Review Summary: The organization of sound in time
I love music that can lay bare the relation between space and time, music that emphasizes the juxtaposition of sound and silence, music that is able to tease apart the threads of itself and reweave them into shapes that only tangentially recall their origins. To simply act upon sound in this way isn’t really a task that takes up much effort; anyone familiar with digital recording technology in this day and age has most likely played around with the raw material of sound, stretching it out, or compressing or distorting it to hear just what’s going on between all those spiky-looking digital waves. To compose these sounds into a work that not only engages intellectually, but aesthetically, a work that can be immediately recognized as beautiful not only in the raw material of sound being employed but in the structure that it has been built on, well that’s what separates the pros from guys like me, isn’t it?
Horacio Vaggione is a composer who, in the 90s and 00s when these works were recorded, was preoccupied with making
sound itself his instrument, not in the discover-cut-compose-arrange method utilized by the practitioners of
musique concréte earlier in the century, but as raw material to be shaped and molded into explorations of resonance and constructions of nebulous rhythm. Vaggione wasn’t the first classical composer to use the computer to explore the riches of resonance and rhythm that could be teased out of a given sound, but his singleminded devotion to taking each sound, examining it under a microscope, putting it within its own space in relation to the rest of the composition in a way that bears so little relation to what the sound might originally represent speaks to a musical language that feels as fresh and relevant today (maybe moreso) as it did decades ago.
The release of these works in 2024 then, doesn’t really feel like an anachronism, like the dredging up of an obscure composer’s written work from almost 30 years ago for the sake of some empty obscurity. In fact before I learned about this album’s backstory, I was struck by the freshness of the album’s approach to space, the way the sound danced between channels, in and out of the foreground, a tinkling piano windchime or the sound of shattered crystal bursting into consciousness, little skittering waves of insect sound, or what seemed to be the light, rhythmic click of a ratchet. The richness of color being used in what is essentially a way that rejects all use of melody or tonality gives the album a vibrant sensibility that is nonetheless bounded and contained by its digital nature.
These works weren’t composed with the intention of releasing them as a single album, but the unitive project that Vaggione engages in provides a sense of coherence, albeit one that very occasionally smacks of redundancy. The titling of the album
’Schall’ / ‘Rechant’ might inadvertently reveal that the two essential pieces of the album are right there in the front half, and that the two latter pieces, recorded 7 years after the first two, don’t represent a evolution of 1994’s project, but another facet. If 24 Variations and Gymel provide new avenues of exploration through Vaggione’s application of the tympani to his formula, the development of his earlier project is, if not shallow, then at the very least one that is still indebted to the explorations of nearly a decade prior.
The computer as instrument, an object attuned to a given task, in this case to reaching into a sound and enlarging a certain, selected quality to the point that it becomes the material of the piece itself, wasn’t quite a novel idea at the time these works were being composed, although it was certainly a recent one in the history of classical music. But listening to the pieces, I feel like I’m hearing a work that almost prefigures glitch music in its total digitization of sound, in its making the conventional musical instrument the raw material for the composer, in the way that wood and wire are the raw material for the instrument-maker. The sounds we’re hearing are the digital ghosts of the sounds of classical instruments played conventionally, and when we hear these rustling, shifting tapestries of a piano trill molded into a thousand simulated crickets, or a cymbal hit transformed into a waterfall of sand, we find ourselves removed a step from the actuality of the sound of an instrument being played, and into a rabbit-hole leading to a wonderland of digital exploration. Luddites and reactionaries and people who think Schoenberg represents the antichrist of the classical tradition be warned: here be monsters. People who can still find a sense of the wonder of exploration, who can still find an idea of beauty outside of the idea of music as tonality, or simple fidelity to what is possible in the physical world,
bon voyage.
