Pauline Kim Harris: Wild at Heart
Sono Luminus

Wild at Heart, the second chapter in Pauline Kim Harris's Chaconne series, follows 2019's Heroine and anticipates the final installment, whose contents are already determined and will appear on a future Sono Luminus release. The New York violinist sees the latest collection as a stark contrast to the first, and, true, there are differences. Whereas Heroine presents two multi-part recastings of J. S. Bach's Chaconne by Harris and co-composer Spencer Topel, Wild at Heart features reimaginings by four composers, Annie Gosfield, Elizabeth Hoffman, John King, and Yoon-Ji Lee. More critically, while the earlier treatments incorporate ambient-drone elements and electronics, the new ones are solo acoustic violin performances. That doesn't mean, however, that Harris has opted for a traditional approach on this forty-minute release; on the contrary, she uses a variety of extended techniques to broaden dramatically the soundworld associated with the instrument. More to the point, her visceral, no-holds-barred attack is in keeping with the style of her classical avant-punk violin duo String Noise with husband Conrad Harris. Wild at Heart hardly qualifies as noise, but there definitely are raw moments as well as delicate ones.

She initiated the project in 2012 when Bach's original brought her solace at a difficult time when someone close to her was struggling. Just as she found a personal connection in the piece, she hoped that the composers she approached to create versions based upon it would find it resonating with them too and inspire them creatively. The audacity of the creations shows that they shared with Harris a desire to boldly extend the violin's sound and reset the boundaries of possibilities associated with the instrument. Tension is omnipresent in the way these reincarnations collapse the temporal gap between Bach's time and today. All four composers are thoroughly qualified for the challenge: a Korean composer based in Boston and New York, Yoon-Ji Lee is currently Assistant Professor at Berklee College of Music; King is a composer, guitarist, and violist who's collaborated with Kronos Quartet, String Noise, and others; the NYC-based Hoffman teaches at New York University, and the also New York-based Gosfield draws for inspiration from found sounds, noise, and machinery in her work.

The album engages the second Lee's Shakonn (2014) opens with high-pitched glissandos and flourishes. In the first minute alone, Harris packs an abundance of techniques into the performance and in doing so demonstrates the versatility of which she's capable. Bach's Chaconne is at the centre of the piece, but extreme transformations are applied to fragment and liberate the material from the original. While striking moments are plentiful, perhaps the most memorable is the emergence of Harris's voice midway through as an accompaniment to the violin. As Lee correctly attests, both performer and composer inscribe their beings into Bach's music in deeply personalized manner, and only at the end do we hear a literal reference to the original as if to remind us of from whence the derivation came. Consistent with its title, Hoffman's morsels (2018) assembles its soundworld from a delicate array of tiny musical gestures—described by the composer as “an almost frozen world of minutiae”—that gradually cohere into a fragile assemblage of bowed figures, harmonics, and folk-like melodic fragments.

Two longer pieces follow the openers, with the eleven minutes of Gosfield's Long Waves and Random Pulses (2012) followed by the fifteen of King's C-H-A-C-O-N-N-E (2013). Pitched by Gosfield as “an imaginary duet for violin and jammed radio sounds,” the former exists in two versions, one for violin and fixed media and the other for violin alone. Consistent with her compositional approach, among the materials that influenced the piece are a “repeated six-note figure from an Italian radio jamming device, a buzzing pitched pulse used in German interference, and a quote from J. S. Bach's Chaconne in D Minor as it could have been heard in a jammed broadcast.” Only Harris's violin is heard during the performance, however, though string textures are produced that evoke the character of those radio signals. In having to replicate those non-violin elements, Harris is called upon to demonstrate remarkable dexterity, but the piece includes many illustrations of her beautifully expressive tone too. As demanding on her abilities is King's setting, which likewise draws on her virtuosity and command. An encompassing range of techniques is showcased during the performance, with everything from multi-phonics and fiddling-styled gestures to hushed single lines involved.

January 2022