Christopher Rountree with Wild Up | HOCKET | Nadia Sirota: 3 BPM
Brassland

Composed by Wild Up's founder and artistic director Christopher Rountree, 3 BPM (Three Beats Per Minute) sounds like nothing else released in 2024 nor anything before it, for that matter. It's not sui generis—no artwork is—but it does separate itself from other musical works on a number of counts. As a release, it's presented in two forms, the first a single-movement, twenty-eight-minute version, the second a six-part treatment that breaks the whole into sections titled “Gathering,” “Moonrise,” “Venus,” “Pulpit,” “Awash, Stars, Awash, ”and “Almanac.” Rountree's debut album as a composer does share three things with Terry Riley's iconic In C: long-form duration, a flexible score amenable to any number of instrument groupings, and a palpable sense of communal music-making. The latter's confirmed as much by Rountree's own characterization of the work as “a musical framework for being together," material that explores the social interactions between musicians creating in a shared space and time.

Members of the LA-based new music outfit Wild Up were naturally called upon to perform the piece, but for this realization the ensemble's been augmented by piano duo HOCKET (Sarah Gibson and Thomas Kotcheff) and acclaimed violist Nadia Sirota. The oft-playful piece, which Rountree likens to a “conversational game,” begins with the HOCKET members engaged in conversational to-and-fro that in turn triggers contributions from the other musicians. The origin of the title? In simplest terms, each musical bar spans one entire line of the score, with each line lasting precisely twenty seconds; when the end of each twenty-second increment is reached, a pulse appears in the form of a modular synth-generated exhalation that's set at three beats per minute.

Of course, as with any musical work so structured, the listener may choose to attend to its formal architecture and its unfolding or simply surrender to the sensual pulse of the music as it advances through multiple episodes and bask in the polyphonic allure of the instruments' interactions. The material mesmerizes from the outset when reverberant piano notes alternate with cloud-like exhalations, the minimal piano phrase not a melody but nevertheless evoking the opening piece in Eno's Music for Airports. Gradually the material expands as woodwinds and strings add to the music's lustrous shimmer without undermining its peaceful flow. A sweeping flourish by Sirota reminds us of her presence at the same time as Wild Up's strings add a neo-baroque quality to the material. Painterly strokes of a pastoral kind imbue the piece with a hymnal tone before the music swells cataclysmically before contracting. Throughout the performance, piano elements act as a binding element and through-line, whether they're gently ascending and descending as chords or lulling the listener with cascades. With the focus shifting to saxophones, the music grows animated and with the horns wailing ecstatic in a way that recalls free jazz, if briefly. As serene as much of it is and as lovely as its rustic resolution is, 3 BPM also includes fleeting passages of rolling thunder.

However definitive this performance might appear, it's worth remembering that it's but one iteration of an unlimited number of possible treatments. If 3 BPM recalls at various moments and in different ways musical works by Riley, Eno, and John Luther Adams, it's no less memorable for doing so. Rountree and his musical collaborators have created an absorbing travelogue whose itinerary includes huge vistas, eruptive geysers, and breathtaking landscapes.

August 2024