William Susman: Quiet Rhythms: Live at Spectrum NYC
Belarca Records
American composer William Susman began working on the piano music for Quiet Rhythms in 2010, never anticipating it would grow into four volumes, each one comprising eleven “Prologues” and eleven “Actions.” One reason he created the material was to have music he could perform in concert, which, after returning his technique to where it'd been in his early twenties, he summarily did two years later at Glenn Cornett's second story loft at 121 Ludlow Street in lower Manhattan. At the site, home to Cornett's Spectrum series and his nine-foot Steinway concert grand piano, Susman delivered occasional performances before presenting a one-hour concert of selections from the first and second volumes on January 16, 2013. Revisiting a recording of the concert seven years later, Susman was so taken by what he heard he decided to share it publicly.
Other pianists have recorded Quiet Rhythms material before, including Vanessa Wagner, Erika Tazawa, Francesco Di Fiore, and Nicolas Horvath, but Susman's release is obviously special for capturing the composer's own interpretation during the time of the project's development. While the treatment by the artwork's creator should never be regarded as definitive, it's nevertheless valuable for presenting a critical reference for listeners and other performers; it's safe to say no one else can possibly know this material as deeply as Susman. The choices he makes about tempo, dynamics, phrasing, and articulation on this recording offer an invaluable blueprint for fellow interpreters. Within a given piece, chiming, chords-heavy patterns modulate through multiple keys, the music rising and falling like a slow-motion wave and swelling into lilting, multi-layered masses. Melodies sparkle and crystallize as patterns oscillate between hands, the latter at times evoking the back-and-forth effect of hocketing. Animated by syncopated rhythms, the music pulses, ebbs, and flows with restless momentum.
As a title, Quiet Rhythms is a bit of a misnomer, as the material is not only quiet. It generally pulses and hums at a medium pitch and with insistent urgency, though there are, of course, reflection-inducing episodes of calm and delicacy. It's introspective, yes, but, as the repeated builds in intensity in the declamatory seventh piece show, extroverted too. One of the more interesting aspects of the material is that it isn't static: often a pause interrupts the flow and is followed by a dramatic shift in presentation (see the eighteenth and sixteenth as examples). Stylistically, the music is most obviously grounded in the hypnotic pattern-making of minimalism, but elements of jazz, folk, and other genres well up to the surface also. The swinging rhythms that buoy the thirteenth and twenty-second settings, for example, could even be described as Latin or Afro-Cuban.
The intimate quality of the material is amplified by the circumstances under which it was recorded, in a second-floor loft that was as much studio apartment as performance space and that on that wintry 2013 evening was inhabited by Susman and perhaps two dozen friends and neighbours. One pictures the dimly lit composer dwarfed by the concert grand with listeners mere feet away basking in the wave-like resonances of the music flooding the room. Listening to these thirteen selections makes the idea of a recording of Quiet Rhythms in its complete form an altogether enticing proposition. As easy as it is to be pulled into the absorbing swirl during the hour-long performance, the impact of the music would be all the more powerful were it presented in its fullest form.November 2023