Stephen Montague - Slow Dance on a Burial Ground

What's this? Two posts in two weeks? And more coming!
I'm trying to make my posting a bit more regular, rather than the super-infrequent posts of the past. Another post is coming up next Sunday. I can't promise that I'll be able to maintain a once-a-week posting rate, but I'll definitely aim for at least one entry per month. Anyway, on to the music!




Stephen Montague doesn't seem to be a terribly well-known composer. I never see him mentioned in lists of post-minimalist composers, possibly because he's UK-based, though he was born and raised in the US. Maybe he's better-known in Europe, I don't know. I only discovered him because I was checking out every LP on Lovely Records I could find. No real internet presence either, aside from a bio and work list at his publisher's page.

Montague is one of the group of post-minimalist composers who combined elements of minimalism with romantic classical music, like John (Coolidge) Adams, Daniel Lentz, and others. He's got a number of CDs out, of which I have a couple, on ASV and Continuum Records. They're nice albums, some orchestral stuff, some chamber music and some mixed electronic works, and I would recommend them to anyone interested in the more accessible end of the post-minimalists, but this here LP is rather different.

Side A of the LP is taken up by the 24 minute piece which gives the LP its title, "Slow Dance on a Burial Ground", a tape piece constructed from electronic sounds, recordings of log drums, field recordings and folk flutes. It reminds me a little of Alvin Curran's early work, with its mixture of drones, electronics and field recordings, but Montague's piece here has a strong ethnic/folky element, what with the prominent flutes. It's a beautiful piece, static and textural, which sticks with a consistent sound and feel throughout.

"Paramell I" is the next track, for muted trombone and "muted" piano. Fantastic new music trombonist James Fulkerson plays the trombone, while Montague plays the piano, presumably muted with some fabric or something. Much of the piece features the two instruments playing in unison together, very fast staccato notes, sometimes with longer drone notes from the trombone. Surprisingly the sounds of the trombone and piano blend together, and it can be hard to tell which instrument is which, and when they play together it creates a nice combined texture.

"Paramell Va" (meaning Paramell 5, variation a) is a somewhat similar piece for solo piano, here played by Philip Mead. It features very fast staccato playing on the piano, alternating between high and low chords. I could again compare it to Charlemagne Palestine's Strumming Music, but this piece has a very, very different character. It's more melodic rather than textural, and not what I would call droney at all. It's minimalistically repetitive, but with a more natural, free-flowing character than, say, Philip Glass' piano music, with fantastic crescendos caused by the use of the sustain pedal.

This is a really excellent LP from an under-appreciated composer, and certainly the best work of his that I've heard. It was released on LP on the amazing Lovely Records in 1984, and is one of the very few items on that label that has never been re-released. Lovely seems to have been doing some archival releases lately, though, so maybe that'll happen someday.

Ingram Marshall - The Fragility Cycles

Ingram Marshall has been active since the mid 70s, and this here is his first album. He's one of the earlier second-generation minimalists, along with John Adams, and studied under early electronic music greats Vladimir Ussachevsky and Morton Subotnick.

This LP was recorded in 1977 (at Charlemagne Palestine's New York City loft!), and released on Marshall's own IBU records.

The Fragility Cycles was a semi-improvised piece for live performance, performed solo by Marshall. It's played on gambuh (a balinese bamboo flute), Tcherepnin synthesizer, tape, voice, a delay system, and some percussion instruments. The end result is a beautiful, droning swirl of sound. The piece is very textural and slow, with sounds meshing with one another beautifully.

Marshall has continued to explore fairly similar sounds, his relatively well-known piece "Fog Tropes" for brass sextet is a beautiful, droning classic. I've got a couple of more recent CDs of his, and it's all excellent, definitely worth checking out.

I believe some of the music from this LP has been rereleased on CD on IKON and Other Early Works on New World records, but I don't think it has the entire Fragility cycles album, which is a shame because the whole thing flows beautifully as one piece of music.

Alvin Curran - Fiori Chiari Fiori Oscuri

Alvin Curran was one of the members of the Musica Elettronica Viva collective, along with Fred Rzewski, Richard Teitelbaum and others.

Curran's first solo album, Songs and Views of the Magnetic Garden, was originally released in 1975, and consisted of largely improvised live electronic and acoustic drone music. Fiori Chiari Fiori Oscuri was released a short while later, and continues in a similar vein, with more soundscapey tapes, vintage synths, and acoustic instruments.

Side one starts with recordings of a cat purring, and then goes through a long series of electronic synthy drone bits, with occasional soundscape recordings underneath the synths.
Side two goes through a lot of change in its 28 minutes, starting with Alexis Rzewski speaking (I'm guessing he was Fred's young son). It goes into some toy piano, then quite a bit of super-fast minimalist piano playing, in the vein of LaMonte Young & Charlemagne Palestine's piano music. The piece ends on some nice improvised jazzy piano, which fades into electronic chimes and tapes of dogs barking.

While Songs and Views was rereleased on Catalyst, a subsidiary of BMG, in the mid-90s, Fiori Chiari has remained out of print for the past 30 + years, never released digitally. Shame. It would be really great if someone out there collected all of these 70s Curran LPs together and rereleased them.

UPDATE:
New World records has, in fact, collected all of Curran's 70s LPs and rereleased them, in a 3CD set. Looks amazing. Took down the download link since this is now commercially available and I don't want to bite into their sales. Go check out the set HERE