Three works from English composer Christopher Fox performed by the five-member Ensemble SEV, with two renderings of his work "This is the Wind" along with three duos, each combining two of a set of six "Paralogos", a solo work for violin--"Planes and Folds"--and the title piece "Hieroglyph" about decoding the incomprehensibility of unfamiliar music.
Label: ezz-thetics by Hat Hut Records Ltd Catalog ID: ezz-thetics 1030 Squidco Product Code: 32287
Format: CD Condition: VG Released: 2022 Country: Switzerland Packaging: Cardboard Gatefold Recorded at the Israel Conservatory of Music, in Tel Aviv, Israel, on August 29th, and September 2nd, 2021, by Yaron Aldema.
Previously played Squidco store copy, used for cataloging and samples, in excellent condition.
"Hieroglyph is a word that history has gradually prised away from its linguistic roots as the Greek term for sacred carvings. Over time it came to be associated principally with the enigmatic symbols found in Egyptian burial sites and because these symbols resisted translation for so many centuries the word hieroglyph became a synonym for incomprehensibility. It was the discovery of an artefact - the so-called 'Rosetta Stone', containing both hieroglyphs and parallel texts in other scripts - that in the early 19th century made translation possible: understand one text and the decoding could begin. Perhaps we follow a similar path when we listen to unfamiliar music. But what are the parallel texts: titles, other music that sounds similar, or a text like this?
The title track on this album is an attempt to make music out of this journey to understanding. Hieroglyph begins with a single plucked note on the cello, insistently repeated. Gradually it starts to gather resonance from the body of the instrument and the other strings and out of that resonance grows a sense of the identity of the cello, or at least the identity of the cello in this music. As the music evolves it becomes, phrase by phrase, section by section, less exploratory, more solid. At least this is how it seems to me. I wrote Hieroglyph in the summer of 2020 for Dan Weinstein; if I knew more about it I would say so.
The two works entitled This is the wind, both for an ensemble of three instruments, are easier to introduce. The first was written in 2017 and 2018 for the Fidelio Trio who premiered it in London in the 2018 Spitalfields Music Festival. In his 1984 poem 'Wind' James Fenton writes that 'great crowds are fleeing... down through the beautiful catastrophe of wind' and in This is the wind each movement imagines a different sort of wind, a different sort of catastrophe. 'Shamal' is a hot, dusty north-westerly wind that blows across Iran (originally this movement was to be premiered in Teheran) in June and July. In 'Interference' Debussy's prelude 'Le vent dans la plaine' becomes a series of glitches, like a digital file that is being corrupted as it is transmitted. 'Mouth' is based on the melody of a Welsh folk-song and takes its title from a line in R.S. Thomas's poem 'Depopulation of the Hills', in which he describes the harsh living conditions of Welsh hill farmers : 'the hole under the door was a mouth through which the rough wind spoke.' In 'Idaho' we hear the wind blowing across the plains, through the telegraph wires, the sound of LaMonte Young's childhood, inspiration for a radically reduced music.
In 2019 Dan Weinstein asked if I would make a version of This is the wind for a new trio in which he would be joined by tenor saxophone and electric guitar. As I reworked 'Shamal' I realised that the sonic possibilities of the ensemble were taking me in new directions. 'Chaff' returns to the imagery of James Fenton's poem - 'like chaff we were borne in the wind' - the instruments scattering grains of sound. 'Palmyra' reflects on the destruction of that ancient city by the Roman Empire in 273 and its further partial destruction by ISIS in 2015. The music is a sort of archaeology, as if fragments of Thomas Tallis's 16th century settings of the Book of Lamentions, in which the prophet Jeremiah mourned the destruction of Jerusalem in 586 BCE, had been recovered from the ground. Over and over again the saxophone, guitar and cello piece together these shards of Tallis's music, trying to make them into a coherent form.
The title of Planes and folds suggests a different relationship between music and earth: not the recovery of shards from the ground but the tectonic processes through which that ground itself was formed. It is also a nod of gratitude in the direction of the conductor and improviser Ilan Volkov, for whose Tectonics festival I wrote the orchestral piece Topophony.In 2017 Ilan directed the Tel Aviv premiere of the chamber orchestra version of Topophony and it was through that performance that I was introduced to Yael Barolsky and Dan Weinstein, the musicians whose playing has inspired so much of the music of this album.
Planes and folds was written in 2018 for Yael and in it her violin traces a trajectory across the range of the instrument, her playing triggering sine-tones that measure the same acoustic space according to Pythagorean principles: music as a confrontation between the human and the abstract.
In between these longer works are three duos, each combining two of a set of six Paralogos. These scores were written at the beginning of 2021 and are intended to be used as commentaries on other music, either by me or by other musicians, and either simultaneously with that music or, as here, separately. But how can music 'comment' on other music? What is being created by such a commentary: a translation, a summary, or another musical hieroglyph?"-Christopher Fox, October 2021