Another Timbre TimHarrisonbre
at91 Jürg Frey - ‘Circles and Landscapes’
Works for solo piano played by Philip Thomas
1 - In Memoriam Cornelius Cardew (1993) 2:20
2 - Circuar Music No.5 (2012) 13:14
3 - Extended Circular Music No.2 (2014) 4:35
4 - Pianist, Alone (2) (2012) 29:36
5 - Miniature in Five Parts (2014) 5:42 Youtube extract
6 - Extended Circular Music No.9 (2015) 21:35 Youtube extract
Discussion between Venezuelan composer Gil Sansón and Jürg Frey
GS: You’ve talked about the importance of ‘knowing your materials’ when composing. Material can be anything from stones and dry leaves to actual notes and chords. When composing for the piano, which in itself puts some restrictions on the material regarding timbre and duration, is the notion of harmony somehow more prominent? It seems to me that having to work with restricted materials such as single notes, dyads and chords, one can feel the harmonic underpinnings in a way that's both abstract (pitch relationships) and concrete (the possible affects that the harmonic discourse can bring forward) in an unmediated way, using the very instrument on which the whole notion of western harmony is based.
JF: In one sense your question is easy to answer: yes, when composing for the piano,
the notion of harmony is more prominent - although we know all the (lovely) extended
techniques that have been developed for the piano, to make it sound unlike a piano.
But yes, the piano remains the instrument to represent harmony. In a general way
it’s still similar to composing for stones or leaves in that the materials just represent
noises, but here complex sound textures are more prominent.
The other side of your
question is more difficult to answer, and it's connected with the notion of harmony
– or in your words ‘the whole notion of western harmony’ - which is embodied in the
piano itself, and offers itself so easily to the composer.
When I write for piano,
I shouldn’t rely on the piano itself, but on the composition. The piano gives single
notes, dyads and chords too easily. Also, if I write consonant dyads, it could suddenly sound
wrong, ironic, like a quotation rather than the real sound.
In this context to compose means to build a basic confidence in the clear and restricted material that you are working with. It's a basic, existential trust in such a simple thing as a third or a fifth. It's not given by itself; one has to try to create it for every piece, to compose it and to find a context for it. This is part of the work on the piece; I'm looking to find a confidence in chords, dyads and single notes, and I hope that accordingly they will resonate with confidence.
This applies to every material, whether stones or a piano, but with the piano it
seems to be more challenging because of the clarity of the material and how the instrument
itself suggests it should be used.
GS: Listening to ‘Circles and Landscapes’ there's
definitely a sense of compositions for the piano, as opposed to piano compositions
(the kind that take into account the natural inclinations of the instrument and its
sound), in that the pieces seem to articulate their discourse based upon harmony
and register, without employing any of the other resources available to the composer
when writing for the piano today (as in Eva-Maria Houben's Keyboard Music III, where
a four note chord in the low register is held down without sounding for the duration
of the piece, subtly colouring the single notes played by the right hand). I often
think of Wandelweiser as a sort of leveller. To eliminate virtuosic display, formal
complexity and grand statements while existing in real time and the real world, not
offering an escape from it, but showing how to exist in it without compromise. In
this sense, and coming from this new environment, a feeling for harmony can express
itself away from the trappings of past styles and historical practice. Here I think
of what you said about how a very important aspect is to ensure that the two notes
sounding at one time have the assuredness to be themselves in the continuity. So
in this regard I think your music proves there's a rich present for harmony in the
post-Cage continuum, both as a continuity of the essential aspects of western harmony
and how this notion has become greatly expanded.
My next question deals also with harmony, but in a different order of things: seeing that harmony (even something as simple as, say, a B flat minor triad) in its very essence has the power to elicit a wide range of emotional responses in the listener, do you take into consideration these potentially charged materials for their affective characteristics when you compose, or are the formal necessities of the piece what ultimately determine the end result? Perhaps a combination of both?
