Ryan MacEvoy McCullough and Lucy Fitz Gibbon: the labor of forgetting
False Azure Records

Ryan MacEvoy McCullough and Andrew Zhou: sedgeflowers | MANTRA
False Azure Records

Many classical piano works involve a rather straightforward preparation process leading up to recording. Karlheinz Stockhausen's 1970 epic MANTRA, on the other hand, requires weeks of planning, not just for the performers familiarizing themselves with the material but for the myriad technological details that must be sorted out. Operating under the name HereNowHear, pianists Ryan MacEvoy McCullough and Andrew Zhou have accomplished something quite remarkable in their realization of the masterwork and, as if that isn't enough, have coupled it with a set of companion works by John Liberatore and Christopher Stark plus pieces by Yi-wei Angus Lee, Dante De Silva, Aida Shirazi, LJ White, Chris Castro, Laura Cetilia, and Zhou that, based on Beethoven's “Rondo Alla ingharese quasi un capriccio” (“Rage over a lost penny”), were conceived with the 250th anniversary of the composer's birth in mind. An earlier release by McCullough fleshes out the portrait, with this one featuring him playing alone and partnering with his wife, vocalist Lucy Fitz Gibbon, on one of its pieces.

As musicians, McCullough and Zhou are forward thinkers, but they're also scholars, something clearly shown in the in-depth liner notes the former composed for the release. His “The Blossoming of sedgeflowers | MANTRA” provides illuminating historical context in its first part, “Galaxy,” that describes the WWII-desecrated soil out of which the Stockhausen work grew (it's noted, for example, that his father likely died on the front lines, his mother was euthanized by the Nazis, and Stockhausen himself acted as a stretcher-bearer near the front lines at the war's end and thus witnessed firsthand the horrific atrocities of war) and the German composer's own oeuvre; in its second part, “Solar System,” McCullough discusses the nine works that compose the sedgeflowers disc and clarifies their connections to MANTRA and Beethoven. Augmenting those notes is “The Genesis of MANTRA” by Duquesne University music professor Paul Miller, who provides a meticulous account of the epic's structure and form.

Before tackling MANTRA, it makes sense to follow the sequence of the release itself, which casts the sedgeflowers material as a lead-in to the primary work. In keeping with the pianists' conception of MANTRA as “a humble melody, shattered into many component parts, where each shard is a gateway to its own unique universe,” the duo determined that one way to highlight those musical fractures would be to elicit treatments from living composers. With that in mind, Liberatore's five-part Sedgeflowers (2017-18) and Stark's Foreword (2017) were created, which serve as bookends to the concise Beethoven-inspired settings. The latter grew out of the pianists' commissioning project, RAGE: Vented, which, as mentioned, drew for inspiration from the composer's 1795 material. Having settled on the composers, they approached them during the pandemic-dark summer-of-2020 with the brief to create “musical soliloquies in the form of variations on this piece, reflecting on what Beethoven meant to them in this wild historic moment.”

In the nimble-footed rhythms of its opening movement, “Giocando,” Liberatore's Sedgeflowers manifests a beguiling playfulness that initiates the project on a note of child-like joy. Pensive by comparison is the shadowy “Largo, senza misura,” which slowly blossoms into a swirling colossus before decompressing, while the high-velocity “Presto possibile, molto meccanico” is as agitated and animated as expected. With two explorative interludes separating three more developed movements, the twenty-three-minute work sparkles with a playfulness that's also very much part of Stockhausen's. Turning to the RAGE: Vented pieces, we begin with Lee's ethereal Rage Over Lost Time, which sees the pianists “inside” the instrument, striking its strings and muting them with their fingers, until a ghostly snippet of the Beethoven piece materializes at the miniature's conclusion. In De Silva's brain-addling Too Sedated to Rage, bits of Satie's first Gymnopédie and Bach's Goldberg Variations “Aria” intermingle with Beethoven, the dazed effect of their coupling intensified by electronically treatments and digital delays.

