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Adjacence is the recent release from New Focus Recordings of solo and chamber compositions featuring guitar from a variety of contemporary classical composers. The 128-minute double album is available in both CD and digital format, and it includes a booklet with liner notes by Daniel Lippel, a guitarist on all the pieces showcased in the album. In addition to Lippel, the album features an extensive group of performers, specifically guitarist Oren Fader, guitarist John Chang, guitarist William Anderson, soprano Nina Berman, soprano Elizabeth Weigle, bassist Randall Zigler, clarinetist Amy Advocat, flautist Roberta Michel, dulcimerist Nathan Davis, violist Wendy Richman, violist Jessica Meyer, percussionist Jeffrey Irving, percussionist Haruka Fujii, percussionist Clara Warnaar, pianist Eric Huebner, pianist Karl Larson, pianist Cory Smythe, pianist Renate Rohlfing, saxophonist Timothy Ruedeman, violinist Nurit Pacht and bassoonist Rebekah Heller.
This double album highlights works by composers from across the landscape of 'contemporary artists', to use Lippel's terminology, though it appears to focus specifically on the established academy-supported subgenre of contemporary classical music in the United States that often identifies itself as 'New Music', based on the composers and sonic profiles included. (Lippel himself does not use this identification here.) This idiom is, one might say, characterized by a kind of maximalism in miniature. There has evolved within academy-adjacent circles a compositional vernacular which intentionally and regularly brings to the fore the full range of modern and contemporary sonic innovations in Western art music, compressed in scale for the purposes of cohesive presentation and study in an intimate studio setting by would-be contemporary composers. It is this New Music vernacular which is audibly present throughout this album. Within this audible context, Lippel articulates the goal of this guitar project as 'a chronicle of an attempt to make music not in opposition to any one credo or in uncritical embrace of another, but on an adjacent path', the implication being that the art form in question otherwise trends toward ideological motivations which remain unnamed in the booklet essay. In any case, such ideological associations are what this project seemingly aims to transcend by reframing these pieces of music through a novel perspective of pure sonic focus. To this end, Lippel has assembled an astonishing diversity of creative voices contributing to the guitar repertoire in the New Music context.
The album opens with Daniel Lippel's Utopian Prelude for electric and microtonal classical guitar, a freely atonal piece juxtaposing polyphonic and homophonic textures.
Listen — Daniel Lippel: Utopian Prelude
(fcr423 CD1 track 1, 0:00-0:30) ℗ 2024 New Focus Recordings :
This is followed by Cantione Sine Textu (meaning 'song without text') for soprano, clarinet, bass clarinet, flute, piccolo, alto flute, bass and guitar, composed by Mario Davidovsky on the text of the piece's title itself. Another freely atonal work, the piece continuously alternates between dense and sparse ensemble textures.
Listen — Mario Davidovsky: Cantione Sine Textu
(fcr423 CD1 track 2, 3:33-4:03) ℗ 2024 New Focus Recordings :
Next is Ghost Flowers for violin, dulcimer and guitar, composed by Ken Ueno. This composition showcases a fast landscape of scraping glissando gestures punctuated by accented plucked single notes. Gradually the plucked notes themselves emerge as the dominant landscape material before further developing into masses of melodic imitation. The following piece is Peter Gilbert's Neñia (Canción Fúnebre) for guitar and soprano, a lyrical and comparatively diatonic setting of a poem by Carlos Guido y Spano which recounts the War of the Triple Alliance in South America. This is followed by Nico Muhly's Wedge for percussion and guitar, a quasi-minimalistic pandiatonic piece for guitar and percussion in which a looped motif gradually transforms its melodic and metrical content in various registers.
Next is Moments for piccolo and guitar, a piece in five movements composed by Tonia Ko.
Movement one, 'Momentum', is fast-moving and freely atonal, while the next movement, 'Légèreté (on two cadences by Couperin)', is slow, quiet and hesitant. Movement three, 'Interlude', is slower and quieter, while movement four, 'Crossing Paths', proceeds with a medium tempo and an imitative texture. The fifth and final movement, 'Memento', has a slightly louder dynamic at medium tempo with the piccolo leading the guitar.
The first disk closes with Serenades II to IV (No 23) for electric guitars and electric bass, composed by Peter Adriaansz. 'Serenade II', the first of these three, is a medium-tempo minimalist movement made up of alternating blocks of sound. Here the frequency of transitions between the blocks of sound itself becomes a centrally expressive composition parameter. 'Serenade III' is a slower movement with a similar conceptual structure to the previous one using dense pandiatonic harmonies. The last of the three movements, 'Serenade IV', has a medium tempo and a two-against-three polyrhythm.
Disk two opens with Ode to Gust Burns for bassoon, percussion, piano and electric guitar, composed by Tyshawn Sorey. Here, masses of sound glacially unfold with varying internal organization of textural, timbral and dynamic material. This is followed by The Alphabet Turn'd Posture Master, or The Comical Hotch Potch for percussion, piano, tenor saxophone and electric guitar, composed by Carl Schimmel. Here we hear rapid alternation among numerous ensemble textures, such as monophony, polyphony and homophony.
Next is Five Prayers of Hope for violin, viola, piano and guitar, a piece in five movements composed by Sidney Marquez Boquiren. The first movement, 'Beacon', is characterized by an undulating landscape of tremolo and glissando. Movement two, 'Bridges', showcases a lyrical layering of notes emphasizing diatonic subsets within freely atonal pitch collections. The third movement, 'Silence Breakers', is fast-paced, showing imitative polyphonic interplay between instruments. Movement four, 'Sanctuary', is a comparatively long and slow-pulsing movement with an aria-like melodic line.
Listen — Daniel Lippel: Sanctuary (Five Prayers of Hope)
(fcr423 CD2 track 6, 1:53-2:23) ℗ 2024 New Focus Recordings :
The piece ends with the fifth movement, 'Home', in which a single vibrant sound mass emerges and then subsides.
Ajiaco follows, a piece for piano and electric guitar composed by Tania León. Here, we hear an undulating sound mass with an imitative polyphonic internal structure. Next is Échange for piano, percussion and guitar, composed by Bernadette Speach. This is a medium-slow piece in which various textural and rhythmic organizational methods morph into one another, including free rhythms, polyrhythms and pointillism. This is followed by Electric Quartet for four electric guitars, composed by Charles Wuorinen, a medium-tempo piece with an imitative and freely evolving textural structure. The album closes with Dystopian Reprise for solo electric guitar, an improvisation by Daniel Lippel on one of the previously heard Adriaansz Serenades. Here we hear Lippel's improvisation unfolding over multiple layers of sustained chords.
In an era when much music created by - and for - academy-adjacent circles is done so in service to ideological debates through aesthetic avatars, a release like this stands out for its openness of pure sonic expression. It is, in effect, a collection whose message celebrates the toolbox of the musical rhetorician without the teleological constraints of rhetoricism itself. While the individual pieces featured on this album have diverse origins with original circumstances necessitating different purposes, Lippel's curation and presentation of the collection has the effect of transcending these circumstances. In this way, the album highlights their shared flexible and virtuosic vernacular of New Music using the guitar as a focal point. For this reason I consider this release a valuable and necessary addition to the recorded discography of compilation albums in the medium.
Copyright © 22 January 2025
John Dante Prevedini,
Connecticut, USA