Christopher Cerrone: Beaufort Scales
Cold Blue Music

The considerable artistic strides taken by Christopher Cerrone (b. 1984) on last year's In a Grove (In a Circle Records) continue apace on his latest release, this one also a vocal work but of a different kind. Whereas the earlier one captured the composer's second foray into opera (his first, the Italo Calvino-inspired Invisible Cities, was a 2014 Pulitzer Prize finalist), Beaufort Scales (2022-3) is a riveting oratorio of thirteen sung movements interspersed with four spoken interludes. Performed by the nine-member Lorelei Ensemble—five sopranos, two altos, and a mezzo-soprano conducted by artistic director Beth Willer—the mesmerizing result reaffirms Cerrone's stature as a composer of singular gifts and a standout of his generation.

That the world premiere recording of Beaufort Scales would appear on Cold Blue is fitting, given the label's ongoing commitment to visionary work. That the words “In memoriam Ingram Marshall” appear on the release's inner sleeve is likewise fitting considering the pioneering advances the late composer made in incorporating electronics into his creative practice. Cerrone is following a similar path in the way electronics weave into his thirty-five-minute piece. Like Marshall, Cerrone's treatments aren't indulgently or randomly applied; instead, they're integral to the realization of the desired effect and the work's kaleidoscopic character.

While Stephanie Fleischmann's libretto for In a Grove drew for inspiration from a short story by Ryunosuke Akutagawa, the primary text for Beaufort Scales comes from the Beaufort Wind Force Scale devised by Francis Beaufort in 1805. Images of wind and sea on the release package reflect a scale designed to measure wind speed as it relates to sea conditions. Complementing the Beaufort texts are ones by Herman Melville (Moby Dick), F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby), Anne Carson (The Anthropology of Water), and the King James Bible that reference weather conditions at particular points in time.

Despite the fact that Beaufort devised his scales over two centuries ago, Cerrone's oratorio, recorded at a Boston studio in November 2023, is timely given the weather extremes the planet's currently experiencing; with tsunamis, earthquakes, hurricanes, wildfires, and tornados everyday occurrences, topics like climate change and global warming are never now far from many peoples' minds. The issue's contemporary relevance is referenced by the composer, with Cerrone stating that the increasingly frenzied vocal expression in the work “mirrors our technology-saturated world, one in which uncanny and tumultuous weather has a growing presence.”

If the integration of electronics into a classical context suggests a parallel to Marshall, the vocal design, even if superficially, calls Steve Reich's Tehillim to mind. Yet Cerrone's distances itself from that seminal work in not grounding itself in the kinds of strictly delineated rhythm patterns for which Reich had become known. Cerrone adopts a freer approach to the vocal writing, such that voices flurry like the most unpredictable of winds. Which is not to suggest that a clear compositional structure isn't in place, as he clearly designed the piece so that it would grow increasingly turbulent from one vocal section to the next. That's shown in Beaufort texts that advance from the initial “Sea like a mirror / Smoke rises vertically / Calm” description to the culminating “Widespread destruction” and “Sea white with driving spray; visibility seriously affected.”

Every composer needs performers capable of rendering a particular vision into being, and Cerrone could have asked for no better vocal outfit than Lorelei Ensemble for the presentation of this work. Founded in Boston in 2007, the group's eight ultra-flexible female vocalists are capable of singing with naturalistic purity and surgical precision, but they're just as capable of generating wild and unusual effects when the material demands it. In the work's tone-establishing prelude, the singers whisper, hiss, declaim, and layer their luminous, resonant voices into incandescent ripples; in step one, electronics multiply the voice elements, scattering the fragments and creating gyroscopic flurries. By the time step eight is reached, the voices are furiously clustering and criss-crossing.

The calmly enunciated interludes act as grounding episodes in a presentation that grows progressively more chaotic. Even there, however, intimations of disruption are audible, as the wind-smeared excerpts from Moby Dick illustrate. And while much of the interlude texts are spoken, some parts are sung in a way that reinforces the content. When the words “The mechanisms that keep us from drowning are so fragile: and why us?” occur during the Carson interlude, for instance, the voices spiral vertiginously downwards.

June 2024