William Susman’s Programmatic Anthology

from the Bandcamp Web page for the recording being discussed

This past Wednesday Belarca Records released A Quiet Madness, an anthology of compositions by William Susman. Readers will see from the hyperlink that the best site for purchasing this album in both physical and digital forms is provided by Bandcamp. The Web page itself is particularly valuable, since it includes all of the text content of the booklet that accompanies the physical release.

Susman was born in 1960, and a major source of his education came from Herbert Brun at the University of Illinois. The advance material for this album cite’s Susman as “working in a post-modern, post-minimalist language.” I have been very skeptical about any useful semantic interpretation of “post-modern;” but it is clear from this album that Susman found his own way to work with the sorts of repetitive structures that served as a bedrock during the emergence of the minimalist movement.

One may approach A Quiet Madness as a suite compiled from individual movements involving different instrumental resources, which he composed between 2006 and 2013. The “spinal cord” is defined by the first, fifth, and seventh compositions in a series of solo piano pieces composed in 2010 under the title Quiet Rhythms. Susman collected 44 of these pieces in two Books during 2010. These were followed by a third book of 22 pieces in 2012 and a fourth book (also of 22 pieces) in 2013.

On A Quiet Madness the three selected pieces are played by Francesco Di Fiore, whose approaches to composition seem to parallel Susman’s. The album begins with the only piece composed in 2013, “Aria,” performed by violinist Karen Bentley Pollick, accompanied by Susman at the piano. The pieces interleaved among the three Quiet Rhythms selections are “Seven Scenes for Four Flutes,” performed by flutist Patricia Zuber, and “Zydeco Madness,” played by accordionist Stas Venglevski.

While there is considerable diversity among all the scores being performed, there tends to be an overall impression of rhetorical sameness. For example, “Zydeco Madness” was supposedly composed as a response to the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina. However, there is not much to either denote or connote that tragedy, let alone the richly diverse culture of music making one encounters in New Orleans. NCIS: New Orleans may make for pretty routine television viewing, but it certainly does not short-change that aforementioned culture of music making.

Perhaps my listening experience amounted to confronting a diversity of abstractions, none of which offer many (if any) hints of what is being abstracted, reminding me of the joke about feeling hungry within an hour after having consumed a full meal.