A Frustrating Encounter with Florian Weber

The good news about December is that things begin to quiet down, giving me a bit more liberty to take on recordings I might previously have had to dismiss for lack of time. However, when I venture into those “unknown regions” (as Walt Whitman described them), I have to accept that the trip may not always be worth the while. Such is the case when I had the opportunity to list to an ECM album, which had been released this past September at a time when I had more than enough on my plate. Today, I finally had the time to listen to that album without worrying about other commitments; but I am not sure it was worth the wait.

The title of the album is Imaginary Cycle: Music for piano, brass ensemble and flute, composed by Florian Weber. This is one of those releases that includes a booklet. It provides a generously informative essay by Friedrich Kunzmann. Sadly, I feel that I derived more from reading the essay than from listening to the music.

This may be due, at least in part, to my own educational experiences. I happened to be an undergraduate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology at a time when the Music Department began to take on new faculty members willing to teach courses in harmony and theory at a time when past faculty members never ventured very far beyond “music appreciation.” Naturally, I devoured as many of those new courses as I could cram into my schedule; and my memories are still fond ones. What has remained stuck in my mind since that time, however, was one criticism that made me aware of the real challenge behind composing music that others might want to experience. The teacher described the “cardinal sin” of composition as “noodling;” and all of his pupils (myself) included labored over avoiding being accused of that sin!

Of course the teacher never reduced “noodling” to specific necessary and/or sufficient conditions. Basically, what we learned was, “You know it when you hear it.” Leaping now into the present, I realized that, in listening to Imaginary Cycle, I found myself encountering noodling again. This was more than a little disappointing, particularly since the instrumentation included one of the most seldom-performed instruments in the orchestral repertoire, the serpent. This is played by Michel Godard, who alternates with tuba.

Composer Florian Weber at the piano (photograph by Stefan Groß, courtesy of Crossover Media)

Composer Weber leads the performance from the piano, and the instrumentation is almost entirely brass. The tuba is joined by four euphoniums and four trombones, the last of which is a bass instrument. The one non-brass instrument is a flute. To borrow a joke from Peter Schickele, this is one of those cases in which looking and the instruments is probably more interesting than listening to them! Sadly, even with the opportunity to explore unconventional sonorities, Weber never gets behind noodling his way from one episode to the next. Perhaps Imaginary Cycle should have been left to the composer’s imagination.