REVIEW (031 - 040)
Samuel Reinhard about For Piano and Shō (elsewhere 032)
Bill Meyer's review in dusted magazine (9/4/2024)
John Eyles' review in All About Jazz (6/13/2024)
Dionys Della Luce's review in Inactuelles Musiques Singulières (in French)
Eyal Hareuveni's review in salt peanuts (5/20/2024)
Ben Harper's review in Boring Like A Drill (5/3/2024)
Stephan Kunze's review in zensounds (5/4/2024)
Philip Sherburne's review in Futurism Restated (7/17/2024)
Peter van Cooten's review in ambientblog.net (7/27/2024)
John Eyles' review in All About Jazz (6/13/2024)
Dionys Della Luce's review in Inactuelles Musiques Singulières (in French)
Eyal Hareuveni's review in salt peanuts (5/20/2024)
Ben Harper's review in Boring Like A Drill (5/3/2024)
Stephan Kunze's review in zensounds (5/4/2024)
Philip Sherburne's review in Futurism Restated (7/17/2024)
Peter van Cooten's review in ambientblog.net (7/27/2024)
Adrián Demoč - Piano (Miroslav Beinhauer) (elsewhere 031)
John Eyles' review in All About Jazz (6/13/2024)
Peter Margasak's review in The Best Contemporary Classical Music on Bandcamp, April 2024 (5/7/2024)
Ben Harper's review in Boring Like A Drill (5/3/2024)
Robert Kolář's review in Hudobny zivot magazine (June 2024)
Emo Kochol's review in Vlna (Slovak art magazine) (June 2024)
Peter Margasak's review in The Best Contemporary Classical Music on Bandcamp, April 2024 (5/7/2024)
Ben Harper's review in Boring Like A Drill (5/3/2024)
Robert Kolář's review in Hudobny zivot magazine (June 2024)
Emo Kochol's review in Vlna (Slovak art magazine) (June 2024)
Adrián Demoč - Piano (Miroslav Beinhauer) (elsewhere 031) by Peter Margasak in The Best Contemporary Classical Music on Bandcamp, April 2024 (5/7/2024)
Over the last three or four years Slovak composer Adrián Demoč has produced a steady stream of beautifully articulated music drawn from reduced materials. He exhibits an impressive sense of imperturbability, discovering richly nuanced potential in the most stripped-down forms. This new album features three pieces for the titular instrument, deftly performed by Czech pianist Miroslav Beinhauer—featured in the previous edition of this column, playing music for the ultra-rare sixth-tone harmonium—all of which were either designed or adapted for variable instrumentation. I was immediately enraptured by the familiar melody of “Ma fin est mon commencement,” which had previously been realized by the British ensemble Apartment House in a trio account on the 2021 album Hlaholika. Demoč conceived that and the following composition, “Gebrechlichkeit,” with three instrumental possibilities in mind, and the transformation as a solo piano work is utterly convincing. It’s not a simple transcription for another instrument, but a wholly unique—albeit closely related—creation. Across all three works, Beinhauer digs in deep, imparting a delicate touch to each repeating phrase, morphing with molasses-slow placidity. Overtones hang forlornly over the proceedings as he weaves subtle shifts into the measured fabric in a way that almost makes Morton Feldman’s music feel impatient.
Samuel Reinhard - For Piano and Shō (elsewhere 032) by Ben Harper in Boring Like A Drill (5/3/2024)
Elsewhere has released two albums of very spare, refined music. Samuel Reinhard’s For Piano and Shō presents a pigeon pair of like-titled works which find inspiration in John Cage’s late works without imitating his style. Reinhard first heard the gagaku mouth organ in a recording of Cage’s Two4 for violin and shō and the very slow, open structure of that piece, making use of the shō’s capacity for tones of extended duration is reflected in Reinhard’s two pieces. They also seem to draw upon Cage’s earlier Two for flute and piano, in which the typical sonata-duet form is subverted by Cage restricting the flute to single, isolated notes played softly, tinting the backdrop of silence. Likewise, in For Piano and Shō pianist Paul Jacob Fossum creates figures in the foreground, while Haruna Higashida plays shō with incredible delicacy, using fine tones with the same elusive prominence as a watermark. For Piano and Shō I in fact overlays three recordings of each instrument: single piano notes with sustain pedal held down drop onto the surface and resonate in irregular patterns, threaded through with harmonising from the shō. The use of sustain keeps everything as slow as possible, to let each moment speak. It seems busy in comparison to For Piano and Shō II, now reduced to single performers, Fossum alternating between two chords, one arpeggiated and the other unbroken, while Higashida plays even more faintly than before, on single notes bridging one piano element to the next. Each musician makes full use of the freeness of tempo, allowing reflective moments of silence to emerge and, with the reiterated piano elements, seem to make time almost stop.
