Caleb Burhans: Past Lives
Cantaloupe Music

It's been six years since Caleb Burhans' well-received debut album Evensong introduced this listener to the violinist's affecting and highly personalized brand of neo-classical music. The Brooklyn-based Burhans (b. 1980) has hardly been idle, however: when not involved in preparing the album's follow-up, he's been performing with the many groups of which he's a member, among them Alarm Will Sound, Ensemble Signal, and the American Contemporary Music Ensemble.

Co-produced by him with long-time itsnotyouitsme partner Grey Mcmurray, Past Lives memorializes figures dear to Burhans who're no longer with us. In his own words, “For the past twenty years, my music has dealt almost exclusively with themes of grief. Past Lives is a collection of four of these works, reflecting on years lost to addiction and fallen friends.” Yet though the music's often plaintive, Past Lives favours hope over resignation. In honouring artists no longer alive (Douglas Lowry and Jóhann Jóhannsson, to name two), the recording brings into sharp relief the magnitude of the loss, artistic and otherwise, incurred by their passing. Respectively performed by JACK Quartet, Duo Harpverk, Irish guitarist Simon Jermyn, and Burhans himself, the pieces make for cathartic listening; yes, sorrow is central to the experience, but perseverance is implicitly promoted as a better response than inaction. Stated otherwise, wallowing accomplishes little.

Written in 2013 and recorded two years later in Brooklyn, A Moment for Jason Molina pays fond tribute to an Ohio-born singer-songwriter whose struggles with alcoholism brought about death at the age of thirty-nine. For nine engrossing minutes, Jermyn builds layers of guitars into a poignant paean to Molina, the crystalline shimmer of the picking coalescing into a lustrous, chiming mass that while marked by sadness nevertheless conveys uplift in celebrating the deceased artist's spirit.

Recorded in 2016, the fifteen-minute Contritus (2009) is one of the final pieces laid down by the original JACK Quartet lineup, which on this performance features founding violinist Ari Streisfeld, violinist Chris Otto, violist John Pickford Richards, and cellist Kevin McFarland. In the opening section, keening lines exude a stately air that calls to mind Baroque and Renaissance forms, even if the composition itself unfolds with a natural fluidity more characteristic of contemporary writing. The episodes thereafter, however, up the dramatic ante: deep bowed lines and pizzicato plucks establish a sense of unwavering forward motion and an intense ascending arc brings the music to an early climax before the work's finest moment arrives, a moving coda permeated by plaintive expressions, the effect tantamount to an emotional outpouring.

Also noticeably stately in character, Once in a Blue Moon (2009) casts a nocturnal glow on the recording when the lyrical setting features a lilting pas de deux between Duo Harpverk members Katie Buckley (harp) and Frank Aarnink (marimba). The thirteen-minute performance might have been laid down at Greenhouse Studios in Iceland in 2017, but there's certainly nothing chilly about the playing. While 2007's five-minute early music (for a saturday) is modest in length and design compared to the other three, the meditative exploration is perhaps the most personal creation of the four in that it was performed by Burhans himself using electric bass, electric violin, space echo, and tape delay.

May 2019