(b.1960)
mode 184
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(b.1960) mode 184 |
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Centre Bridge: electroacoustic works
Like the lily (1999) (14:20) for viola, double bass, and electronic sound Liuh-Wen Ting, viola Troy Rinker Jr., double bass Centre Bridge (1999) (12:02) for shakuhachi duo and electronic sound Elizabeth Brown, shakuhachi A veil barely seen (2000) (13:26) for viola and electronic sound Liuh-Wen Ting, viola Walk through "Resonant landscape" No. 2 (1992) (9:55) for electronic sound Centre Bridge (dark river) (2001) (11:54) for string quintet and electronic sound Pauline Kim, first violin Airi Yoshioka, second violin David Cerutti, viola Susannah Chapman, cello Troy Rinker Jr., double bass Paul Hostetter, conductor first recordings Much of Frances White's music is inspired by her love of nature, and her electronic works frequently include natural sound recorded near her home in central New Jersey. This is the first complete disc of White's electro-acoustic works, both with or without instruments. Centre Bridge is one of several bridges crossing the Delaware River, connecting New Jersey and Pennsylvania. It is a nondescript bridge, not particularly attractive, nor does it have a grand history. What Centre Bridge does have is a beautiful voice. The roadway on the bridge consists of a metal grating, and the cars passing over this create low drones, their tones shifting as they speed up and slow down. While on vacation some years ago, Frances White walked across Centre Bridge and discovered the music of the bridge, and it opened up a whole world for her. This disc is titled Centre Bridge because it has inspired two of the works contained on it. But beyond this, it is because the role that the bridge has played in White's work is so characteristic of her music. Her music is about listening deeply: encountering sound in the world (especially the natural world) and immersing herself in it. From this experience, she develops an image from it through intuition. It is this image, drawn from experience, that she then brings out again into the world through her music. To engage her work is to take a walk with her through her inner and outer sense of sound. Like the Lily utilizes quiet, indistinct, irregular pulsing electronic sounds, while the instrumentalists play simple overlapping extended tones over this delicate texture - using electronic sound to create a sonic space to hold the instrumental music. In A veil barely seen the purling water is heard throughout, its natural pitches combined with White's imagined ones. The viola moves through this space as one stream flows into another, from bare outward sound to the various moods and tones of White's inner reflections. Centre Bridge (dark river) uses the Delaware River as a backdrop; the pitch bends and transitions of the low strings are simple transcriptions of the sounds of actual traffic on the bridge: "The bridge transforms the sound of traffic into a kind of music," says White, "into something beautiful." Liner notes by James Pritchett. REVIEWS: Frances White Centre Bridge: electroacoustic works Mode 184 Princeton-based composer Frances White has been working in electro-acoustic music since at least 1985; her works have been widely anthologized in collections of electronic and computer music, but Mode's Centre Bridge appears to be the first omnibus on CD devoted exclusively to her work. While the chronological compass of the five pieces included span a decade-long period from 1992 to 2001, there is a strong sense of continuity between all of these pieces. Rather than viewing the situation in metaphorical terms of composing computer music like being a Picasso with two billion colors on her palette, as the inference has been made elsewhere, White favors perhaps about two dozen colors that she applies rather sparingly and with a great deal of patient refining. An avid gardener, White draws inspiration from both manmade and natural sources; the tones generated by a "singing bridge" that runs between Pennsylvania and New Jersey or in populating a musical work in that manner that the bulbs she plants populates her garden. Of the five selections, only Walk through "Resonant landscape" No. 2 is purely electronic; White is somewhat fonder of supplementing her electronic pieces with parts for live instruments, and often the human players are used merely to sustain tones or enter and exit at certain times. "Even though they have just a few notes in them," White has said, "I think of these pieces as being quite virtuosic," and she is right. White's music is not only virtuosic in the way it makes players wait until just the right moment to sound, but also it is very generous to musicians when they are asked to step forward from that role for a bit. Listen to how magisterial and full-throated Liuh-Weh Ting's viola is during her brief solo on Like the lily, or in her more substantial turn in A veil barely seen, or the way the double bass works in the overall texture of Centre Bridge (dark river). Frances White is so committed to maintaining the balance of her careful, painterly and landscape-like constructions might lead some to complain that there are no "people" in her music. Not to put words in Frances White's mouth, but it calls to mind a comment made by Dutch documentarian Bert Haanstra early in his career, "I can handle nature, but I've not yet learned to handle people and their problems." On the other hand, White's devotion to atmosphere and color has won the attention of a different filmmaker, Gus van Sant, whose film Paranoid Park won the Sixtieth Anniversary Prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 2007; it utilized Frances White's music rather extensively. Frances White's works on Mode's Centre Bridge is diverting in that the elements of the music, though underplayed in their presentation and relatively gentle sounding in comparison to those common to most "computer music" add up to a result that is provocative and challenging, creating its own rules. --- Dave Lewis, All Music Guide, September 2007 Related Resources: Elizabeth Brown profile David Cerutti profile Susannah Chapman profile Paul Hostetter profile Pauline Kim profile Troy Rinker profile Liuh-Wen Ting profile Frances White profile Airi Yoshioka profile |
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