For All English Music is Greensleeves / Apartment House, released by Another Timbre
22 January 2021
Múm was an Icelandic group with singers channeling the wisely innocent voices of children while a lush landscape, rife with music boxes and other liquid-crystal sonorities, multihued the adjacent soundspaces. There is something similarly open about this music, something so unpredictably predictable, so comforting, so quietly inclusive! Belgian composer Maya Verlaak delves to the depths of experience’s networks while observing from just far enough to escape the iron grip and rationalizations of memory. This is music in which even the harshest sounds melt into a winning simplicity, a world of sound and sense in symbiosis.
It would be too easy to point toward modality to explain such a beautifully optimistic vision. After all, “All British Music is Greensleeves” tears that increasingly irrelevant construct to shreds in a hurry as two layers of sound, one prerecorded, spin bits of the tune down the dimly lit corridors conjoining memory and reflection. Chord, cluster and motive blur boundaries, even as space ensures a tidy trail of readily identifiable components needling consciousness reluctantly toward recognition. It’s a world with which Ives or Mahler might have made contact, had chamber music been more in their sights, such are the buds and blooms of poly-event amidst distantly lit string writing that refuses to answer Ives’ perennial question. The unfurling harmonies, formed of motives in quasi-counterpoint, are inextricably linked with their kaleidoscopic timbres. Recurrence is both evident and backgrounded but none so blatant as the delicious silences, almost periodic, separating the streamlined multivalences. Fortunately, as with many Apartment House recordings, vibrato is nearly absent.
The “Formation” pieces place a similarly subversive emphasis on relationship so subliminal that a simple listen won’t unlock the door or open the blinds. Any hats doffed toward conventional chord or set are quickly displaced by the gentle but insistent winds of change emanating from a vocal imperative or an intoned repetition. Mark Knoop and Sarah Saviet are in something near dialogue with overlapping technologies guided by a compositional voice whose questions also seek a malleable answer. The openness at the heart of Verlaak’s work stems from the various paths through subversion, re-subversion and integration integral to the majority of these pieces. What, in the case of “Song and Dance,” do performers do when confronted only with the analysis, or justification, for a musical score rather than with the score itself? What happens when the justification becomes the score? How is it possible, practical or desirable to confront musical parameters neither heard nor witnessed? The wonderful thing about such conceptions is that they really form the metanarrative of all artistic endeavor. No art, no matter how explicit, relinquishes all of its secrets, just as no single pitch or sonority, even those as pure as Apartment House offers with staggering consistency, is the actual embodiment of that sound. Composers and performers deal in approximations, and it is to Verlaak’s credit that the processes have been rendered at least partially transparent with such beautifully cooperative forces to give them form and voice.
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