Genre: Avant-garde, Contemporary
Label: hat ART
Quality: FLAC
Recording Date: 1996
Size: 231 MB

Ernstalbrecht Stiebler is one of only a handful of composers from his generation who obsess themselves with three principal concerns: sonority, rhythm, and duration. All other musical notions are part and parcel secondary. The pursuit of these obsessions has led to a large and varied body of work. The three pieces here, all of them first recordings, offer a shining example of how Stiebler has assumed all influences since the reclamation of Webern and Stravinsky in the 1950s, and taken in what has come after, and used it sparingly to carve out an iconoclastic music that is, if not beautiful to listen to, compellingly meditative in its beauty. The first work here, the title piece, was composed for bass flute and electronic tape. The flute played by the ubiquitous Eberhard Blum is the responsorial instrument. Blum responds with sonority to lines he has previously recorded on tape. Pitch, interval, and duration are all subject to sonorous statements made previously, whether in harmony, drone, or in dissonance. Over 18 minutes in length, it offers a glimpse of the difficult restraint placed upon a performer in one of Stiebler's scores. For the listener however, the droning effects created by a compressed set of tonalities, and a rhythmic element that is only present in the duration of each phrase, the result is airy, sparse, contemplative. In the "Trio '89" for violin-cello, piano, and percussion, performed by no less than the glorious Frances-Marie Uitti, the wonderful Marianne Schroeder, and stalwart percussionist Robyn Schulkowsky, the mannerism is different but the process the same. The longest work here, Uitti opens the work with long, bowed lines as Schroeder reaches inside the piano for various strings, signaling the specific pitches and how they're to be manipulated in the work. The beautiful thing about the restraint in this beginning is how natural it feels; this softly droning elemental music where percussion block and piano strings rather than chords set up the language for what is to follow. This is all microtonalism; semi-quavers and quartertones abound from the reverberation of Uitti's droning. When she changes pitch, the activity moves in a sideways direction harmonically and looks to interval and duration as a guiding force through the score. More direct than Morton Feldman's music yet far less direct that Cage's setting of conditions. One can hear the nuances of Webern, but also the approach to sonority practiced by Stockhausen. When Schroeder begins to play notes in the lower register and Uitti scales her pitch ever southward, the elementary nature of Schulkowsky acts as a bridge between sonorities and becomes the messenger of duration — and its limitations. Dynamically the work increases in intensity but never strikes out of its confines as music of delicate articulation rather than shock or bombast. The final work here, "Sequenz II," for violin-cello and tape from 1984 is the most rewarding in the collection. The cello is detuned to open certain strings to one another organically, creating the appearance of no flats, no sharps, and no possibility for arpeggios. It's bowing is across the entire range of the color spectrum in each interval and carried within it the notion of plainchant, or monody. Uitti is so careful, so restrained, and full of the composer's vision, she makes the taped drones and the cello's long phrases a single part, the microtones emanating from between their ever-so-slight different pitches — just enough to cause vibration as a force but not enough to cause dissonance. The repetition is indeed trance-like, yet dynamics change by the ebb and flow of the differing sonorities that occur within and between intervals. This is tOption (9-10/96, pp.132-133) — "...long tones moving around a central drone that functions as a kind of anchor....each sound is to be savored...each note and its accompanying array of overtones and sonorities is to be thouroughly explored...each color...is of crucial importance..."

eberhard blum, bass flute
marianne schroeder, piano
robyn schulkowsky, percussion
frances-marie uitti, violoncello

1. three in one (1992) for bass flute and tape (dedicated to eberhard blum) 18:20
2. trio ’89 for violoncello, piano, and percussion 23:25
3. sequenz ii (1984) for violoncello and tape (dedicated to frances-marie uitti) 15:29

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