Michael Gordon: Clouded Yellow (with Kronos Quartet)
Cantaloupe Music

Bang on a Can co-founder Michael Gordon wrote his first work for string quartet, 2000's Potassium, when he was well into his composing career, which, at first, might seem rather backwards: wouldn't the more natural trajectory involve tackling a well-established form before uncharted experimental territory? For Gordon, however, the prospect of writing a string quartet brought with it a certain kind of pressure due to the genre's illustrious history. That pressure was eased by the fortuitous involvement of San Francisco's Kronos Quartet (violinists David Harrington and John Sherba, violist Hank Dutt, and cellist Sunny Yang), which since its 1973 inception has brought fervent commitment to the production and performance of new string quartet works. Like many a listener, Harrington was stunned by Gordon's 1992 amplified cello-and-electronics work, Industry, which makes this current collaboration somewhat of an inevitability, and, in fact, all four pieces on Clouded Yellow were written expressly for Kronos by the composer.

Up first is the 2010 title piece, written in just nine days and its title a reference to the clouded yellow butterfly, a type known for its fluttering migrations in England. Perhaps by design, Gordon chose this largely spirited setting as the opener to counterbalance the comparatively heavier works that follow. Regardless, its distinguishing sound, specifically arcing, pitch-bending flourishes whose hypnotic effect Gordon bolsters by staggering them, shows the composer's way with a hook. Ascending, high-pitched figures exude a supplicating quality that's offset by rapidly plunging descents, and the piece chugs and churns with purposeful intensity. An equally memorable treatment distinguishes Potassium (the alkali metal's chemical symbol is K, making its title a clever nod by the composer to the quartet), in this case a raw, Doppler-like phrase produced by augmenting the amplified quartet with a fuzz box. In these opening pieces, repeating patterns identify Gordon as someone influenced by minimalism but hardly defined by it; in his case, the repetitive gestures act as foundation on which to build.

Though he opted for Clouded Yellow as the album title, it's the four-part The Sad Park that is the centerpiece. Written in 2005, the work is his response to the shattering events of Sept. 11, 2001, which left an indelible scar on him as they did so many others. On that fateful morning, the longtime TriBeCa resident, his wife (and Bang on a Can co-partner) Julia Wolfe, and their children were two blocks north of the World Trade towers when one of the planes flew overhead (it also happened to be their daughter's fourth day of Kindergarten). The Sad Park incorporates cassette recordings made by Loyan Beusoleil, their son's teacher at the time, of pre-school children's responses to the event. It's not the first time an American composer has written a work about 9/11—Steve Reich and John Adams being two well-known others—but Gordon's individuates itself by emphasizing the child's perspective. However bewildering and incomprehensible the event is to an adult mind, The Sad Park offers a small sampling of a child's response. Sensitive to the potentially exploitative effect of adopting such material, Gordon spent months listening to the material before choosing four excerpts, each one heartbreaking in so matter-of-factly referencing the horrors associated with the event (e.g., “Two evil planes broke in little pieces and fire came”).

Using the spoken material as the starting point for the music, he replicates the children's voice rhythms and pitches in a manner somewhat reminiscent of Reich's Different Trains. Subjected to manipulation, the voices stretch, stutter, and loop, becoming ghost-like laments that the music reflects in growing woozy and ever more haunted. At album's end, 2010's Exalted, which Gordon wrote after his father's passing, perpetuates the mournful theme of The Sad Park by having the Young People's Chorus of New York City sing the first line of the Jewish Kaddish, “Yisgadal v'yiskadash sh'may rabah” (“May His great name be exalted and sanctified”); that being said, the performance is delivered with a dramatic gusto that speaks more of triumph than defeat.

July 2018