JF: To answer this question I have to describe how I start to work on a new piece. This comes even before your question ‘Perhaps a combination of both?’ because at the very beginning of the process of composition I think neither of the power to elicit certain emotional responses, nor do I know anything about formal necessity of the piece. I think both ideas may limit the potential of the working process.
I hear the sounds, the chords, the dyads, the single notes in their own reality, before they start to move towards becoming a part of the composition. Later I write notes with a vague impression of the piece. To give a simple explanation of what is a complex process: I translate these impressions and feelings gradually into notes, durations/seconds, pitches, volumes, colours and not least to a conceptual underground. This process of translation is hazardous, because during the translation the feelings and impressions are also constantly in the process of changing. Then later, yes, decisions for or against a chord or a certain harmony are guided by emotional responses and formal necessities, in respect to emotional responses in myself, and in respect to the formal necessity of the piece, which may at some lucky moments be the same.
I work at my desk, and during this work, the piece gradually becomes alive. I work with my ears, sometimes using and sometimes avoiding learned skills - ideally sometimes far away from any learned skill, using simple procedures underpinned by a fundamental concern with material. I’m the listener, and later, when the piece is performed, the audience takes my place and listen to what I’ve composed for their ears.
GS: So, in a sense, composing is a mental activity that is translated into signs
in order to be brought to life? A process of distillation or sublimation in which
the ideal and the actual are in a dynamic of compromise and negotiation (say, when
the ideal has to adapt to the acoustic realities of the piano, for example)?
JF: It’s so good to have the opportunity to talk about this! In fact it is a two-step
thing: it starts with my visions, impressions, and I experience it as a living feeling.
Then this vision is translated into signs and notes - and the next step is for the
musicians to bring these signs back to life. The challenge for the composer (in addition
to the challenge of having a vision, a music inside) is to bring the music to the
signs, to the paper, without destroying it. And a strong and irritating experience
I had at the beginning of my life as a composer was the experience of things dying
on paper. Looking at the notes, I discovered something different from what I had
had in my mind. During the process of notation something had happened that had killed
the music. Like with collections of butterflies in boxes; they look lovely, but also
terrible, because the butterflies are dead. At that time I had the same feelings
when I read my first attempts to write scores: lovely, but where is the piece, the
life? I had lost the music.
How can this process of translation be made at least
partly successful? To answer this, I have to think in relative terms about what
I wrote above. In fact, it's not so simple: first a vision and then a score. You
mentioned 'a dynamic of compromise and negotiation', I prefer the word 'collaboration'.
It only can happen in collaboration with what is going to arise. As a composer, I
have to listen to what happens as a result of what is written on the paper, maybe
this can tell me where the piece will be or where it will go. But before I can listen
to it, I have to write down something…something that I think might be good…
I'm also
a player, and a score is like a gift for a player. Although it appears to consist
just of notes, 'dots and lines', in fact the whole life of the piece, the music,
is wrapped up in the score. And the process of practicing and rehearsing the piece
is one of unpacking the music and bringing it back to life. With some pieces you
can do this again and again.
GS: The theme of harmony keeps flowing back, somehow. This question begs to be framed as an ellipse: when composing (or when reflecting on composing) do you ever feel the gravitational pull of harmony as inherited notion and practice? For example, the pull of certain tendencies in chord progressions that seem to proceed on their own to a certain extent? Maybe it's just me hearing what I want to hear, but am I wrong in detecting an invisible thread that somehow connects your work with, say, the work of Robert Schumann? All of this comes to mind in the context of Wandelweiser, which I think is a singularity of sorts that has allowed music to achieve escape velocity and finally enter this century and leave behind many of the trappings associated with the term ‘contemporary music’. This is why I find this dynamic so wonderful to hear. Harmony and paradox, side by side, which in a way suggests that these two should always go together, and that harmony is only a problem when we start to take things for granted.
JF: Your remarks are touching on important things, especially at the end when you
say that "harmony is only a problem when we start to take things for granted". Let
me elaborate some thoughts.
