Sax QT (Lorraine) 2022
From a solo saxophone album, we move on to a saxophone quartet, for another new release - another box set, actually - which I could easily have missed altogether, if McC had not brought it to my attention: Discogs does list it, but it's one of those outlier releases peculiar to that site, filed (in this case) under Anthony Braxton Saxophone Quartet, but not under the main entry for B. himself. (This really makes no sense, but... ah, fuck it.)
A much more useful place to look for this, then, is under the entry for the release itself on Bandcamp. Here we have full details and excerpts from the performances, as well as a video, just under thirty-two minutes long, of B. talking to camera in a sort of Q&A sessions (where the questions mainly happen offscreen, and what we are left with is the lengthy answers). I watched, this and listened to the audio clips, before posting.
The album is put out by the Bolognese label i dischi di angelica, which (in the style of Moers Music, and others) is attached to a local music Festival: in this case, naturally enough, the AngelicA Festival, under which auspices the second disc from this four-CD box was recorded, on 3rd June 2022; the Q&A session was recorded in the same city the previous day. But the live performance in question was in fact one of four on a short European festival tour that summer, and all four concerts are presented in this box. For these dates, B. was joined by longtime senior student/ major collaborator James Fei and by another Wesleyan alumnus making a return, Chris Jonas; for the first show, in Vilnius, the quartet was rounded out by yet another former student, Andre Vida, who played on just this date; for the remainder of the tour, the fourth voice was supplied by Ingrid Laubrock. Bologna was the second stop, followed by Antwerp and Rome in due course*.
The label makes a bit of a fuss about the instrumentation: rather surprisingly, they describe the format as an "almost unprecedented lineup for the composer", citing as the only strict precedent the version of Comp. 37 which appears on side two of New York, Fall 1974**; more perversely, they then mention the 2001 album Composition N. 169 + (186 + 206 + 214), which does star four saxophones, it is true - three of which were played by B. plus Fei and Jonas, again - but which also features an orchestra. (Some mention of this album was made on the blog last year.) The point being, if multiple saxophones plus other instruments are to be included in this, there is absolutely no shortage of such recordings - from the mid-1990s onwards***; and if we are only considering multiple saxophones without other instruments, well, there is precedent for that too, isn't there? It just happens that B. has not regularly employed a saxophone quartet, per se; but with that format being used by every Tom, Dick and Harry since the 1970s#... why would we expect the maestro to do the obvious? (We'll allow for a bit of label hype here, but will also assume that they may be unaware of the saxophone quintet recordings.)
Also inducing a steeply raised eyebrow here was the suggestion that the "distinctive feature of this new project is the addition of electronics", with the blurb going on to explain about SuperCollider, as if this were being unveiled for the very first time. Obviously, we all know that that is absolutely not the case, and indeed the question which McC and I have had ever since the first Lorraine document was released is: what is it about this new system which really sets it apart from Diamond Curtain Wall Music? That question was not answered by the Other Minds album, nor was it really cleared up with the release of the recent megabox - and in all likelihood it won't be fully answered by this new set either, at least as regards the distinction between the two systems for the listener. What is becoming more and more clear is that for the composer himself, there is a massive difference.
Much of the content of the video (which is freely available on the Bandcamp page - go check it out) concerns background theory of B's musical systems in general, and won't be looked at here at all (not least because there is a great deal of overlap with the content of an online article which I was already going to post about, hopefully later this month); this was obviously considered necessary as part of the explanation of what the Lorraine system is. This, you see, is part of a "new system of poetics", according to the maestro himself, as removed from the origin systems as clouds are from the ground; all that has gone before is part of the "ground floor" layout of B's Tricentric musical model; centred around winds and breath, the new music is the first of the systems which will make up an "ethereal world", designed to "fly above" the ground floor systems. (In the future, we are told, there will be a corresponding "underworld" layer, too, but this has not yet been formulated.) At the time of speaking in Bologna, B. still did not know how many new systems would make up this "ethereal layer" - he speaks of needing to do more research, which might take as long as another ten years##. In the meantime, he had already composed nine pieces for the Lorraine system, and envisaged "fifteen to twenty" in total before he would be able to declare the system complete and move onto the next constituent element###.
