Michael Gordon & Theatre of Voices – A Western

Assailed by Howard Hawks and John Wayne for its marshal cut adrift, lauded by some viewers as an allegory against McCarthyism and containing in Gary Cooper and Grace Kelly one of the most memorable pairings ever on screen in spite or perhaps because of their twenty-eight-year age difference, High Noon the touching and steadfast Fred Zinnemann movie Western already possesses an Oscar-winning score and one of the cinema’s most iconic musical themes. Yet like a tumbleweed skirting the borders of a saloon, with a deft touch the composer Michael Gordon returns to the fray, using High Noon as a jumping-off point for his own evocation of the genre, which was recorded at Garnisonskirken in Copenhagen in the summer of 2020 by the vocal ensemble Theatre of Voices and their founder and conductor Paul Hillier.

While there is an underlying sturdiness to the nine compositions which make up A Western the expression of the parts is lapping and fey, less redolent of saguaros and sandstone buttes than sloshing waves in the vein of the California works of Daniel Lentz with their looped vocals and sun-kissed layers. Can the panorama of a Western be effectively conjured by a mere list or word association game, is the question Gordon both asks and answers on the prelude where Theatre of Voices – here comprising the sopranos Else Torp and Kate Macoboy, the alto Laura Lamph, the tenors Paul Bentley-Angell and Jakob Skjoldborg with Jakob Bloch Jespersen holding down the bass – sing in the round, reeling off nouns from cowboys, buffalos and sunsets to those tumbling tumbleweeds, Indians and Apaches and that gnarled hero himself in the form of Gary Cooper.

Opening through the tenor and bass, the second piece recalls ‘When I was a boy, I played with guns’ with an air of nostalgia, whose lingering plaintiveness is cut through by the plosive ‘pew’ of a verbalised pistol. And the third composition repeats the refrain ‘I wanna be a cowboy’ with the quality of a boomerang or wobble board, with the emphasis laid squarely upon the wanting.

At once charming and twee, musically captivating and perhaps even a little bit disconcerting for its roomy nostalgia and prevailing naiveté, through the course of A Western the composer Gordon manages to capture a sense of childlike wonderment over his chosen subject matter, evoking a sense of mid-century suburbia and kids playing in the yard, adopting the roles of cowboy and Indian which were gendered even as Gordon and Theatre of Voices tug at gender conventions, whose stereotypes were no doubt internalised and long defined collective attitudes to heroes and villains and life on the frontier. In short A Western is a childlike reverie which still manages to capture in bristling and windswept fashion both the drama and the looming complexity at the root of the films.

‘A Western (Part 1)’ relays with some foreboding the events of High Noon, from a morning wedding to a ‘gang of gunslingers’ who ‘arrive on the noon train, seeking revenge’ and ‘the marshal’s new bride’, portrayed here as ‘a devout pacifist’ who ‘pleads with the marshal to get out of town’. But he has never run before and some habits aren’t for changing, as the narration of events shifts into a strained and striated dialogue between lovers.

Just like an old movie night, stranded on the sofa, flicking between three or four channels on a cathode-ray tube with its phosphor-coated screen, A Western intercuts the action with advertisements, in this case ‘A television commercial, 1958’ which sells to us in swooning voice as the ensemble sing ‘You are watching a demonstration of the most authentic cat pistol in the world’. That begets questions of finance, as the following composition wonders ‘Whose parents had the money to buy those toys?’ and states ‘I made my toy guns out of wood’, in a return to the plaintive and gilded wistfulness of ‘When I was a boy I played with guns’, here with more consequences as the ensemble return us to the immediate sights and sounds of childhood, singing ‘I yelled bang bang, you’re dead’.

The composer Michael Gordon, a co-founder of the Bang on a Can collective alongside his wife Julia Wolfe and David Lang, might view the Western at some remove as he grew up in Nicaragua before returning to his birthplace of Miami Beach at the age of eight years old. As the songs on A Western become more hallowed and liturgical, they manage to retain the gossamer lightness of a childhood caper through his penchant for lean and whittling minimalism.

‘I wanna be a cowboy (Part 2)’ fortifies the wobbling tenor refrain as Laura Lamph’s wiry alto gets in on the act before a burnished and yearning top line of soprano arcs over the composition, singing ‘I want to ride in the saddle ’til the day is done. I want to sit round the fire and sing this song’ in the manner of a fading sunset. In the background Jakob Bloch Jesperson’s bass fills out the composition, urging ‘Whoopie ti yi yo git along little dogies’ from the traditional cowboy ballad which has been covered by everyone from Bing Crosby and the Kingston Trio to the cowboy king Roy Rogers and the Sons of the Pioneers.

Returning to High Noon, on ‘A Western (Part 2)’ we are made aware of the passing of time and the ticking hands of the clock, with Theatre of Voices once again outlining a splintering narrative as Frank Miller’s gang complains ‘the marshal tries to round up our posse’ with a certain lustfulness while the devout Amy laments ‘You’re asking me to wait an hour to find out if I’m a wife or a widow’, a line pulled directly from the film. The ensemble give shape to these words through stretched syllables which capture more than ever the emptying out of the small town and the portentousness of the events as they unfold, with the album closer ‘The Showdown’ detailing the Colt Single Action Army revolver, known as the ‘peacemaker’ or ‘the gun that won the west’, before concluding the drama with a dizzying, at once rhapsodic and disturbed counterpoint as the couple ride out of that dusty place for good.

Cantaloupe Music, the record label created by the Bang on a Can organisation, releases A Western as one half of a split album alongside a choral work by Caroline Shaw. Billed as an extension of the vocal acrobatics which Shaw has employed with Roomful of Teeth as well as across her numerous collaborations with Sō Percussion, the piece How to fold the wind enfolds tender loving care through a musical enactment of origami folding, from rustling paper-thin whispers to other brief utterances, counting patterns and dexterous verbal play.

How to fold the wind was also conducted by Paul Hillier at Garnisonskirken, this time in the spring of 2021 with Ars Nova Copenhagen, another leading vocal ensemble which specialises in both early music, especially the polyphonic choral music of the Renaissance, and more contemporary fare.

The prefatory ‘In the Beginning’ is swathed in the sounds of somebody enjoying a can of soda on a nice warm day, with the hissing of bottle caps being yanked open or ring tabs being pulled as the carbon dioxide rushes out plus those satisfied mmms and aahs which follow the first cool sip. Soprano and alto voices tentatively and falteringly, as though beset by uncertainty, start to outline the origami process as if reading from instructions aloud, saying ‘with a square folded in half to form a square in a piece to begin’. Some humming and swooning, almost cherubic vocal harmonies characterise the middle section before rustling whispers give way to a beautiful pattern of ‘fold and unfold’ or ‘unfold and follow’ as the ensemble unite with an ebullient and thoroughly captivated air.

How to fold the wind features more sustained notes and lush counterpoints, with some voice crossing. The second track ‘In Creases’ bears more instructions with an intimate and life-affirming aspect, like ‘turn the edge of the crease’ and ‘edges in, edges out, facing you’. The general breathiness of the composition as well as some of the glissandi and portamenti remind me of Björk’s vocal album Medúlla which featured Tanya Tagaq, the Inuk throat singer, while the layering of the bass voices also calls to mind the trios ‘I am so proud’ from The Mikado or ‘Pretty Lady’ from Pacific Overtures. Deep sighs are accompanied by aspirated stops and some slight sputtering or blown raspberries at the lips, as the last couple of tracks adopt a more nautical atmosphere.