When I work with certain features of a chord progression,
then yes, I understand that you may hear this as a connection to Schumann. But let
me put it in a more general way, because in fact a composer is often faced with such
problems: you have a similar situation when you are using ‘chance operations’ or
‘extended techniques’, or ‘atonality’, even with ‘counterpoint’ and ‘melody’. In
all these instances you find yourself in the context of the past. That happens when
you are looking back to the pieces that have already been written by other composers. But
what happens when I look forward to my new piece, to the next composition that I
am going to write?
Let me make a small digression with Schumann. I would say that
I don't use the chord progressions of Schumann, but I do hear in his music sometimes,
not too often, a flow of chords without any effort of the composer. The music goes
on and on, and the whole energy feels like it comes from inside the music, not as
a compositional effort made by the composer. Obviously this has a strong impact on
my thoughts and feelings. I also hear this 'going on by itself' in works by other
composers, particularly in the pre-Baroque era, but with Schumann it's coloured by
a more personal handwriting. I don't hear it with much of the expressionist music
of the 20th century, and even sometimes not in the music of Schönberg. There a variety
of expressionist gestures are used to move the music forward rather than it having
this sense of 'going on by itself' with its own internal momentum.
This 'going on
by itself' is an issue that has concerned me for many, many years. It was even, I
think, the initial spark at the beginning of my life as a composer. However, over
the years, and not least after many, many discussions with my Wandelweiser friends,
I came to a clear awareness of how important it is for me to have stasis and silence
as the background for any forward motion in a composition.
‘Moving forward’ is not
a given in my music; stasis is the underlying basis from which everything starts.
Sometimes there is movement, sometimes there’s a conceptual issue, and sometimes
a piece will remain static for its entire duration, or it will return to stasis.
In recent years a sense of moving forward, of going from one thing to the next (and
this can be melody - pitch by pitch - or chord progression, or formal progression)
has moved more to the centre of my work. And I have also learned that this sense
of ‘moving forward’ in a piece may work more readily for me when I use clear triads
and dyads.
But, once again, I want to lead my answer back to the practice of composing,
and it's not as simple as I’ve described it. I have discovered another paradox: a
chord progression, which includes a sense of movement, may also produce a stasis,
like in my ‘Extended Circular Music No. 2’. And vice versa, a stasis, as, for example,
when the same note is repeated many times, may lead the piece to a completely new
situation.
As a composer, I think and feel something, but afterwards the composed
music may tell a slightly different story, and one of the most adventurous parts
of my work is to listen to and to learn from these unexpected stories.
GS: On a completely different subject: some of your fellow composers in the Wandelweiser
milieu have a strong sense of intellectual engagement with the work of key philosophers
like Deleuze, Badiou and Spinoza, among others. Some traits, such as Spinoza's critique
of negative feelings like melancholy or sadness, seem evident in the music of Antoine
Beuger, which somehow shows a neutrality of emotion in its composition (execution
is another matter). The notion of field, the notion of the fold, among many others,
keep coming up when dealing with or discussing Wandelweiser music. Is your music
different in this regard?
JF: I think my music probably is different. I haven't read Badiou, and although I have read selected works by Deleuze, and more by Spinoza, I don't see a conscious relationship to the thoughts of these philosophers. Although, when I read Deleuze or Spinoza, I do feel a closeness...
I’ll take your question in a wider sense, and talk about how important (at least for me) is the engagement with other artists, writers and composers as regards intellectual, poetic and practical aspects. Elsewhere I have mentioned my engagement with Agnes Martin, with Gustave Roud (and the sensitivity of his poetic language), and with Giorgio Morandi (his work being situated between the abstract and the figurative, or, in music, between sound and melody).