At the time of writing today, then, there are already fifteen compositions that I know of within this new system; some rearranging of numbers must have taken place somewhere along the line, since the four works unveiled in 2022, and released in this box set, bear the opus numbers 436-39 inclusive, and all the others released thus far have lower numbers than that. (If only nine had been finished by June 2022, clearly they were not all composed in - what is now - strict numerical order.) For the sake of completeness: the recent NBH box collects Comps. 423-28 (all recorded live in 2021) and Comps. 432-35 (recorded in the studio the following year, less than two weeks before the tour documented in this latest box was undertaken), whilst the Other Minds album in duet with Fei presents Comp. 429 (also recorded live in the autumn of 2021). Missing from this list are Comps. 430-31, not yet accounted for; but in any case, and not for the first time, something doesn't quite add up here... leaving aside the whole business of exactly when the opus numbers were assigned to the works themselves, the chronology would seem to confirm that on June 2nd 2022, at the time of the Q&A session in Bologna, twelve new pieces had already been performed live or recorded in the studio; even if we assume that those last three were being finished during the tour - which seems unlikely but is not impossible, given the way this man operates (and allowing for the calibre of his collaborators here, all of whom were very thoroughly versed in B's methodologies by this point) - this still indicates something awry with the maestro's arithmetic... but if I'm honest, that doesn't feel like a new problem and as usual, I'm prepared to overlook it ;-)
What really matters here, after all, is the music itself, which is pretty sublime, as far as can be judged from the available samples. The four performances are subdivided into parts on the Bandcamp page, and presumably on the CDs themselves; of these, one part from each concert can be streamed from the webpage, between seven and eleven minutes in duration, and this is more than enough to glean the overall "flavour" of the music. With the players involved, it is no news at all that a very considerable level of virtuosity is on display, and I will definitely buy a copy of this box in the near future to hear the whole thing for myself. It's worth stating that the excerpts published do make it clear that there are frequent passages with no electronic backing, and some unison written parts which do, after all, sound completely different from anything we might associate with DCWM. It goes without saying that we can hear breath, given the instrumentation; if the listener focuses on the idea of floating or flying, there are passages too which appear emblematic of that. At the same time, when the electronics are present, there are passages which even a diligent listener probably could not distinguish from DCWM in a blindfold test (... I am sure I couldn't). But it does seem apparent that the interactive software is less essential here than it was in that previous context, and there are often is quite a sense of "air and space" about these proceedings. It does sound pretty new and fresh, I must admit; and it is quite beautiful. The conceptual distinctions might only be fully clear to the composer and his players, or to anyone who has access to the scores and understands how to read them; the beauty of the music is completely exoteric and will be obvious to anyone who pays attention.
***
Yet another piece of news concerns an upcoming live event, right here in the UK this time; but that, too, will require a further post all of its own..!
* The itinerary here was nothing like as wearying as the "bad old days" of the 1970s and '80s, when groups had to travel around obscure parts of Europe in no great comfort, and were sometimes booked to play twice in one day - in two different places; but still, it seems bizarre that June 2nd found B. in northern Italy, where he played the following day, but that he thence had to fly up to Belgium for the 5th, only to return to Italy for the 7th... still, I suppose that in this case the scheduling was governed by which slots were available at the various different festivals. Tiring stuff, nevertheless...
** Famously, this utilised (what would later be) three quarters of the World Saxophone Quartet - minus David Murray, still in California at this point. In other words, B. himself actually got there before they did, though who knows whether Hemphill had already conceived of such a thing...
*** This is only to be expected, since the first musicians who sought B. out at Wesleyan were predominantly reed players, and the recordings from that point on overwhelmingly feature his students.
# Slight exaggeration here, but the format has been used quite a lot since the mid-70s, and the impression I have is that for every ROVA there are about ten far more safe and traditional outfits.
## One hopes it will take rather less than that, since the same interview sees B. acknowledge that he may not have that much time left to him, and that his main focus is to complete the 36-act Trillium cycle and to realise some more Sonic Genome projects. If any more detail has become available in the last two years regarding the precise nature and structure of the "ethereal world" systems, I am not yet aware of it...
### ... but whilst I immediately though "Thunder Music" when he mentioned moving on to the next system, this same thought clearly occurred to somebody off to B's right at the same time, and the maestro said no, Thunder Music is part of the origin / ground-floor systems. (Rather confusingly, the account he then gives of Thunder Music makes it sound exactly like SGTM, though surely there has to be a difference... all will become clear, maybe? But let's not count on it..!)
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