Having completed my journey through the seven volumes of CD volumes accounting for the complete piano works of French composer Jean Catoire, I have discovered that pianist Nicolas Horvath pursued this project under a label that he initiated entitled Nicolas Horvath Discoveries. Releases under this label are currently being distributed digitally by Collection 1001 Notes; and beginning next month physical albums will be released under the ACEL label. Meanwhile, I have undertaken a discovery of my own, which is that Bandcamp provides a far more amenable site for Horvath’s releases than I have encountered on Amazon.com.
So it is that this morning I found the Bandcamp Web page for Quiet Rhythms Book I, solo piano music composed by William Susman and performed by Horvath. While I knew absolutely nothing about Catoire when I began to write about Horvath’s recordings of his piano music, Susman’s name was already familiar to me. Indeed, in January of 2021 I wrote about A Quiet Madness, an anthology (available through Bandcamp) of Susman’s music, which included three tracks of solo piano music.
Those tracks were the first, fifth, and seventh compositions in the first of four volumes entitled Quiet Rhythms. Each of those compositions followed a two-section plan. A section entitled “Action” would be preceded by a “Prologue” section. This structural plan was described by Rebecca Lentjes for the booklet that accompanied the Quiet Madness album. Each volume consisted of eleven of these couplings, meaning that the total number of pairings was 44.
That Bandcamp Web page was created this past March. The site offered the usual Digital Album option, allowing both streaming and download; and the download included a PDF file of the accompanying booklet. That booklet offered an informative essay by David Sanson and three paragraphs of “remarks” by Susman himself. However, there was also a second option that added an autographed, 89-page, spiral bound edition of the sheet music added to the download package. Presumably, the composer felt that seeing the music itself would enhance the listening experience, if not encourage some of the listeners to try playing the music for themselves.
Personally, I was delighted that Bandcamp included this option (and find it hard to imagine Amazon going down a similar path)! I still treasure my copy of Waltzes by 25 Contemporary Composers, which C.F. Peters Corporation released in 1978. I had recently heard Philip Glass’ “Modern Love Waltz” performed in Carnegie Hall for a piano competition, and I was delighted to discover that I could play this music for myself. (I then went on to explore the other waltzes in the collection!)
Mind you, there remains the question of how one reacts to eleven of these prologue-action couplings unfold “back-to-back” on a single recording. Sanson addresses this issue as follows:
At around the age of 23, Susman encountered the music of Terry Riley, Steve Reich and Philip Glass, and was influenced by their processes involving the repetition and transformation of tonal harmonic material, as well as their reliance on a regular rhythmic pulse. In the case of Susman’s Quiet Rhythms, the pulse is not absent, but its irregularity, along with its metric instability, is at the heart of the music. Susman’s music is also extremely condensed. His cellular evolutions occur in movements of less than five minutes, in contrast to the expansive unfolding of the early minimalists.
It is that sense of “metric instability” that established each “Action” movement with its own individuality. The fact that such individuality can be identified in a movement that may not be much longer than two minutes testifies to the breadth of Susman’s capacity for invention. This makes for a significant departure from the more familiar strategies deployed by the “Holy Trinity” of Riley, Reich, and Glass. Given the opportunity to explore the phenomenology of listening to the eleven prologue-action couplings in Susman’s first book, one is likely to wonder what lies in wait in the remaining three books.
No comments:
Post a Comment