Michael Byron: Fabric for String Noise
Cold Blue

Michael Jon Fink: Celesta
Cold Blue

In press notes accompanying these Cold Blue releases, the argument's made that though the recordings are dramatically different in certain respects, they're alike in at least two ways: both creations develop organically from “a blending of process and intuition” and both defy or even transcend too-restrictive designations such as minimalist or maximalist. Yet while the points are good ones, there's no denying that in terms of timbre and dynamics, the recordings are markedly dissimilar. The bright, chiming sonorities of Michael Jon Fink's Celesta, which features previously unrecorded pieces performed by the composer on a five-octave Schiedmayer celesta, inhabits another sonic universe altogether from Michael Byron's Fabric for String Noise, whose title work is an intense, almost violent “sound object” (the composer's words) played in the higher registers of the violin by the New York duo String Noise.

Fink's hardly the first composer to have featured the celesta's ethereal sound. It's heard in Mahler's Symphony No. 6, Shostakovich's Symphony No. 5, and Holst's The Planets, for starters, but two of the better known cases show how amenable it is to contrasting moods: while it adds enchantment to “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy” in Tchaikovsky's The Nutcracker, it intensifies the macabre tone of Bartok's Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta. Few have embraced the instrument as passionately as Fink, however, with his Celesta Solo included on the first Cold Blue anthology in the mid-‘80s and his solo work For Celesta on the 2001 Cold Blue release I Hear It in the Rain. Celesta, however, is the first time an entire release by the LA-based composer and CalArts teacher has been devoted to solo performances using the instrument. The dozen lustrous settings, many in the one- to two-minute range and the longest six, form a delicate, shimmering suite of sorts. Composed over the past year, Fink's quietly lyrical material exudes a gentle, even magical quality, especially when the sustain emanating from the keys creates the impression of a glow and when the celesta's twinkle at times resembles a toy piano. Many a piece is pensive and delivered at a slow tempo, which tends to deepen the music's dreamlike allure. Track titles such as “From the Singing River,” “Ruins,” and “Softly Yellowed Moon” enhance the material's evocative potential, even if that dimension wouldn't suffer terribly in the absence of titles. Without other instruments accompanying the celesta, the music possesses a simplicity that doesn't lessen its appeal; on the contrary, the austere presentation allows Fink's artistry to be all the more perceptible. So charming is the result, one wonders why recordings featuring the instrument in a solo capacity are so rare.

Fabric for String Noise is a considerably more intense release by comparison, even if the aggressiveness of the two-movement title work is alleviated by the release's other setting, Dragon Rite, the first recording of an 1973 Byron piece whose four parts were realized by LA-based double bassist James Bergman using multi-tracking. The LA-born and NYC-based Byron composed Fabric for String Noise for String Noise violinists Conrad Harris and Pauline Kim-Harris, and the two respond in kind by giving the twenty-one-minute piece a virtuosic reading others would be hard to match. Though only two instruments are involved, the unrelenting swirl of keening, folk-tinged lines the duo generates suggests a multitude of voices, especially when the composition's marked by polyrhythmic complexity and intricate counterpoint. Paradoxically, the material churns with no small amount of animation yet ultimately feels like it's less advancing than spinning wildly in place, the image of a hive buzzing with activity or sword fighters engaged in a vicious duel two of many possible visual correlates. Byron's own observation that staying within the violin's higher registers has the effect of “sharpening the music's edge and crystallizing the perceptual object” is apt; there's certainly no lack of tension. The transition from the opening piece to the second feels like a plummet from on high, so extreme are the contrasts in pitches and velocity. Occasionally employing quarter-tones, Dragon Rite moves like a whale, its bulk so great it tends to make its slow movement seem even slower. Bergman's bowed double basses groan and lurch for eight, deep-throated minutes with the slightly higher-pitched layer of the four hinting at a melodic dimension.

March 2019