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Liner Notes for Jürg Frey - lieues d’ombres (Reinier van Houdt - piano)
Miles of Shadows …Touching the air …
From its beginnings in the early 1990s the music of the Wandelweiser group has been associated with silence. This is largely still the case, even though the group is no longer countable in any real sense, and even though some of us have moved away from using silence “as material.” One thing the work of the collective has shown is that silence is elusive: it is everywhere and nowhere. It can feel empty or full, emotionally charged or nearly blank, musical and anti-musical. As Jürg Frey likes to say, sometimes there is even silence in the sound. There are as many styles of silence as there are composers who “use” it. Frey’s music is drawn from a particular silence. It has dimensions, borders, depths – architecture. It begins before the music starts and remains after it ends. It seems to come from the air itself. If one pays close attention to the environment – to the dust drifting down in the light, to the gradations of greyness of shadows, to the smallest movements in the room, to the tonal hum of distant traffic, the music is already there. Frey seems to have always known that the music of a quiet place surrounds and envelops us. His miraculous L‘âme est sans retenue series is his clearest expression of this awareness. In one of his earliest pieces, Sam Lazaro Bros, it is as if the music was composed by the (found) notebook itself. The presence, the silences … There are many (related) things present in Frey’s silences: Gentleness Reverence Melancholy Grey Mists Countryside Shadows Distance Restraint Coolness (with an edge of warmth) Quietude Acceptance Walking in the mountains near Jürg’s summer home, you might feel you hear sounds emanating from the fog. They are never there for long, vanishing just as they are heard. In Frey’s music presence is coupled with absence. There is surface, but it reveals depths. Brightness is outlined by shadow. Movement is restrained by stillness. Boldness is tempered by humility. The “ja” hides a “nein.” Vielleicht. The music hovers between states of “being there” (Dasein) and “not being there” (Abwesenheit). Frey’s music humbly raises this almost neutral condition to an ontology. The unexplored depths of signs … Frey’s scores are notated by hand. He draws each line, each dot and each circle on a blank page. It’s a beautiful script, instantly recognizable. These carefully, but not obsessively written scores tell the musician that each mark, each event is to be recognized as unique. If there are 52 “repetitions” of a sound (as there are at the beginning of Les tréfonds inexplorés des signes (25)) he wants each instance to count. One would be forgiven for thinking there might have been 51 or 53 repetitions, and no one would be the wiser. But Frey means 52 exactly. It’s also not really 52. It is 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1. One is added to the next until suddenly they stop or move on. We can be sure that Frey played them in his mind and on his piano until he was certain that it was time to stop. It stops just here. In the piano works included in this set there are single notes, dyads, triads, occasionally four or more notes in a chord. There are rests of various durations. The scores have very occasional phrase markings and articulations and almost no dynamics or expressive marks. What we see are indicators, pointers: signs. They are placeholders for what Frey knows is the dense experience of each real sound. Because every sound requires care, because no two sounds are the same, each sign points to a depth which cannot be named. When a performer of Frey’s music becomes aware of this fact, each piece begins to feel like an awesome task. A pianist alone … This recording of piano works, mostly from the last fifteen years, couples Frey’s distinct sensibility with the equally distinct world of Reinier van Houdt. Houdt’s work makes audible the density of the situation: those “other” things that we hear while playing music, both in the environment and in our heads. He writes and performs to make these things directly audible. Since it is not possible to add elements to Frey’s meticulously constructed scores, Van Houdt has to find another way to reveal the multitude of considerations involved in playing each sound. He does this by making each moment of Frey’s music resonate privately. He is not playing a score for the composer or for us. He is alone with the music, discovering it for himself. Sam Lazaro Bros … I’ve spent hundreds of hours listening to the music of Jürg Frey. I’m as familiar with some of his pieces as I am with my own or anyone else’s. If there is a revelation for me in this collection, it is that Frey’s music is guided by melody. Perhaps everyone knows this already? But there are after all so many pieces with simple sounds, chords, single tones alternating with silences, cosmic formal structures, that it would be easy to forget. In Van Houdt’s interpretations, melody shows up above all in the way in which the chordal sounds are balanced. Sam Lazaro Bros is the piece by Frey that I’ve heard the greatest number of interpreters play. But it has never sounded like this. It is by far the earliest piece in this collection, and if any piece is a candidate for the archetypal Frey work, it’s this one. Van Houdt magically gets the melody of the top voice to sound just enough above the lower voices to make it sing. Van Houdt discovers melody everywhere in this music. He finds beautiful lines in the inner voices of the chord sequences of Pianist, alone (2). He never loses the connection between fading sounds or sounds that occur as frames around silences. Van Houdt knows there is melody in (so-called) repetitions. The material repeated in Extended Circular Music 9 is part of an ever-widening spiral. (A spiral is also a kind of line.) Van Houdt plays the three-hour melody that is this collection. Extended circular music … One of Frey’s favorite painters is Giorgio Morandi. Morandi is known for using just a few props. The same vases, pitchers and vessels appear in painting after painting. But they are shifted into a different arrangement for each one. Although the paintings are undeniably beautiful, some might find a whole exhibition of Morandi’s work monotonous. One must take the time to discover what is going on with this continuous rotation of the objects. The palette is muted, but the colors change subtly with the light that falls on the scene. Under Morandi’s brush, the objects themselves begin to seem somewhat unstable, almost fluid. Cumulatively, the apparent permanence created by a single still life, disappears into ever-changing variation. The flux of existence begins to seep into the small shadows the objects cast. In Bologna (where Morandi lived) or Aarau (where Frey lives) or, say, Utopia Parkway in Queens (where Joseph Cornell lived) – or anywhere else – if we look or listen closely enough, there are intimations of the world. As Morandi, following Leibnitz and Deleuze, knew, a nearly infinite multiplicity is implicated in any object. If we move an object slightly, so that its shadow falls at a different angle, the small change can make the painting a little more ominous or a little more content. Thus, Frey returns to the same sounds: a mid-range tone, a perfect fourth, two notes connected (and separated) by a silence, a major second played a number of times, and so on. But in this apparently limited range there are many small but surprising events. It might be the sudden stopping of a tone you expected to last longer, the addition or subtraction of an eighth note in a series of longer tones, or a chromatic note that destabilizes the harmony. This recording is teeming with such moments. What at first seems like an almost fixed, self-similar tableau is revealed to be a miniature world, rotating slowly and gently on its axis in uncertain illumination. Michael Pisaro-Liu June 2022 > Japanese translation 
Jürg Frey: lieues d'ombres (Reinier van Houdt)
(elsewhere 020-3) |
also available ...
Jürg Frey - Composer, alone (elsewhere 030-3) was released in September 2025 as the sequel to 'lieues d'ombres' (2022).
(*Jürg Frey 'Composer, alone' 3-CD set does not include the liner notes.
For the details, please read the Q&A with Jürg Frey and Reinier van Houdt)
> Q&A with Jürg Frey and Reinier van Houdt about Composer, alone
(*Jürg Frey 'Composer, alone' 3-CD set does not include the liner notes.
For the details, please read the Q&A with Jürg Frey and Reinier van Houdt)
> Q&A with Jürg Frey and Reinier van Houdt about Composer, alone
