COWIE: Pre Dawn & Dawn: Australian Bell Birds. Guten Morgen, Herr Kandinsky! Boom Time – Bitterns at Leighton Moss. New York-New York Mark Rothko-Jackson Pollock. Ornitharia. Stonehenge Thunderstorm and Skylark. Lake Eacham Blue. Dusk/Night Lyrebirds / Laura Chislett, fl/a-fl; Edward Cowie, pno / Métier 77121
In the interests of full disclosure, the brilliant Australian-British composer-artist Edward Cowie and I are pen pals of a sort on Facebook and via email, but this doesn’t mean that I will not say in print when I don’t like certain pieces of his. He knows me well enough to know that it is a music critic’s duty to be honest and not let personal relationships enter into their reviews. Way back in 1979, when I attended the Aspen Music Festival for the first and only time, I met the distinguished critic Alfred Frankenstein who told us young critics the golden rule, not to get too close to a performer or a composer. I will never forget his wonderful analogy: “You cannot ring the bell and march in the procession.” Thus when I review, I am always honest and the few musical friends I have know this.
For the most part, I always assume in the case of contemporary music that the performers are presenting the music in a manner that pleases the composer since very often that composer supervises the recording sessions. The few times I will say something about the performers in music I don’t know is when they strike me as not being very good, but in this case there is clearly nothing to complain of. This is Cowie’s recording debut as a pianist, and as for flautist Laura Chislett, the composer himself said everything that can be said of her in the liner notes:
I met and performed with the distinguished and brilliant Australian flautist, Laura Chislett in 1989, when I was still working in Australia as Professor and Director of The Australian Arts Centre in Townsville, North Queensland. I already knew of her phenomenal technical skills through recordings of some of the most ferociously difficult flute music ever written, including works by her then husband, Chris Dench and works by Brian Fernyhough. I can’t exactly remember why I invited her to fly to Townsville to do some improvisation concerts with me (at the piano), but be that as it may, she did fly up and from the very first moments that we played together, I knew there was a very special and even unique creative ‘chemistry’ between us and that our sensibilities of sound and its connection with the natural world were perfectly in accord.
So there you have it: praise for the second artist on this CD from the one person who really counts. the composer.
Ah, but THIS album is very different from most of those that Cowie has made previously, as each of these pieces were improvised into being. This, of course, is an extremely difficult art form in itself and one that has pretty much disappeared from classical music where it was considered a basic tool of the performer’s art from the 16th century into the early 20th. In our modern age, where classical music is rigorously instructed to be played as written with no deviations, we ignore the fact that soloists were not only encouraged but expected to improvise when playing classical works. Even Johann Sebastian Bach, according to his sons, improvised when playing some of his toccatas and fantasies; Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Liszt an Brahms were known to improvise some of their pieces into being before committing them to paper, and all solo artists HAD to improvise cadenzas—a fact which has frustrated and confused both performers and listeners in a work such as J.S. Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 3, where all that is written in the second movement is a short sequence of orchestral chords. The solo keyboard player was expected to completely improvise a piece into being over those chords; nowadays, we’re lucky if we get a four-bar solo cadenza.
Since the 1920s, improvisation has been almost exclusively the province of jazz musicians, some of whose work was so masterful that it has become iconic, but only within the jazz world. Classical musicians still turn their noses up at jazz, primarily because it was based on and conflated with popular tunes from the 1910s through the 1950s, and to them popular tunes are musical rubbish not to be taken seriously as art. In this respect, they have missed the forest for the trees.
In creating these improvised pieces, Cowie explains:
We knew a significant part would be dedicated to land, sea, and sky in general, and birds in particular. But since I am also a visual artist and married to a very brilliant one, I also wanted to continue and contain the suggestions of both Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky that ‘music and the fine arts are deeply connected on many levels’. We therefore chose Kandinsky himself as an acoustic stimulus; the contrasted and powerfully dynamic paintings of Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock, a particularly evocative mixed-media work by Heather Cowie [the composer’s wife] called Lake Eacham Blue. In this way, the visual senses would be interwoven in between evocations and invocations of the life, songs and habitats of Australian and British birds.
So there you have it. And now, on to the music.
The one thing that struck me immediately in the opening selection was the use of two Cs an octave part, with some smeared figures in between, before Cowie enters on piano. The music here is sparse and delicate, with a lot of space in it; in this sense it is the opposite of jazz where rapidly-flowing and quite virtuosic ideas are the norm rather than the exception. Cowie’s playing is similarly sparse, but it seemed to be that it was in his part that you heard the bell birds; Chislett represents dawn and pre-dawn. It is clearly a fascinating piece, a one-time creation, thus here (as in jazz) the recording is the composition. As it goes along, Cowie’s bell birds dominate; eventually, Chislett moves from dawn to bird herself. Perhaps a musical mating ritual?
Cowie’s tribute to Wassily Kandinsky is a different animal, all pointillistic shards of notes, yet perhaps he has been so intricately involved with birds for such a long period of time, there is a curious sense of cubist bird calls mixed into it. It is, and has always been, difficult to capture visual art of any kind in music, the most famous example being Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. If you’ve ever seen the original artwork (which, to return to the top, was discovered by Alfred Frankenstein), you might be amazed at how plain and simple Hartmann’s drawings were in comparison with the richly textured music. Here, the surprise comes a minute or two into the piece, when both improvisers suddenly wax lyrical, creating tonal, melodic music before returning to their abstract roots. Of course, early Kandinsky was different from his later self; in those years, he actually painted objects, although in his own unique way, before turning, as did Picasso, to abstract blocks of color juxtaposed against one another. In the last section of this piece, it gets very abstract indeed.
The Bitterns at Leighton Moss must be some truly dark, sinister birds, as this is the mood that Cowie sets up on piano, playing a few sparse notes in the extreme low range of his instrument as Chislett inserts a few softly grunting notes as well as whistles across her mouthpiece. Cowie explains in the notes that these bitterns are highly secretive birds who spend most of their time hidden in “three-metre-high reeds.” The dual tribute to artists Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock (the latter, I must confess, an artist I’ve never liked) starts out equally slow and moody if rather less sinister-sounding. About two-thirds of the way in, I suspect, we shift from Rothko to Pollock as the music becomes a series of atonal keyboard runs with equally atonal, sharply-etched spurts of notes from the flute.
Two solo pieces then follow, Ornitharia for flute and Stonehenge Thunderstorm for piano, each quite descriptive and revealing not only the technical skills of each performer but also how their creative minds work. Chislett uses sharply-etched figures with some purposely distorted notes on the flute while Cowie really seems to like that dark low range of the piano., although he does move up and in fact creates some fast, rhythmically quirky figures that somehow seem to overlap one another.
Lake Eachem Blue actually starts off with a melodic line played by Chislett, with Cowie coming in behind her to add ambient sounds, this time in the upper register. This piece develops well as the two musicians are very much on the same wavelength, although Cowie’s tendency is to ramble a bit more than the flautist. Still, it’s a lovely piece, and Chislett keeps the music evolving. It is Cowie who opens the final piece, rambling a bit on the keyboard, but it is only when he stops playing that Chislett enters, and she, too is playing mostly bird song imitations. This is much more of an ambient piece than a developed one.
Although there are several places in these works where the music meanders a bit more than I like, which is often the case with musicians who seldom improvise, my overall impression of this recording was positive. Cowie is an old hand in music that creates a mood, and his partner is here clearly up to her task. In fact, I found that in general her improvisations had more structure to them. A fascinating disc by any measurement.
—© 2024 Lynn René Bayley
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