TT 411: Scott Wollschleger, BETWEEN BREATH

The "A" Team

(If you live in NYC, the record release concert of this terrific music is at Roulette this week on Thursday June 27.)

I became a charter member of the Scott Wollschleger fan club some time ago, and have been enjoying each new record as it comes out. A rare chance to hear a favored composer develop in real time!

In the liner notes of Between Breath, just out on New Focus Recordings, I am quoted as describing his music as, “Morton Feldman meets Thelonious Monk meets H.P. Lovecraft.” Certainly true.

Between Breath offers three duos and a solo. Wollschleger worked closely with his performers on innovative extended techniques. The duos sound vast, it is hard to believe two performers in an acoustic setting are making all this sound.

Wollschleger writes:

The album is the culmination of artistic collaborations with a cast of extraordinary musicians, each of whom commissioned the compositions and are featured on this album. Each piece requires a huge amount of physical stamina and concentration; many passages push the musicians to their physical limit. They are the true heroes and navigators of this journey.

To state the obvious, this is “challenging” music. But I always find Wollschleger to be a pretty easy listen. Each note is correct, and major events turn up at the right time.

Violain is in two parts and features violinist Maya Bennardo and violist Hannah Levinson, the members of andPlay. The work begins in the middle of things, an assault of sound. Soon a “gentle” theme counters the roar. Wollschleger: “Many of the sounds are a result of very fast gestures with unconventional bowing techniques.” The second movement is a bit more rhythmic, almost a gigue; at times a minor ninth goes off in one of the strings like an air horn.

Between Breath is for trombonist William Lang and pianist Anne Rainwater. “The opening trombone sound is the musical version of the scream I felt inside my head at that time….Throughout the work the trombone uses a special kind of overpressure invented by Will. We ended up calling this ‘Dirty Split Tone.’” Part of the effect is generated by harmonics that end up being microtonal; even the well-tempered piano gets into the action thanks to special preparations.

It’s a great piece, maybe my new favorite Wollschleger. Throbbing on a piano string can be banal but this is fresh. In the middle, a not-quite plain C seventh chord gets a workout, the “Thelonious Monk” element I mention above.

Anyway, where threads go, it all goes well is a song for soprano Lucy Dhegrae and pianist Nathaniel LaNasa. Wollschleger lets himself be inspired by anything, and in this case it was a fake post from the “John Ashbery” twitter bot account. Both performers also play chromatic pitch pipe. Dhegrae has a beautiful voice and offers flawless control within this insane environment. Some of the piano chords are dense, some are gentle.

The final piece is the longest. Wollschleger explains:

Secret Machine no. 7 was completed after a series of workshops with violinist Miranda Cuckson over a two-year period. The piece uses a metal mute and has a scordatura, tuning the violin’s G string down to an E. The mute allows for the violin to emerge and fade into nothing.

Much of the music was conjured by dreaming, and it gave me the feeling I was chan- neling something telegraphed in from the outside. The material is organized in an ever-expanding, wave-like song form, and correlated to a wave-like expansion of the violin’s range. The piece’s hyper-virtuosity generates an unusual, cool glow of resonance. While writing, I often imagined Miranda performing the music while hovering over a blue-glowing portal, with the sounds of her violin communicating in a secret cosmological language to activate it.

It is rare for Wollschleger to write conventionally “tonal” music, but Secret Machine no. 7 definitely begins with a major triad in open position, a classic violin sound. Of course, this is just the starting point for denial, extension, and imagination. The work explores a whole world of violin possibility. I know both Scott and Miranda pretty well, and it is fun to imagine them in the workshop together creating this magnum opus.

As good as the record is, music this visceral is even better live. Again, the record-release concert is at Roulette two days hence…

Between Breath on Bandcamp.