In a letter to his patron Harriet Shaw Weaver as he sought psychiatric treatment for his daughter Lucia, struggled with his failing eyesight and laboured to finish Work in Progress, which would become Finnegans Wake, the Irish author James Joyce with a flash of defiance wrote that ‘nobody has ever written English prose that can be compared with that of a tiresome footling little Anglican parson who afterwards became a prince of the only true church’. He was talking about John Henry Newman, a poet and prose stylist as well as a theologian and educator, who became a cardinal after converting to the Catholic Church and in 2019 was canonised as a saint.
This week Arvo Pärt releases an album of compositions which blend the timbres of choir and string orchestra, starting with a new version of the Littlemore Tractus which was written to celebrate the 200th anniversary of Newman’s birth, based on the final lines of one of his most famous sermons which builds on the exhortation ‘be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves’ to end with a prayer for safe lodging, holy rest and eternal peace. Recorded last year at the Methodist Church in Tallinn, the album also features the compositions Greater Antiphons, L’abbé Agathon and Cantique des Degres whose soaring choruses, pliant drones and silvery strings are performed by the Tallinn Chamber Orchestra and the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir under the direction of Tõnu Kaljuste.
Since releasing her last studio album Aviary back in 2018, the balmy troubadour, memory wanderer and stranded silhouette Julia Holter composed the score for Eliza Hittman’s award-winning drama Never Rarely Sometimes Always, wrote and performed a new live soundtrack to Carl Theodor Dreyer’s silent landmark The Passion of Joan of Arc with the 36-strong Chorus of Opera North, reimagined through rippling warmth and dark lustrous reveries the Keyboard Fantasies of Beverly Glenn-Copeland, featured alongside Call Super and from memetic phobias to moss-green curtains and the smell of conifers, elaborated the song cycle Behind the Wallpaper with Alex Temple and Spektral Quartet. Dappled and playful, her new single ‘Sun Girl’ is a summery incantation which makes soft-hued psychedelic use of fragments of flute, field recordings, the Yamaha CS-60, bagpipes, Mellotron, drums and fretless bass.
Seeking ‘a leaner version of the piece, a more human version, one that emphasises every breath, and that heightens the individuality of each singer’ the Bang on a Can composer David Lang updates his Pulitzer Prize-winning the little match girl passion featuring the vocal talents of Molly Netter, Kate Maroney, Gene Stenger, Dashon Burton, Sarah Brailey and his longtime collaborators Trio Mediaeval. The digital version of the album includes three additional tracks where Trio Mediaeval tackle ‘i want to live’, a movement from the staged oratorio Shelter, and offer a fresh version of ‘just (after song of songs)’, an Old Testament echo of intimacy which was adapted for Paolo Sorrentino’s acclaimed comedy-drama Youth, while Brailey performs the album premiere of ‘let me come in’ as Lang renders fresh vistas of accessibility to a beloved work of modern choral music.
Teasing out the tensions which exist between the vibrations of the human voice and the oscillations of vintage synths, for his latest album on Tresor Records the dub techno mastermind Moritz von Oswald turned to his own collection of classic equipment including the VCS 3 and EMS Synthi AKS, the Prophet-5, the Oberheim four voice polyphonic and the Moog Model 15. His pulsating abstractions were subsequently transcribed to sheet music by the Finnish composer and pianist Jarkko Riihimäki and performed at the Ölberg-Kirche in Kreuzberg by the sixteen-piece Vocalconsort Berlin. Drawing from the ensemble works of Edgard Varèse, György Ligeti and Iannis Xenakis as well as his own seminal output as one half of Basic Channel, whose stabbing chords and shifting timbres provided the slowed-down yet sumptuous basis for minimal techno, von Oswald proceeded to pull these choral recordings back into the synthesized parts of Silencio, furrowing out those liminal spaces between dark and dissonant and light and ethereal.
Following up on a slew of collaborative efforts – this year alone with the chiptune and gabber veteran Scotch Rolex, as one half of the magick-infused Flesh & The Dream alongside the vocalist Heather Leigh, and on an album of limpid transcendence with the young Hindustani classical singer Siddhartha Belmannu and the Polish folk practitioner Wacław Zimpel – the trance maestro Shackleton turns to open-ended drones, xenharmonic percussion and German volkslieder. The duo of Frank Menchaca and Anar Badalov as Hourloupe conceive an Opera of the War which opens amid the charred remains of a ruined theatre, moving through corporeal testaments, chance notes and the scorched pages of history, the pain of loss and lovers’ furtive trysts as clouds of synths, drifting lap steel, prepared bass, blackened power chords and blinking electronics finally culminate in a clangorous iron din.
Drawing variously from the lyrical abstractions of Hans Hartung, the magical thinking of Joan Didion and the Moroccan portraits of the contemporary photographer Hassan Hajjaj, composed between her native Taiwan, her home in New York City and a six-month residency at Cité internationale des arts in the Marais and Montmartre, the vibraphonist Yuhan Su issues a paean to freedom in the company of the alto saxophonist Caroline Davis, the pianist Matt Mitchell, the bassist Marty Kenney and drummer Dan Weiss. Into the cavernous frame beneath a Monterey Park hot pot restaurant, Patrick Shiroishi returns armed with a single alto saxophone, a glockenspiel, two microphones and a Zoom recorder, delving into Japanese concepts of free improvisation and negative space for his poignant and surreptitiously spellbinding new album I was too young to hear silence, which closes with a plea to the heavens at the end of one long improvised take. Tracks by Akai Solo, Martyna Basta and Keith Fullerton Whitman also feature in the latest curt roundup of all that’s best in music.
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Arvo Pärt – ‘Littlemore Tractus’
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AKAI SOLO – ‘WAVELAND’
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Shackleton – ‘The Dying Regime’
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Yuhan Su – ‘She Goes To A Silent War’
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Keith Fullerton Whitman – ‘191127.2.SWN.Amb’
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Moritz von Oswald – ‘Luminoso (Version)’
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David Lang – ‘just (after song of songs)’ (feat. Trio Mediaeval)
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Patrick Shiroishi – ‘if only heaven would give me another ten years’
