Ben Melsky: Ensemble Dal Niente
New Focus Recordings

For many, the harp evokes the image of a musician contributing a soothing background soundtrack to an outdoors assemblage of wine-sipping minglers, an image that persists despite the harp's status as a core symphony orchestra instrument of long standing. On Ensemble Dal Niente, Ben Melsky presents the harp in an entirely different light, as an expressive vehicle for experimental music-making, an instrument as qualified to give voice to contemporary composition as any other. Challenging long-standing conventions is nothing new for Melsky, who's premiered hundreds of new works featuring the harp, is the principal harpist of the Joffrey Ballet, and who has performed with many different outfits, including Deerhoof.

Lilting melodies and angelic strums are eschewed on this challenging fifty-two-minute set; extended techniques are commonly deployed, and vocalizations and alternate tunings similarly appear. It's a bit of a family affair, with Melsky joined on the release by fellow members of Chicago's Ensemble Dal Niente collective. Only the opening pieces by Tomás Gueglio feature the harpist alone, the five subsequent works pairing him with one player at a time: flutist Emma Hospelhorn, guitarist Jesse Langen, clarinetist Katie Schoepflin Jimoh, percussionist Kyle Flens, and soprano Amanda DeBoer Bartlett. Besides Gueglio, Wang Lu, Fred Gifford, Tomás Gueglio, Alican Çamci, and Eliza Brown are the composers whose works are featured.

The album begins by exploiting one of the instrument's signatures, the glissando, in Gueglio's After L'Addio. The familiarity of those entrancing swirls is altered, however, by the addition of another technique, cheekily christened by the composer the “Guegliando.” Here the harpist drags finger calluses along the string to generate a dry, somewhat percussive effect markedly unlike the brilliant swirl of the glissando. Felt wends a slightly different route by comparison, the focus in this case on stark phrases, each plucked note separated from the next by a brief pause, and the character of the material spectral, ponderous, and introspective.

To write Perde, Çamci used the rhythmic contour established by recited fragments of a fifteenth-century Persian religious poem as a starting point. In this patiently unfolding performance, Hospelhorn uses her bass flute to produce spoken and sung syllables, with Melsky accompanying her rhythms, sometimes in unison. An intensely focused and rather ritualistic exploration results that manifests the unpredictable quality of a live improvisation, however formally notated the composition is.

That unpredictability is built into Mobile 2015: Satirise, which, as part of Gifford's Mobile series, purposefully embraces indeterminacy when the composer asks the performers to reorder the material to generate a unique performance each time the work's played. More than any of the other pieces on the recording, Langen's guitar and Melsky's harp meld naturally when their timbral properties are so alike. Both performers liberally pluck, strum, pick, and rub their respective instruments' strings and bodies for seven explorative minutes, the spidery latticework created rendered more arresting by the use of microtonal tuning.

Clarinetist Jimoh joins Melsky on a performance of Lu's After some remarks by CW on his work, the title alluding to Christian Wolff and his study of different systems for facilitating structured improvisation. Unlike Gifford's setting, contrast is pronounced in Lu's, with the sustained expressions of the woodwind differentiating themselves from the harp's plucks and strums. Even greater contrast is present in Brown's closing On-dit, which pairs Melsky with soprano Bartlett. Working with a short text fragment by Voltaire, Brown created the harp and breathy parts first and added the text last, the move a deliberate subversion of the customary approach that sees text given priority.

At thirteen minutes the longest of the album's pieces, Santos's Anima tickles the ear with the diverse sonorities of Flens's percussive arsenal. The mechanical rhythms hint at gamelan, but in following multiple paths the material resists simple definition. That said, it's easy to imagine the piece as accompaniment to a Noh theatre performance, especially when the harp resembles a pipa in some moments and the percussion instruments (vibraphone, snare, gong, et al.) and vocal noises seem to tell a story all by themselves.

October 2019