Adrián Demoč - Piano (Miroslav Beinhauer) (elsewhere 031) by Ben Harper in Boring Like A Drill (5/3/2024)
The three solo pieces that make up Adrián Demoč’s album Piano are also restrained – a little too much so for my taste when I first heard it. Miroslav Beinhauer plays these piano interpretations of Demoč’s chamber compositions with solemn dignity, avoiding trying to do too much to fill out the sound while not erring the other direction into enervated preciousness. The pieces Ma fin est mon commencement (from 2019) and Gebrechlichkeit (2023) were composed with small ensembles in mind, but Demoč also imagined hearing them as piano works, stripped of additional colouring. The earliest piece, 2018’s A Luca Marenzio II, is a spin-off of the original, given that it was originally composed for a scale of natural harmonics. Heard here as the first track, in equal temperament and in monochrome, it struck me on first listen as a fairly bland chorale, a little disappointing after his more exciting recent works. The second hearing changed my mind as the homogeneity in timbre and pulse was offset by the firmness of composer’s and pianist’s grasp on the material, making a piece that changes perspective from one chord to the next from sounding predominantly as harmony or as first species counterpoint, capturing a moment’s hesitation between movement and stillness. Each successive work feels more assured in this method. Ma fin est mon commencement restricts pitch range but adds introspective variations in phrasing, calm but never quite settled. The longer Gebrechlichkeit obsesses over soft, small clusters in the middle register that are each repeated a few times over on each appearance. Beinhauer’s solo interpretation makes this a study in touch, with the clearer chords of the preceding pieces replaced by smudged, muted attacks where some tones linger while others are swiftly damped, building up a bleak but compelling landscape in dabs of grey.
Samuel Reinhard - For Piano and Shō (elsewhere 032) by Eyal Hareuveni in salt peanuts (5/20/2024)
Samuel Reinhard is a Swiss, New York-based composer whose background is in experimental electronic music but his current work is guided by minimalist and aleatoric tenets, emphasizing ongoing explorations of repetition and extended duration. His composition «For Piano and Shō» (2023) (the shō is a traditional Japanese bamboo reed instrument introduced into contemporary music by John Cage) investigates slow and still sounds while exploring the elongation of the piano’s decay as the shō’s clean harmonics. This delicate and ethereal composition asks us to alter our awareness and notice the small things that swell at the periphery of our attention when we reduce the density of inputs and settle into slower temporalities.
This most beautiful, enigmatic and hypnotic composition was recorded remotely – in Tokyo, when Reinhard was there in residence in 2023, by shō player and gagaku performer active in contemporary music Haruna Higashida and in Copenhagen by Canadian pianist Paul Jacob Fossum (who performed on Reinhard’s Two Pianos and String Trio, Präsens Editionen, 2023). Its first part is comprised of three pianos pursuing and repeating respective thread-like motifs, slowly encircling each other, each at their own pace. The pianos are accompanied by three shōs, playing individual notes and chords from a circumscribed pool of material and providing harmonic «reflections» of the melodic motifs played by the pianos. Together, the resulting material is ever-changing. In the second part, a piano moves through a trio of figures—an arpeggio, an improvisation, a chord—for the duration of the performance. Each iteration of this sequence is accompanied by a single shō, which freely selects and plays a note or chord, emerging from the piano’s first figure and disappearing into the third.
