Wildlife (review)

David A. Jaffe's Wildlife is a compact disc you will want to listen to repeatedly. It offers four works that successfully combine live instruments and the computer to create a fascinating, kaleidoscopic mixture of virtual, and real, materials and sounds. Jaffe is a prolific composer who has written orchestra, chorus, and chamber pieces, as well many electroacoustic pieces, including the well-known Silicon Valley Breakdown, composed in 1982. His approach to composition owes debts to innovative American composers such as Henry Brant, Carl Ruggles, and Charles Ives. Jaffe is also a skilled mandolinist and violinist, and often performs in his own compositions. He is a triple threat as composer, performer, and computer programmer. Today, more and more composers are exercising their triple threat credentials, a trend that has accelerated since the heady days of the 1980s MIDI revolution.

In the liner notes, Jaffe states that his goal in writing music is to celebrate diversity and embrace "heterogeneity with all its contradictions" in order to "create a hybrid musical organism, expressing something of the diverse multidimensional and sometimes fractured nature of contemporary identity." To do this he uses a kind of "musical genetic engineering," whereby he draws upon wide and disparate range of sources. The blending of incompatible elements shapes the development and structure of his music. Jaffe's praxis resembles the consummate, postmodern approach in which "sampling" is used to reflect and refract contemporary pluralism and paradoxical combinations. But unlike, say, John Oswald's plunder-phonic techniques, Jaffe is not merely operating on extant recordings, he is composing and re-composing his source materials according to iconic and indexical resemblance, using "old school" notation to accomplish this task. This allows him to personalize his source materials, because ultimately they are coming from his memory, requiring representation in the form of musical notation, a kind of objectification and distance, unavailable to the plunderphonic artist.

The first piece, Racing Against Time (2001) is also the most recently composed. It is a 15-min tour de force of techniques and references, scored for the unusual combination of two violins, two saxophones, piano, and live computer-generated sound controlled by a Boie/Mathews Radio Drum (a capacitive sensing, three-dimensional controller). Jaffe uses the Radio Drum to manipulate the instrumental sounds, creating physical modeling simulations using software that he himself wrote.

The piece begins with a low-register octave on the piano. This builds to an artificial-sounding, even-note quantization that gives way to a fast, high-register barrage of notes played by the saxophones. Immediately following this all the instruments play a marcato, rhythmic unison line in octaves. This area of stability comes back again at several points during the piece, but always immediately before, or after, a menacing sound or texture that threatens to unhinge the sense of stability. One such moment occurs about 3.5 min into the piece. Suddenly, a thick, low-register, filtered sawtooth patch takes over. The effect is very similar to what is found during the introductory or final sections of progressive rock tunes. In Jaffe's piece this texture quickly morphs into a humorous, cartoonlike amplitude modulation whose exaggerated features draw attention to the artificial nature of the sounds being presented. This serves as an efficient contrast to the "natural," instrumental sounds.

This piece presents a diverse and creative employment of timbres and modified timbres, including: extreme registral moaning and groaning; screeching; multiple simultaneous glissandi; plucked and muted piano strings; a jet airstream sound that passes from one ear to the other; a sound that might be described as a giant, Futurist motorcycle blender; sul ponticello tremolos against low-register saxophone honking; and rapidly repeated scalar passages strongly reminiscent of the work of Franco Donatoni.

The rapid glissandi, irreverent trills and tremolos, and fluctuating tempos that Jaffe has composed sound like indices of similar devices found in Ives and Brant, two of the composer's most significant influences. Additionally, the piano's rapid chordal planing suggests a hectic, Conlon...