In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • 8 Pieces, and: Happily Ever After
  • Mike Mosher
8 Pieces. Carter Scholtz, Frog Peak Music, U.S.A., 2000.
Happily Ever After. Randy Hostetler, Frog Peak Music, U.S.A., 2000.

Frog Peak Music ("A Composers' Collective") is an artist-run organization in New England that publishes and distributes experimental works of its composers. These two CDs, produced in 2000, offer two very different sensibilities and resultant works, from the most severely abstracted to the most lushly narrative.

The work of Carter Scholtz reminds us that Frog Peak's home, Lebanon, New Hampshire, is only a few miles from Hanover's Dartmouth College, where Jon Appelton has taught electronic music composition for a quarter century. While the composer Scholtz's mathematically determined methodologies are detailed on the CD sleeve, I will also relate how the CD sounds, for as it accompanied me on a long, rainy freeway drive, it promoted contemplation. The opening cut, "Lattice," is a characteristic piece of electroacoustic music, where tones assemble slowly and pleasantly. Its pitches diverge and then return in intervals based on the prime numbers 7 and 2. I found it reminiscent of a late-1970s California radio show, "Music from the Hearts of Space," in that it was enjoyable but undistinguished. The dilemma of such mathematically structured, possibly overdetermined music of this nature is the philosophical question of whether the listener can hear the relationships within the music or must turn to the composer's descriptive "key" afterwards to understand what has been heard.

"Rhythmicon" is a phase-shifted canon using 17 members of a harmonic series, whose tones accelerate or decelerate along a curve. Its 5 minutes of distinctly serial music sound as simple as a children's song, syncopated and seemingly played upon a kalimba or balafon. "Kaleidophon (strict)" is equally determinate but sounds more sensual, like wind chimes, celeste and bells, tinkling slightly discordantly—it reminds one of the part of a movie evoking the murderer's troubled childhood. This piece is followed by "Epimores," making use of Ptolemaic intervals in its construction. "Hamilton Circuit," based upon graph theory by mathematician William Rown Hamilton, is a rich 14 minutes and 9 seconds of evocative sound. A single tone sounds and is then modulated with the addition of another tone. We hear a series of insect sounds, clattering, chirping, squiggling and clacking, then echoes rising and falling and vulpine whoops out in the hills (not uncharacteristic of some parts of woodsy New Hampshire).

"Jet" incorporates both aircraft sounds and the sounds of earth, air, fire and water, but seems primarily liquid, with its running water. What sounds like a record player needle in an endless groove may be fire, and perhaps we hear an air current slowly rising and falling, as if in a state of mourning and whispered prayer. The piece has abrupt changes like radio channel-switching, from bell-like tones to its water source. The seventh piece, "Luminous Voide," is also collage-like, with sounds like bells, voices, finger cymbals and fanfares like the arpeggios from Doug Hollis's Wind Organ in Berkeley, California. The final piece, "Kaleidophon (Stochastic)," is performed by the Berkeley Gamelan and uses analog filters tuned to 16 members of a harmonic series and rung by a random source.

Another Frog Peak CD, Randy Hostetler's Happily Ever After, contains the 45-minute work of the same name, in which Hostetler assembles the voices of various people telling their favorite stories. Sometimes the voices of people saying the same phrase (i.e. "Once upon a time . . . ") are layered into a chorus, while at other times a story builds, and then either the voice telling it stops where one would expect a climax or another story enters and competes for the listener's attention. Stories recorded from 66 individuals become, in Hostetler's hands, an orchestra, which he then assembles in the studio. The inherent intimacy of listening to a teller's tale is alarmingly violated when other voices are shoved into and over the experience.

There is a sense of urban multi-vocality at play here, the city talking to itself, its citizens and denizens recounting stories to each other. One is...

pdf

Share