Charles Amirkhanian Gives the Ratchet its Due

Cover of the album being discussed, showing the instrument that inspired it (from the Other Minds Web page for the album)

This coming Friday Other Minds Records will give the ratchet its due. The album Ratchet Attach It is basically an eleven-movement suite composed by Charles Amirkhanian. According to its Other Minds Web page, it was commissioned by Errollyn Wallen, the Royal Composer of the United Kingdom, for the 2021 Spitalfields Festival in London. That text goes on to note that the result reflected the composer’s “career-long fascination with the noisiest of percussion instruments: the ratchet.”

As one might expect, percussion has its say over the course of the album; but do not wait for an elaborate cadenza from the ratchet. The primary departure from percussion comes with a player piano with piano rolls prepared by Rex Lawson. The most interesting of these is “Burn of the Flightlebee.” This resulted from taking a player piano roll of “Flight of the Bumblebee” and playing it in reverse. Another transformation arises when a piano roll for “To a Wild Rose” for a full piano keyboard is played on a pianola with only 65 available keys.

In many ways, this is an album of “in jokes” for well-informed musicians. For the most part, I could “get” and enjoy most of those jokes, sometimes with assistance from the booklet notes. Nevertheless, the playful rhetoric of this album can only go so far. The overall journey of eleven tracks is, for the most part, satisfyingly amusing. However, I suspect that the humor will not hold up over frequent listenings. On the other hand, returning to the album after a few months’ departure will probably be refreshing!