In addition to these comprehensive engagements, which have been incorporated into and have transformed my work at a deep level over a long time, there are also other spotlights, which enlighten and make me aware of specific features in my work. Spotlights which work like anchors, and which I go back to from time to time to assure myself. I take a catalogue, a text or a score from my bookcase. This may be Fred Sandback, to understand how a simple line works in space, and in a score. Or Ed Ruscha, to think about words in a score (or, with his gasoline stations, to better understand neutral figuration, neutral melody). Or Sean Scully to learn about the complexity of clear forms. These are the artists. Of the poets, I could mention Edmond Jabès when I try to understand how a piece develops from the depths of an empty sheet. Or finally to come back to music: to understand the paradox in Bruckner’s music, where sometimes a wide expansion happens without any extra subjective or emotional benefit.
GS: Am I correct in inferring from your words that what is truly important is the invisible thread that somehow connects a work of art or literature to a piece of music? Your answer brought to my mind an elliptical thought: Feldman once said that perhaps Cage's greatest achievement was that he proposed that music could in fact be a form of art, not something separated from it.
JF: The question of whether music is a form of art has periodically haunted me at
my composer’s desk since I first read Feldman’s statement, I think in the late 1980’s.
If I understand this remark in the context of the art world of 1960’s New York, then
it could be saying that music which doesn't tell a story but is just abstract sounds
- a quasi ‘all over music’ - is nearer to art, similar to a painting where your first
impression is also an all over impression. Of course music unfolds in time, starts
at some point and ends at another, but some pieces by Cage at least are thought of
as an all over structure.
This is simple enough, but the difficulties start when the
music has any kind of rhetorical facet, be it in relation to ‘melody’ (a ‘phrase’)
or ‘form’, both of which are facets of non-abstract figuration and connected to a
kind of rhetoric, the rhetoric of figuration and the rhetoric of form.
I don't want
to discuss all the pitfalls, whereby a rhetorical virtuosity can take over a composition
on the surface (and the performer is willing to follow or extend this), and the thing
degenerates into a circus act.
But there is also a virtuosity in composition. The
delicate questions of rhetoric have become a more important part of my music in the
last few years. So has my music moved away from art? For sure, an earlier work such
as the WEN cycle of 59 solo pieces is nearer to the form of art that Cage evoked;
WEN can be understood as a set of single drawings, an alphabet of the vocabulary
of the composer, to mention a description I read once about the small 1960s pencil
and ink drawings by Agnes Martin.
Is a poem nearer to being a form of art than a
novel? It's clear that a story affects the clean character of abstract art. When
I mention “story” I’m not talking about programme music or intellectual ideas. My
focus is on the immanent musical thinking and its possible teleological aspects,
when a piece has an energy of moving forward and a direction, and when it makes sense
that certain things happen earlier and others later. In my music a fundamental question
is how to leave something and how to proceed, then I have to grapple with the question
of form and its rhetorical aspects. And a rhetorical aspect means speaking to somebody,
while an abstract piece doesn't speak to anyone, it's just there. (And by the way,
for me this is such an exciting observation and experience in relation to my pieces Pianist,
alone No.1, and Pianist, alone No.2. No. 1 doesn't speak to anybody, it's just there
over 90 minutes, maybe with an audience beside it. But No.2 does speak to the audience.
The piece says: listen, how this and that happens. And how the music goes on and
doesn’t return).
I think that any kind of rhetorical process only makes sense when
you find that at the end the piece is at another level or in a new dimension. The
art and the rhetorical process are balanced, and at the very end the piece may become
an art work.
But it’s difficult for me to speak about this; it becomes blurred, and
at the same time it's lifeless and theoretical. So let me go back to what I know
better, the process of composing: not speaking about it, but doing it, and I feel
that suddenly these kind of problems disappear, and instead the difficulties of the
actual work emerge and are what is significant: to make something happen in the score,
to let it arise on the paper. This is about more than just finding the sounds, but
transforming them into an art work. I think Paul Cézanne spoke about this when he
mentioned "la réalisation", a lifelong struggle in his work, and William Carlos Williams
said simply: "The same thing exists, but in a different condition when energised
with imagination".
So here again are the invisible threads that you mentioned above. Yes, there's a
connection - sometimes deep and intense, sometimes light at certain precise points
- to artists, poets, composers (of the past, and friends of the present). These threads
are important to me and keep my work at the composer's desk agile and open. Composing
is a lonely activity, but these threads make the work less solitary.
