & Sjors Mans’ The Amsterdam Sessions, one of the first releases on piano & coffee Records. Now the duo have returned to the label with Origami Birds, an album that is, to our minds, a considerable leap forward. Inspiration comes from the brief life of Sadako Sasaki and the legend of the thousand origami birds, with a poem recited at intervals throughout the record. Not content to stick to one genre, Origami Birds flies gracefully between electronica and classical, always heartfelt and evocative. (Jeremy Bye)

Original Review

Max Richter ~ In a Landscape (Decca) Max Richter released In a Landscape as something of a continuation of his record The Blue Notebooks, released 20 years prior. The Blue Notebooks was written in protest of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and In a Landscape also finds us in the midst of global conflict and violence. In typical Max Richter style, many of the tracks are sweeping and cinematic, melancholy but hopeful, featuring strings and piano. But In a Landscape also features a set of “Life Studies” in the form of brief field recordings distributed throughout. Through a literary motif, the album invites one to reflect, read, and ultimately write their part in the greater narrative of life. (Maya Merberg)

Original Review

Otto A. Totland ~ Exin (LEITER) I wasn’t surprised to learn that Totland’s soothing compositions for solo piano have become popular on streaming services, with an intimacy and plaintive quality that is unsurprising in a self-taught pianist. Totland takes a variety of approaches across the 16 compositions which comprise Exin.  Sometimes sounding very much like half of  Deaf Center, other songs are quite different, even surprisingly spritely as on “Tapper” and “Ono.” Once again, as on his previous trilogy of solo piano albums, the sound of Totland’s miniatures for piano have been captured in Nils Frahm’s studio in Berlin, whose subtlety and warmth give these recordings a special character. (Joseph Sannicandro)

Original Review

Patrick Shiroishi ~ Glass House (Otherly Love) A tender quietness, a fierce propulsive character, and an eclectic approach willing to take risks – thus flow the compositions in Glass House, an album of contrasts and subverted expectations. Conceived for a theater piece, the music develops a narrative that begins with introspective ponderousness, followed by hectic traversal of an expressive connection towards the world, a moment of pulling back into inner turmoil, and a final expansion towards the release of tension. Though different, even to the level of instrumentation, each track contributes to an overall aesthetic of connections through change, mirroring the bodies of theater dancers as they turn into another even as they remain the same. Every variation is significant, every twist an element in a story that evolves, second by second, through movements. (David Murrieta Flores)

Original Review

Ryuichi Sakamoto ~ Opus (Milan) It’s impossible not to approach this album with sadness, given it records the artist’s last concert. The very first track acknowledges this feeling, and then begins to lead us elsewhere, towards a sweet melancholy comprised by a sort of despair born not from desperation, but from love. Love of music, love of art, and its truly grounding qualities, which have allowed so many of us to stay and see whatever life has in store for us. The long arc of Opus will not be realized this year, but within decades, whenever we happen to look back and observe, clearly, that its vitality has finally withered. And yet, I am quite certain that we will stand upon that precipice and feel the warmth of fulfillment, the kind that only music, and the lives dedicated to it, can give. (David Murrieta Flores)

Original Review

Sarah Neufeld, Richard Reed Parry, Rebecca Foon ~ First Sounds (Envision) In 1999, Rebecca Foon, Sarah Neufeld and Richard Reed Parry had a jam session (if such a term is fitting for orchestral players), but they didn’t record the results. Around two decades later, they teamed up again – to see if the magic could, this time, be captured on tape. They’d been busy on other projects in the meanwhile (Esmerine, Arcade Fire, solo projects – you get the idea), so who could predict the results? Thankfully, the sort-of-accurately titled First Sounds is a success. The memories of that first session seep through. A life of working in the same field makes the playing rich and empathetic. This is simultaneously old and new music, that circles and spirals around the audience. We’d like to book the studio space now for a second instalment. (Jeremy Bye)

Original Review

toechter ~ Epic Wonder (Morr Music) toechter is a classically-trained string trio, though one wouldn’t necessarily know it from listening to Epic Wonder. Every sound on the record is acoustic in origin, but many of the tracks are heavily manipulated such that they could be mistaken for digital. Swinging from sweeping and orchestral to glitchy and rhythmic, Epic Wonder keeps listeners on their toes. It explores the connection between the organic and the synthetic, while simultaneously proposing a dissolution of the dichotomy altogether– after all, “Every sound you hear in our universe comes from us.” (Maya Merberg)

Original Review

Wild Up ~ Julius Eastman Vol. 4: The Holy Presence (New Amsterdam)

The fourth and final volume in Wild Up’s series performing the music of the late Julius Eastman. At the time of his death in 1990, he was little known and his work rarely performed, despite being a member of Meredith Monk’s ensemble and works like Femenine (1975) predating the first performance of Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians (1976). Partly due to the tireless efforts of Mary Jane Leach, who assembled his scores, and later Jace Clayton, whose The Julius Eastman Memory Depot (2013) introduced his music to new audiences, we’re now in something of a full bloom Julius Eastman renaissance. I’m particularly partial to the versions of his compositions recorded in the 1970s, that included Eastman as conductor / vocalist and which we’ve heard re-mastered by the likes of Jim O’Rourke and Giuseppe Ielasi. So while I was happy to see recordings by this LA new music ensemble gain traction and critical acclaim in recent years, I’ve been mostly content to keep putting on those original recordings. I don’t have much of an objective argument for this; I find the versions I know best more affective. But The Holy Presence has less baggage, and Wild Up have more opportunities to leave their own mark on the material. Each of these four compositions foreground solo performers rather than full ensemble, to varying degrees, an interesting choice for a new music ensemble that has previously emphasized their own bandness. The opening, “Our Father,” features Davóne Tines’s operatic bass-baritone in duet with himself, backed with a rich ensemble of strings, while the short “Solo Piano” provides a brief respite before what is surely the main attractions. The “Prelude” and “The Holy Presence of Joan D’arc” are both dedicated to Joan of Arc, a symbolically important figure for the composer. Tines again shines in the “Prelude,” a solo voice for work previously sung by Eastman, given new life here, its dramatic crescendo giving way to a dense 20 minute arrangement for cellist Seth Parker Woods, working with ten tracks, a more focused and condensed version than found on earlier releases. All these compositions feature Eastman’s signature rhythm, repetition, and wit, but Wild Up shine particularly bright exploring the more spiritually reflective side of the composer. (Joseph Sannicandro)

Original Review