With a title invoking alarm bells, this ambitious collection of the New York composer’s work is turbulent and disorienting, suggesting cycles of crisis and change.
Patrick Higgins composes with a scholar’s historical perspective and a punk’s sense of abandon. While many avant-garde musicians strive for originality by incorporating elements from outside Western tradition—or scrapping tradition altogether—Higgins melds the elegance of baroque chamber music, the colorful dissonance of Krystof Penderecki and Edgard Varèse, and the unrestrained discord of contemporary noise music, bending stylistic tropes from each era towards a central aesthetic meeting point. One of his most fascinating releases, Early Music, is a collaboration with violinist Josh Modney in which the duo fuses Renaissance forms with digital processing and the serrated edge of electric guitar. There are moments on Bachanalia, his album of radical reinterpretations for guitar from across Bach’s oeuvre, where the addition of delay and other electronic effects contorts the well-worn compositions into something resembling 20th century minimalism. Higgins’ influences are canonical, but he approaches them with as much skepticism as reverence.
Bach again provides the jumping-off point for TOCSIN, Higgins’ most ambitious and wide-reaching collection of original compositions. The album contains three distinct multi-movement pieces, but it begins with an arrangement of Contrapunctus XIV, an unfinished fugue written at the end of Bach’s life, performed by Mivos Quartet. The piece ends abruptly in the middle of a phrase, alluding to the alternate meaning of “fugue”: a sudden dissociation or break in the normative perception of reality. In the album’s liner notes Higgins asserts that his own compositions take that bruised silence and use it as a mandate to explore “the question of death, the task of ritual, and the crisis of representation in our contemporary world.” The album’s title, meanwhile, invokes the act of ringing an alarm bell, although the urgency it suggests is dampened slightly by the quartet’s somewhat leaden performance of this fragmentary opening piece. As a conceptual hinge, however, Higgins’ framing of the piece is inspired.
Higgins’ own compositions are turbulent and insistent. “SQ3,” performed again (and more persuasively) by Mivos Quartet, is filled with uncomfortable stillnesses and bursts of agitated frenzy emerging from that initial crack of silence galvanized by Bach’s death. The suite is divided into four movements, each retaining the same eerie atmosphere but varying in structure and tumult. Higgins pushes the players to cacophonic extremes only to pull them back into a shadowy quiet, the strings groaning to life like a ferocious animal struggling to overcome the effects of a sedative. In the second movement, dissonant, droning crescendos dissolve into fits of pizzicato that then crumple back into silence. It is only with the piece’s final movement, allusively titled “Fugue (Burial),” that Higgins turns to more structured notions of harmonic and melodic development; even then the framework dissolves in the piece’s final minutes, returning to powerful thuds of clustered tones and screeching wails.
“Tocsin,” the album’s double-movement centerpiece for two cellos and piano, benefits from the spotlight on prodigious pianist Vicky Chow, whose exactitude and expressive instincts transform what might otherwise be obtuse into a riveting thrill ride. Her instrument is prepared with objects that transform specific keys into gamelan-like plinks, which come into play in the quietest and most chaotic moments, adding a surrealist bent. Higgins is a technically virtuosic guitarist, and his propensity for disorienting complexity shines in moments when the instruments coalesce into pulsing patterns of indeterminate beats that dance about wildly before collapsing in on themselves. Compared to “SQ3,” the chaos in “Tocsin” feels controlled. Rather than diminish its impact, that precision offers a more approachable entry into the clamorous world that Higgins has built.
Higgins composed and premiered these pieces in 2015 and 2016—a period when, in the U.S., an old way of being was snapped in half, and a new period of turmoil was intensifying. The music on TOCSIN, charged with brutality and unease, feels like an acknowledgement of the cycles of crisis and change confronting us in the new decade. Alarm bells ring and ring and ring, over and over, but there is force in Higgins’ portrayal of both moments of rupture and the determination to continue on.
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