DARKER THINGS / MELLITS: Black. MEIJERING: Nocturnal Residents. GUBAIDULINA: Duo Sonata. ANDRIESSEN: Lacrimosa. DAUGHERTY: Bounce / Tuple: Lynn Hileman, Rachel Elliott, bsn / Bright Shiny Things (no number)
I’ll just bet you’ve been sitting around your living room on these summer evenings asking yourself, “When are we finally going to hear a bassoon duo playing modern music?” Well, your prayers have been answered, because here is Tuple, comprising of bassoonists Rachael Elliott and Lynn Hileman. After meeting as students at Yale they decided to become a duo in 2006 and have performed at experimental art and music venues across the U.S. They’ve also given master classes at Yale, Northwestern University, and the Universities of Michigan, Vermont and North Carolina (two of the latter).
And Lord love them, they really get into their music. The first piece on this new album, Marc Mellits’ Black, is actually a pretty jaunty piece in fast 6/8 time, with our intrepid bassoonists playing energetically opposite each other in counterpoint (and occasionally in thirds) as the music jogs along. At 1:42, the music suddenly backs off its perpetual-motion 6/8 and moves into a sort of rollicking syncopation in 4/4. It’s a fun piece to listen to if not really interesting in development—too much repetition in the rhythmic figures for my taste.
Next up is Nocturnal Residents by Chiel Meijering. This begins as a slower, moodier piece, primarily tonal with some odd passages out of tonality, but after the slow introduction we move into rapid, syncopated passages in which the bassoons play opposite one another again. Again, a fun piece to listen to but not really very substantive.
With Sofia Gubaidulina’s Duo Sonata we reach a piece that combines fast, fun passages with more musical substance. In the first movement, it seemed to me that Gubaidulina uses the bassoon duo almost as one might use a two-fingered pianist, writing long lines and unusual bitonal passages which are, at long last, developed through variations and permutations. This is an excellent piece, including passages in which the two bassoons play in close, edgy seconds and others where they slither chromatically. Although a one-movement sonata, it is in two sections, and in the slow second half the bassoons also employ other interesting techniques such as a “buzz” tone (using extreme reed pressure) while the music becomes slowly but surely more atonal.
Lacrimosa by Louis Andriessen is also a more substantive piece, played slowly and using close atonal harmonies to create an eerie mood. This is then slowly but surely developed over the next seven and a half minutes, pulling the listener into its strange vortex of sound.
The finale, Michael Daugherty’s Bounce, is also a slow, moody piece using the bassoons in long, almost endless lines which ever-so-slowly rise chromatically before moving down into the low ranges of the instruments at 2:42. There, they play a very dark, sinister series of long notes before suddenly moving into a very fast series of syncopations (hence the title, I presume), which goes on for some time. In places, it sounds as if Daugherty were using the bassoons to simulate the sound of car horns (which they happen to do very well). They then move into a passage in which one of the bassoons plays staccato, repeated Gs while the other plays around it, then it’s back to the long lines for a while.
An interesting album, then, if not quite a masterpiece. It certainly beats listening to the musically idiotic Rossini Bassoon Concerto!
—© 2019 Lynn René Bayley
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