Jürg Frey
Philip Thomas on the music of Jürg Frey
Jürg Frey the performer is inseparable from Jürg Frey, composer. To understand his music is to know that underlying each event, each phrase, each rest, each relationship, is the beating heart of a performing musician. Frey's sense of pitch is that of someone who knows pitch. That is, someone who knows what it is to make pitch sound, and to make sounds live and breathe, who knows how it feels for two sounds to collide in space and time, and who knows what it is for sounds to appear and then disappear, to be articulated in time. And to hear Frey make those sounds - to hear the clarinet both as an instrument communicating across centuries (how I would love to hear him perform Mozart's clarinet quintet) and as an entirely fresh sound, emerging from nothing, barely present yet imbued with a radiance that makes a nonsense of the reductionist label at times assigned to his music - is to recognise that his composed music is abundantly affirmative.
Like the music of his older friend, American composer Christian Wolff, his music is to be played and to be understood through playing. It is discovered only through the act of performance and through experiencing the sounds made alive. Unlike Wolff, however, whose unique performance strategies result in a strange, at times fragmented music, Frey's flexible treatment of older models, such as canons and chorales, is easily perceptible yet entirely fresh.
To those readers and listeners who know of Frey (born Switzerland, 1953) as part of the ‘Wandelweiser' group of composers, and who consequently characterise his music as reductionist, concerned only with silence and minimal sounding events (possibly somewhat austere), the description of Frey's music above may come as something of a surprise. But, as with all groupings and labels, the story is far more muddied than the generalised perception. Frey has been associated with the Wandelweiser group - including founders Antoine Beuger and Burkhard Schlothauer, Eva Maria Houben, Carlo Inderhees, Radu Malfatti, Craig Shepard, Thomas Stiegler,Manfred Werder, Michael Pisaro, and many others, some who have come and gone, and a host of younger composers, many in their 20s and 30s - almost since its inception as a movement (founded in 1992, Frey joined the following year). His music is published by Edition Wandelweiser, which has also released a number of recordings of his music, and he plays with the Wandelweiser Composers Ensemble.
His music shares with many of these composers an emphasis upon quiet, sometimes extremely quiet, sounds, is generally fairly slow moving, and embraces the totality of the sounding environment, whereby the physical space and time within which sounds are situated and between sounds is fundamental to the musical discourse. Shared influences might include John Cage, Christian Wolff, George Brecht and others within the Fluxus movement. Yet each of the composers listed above pursue their own compositional and aesthetic interests. Pisaro's recent work, for example, is characterised by textural multilayering, field recordings and noise. Werder's work navigates a route between a conceptual, poeticised text-based work, bordering on the non-event, and (live) sound installation. Jürg Frey's own work is diverse, including sound installations, works for electronics and electric instruments, and a number of scores for undetermined instrumentation. Some hcmf// regulars might recall his Un champ de tendresse parsemé d'adieux, premiered by the edges ensemble in 2011, comprising the sounds of falling dried leaves and very small stones and the faint whistling of the performers dispersed around the performing space. At the same time he has written some of the most harmonic and melodic music of all the Wandelweiser composers.
The works which feature in hcmf// 2015 tend toward pitch-based compositions. There are exceptions, most notably the second string quartet, performed by its dedicatees the Bozzini Quartet. (To hear this live will be a rare treat for those of us who first encountered their recording of it, released in 2006, and were stunned by the extraordinary sonority and intimate physicality of the music.) Often familiar tonal material hovers curiously between the states of being and progressing. But lest the music becomes too familiar, too ‘understood', one can sometimes sense the composer consciously rubbing out what's gone before, through repetition or silence, or change, so that what was heard becomes forgotten.
