Northeast Wisconsin Music Review

By Erik Eriksson
Northeast Wisconsin Music Review

fred
eighth blackbird

This contemporary music ensemble has impressed audiences and critics alike with live performances of exciting, often difficult-to-play repertory by present-day composers. With two Çedille Record releases already on the market (“thirteen ways” CDR 90000067 and “beginnings” CDR 90000076), eighth blackbird has established itself as an important presence among premiere ensembles performing the music of our time. You’ll note that this group with a lower-case name likes lower-case titles.

This latest disc, labeled simply “fred,” is devoted entirely to the works of Frederic Rzewski, born in 1938 in Westfield, Massachusetts. After receiving a B.A. in music at Harvard, he pursued his Masters at Princeton, studying there with Roger Sessions and Milton Babbit. With a Fulbright Scholarship, he trained for a year with Luigi Dallapiccola in Florence. Since 1977, he has lived in Brussels, teaching at the Royal Conservatory of Liège.

Rzewski’s music employs “process” methodology which mixes notation with improvisation. An example of this is “Les moutons de Panurge” which requires the musicians to keep adding notes, one at a time, to successive cadences up to sixty-five. At that point, notes are shed, one at a time, until each musician returns to one. The complexity assures that someone will get lost and, when that happens, the others follow – like Panurge’s sheep. Ingenious – and wickedly charming.

Nearly a half hour of this hour-long disc is devoted to Rzewski’s Pocket Symphony, commissioned by eighth blackbird and completed in 2000. Here, too, improvisation is an important element. In fact, in the notes (which are in the form of a conversation between Rzewski and members of eighth blackbird), the composer states, “I don’t think you can really play classical music if you don’t improvise.” Another of his comments is equally illuminating: “I never know what I’m doing until I’ve done it and even then I don’t know what I’ve done.” Pocket Symphony is rich in ideas and humor and, here, is given a definitive performance by the ensemble.

“Coming Together” was inspired by the publication of letters written by Sam Melville after he was murdered in the Attica Prison riots of 1971. Over the increasingly fervid music conceived by Rzewski, words of Melville are read, first in written sequence, then in fragments which are passed (in this arrangement by Matt Albert) from the narrator to other members of the group. These disturbing, cryptic words, at first barely audible, grow into cries of desperation that rend one’s emotions. Rzewski’s score questions as much as it insists, its very semi-improvisational nature adding to its unsettling force.

In live performance, this is a shattering experience and nearly all of that intensity is recreated on this important disc. The eighth blackbird musicians are: Molly Alicia Barth, Flutes; Michael J. Maccaferri, clarinets; Matt Albert, violin; Nicholas Photinos, cello; Matthew Duvall, percussion and Lisa Kaplan, piano. Each is a virtuoso-level artist; together they are unbeatable.

As you listen to this disc, be aware of eighth blackbird’s two previous recordings. They, too, are well worth acquiring.

Copyright © 2005, Northeast Wisconsin Music Review