You can trace the seminal influence of Cage’s writings and Morton Feldman’s sparse and restrained compositions, but Reinhard focuses on finding the magical in stillness, silence slowness and repetition. Higashida and Fossum were instructed to hold notes through touch or breath until the sound decays, just like in deep meditation when the elusive sense of doing nothing allows you to be fully conscious of exactly where you are. «For Piano and Shō» suggests a shared act of listening, engaging the audience in a bond of concentrated and deep listening, and leaves its mark as an afterglow, a bright sensation of time stretched, when all the details and feelings that emerge from a world slowed.
Samuel Reinhard - For Piano and Shō (elsewhere 032) by Stephan Kunze in zensounds (5/4/2024)
I’ve followed Swiss composer Samuel Reinhard’s work quite closely over the past year and even interviewed him for this newsletter. His newest album just got released on the Elsewhere label and features Copenhagen-based Canadian pianist Paul Jacob Fossum and Tokyo-based Gagaku performer Haruna Higashida (playing Shō, a Japanese reed instrument). Like most of Reinhard’s compositions, this piece explores slowness, stillness and space, and is designed for focused listening sessions.
Samuel Reinhard - For Piano and Shō (elsewhere 032) by Dionys Della Luce in Inactuelles Musiques Singulières (5/30/2024)
(English translation via DeepL)
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Taking the time for slowness...
Samuel Reinhard (b. 1980) is a Swiss composer of electroacoustic music based in New York. Profoundly transformed by what he sees as an unsuccessful residency in the Mojave Desert (California), he composes music inspired by a decanted minimalism and aleatoric principles, based on repetition and prolonged duration. In July 2022, he released a superb disc, simply entitled Répétitions, published jointly by Hallow Ground (a Swiss label regularly featured in these columns) and Präsens Editionen (another Swiss label from Lucerne), which brings together four pieces of similar length forming a cycle for three pianos. The new disc published by elsewhere music continues and deepens his search for a music that aims to bring performers and listeners together in a deep listening to slowness, to the minute fluctuations over repetitions and silences.
Piano and shō: a harmonic encounter!
From the outset, I really liked the idea of combining the piano and the shō, a mouth organ with seventeen bamboo tubes from traditional Japanese Gagaku music (refined court music): the piano's striking, percussive side, and the breath, breathing. But the shō is, in its own way, a small keyboard, and the piano, by making the notes resonate for a long time, comes close to this small organ: for both instruments, the harmonic takes precedence over the melodic. The disc brings together Canadian pianist Paul Jacob Fossum and Japanese shō player Haruna Higashida, who plays in the Gagaku style and is deeply involved in contemporary music.
Plenitude of Emptiness
Two pieces of similar length make up the album. In the first, recorded as a multi-track session, three pianos and three shōs follow one another, answering one another. A few repeated notes form the framework of the composition. They resonate for a long time. Gradually, an inner staircase is created, a spiral refracted on several levels, aerated by silences. The restrained melody provides harmonic steps. We are enveloped by a slow entanglement, the notes of the shōs forming like shimmering trails to the harmonics of the pianos. Repetitions dissolve in this moving matter, this almost motionless floating of harmonics. All is infinite sweetness, immense serenity. The listener surrenders to a stretched temporality, a vehicle of ineffable beauty. Samuel Reinhard is the meticulous architect of Ravissement.
Faces of the Eternal Return...
The second piece is for a single piano and a single shō. Samuel Reinhard presents it as follows: "In the second piece, a piano moves through a trio of figures-an arpeggio, an improvisation, a chord-for the duration of the performance. Each iteration of this sequence is accompanied by a single shō, which freely selects and plays a note or chord, emerging from the first piano figure and disappearing into the third. Throughout, the players hold the notes by touch or breath until the sound disappears." The piano is sometimes alone, sometimes accompanied by the shō, whose harmonics double its own. It's as if the piano is calling out to the shō, making it emerge to embrace it, listen to it, merge with it in the silence. Indeed, each sequence is like an aerial embrace, renewed and deepened, more and more gorged with time, more and more informed by silence. It takes us ever further into an out-of-time that perhaps sketches the blind profile of Eternity.
A miraculous record. The mystical marriage of East and West at the Secret Gates of Silence.