Recent works foreground sound over silence, in contrast to earlier works. At the same time one might argue that what we hear is not ‘speaking' but merely being; that the music tends toward silence through its ‘not-speaking'. It is in no hurry to go anywhere nor say anything. In Frey's own words: ‘Silence can also be present in the sounds. In order to have silence in sounds, one must let go of everything which gets in the way of this silence. This sound is a sound without the idea of what it can mean or how it should be used.' Frey's music calls upon both listener and performer to surrender expectations, to give themselves to the present whilst allowing what was to colour what is. All that is known is what is experienced - sound and silence, both physical, both performed, both temporary, emergent and relational, alive.
© Philip Thomas
Philip Thomas
Reviews
“Jürg Frey is inextricably tied to the group of Wandelweiser composers and musicians, and like that group, his music continues to elude easy categorization. The last year has been a particularly fruitful one, revealing extensions to his compositional approach. There was the release of the two-disc set Grizzana and other pieces 2009-2014 for small ensemble on the Another Timbre label as well as his residency at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, featuring multiple performances of his pieces. Two other releases, Circles and Landscapes and String Quartet No. 3 / Unhörbare Zeit deserve special focus as each represents the continued development of Frey’s compositional sensibilities.
Circles and Landscapes features a program of solo piano pieces performed by Philip Thomas, one of the preeminent interpreters of contemporary piano compositions as well as an accomplished improviser. Pitch relationships have always been central to Frey’s compositions, and in these pieces, composed over the last five years (with the exception of the opening “In Memorium Cornelius Cardew” from 1993) the harmonic underpinnings are even more pivotal to the structural foundations. In an interview on the Another Timbre site, Frey states, “I'm looking to find a confidence in chords, dyads and single notes, and I hope that accordingly they will resonate with confidence. This applies to every material, whether stones or a piano, but with the piano it seems to be more challenging because of the clarity of the material and how the instrument itself suggests it should be used.” The opening “In Memorium Cornelius Cardew” moves with slow assurance back and forth between low register intervals and a resonant chord, pausing midway to progress to a deliberately paced, falling phrase which pools in darkly voiced chords. Three pieces from the “Circular Music” series, composed a decade later, distill that concentration on intervals and resonance with poised consideration. Here, the notes and harmonies are allowed to sit. It is not about motion or development, but rather about simply letting the sounds unfold across the duration of the piece.
Frey has stated about his music, “A sequence of notes is most composers' starting point. And it's where I stop. Not that I cease to do anything at all; sometimes it takes a bit more, sometimes a bit less. There are so many traps, so many ways of destroying the sequence, because people think it needs a little compositional help ... More important is the relation of the material to elapsing time.” Listen to the half-hour reading of “Pianist, Alone (2),” and one hears these elemental building blocks accrue with a steadfast forbearance. Thomas places each phrase and chord-set evenly across the duration of the piece and the music advances with an unwavering beauty bereft of any standard notion of melody or harmonic progression. “Extended Circular Music No. 9,” composed over 2014 and 2015 layers in even more brooding consonance over its half-hour course. Yet even here, the music proceeds with notes and chords sounding alone with a sense of succession rather than melodic or harmonic progression.
Frey’s string quartets, particularly “Striechquartett II,” are some of his most absorbing pieces, particularly as performed by Montreal-based Quatuor Bozzini. In these pieces, the composer makes potent use of the microtonal nuances of the string instruments to elicit fragile, almost vocalized voicings of his poised harmonic structures. Where his second string quartet created a diaphanous scrim of sound, on “String Quartet No. 3,” he opens things up, introducing a spaciousness to the deft voicings. The members of the quartet are completely synched in to Frey’s strategies, fully embodying the tonal structures into a singular sound. Frey writes about this piece, “Elemental materials and constructions are thereby perceived as a sensation, and mindfulness consists in hanging these sensations in balance before they have arrived at the limitations of expressiveness.” And it is the way that the quartet hangs at the edges of expressiveness, letting the sensations of the notes and harmonies play out without investing them with dramatic expression. It is this equanimity and stability that allows the piece to play out in a totally absorbing way.
