John Liberatore & Zohn Collective: Catch Somewhere
New Focus Recordings

On this sixty-five-minute collection, composer John Liberatore (b. 1984) is well-served by the high-calibre musicianship of the Tim Weiss-led Zohn Collective. The care with which the nine-member contemporary music ensemble attends to the nuances of the four works attests to the simpatico tie between creator and performer. Catch Somewhere is notable also for the variety of its programme, with two pieces for large ensemble (one featuring vocals) appearing alongside a trio for guitar, percussion and prepared piano and an arresting solo performance by Grammy Award-winning flutist and Zohn Collective co-founder Molly Barth. Differences naturally abound between the works, yet connecting them is their grounding in poetry. Appreciation for the recording is enhanced by the background Liberatore provides in the booklet and his identification of the poetic material relating to the pieces.

Liberatore, since 2015 a faculty member of the University of Notre Dame's Department of Music, is a composer but also a pianist and glass harmonica player. The music he writes has been informed by a number of experiences, a stint studying in Tokyo with Jo Kondo and collaborations with Roomful of Teeth and soprano Jamie Jordan, among others. It doesn't slot itself into any particular school; instead, each piece carves out its own distinctive sound space in the way it addresses a particular subject matter and organizes its elements in concert with it. His music is accessible yet technically sophisticated, complex whilst seeming deceptively simple, and both intellectually sound and emotionally expressive.

The album's engrossing opener, A Very Star-Like Start, is indicative of his style. Scored for eight instruments, the work was created at the Millay Colony, an artist's retreat located on Edna St. Vincent Millay's property in Upstate New York. The title (which arrived towards the end of the writing process) derives from a description of fireflies by Robert Frost, the insect a familiar presence at the retreat. It's certainly easy enough to hear the fluttering interactions of the instruments as firefly-like movements; fragmentary figures begun by one instrument are completed by another, with the whole presenting a restless swarm of activity. It's also possible to hear the piece as something reminiscent of a Stravinsky neoclassical chamber work when it's so rhythmically lively and intricately woven.

For the four-part solo flute setting Gilded Tree, Liberatore used for inspiration a cycle of poems by Randall Potts titled Fable, the poems themselves written in response to mixed-media sculptures by Esther Traugot. Similar to the way her work includes natural objects such as eggshells, seedpods, and twigs, so too does Gilded Tree develop with the kind of natural grace we encounter in the outdoors, especially when Barth's performance hews to the pure timbres of the flute. No effects are needed when the instrument's sound, so rich in pastoral associations, is already so transfixing. Contrasts are plentiful between the parts, as shown when the dance-like “black twig tips” and mystery-laden “silence lost to echoes” are juxtaposed.

Inspired by Whitman's “A Noiseless Patient Spider” and its image of the creature flinging forth threads it hopes'll “catch somewhere,” the album's titular work gives voice to the composer's pandemic-related realization that the connections he seeks in the solitary act of creation are less internally directed than outwardly aimed at expressing something that'll resonate with others. While the feeling of isolation engendered by the pandemic is intimated in movement titles such as “vacant, vast, surrounding” and “surrounded, detached,” resilience and hope, however tentative, are suggested in some of the eight-part work's other titles. In keeping with the sense of separation that permeated the period, Liberatore's choice of instrumentation—guitar, prepared piano, and percussion—establishes a barren quality in the early going; elsewhere, however, animation emerges in the boisterous “filament, filament, filament” and triumphant “catch somewhere” to convey recovery and a defiant refusal to succumb to despair. Contemplation's suggested too, in the pensive dialogue enacted during “O my soul,” for example.

At album's end, the four-part Hold Back Thy Hours is the only piece that sets poetry directly, specifically fragments of seventeenth-century English poetry. Tenor Zach Finkelstein (the work's dedicatee) delivers the texts in contexts that sometimes evoke Baroque music; as Liberatore notes, however, the words might have been written hundreds of years ago yet speak universally to the experience of being human, with all the joy and sorrow that that entails. The presence of oboe, bassoon, and harp alongside strings, trumpet, and other woodwinds also does much to evoke an earlier period, as do the stately rhythms that drive “violets pluck'd.” Still, while the inclusion of harpsichord does lend “gentle river” a Baroque quality, the nightmarish musical design the composer conjures for the movement locates it firmly in the modern era. Much the same could be said of the album in general when each work draws from the past yet ultimately feels emblematic of an omnivorous and polyglot contemporary music culture.

July 2023