For his arresting RAGE: Screamed, RAGE: Stolen, RAGE: Silenced, Shirazi had the pianists mute upper octaves in the piano using tape and putty to generate “a percussive choking sound akin to a rainy deluge on a soft surface, [as] if each raindrop were the distillation of an individual's frustrations.” The keyboard's heard in its natural form during White's Rage is the Bodyguard of Sadness, with the Beethoven fragment refracted into an improvisation-styled lament. Zhou describes his Con variazioni as “a doublespeak berceuse—a stupefying lullaby” wherein Beethoven fragments collide before a minor treatment of material from the “Emperor” concerto threads its way into the design. After Castro's portmanteau-styled Beethausenstro–Castockhoven uses the two-bar introduction to MANTRA as a springboard for a wild interlacing of pianos, woodblocks, and kick drums, Cetilia's sense of missing ends the project with a final instrument-modified meditation—pennies are positioned between the piano strings to produce softly clangorous gong-like tones—that riffs on rhythmic motives from the Beethoven piece. At disc's end, Stark's Foreword reinstates the MANTRA focus with an homage that, with the application of computer processing, configures the pianos as roiling percussive entities. Notes twinkle and roll like cresting waves, fluttering arpeggios intone amidst glistening synthesized tones, ascending chords accent the warble, and waves of percussive clatter rattle and thrum—all such adventurous playfulness anticipating the same in the epic that awaits.

In a 1973 conversation with Jonathan Cott, Stockhausen described MANTRA as “a miniature of the way a galaxy is composed … I've never worked on a piece before in which I was so sure that every note I was putting down was right.” It's a grandiloquent statement, the first part especially, yet there's no denying the work's epic character. It truly does seem like a complete, monumental, and engulfing creation. This meticulously structured electroacoustic creation is dissected exhaustively by Miller in an essay that should be required reading for every listener intending on entering its world, though MANTRA also rewards on pure musical grounds in the absence of any familiarity with its design and origins. Scored for two pianists, it also requires them to supplement their playing with woodblocks and twelve crotales, and also operate a shortwave radio (or a recording of one) and two ring modulators. The idea that took root in 1969, that “of one single musical figure or formula that would be expanded over a very long period of time, and by that I meant fifty or sixty minutes,” was completed less than a year later, performed in late 1970, recorded in 1971, and made available as a handwritten score in 1975. In contrast to some Stockhausen scores that eschewed traditional musical notation, every note in MANTRA is documented.

Miller's technical description is, as stated, exhaustive, and space here only allows for a brief overview. In his words, the titular “mantra” is “a series of thirteen notes consisting of a tone row of twelve distinct pitches, plus the first note repeated at the end. The first event one hears in the piece is the entire mantra compressed into four block chords, followed by a tremolo on A, the mantra's first note. A full presentation of the mantra follows, but, as is typical for Stockhausen, it is not a simple didactic recitation. Rather, each note is associated with a particular kind of articulation or ornament.” Miller then clarifies the thirteen note-pitch-characteristic relationships, which involve repetition, accent, tremolo, staccato, trills, and other effects. As the first pianist's right hand plays the mantra, the left plays an inverted version displaced by one phrase, the result equivalent to a traditional two-part counterpoint exercise: “With each pitch in the right hand expressing a distinct character, and the mantra in counterpoint with itself, this whole complex becomes the work's ‘formula',” a formula that's expanded upon for seventy minutes and in thirteen sections, one for each note of the mantra and with the crotales announcing the beginning of each new section. In each section, the tonal expansions in the first piano begin on a successive note of the mantra, while the second piano “follows the same principle, but begins its permutations on the inverted notes of the mantra.”

Adding to the music's impact, ring modulation is incorporated (McCullough used Max/MSP to generate the effect digitally), with sine wave frequencies cued to match each successive note of their mantra form at (or near) the beginning of each section. Consequently, each of the thirteen sections possesses its own particular timbre thanks to the ring modulator effect. Finally, shortwave radio factors into the presentation too, with a tape the composer himself produced making its appearance during the “Staccato” section. As serious and sober as the work is, musical jokes sometimes surface, an example being the words “‘s ist alles nicht so tragisch” (“It's not all that tragic”) scribbled in the score that, as it's something the audience doesn't hear, become an “inside joke” for the performers. In the fifth section, the music's flow is interrupted when one pianist plays a seeming “wrong note,” the other corrects the mistake, and, after some disagreement about what the correct note is, the second pianist aggressively repeats it as a tremolo; the disagreement settled, the pianists carry on as before.