“Unhörbare Zeit” (inaudible times) adds two percussionists to the mx and here the structure opens up even more. The durations of silence are as central to the piece as the sounds of strings and the low rumbles of percussion. Frey states that he is working with “audible and inaudible durations that appear partly simultaneously and partly consecutively. They give the piece lucidity and transparency, as well as materiality and solidity.” While silence as a structural element has been fully absorbed into the vocabulary of contemporary composition, it is the way that Frey gives the silences weight and dimension within this piece that really stands out. The balance of the timbre of strings, low register percussion, the rustle of room sounds and the mercurial pacing of sound and silence is fully entrancing.”
–Michael Rosenstein, Point of Departure
“When the Swiss clarinetist and composer Jürg Frey was celebrated as Composer in Residence at the 2015 Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, pianist Philip Thomas wrote of him, "Jürg Frey the composer is inseparable from Jürg Frey the composer. To understand his music is to know that underlying each event, each phrase, each rest, each relationship, is the beating heart of a performing musician." If Thomas needed to cite musical evidence in support of those words, an ideal choice would be the current album of Thomas's own renditions of six Frey compositions.
The compositions—ranging from 1992's brief "In Memoriam Cornelius Cardew" to "Extended Circular Music No. 9" from 2014/2015—paint a coherent, integrated picture of Frey the composer. That is even truer when the current album is considered in conjunction with the Another Timbre 2015 double CD of Frey compositions, Grizzana and Other Pieces 2009-2014, played by a seven-member ensemble that included both Frey and Thomas.
The success of Circles and Landscapes owes as much to Thomas as to Frey's compositions, with Simon Reynell's warm, intimate recording capturing every nuance of the pianist's performances—vital, given the importance of the relative volumes of the notes, the spaces in between them and their decay-times. Thomas manages to get all those just right—in fact, so right that it is difficult to imagine his renditions of the pieces being bettered by himself or anyone else.
For example, lasting nearly half-an-hour, the centrepiece of the album is a version of "Pianist, Alone (2)" which, true to its title, makes the pianist sound very exposed. Any slight glitch of timing or pedalling would be all too obvious, but Thomas delivers a flawless performance so such matters become irrelevant, leaving the listener to savour the spare beauty of the composition in Thomas's hands. Throughout the album, that symbiosis of composer and performer is repeated time and again.
Having begun with a Thomas quote, let's end with one from Frey himself. In a 2015 interview on the Another Timbre website , he made the following significant comments, "In my work, I consider each note as an individual, I respect each note as a sound personality. This may also be one of the reasons why I continue to compose by hand: I can give my attention to every note. I take responsibility for the note, and I also want that every note itself feels good and right in its place and in the context." No further comment is necessary... Frey's loving care and attention to detail shine through in his work. Simply exquisite. “
John Eyles, All About Jazz
“A few months ago I noticed the change in Jürg Frey’s music in recent years, when discussing two contrasting but very fine albums of his earlier and later music. A similar impression was made by the concert of his 2nd and 3rd string quartets by the Quatuor Bozzini in Huddersfield last November: that Frey is moving away from ideas and towards music. Frey has long been associated with the Wandelweiser collective, but his recent music has been compromising the “purity” Wandelweiser’s reverence for silence. With this supposed loss of aesthetic purity, Frey has embraced a purity of sound.
After releasing the quietly beautiful Grizzana album, Another Timbre released a CD of Philip Thomas playing Frey’s recent piano music at the end of last year. I previously wrote of his third string quartet that Frey was joining Morton Feldman as a fellow master of non-functional harmony, adapting some of the more rhetorical elements of classical and romantic music, but piecemeal, on his own terms and his own ends. In this piano music, most of it composed between 2010 and 2014, there is a similar sense of exploration, without any perceived goal, to that found in Feldman’s “middle period” before he discovered the tenuous equilibrium found in repeating patterns.
At that time, Feldman was also moving away from abstraction and responding to the need to create melodies (“big Puccini-like melodies”). An interview on the Another Timbre website shows Frey seeking a common solace in a material understanding of music, and in negotiating the paradoxes that arise when wanting to compose without disturbing the music’s material.
