Society of Composers, Inc.: Transition and Apotheosis
Navona Records

Transition and Apotheosis is the latest volume to feature work by members of the Society of Composers, Inc. (SCI), a professional organization dedicated to the promotion, performance, and dissemination of new music. It does so through conferences, festivals, and the release of recordings by the society's members, some based in academia and others outside it. Issuing its latest collection on Navona Records is a terrific way to bring attention to the organization and spread awareness about the work it's doing. SCI is clearly no upstart, incidentally: Transition and Apotheosis is its thirty-fifth volume. The collection inarguably shows that its members are wholly engaged in extending compositional practice into daring new fields.

The contributors are an eclectic group who bring a wealth of different experiences, musical and otherwise, to this shared endeavour. Whereas Portland-born Chris Arrell, for example, creates music that blurs the lines between the human and the machine and the natural and the digital, the music Jiyoun Chung creates draws from a wealth of Asian and Western cultural influences. Based in Kansas City, violinist Yunfei Li works with natural and digital elements to create material inspired by the sounds of nature. Los Angeles-born Joseph Klein, on the other hand, draws from fractal geometry, chaos, systems theory, and literature for his material. A composer-pianist from Poland of Vietnamese descent, Ania Vu explores in her work elements of language, nature, and temporal perception. Some members, such as Mike McFerron, a professor of music and composer-in-residence at Lewis University, and Robert McClure, Associate Professor of Composition/Theory at Ohio University, pursue their work from within a post-secondary context.

From such a collective, one would expect material of immense variety, and one would be correct. Adding considerably to the impact of the release, some pieces were produced using fixed media (Arrell's Carnyx and McFerron's Transition and Apotheosis), some feature a single acoustic instrument, a few combine an acoustic instrument with fixed media, and others are performed by a duo, a quintet, and in the case of Vu's Tik-Tak the Tak Ensemble. Such diversity makes for an always stimulating listen.

Arrell's piece is titled after the carnyx, a ceremonial and battle trumpet with a small mouthpiece at one end and a wide bell at the other. Working with Csound and Open Music software, Arrell's hall-of-mirrors creation doesn't so much conjure a monstrous sound designed to induce terror as creep insidiously into position and infect with the slow spread of a virus. The aural terrain shifts dramatically when Carynx is followed by Chung's Scissors Fantasia Toccata, a solo piano setting inspired by the traditional Korean Scissors dance that's performed by taffy sellers at farmer's markets. Heavily percussive and rhythmically insistent (convulsive, even), the piece was commissioned by April Kim and is performed with intensity. Composed for the Víquez-Wadley Duo, Paul Lombardi's Unwoven incorporates bitonal harmonies and triplet ritornellos, but it's the gripping percussive interplay and timbral contrasts between bass clarinetist Luis Víquez and vibraphonist Darin Wadley that you'll perhaps remember most. Layers of Balinese Gamelan music are subtly woven into the mutating textures of McFerron's fixed media work Transition and Apotheosis, an immersive and slowly morphing “sound meditation on being.”

Some pieces were created in response to real-world phenomena. Li's animated and oft-agitated woodwind quintet work 24/7 pays tribute to frontline healthcare workers who put themselves at risk for the betterment of others during the COVID-19 pandemic. McClure created his struggling in excess as a way to call out the huge amount of waste produced by humans every day. In the former, woodwinds effectively convey the anguish and struggle of that unsettling period; in the latter, the composer weds the oboe of Michele Fiala to sounds sourced from plastic packaging and balloons to suggest the manner by which nature is being overwhelmed by human-generated products.

Locating itself midway between acoustic and electronic realms is Droki Ouro's glass, evaporate[d], a delicately interwoven setting composed for Jacob Mason and realized by him using three tuned pianos. The sixteenth in a series of short pieces scored for different solo instruments and based on characters in an Elias Canetti work, Klein's Der Saus und Braus is given a dazzling performance by the piano virtuoso Redi Llupa, for whom the work was composed. At almost twelve minutes, the album's longest piece is William Price's Sans Titre VII (B), a wide-ranging investigation into the sonic possibilities of the alto saxophone and performed with vigour, agility, and conviction by Brian Utley. Finally, the unstoppable flow of time was the inspiration for Ania Vu's Tik-Tak, which the Tak Ensemble's soprano Charlotte Mundy, flutist Laura Cocks, clarinetist Carlos Cordeiro, violinist Marina Kifferstein, and percussionist Ellery Trafford bring to mesmerizing life in their customary inimitable manner.

May 2024