John Aylward: Celestial Forms and Stories
New Focus Recordings
John Aylward (b. 1980) garnered deserved attention for his provocative 2020 release Angelus and should do the same with his latest, Celestial Forms and Stories. Drawing for inspiration from Ovid's Metamorphoses, the Northampton, Massachusetts-based composer has fashioned a five-piece chamber music suite that ten members of the Viennese ensemble Klangforum Wien, including conductor Finnegan Downie Dear, have brought to a state of compelling realization. The fifty-four-minute recording presents five pieces written between 214 and 2019, all of them enrapturing musical creations based on the myths immortalized by Ovid in his text. Intuition and formal strategies work hand-in-hand in Aylward's compositional process, the result daring explorations of counterpoint and harmonic texture.
He couldn't have hoped for better musical collaborators to bring his material into physical form. Comprising twenty-four musicians from ten different countries, Klangforum Wien has premiered approximately 500 new pieces during its tenure and boasts a discography of more than seventy CDs and a live performance history of about 2000 appearances. For Celestial Forms and Stories, the ensemble's represented by four woodwind players, three strings, a pianist, percussionist, and, as mentioned, conductor. The musicians, arranged in different configurations on the album (Daedalus and Mercury, for example, are performed by a quartet of flute, clarinet, violin, and cello), generate a wealth of sonorities and timbres that makes the scores all the more arresting.
While three pieces, Daedalus, Mercury, and Narcissus, offer an interpretative head start in being named after familiar figures, the two others, Ephemera and Ananke, are more abstractly titled. Some connections might be made between those figures and the musical material—in liner notes, Alex Rehding proposes that the airy opening of Mercury might be seen as a musical allusion to the winged messenger, as might the glassy passages in Narcissus to its famously vain character—but Aylward's less preoccupied with programmatic representation than exploring the general concept of metamorphosis through musical form.
Counterpoint and timbre are key to these pieces. At the start of Daedalus, for example, we witness some musical elements skittering agitatedly as others establish calm using sustained pitches. Sounds intertwine in a way that suggests four tributaries that while distinct also overlap and align and even at times merge. It is, to be sure, music that never ceases mutating as it advances through contrasting episodes of mood and dynamics. Instability likewise marks Mercury in its restless opening moments when string harmonics and fluttering gestures evoke the fleet-footed movements of the titular figure; even later staccato accents could be taken as suggestive of a body's movements.
At the work's centre, Ephemera accentuates timbral contrast by pairing rapid clarinet flurries and cello tremolos that after an intense dialogue sees the two oscillating between passages that are less frenetic and others that equal the intro for animation. Septet arrangements are used for Narcissus and Ananke, with percussion in the former and piano in the latter partnered with flute, oboe, clarinet, violin, viola, and cello. Vibraphone and marimba patterns appear alongside flickering woodwinds and creaking strings during Narcissus, and timbre is naturally at its most dynamic in these settings when woodwinds and strings organize into trios and the seventh instrument positions itself between them. Like the other four parts, Ananke, the longest at fifteen minutes, is a study in contrast, with in this case piano the grounding presence around which the others constellate. Short, staccato accents pave the way for individual strands that then give way to unison statements and ever-changing combinations. The music swirls dizzyingly at one moment before relaxing in the next, with an eruptive piano solo episode at the mid-point differentiating Ananke from the other parts.
While Hassan Anderson, another contributor to the album booklet, recalls a friend describing Aylward's music as “like Elliot Carter dreaming of Debussy,” I hear it more as a contemporary exemplar of the post-harmonic zone explored by Berg a century ago (there are moments, for instance, in Narcissus that could pass for ones in a Berg chamber work). Like his, Aylward's music transcends conventional notions of harmony and dissonance, inhabiting instead an untethered realm where intuition plays as central a role as any adherence to a formal compositional plan. While a sense of liberation from rules emerges in the five parts, there's nothing random about the writing; on the contrary, everything feels meticulously worked out and considered, though not so much that the music feels constrained. It is also, it must be said, sensual, specifically in the way Aylward exploits instrument timbres. In that regard, the reference to Debussy is warranted.April 2022