When composing for the piano, the notion of harmony is more prominent – although we know all the (lovely) extended techniques that have been developed for the piano, to make it sound unlike a piano. But yes, the piano remains the instrument to represent harmony…. When I write for piano, I shouldn’t rely on the piano itself, but on the composition. The piano gives single notes, dyads and chords too easily. Also, if I write consonant dyads, it could suddenly sound wrong, ironic, like a quotation rather than the real sound. In this context to compose means to build a basic confidence in the clear and restricted material that you are working with.
The shorter pieces have a meditative quality, alternating between pedal tones and chords. The longer pieces take on a resemblance to a journey through a succession of musical terrains. Sometimes progress is slow, tentative, with long periods stranded in one particular harmony or register, before unexpectedly moving on. It becomes clear that the journey is its own destination. If there is a structure underneath it all, Frey does his best to conceal or disrupt it or render it irrelevant to the listener.
The album begins with a much older piece, the brief In Memoriam Cornelius Cardew from 1993, with a tonal palette that anticipates the later works. Has Frey allowed a space for emotional expression in his new music, however abstracted? It’s interesting that when philosophy is raised in the interview, he demurs but admits that he feels “a closeness” to Deleuze and Spinoza, two Western thinkers who tried to reason without a dichotomy between mind and body.
The piano is close-miked on this CD, focussing on the grain of the instrument’s sounds. Thomas’ playing is softly-spoken but full-voiced – well suited to the quiet but indomitable character marking out a trail through an empty expanse, as in the longest piece on the album. It’s titled Pianist, Alone (2); a title which seems nakedly descriptive at first but takes on a narrative aspect after hearing it. This time, the protagonist is a little more experienced.”
Ben Harper, Boring Like a Drill
“Jürg Frey's compositions can be so elusive, so hard to see, that the intention behind them often seems out of reach. A composer's intention, of course, isn't requisite to getting something from his or her work, but in the hazy overlap of minimalist improvisation and minimalist composition, that overarching feeling of motivation (especially in ensemble work) is often the only, or at least primary, characteristic suggesting a preconceived plan of action.
A clarinetist himself and a member of the Wandelweiser Group of contemporary composers concerned with using silence, Frey's work bears certain resemblances to the master of minimalist composition, Morton Feldman. Both are given to extended pauses, repetition and shifting time. But Frey also works in microtones and gradual glissandoes, creating an ambiguity quite unlike Feldman the formalist's clear (if slow) statements. Such blurring isn't easily achieved on the piano, however, which makes Frey's compositions for that instrument distinctive, and arguably his strongest work.
Circles and Landscapescollects six of Frey's compositions for solo piano, all played with a fragile beauty by the British performer Philip Thomas, who has given the premieres to several Christian Wolff compositions and has worked with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. The set opens with the briefest of the pieces, dedicated to an early cartographer of contemporary composition. "In Memoriam Cornelius Cardew" is also by far the earliest piece on the disc, dating from 1993. (The other works are all from 2010-2015.) It makes for a fitting preamble to the 74 minutes that follow: short, stair-stepping descents that never reach a bottom. The other small-scale piece here is "Miniature in Five Parts", which is the most formal in meter and tonal structure presented — almost startlingly so.
The remarkable centerpiece of this elaborately set table is the half hour of "Pianist, Alone (2)", a Feldman-esque title for the most Feldman-ian piece presented here. The piece moves easily with no need for tonal conclusions and no resistance to them when they're happened upon.
The album is dominated by circles (the landscapes must be off in the distance), with "Circular Music No. 5", "Extended Circular Music No. 2" and "Extended Circular Music No. 9" comprising about half the playing time. Placed intermittently across the program, their single notes and occasional clusters, primarily in the upper register, seem predictable but will trick you every time, like looking for patterns in a cloud of fireflies.”
Kurt Gottschalk, The Squid’s Ear
CD copies sold out, but downloads still available here