With piano accented by percussion, the work arrests the ear the moment “Introduction and MANTRA” initiates the journey (the thirteen formal sections, incidentally, are framed by intro and outro parts) and quickly cedes the stage to “Regular repetition,” where the pianos hum and dance animatedly. Ranging between two and seven minutes, ten of the sections are concise, with the remainder pushing into the ten-minute zone. The sound design changes frequently, be it the liquified treatments that make parts of “Grace note group around a central tone” sound like it's intoning underwater or the crotales, woodblocks, and fizzing electronics that punctuate the splashing keyboards throughout “Chord (accented).” During the final formal section, “Arpeggio-connection,” the pianists rapidly execute as sixteenth notes every note of the composition in what Miller deems a kind of “toccata meccanica” style. Block chords splash across this rushing river in a cadenza-like culmination, after which “Postlude: MANTRA” caps the work with the insistent rattle of antique cymbals and a final uncluttered voicing of the mantra. Recorded in August 2022 at Oktaven Audio, the duo's recording of the work is one of immense value, not only for its rarity but for being so thorough in its presentation. Needless to say, immense reserves of concentration had to be called upon by the pianists for the performance, and no corners were cut in this realization.

Deserving of attention too is McCullough's earlier release, the labor of forgetting, for a couple of reasons in particular. In being scored for just-tuned piano, Dante De Silva's Four Years of Fog reminds us that the standard equal temperament of the Western tuning system is but one of many possible systems; secondly, McCullough's coupling with soprano Lucy Fitz Gibbon on estrangement (2020), Katherine Balch's song-cycle setting of Katie Ford's poem, makes for a pleasing complement to the solo piano material. In addition to those two, the release includes De Silva's Shibui—a dirge in memory of my mentor, Deborah Clasquin.

The heartfelt work honours Clasquin, a pianist and educator who taught at Humboldt State University and exerted a deep and lasting influence on her one-time students De Silva and McCullough. After she died from pancreatic cancer in 2009, De Silva wrote Shibui as an eloquent elegy that McCullough performed at her memorial, the piece built around a quotation from Bartók's own “Élegy No. 1” from 1908, the composer a favourite of Clasquin's. Shibui is a Japanese term that describes the dichotomized nature of beautiful things, specifically the way pain and pleasure and sweet and sour co-exist within them. As the subsequent four-part work Four Years of Fog (2016) illustrates, we experience a kindred sensation when ears accustomed to hearing the Western tuning system are confronted with the tangy pitches of just intonation. Yet while it might at first be disconcerting, the ear quickly attunes itself and moves beyond that initial reaction to focus on the explorative fabric of this oft-pensive composition.

Conceived as a modern-day response to Robert Schumann's Dichterliebe and its Heinrich Heine text, estrangement adopts the perspective of the unheard woman in the German poet's words. Examining a relationship in the final throes of disintegration, the work advances through thirteen parts, most miniature-like in size. As McCullough characterizes it, Ford's poem casts the woman as one who, having “experienced a “great love” that proved to be unattainable, ‘settles' for a series of lesser loves in which each is an attempt at some facet of that original ideal,” Heine, in fact, included as one of those thrown-away loves. In its spontaneous combustion and abrupt shifts in tone, Balch's setting of the text mirrors the emotional turbulence happening within the protagonist as she attempts to articulate what she's experiencing. Words and lines repeat obsessively, segues between sung and spoken parts occur frantically, and connections between voice and piano conjoin, splinter, and fracture. While both performers distinguish themselves, Fitz Gibbon dazzles with a riveting performance that gives commanding voice to the emotional terrain and meets the considerable vocal challenges posed by the material. A few passages in the tenth part, “only the song,” invite comparison to Hans Abrahamsen's Let me tell you and elsewhere the oscillation between spoken and sung texts recalls Schoenberg, but estrangement in the long run registers as an authentic original expression by its creators. Neatly closing the circle is a brief reprise of Shibui to lend the recording a formally pleasing frame.

Both releases, as stated, warrant attention, but without question the major achievement here is the pianists' presentation of MANTRA. Performing such an extraordinary work demands weeks of study and preparation, but the result of their efforts is a recording of undeniable merit.

January 2025