Composer Adam Mirza releases Partial Knowledge, a collection of chamber works written between 2006 and 2022. Featuring some of the new music world's most active ensembles, including loadbang, Mivos Quartet, Unheard-of//Ensemble, Bent Frequency Duo Project, Amorsima Trio, and members of International Contemporary Ensemble, Mirza experiments with the relationship between the part and the whole that is germane to the experience of chamber music. He employs strategies involving independent tempi, integration of field recordings, and live electronics to destabilize expectations and inject unpredictability into the essence of ensemble works.
| # | Audio | Title/Composer(s) | Performer(s) | Time |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Total Time | 58:46 | |||
| 01 | Reading: (A Mish-Mash) / For a Man / I Will Never | Reading: (A Mish-Mash) / For a Man / I Will Never | loadbang | 8:01 |
| 02 | Triangles | Triangles | Alice Teyssier, flute, Josh Modney, violin, Cory Smythe, piano | 12:54 |
| 03 | Growth | Growth | Unheard-of//Ensemble | 5:25 |
| 04 | QXTR | QXTR | Mivos Quartet | 6:49 |
| 05 | Cracks | Cracks | Bent Frequency Duo Project | 8:11 |
| 06 | Shared | Shared | Amorsima Trio | 11:27 |
| 07 | Time Patterns | Time Patterns | Olivia De Prato, violin | 5:59 |
Composer Adam Mirza’s first solo portrait album, Partial Knowledge, features chamber works written between 2006 and 2022, in performances by loadbang, Unheard-of//Ensemble, Mivos Quartet, Bent Frequency Duo Project, Amorsima Trio, Alice Teyssier, Josh Modney, Cory Smythe, and Olivia De Prato. In these pieces, Mirza explores the ways in which chamber works are reflective of the collective merging of individual perspectives, informed by their role in the whole, but in other ways shaped by their unique perspective. To further facilitate this paradigm, Mirza employs unsynchronized parts, removing form as an imposed, external force, and instead allowing it to unfold as a circumstantial manifestation of how the individual parts are executed. In some pieces, Mirza includes live electronics, field recordings, and spoken text as other elements that complicate and enrich the real time dialogue that occurs between various parameters in the music.
The first piece on the album is a setting of poems and prose of the American experimental poet Larry Eigner. Mirza describes Reading: (A Mish Mash)/For a Man/I Will Never, as a “city-like collage of poetry and experimental music.” It does take on the quality of an avant-garde spoken word performance with music; invariably the instrumental music communicates within a context of word-painting whether or not the specific simultaneities are intended. And yet, in Mirza’s assemblage of individual parts, proceeding at different speeds, he combines elements that are unified by a common expressive gestalt even in the passages where the moment to moment coordination is not fully prescribed. So the result, with the theatrical presentation resulting from the text, is a carefully curated work that possesses many local moments of serendipity despite strategically avoiding their explicit dictation.
Triangles was written for the International Contemporary Ensemble in 2012. In the compositional process Mirza focused on the characteristics of the individual instruments for which he was writing. While during most of the piece the players are unsynchronized, they do come together in the same timeline at key moments, giving the work structural pillars to rest upon. The violin and flute parts rely heavily on a fragile, gestural vocabulary of refined noise balanced with emerging pitch, while the piano plays liquid arpeggios, repeated notes, and stark, accented chords.
Growth for clarinet, violin, cello, piano, and live electronics is inspired by the city of Atlanta, and more specifically the composer’s experience growing up there only to return as an adult and a professional. Mirza captures the relentless speed of this center of the “New South” with a jump-cut collage approach to material, generated by the four performers armed with MIDI controllers that trigger live electronics. Taking the personification of the performer to another level, Mirza pits the members of the quartet against each other in a kind of futuristic Darwinist game, empowering them with the ability to process each other’s sound. Atlanta’s Hartsfield Airport makes a series of cameos, with the sounds of landing planes symbolizing a fast-paced environment in which the four protagonists play out individual destinies.
The solo violin work Time Patterns and the string quartet QXTR are closely related, the latter being an extrapolation of the former across four independent parts. In Time Patterns, the solo violin score uses graphic notation in two staves (one for each hand) to chart evolving trajectories of different physical parameters of performance, including bow pressure, finger position, number of note-events per second, and the selection of which string is being played. Through the independent unfoldings of these “patterns” of performance, Mirza was interested in circumventing the strictures of traditional rhythmic and pitch material, instead endeavoring to facilitate a structured improvisation performance that found its way into the sounds “between the notes.” The result is a piece of focused intensity that is driven forward by the realization of fast changing sonic elements, as opposed to their execution in a fixed timeline. QXTR expands this notational strategy to the four players in a quartet. Here, in addition to the individual gestural interpretation of multi-layered graphic instructions, each player proceeds independently and desynchronized from the others. The resulting composite achieves its homogeneity from a similar vocabulary of sounds and its heterogeneity from the freedom afforded the players in their chosen pace.
Spatial considerations figured prominently in the conception behind Cracks, written for the Bent Frequency Duo Project. In the premiere, and by design, the two performers were positioned antiphonally in the hall on opposite balconies. For subsequent performances in less resonant spaces, Mirza created a fixed media electronic part that evoked sounds of moving within a space, such as the creaking or groaning of floor boards. Slithering saxophone runs and shimmering percussion textures come together for punctuated arrivals before retreating to their respective corners.
Shared, written for the Amorsima Trio, is a deconstruction of different kinds of chamber music behaviors. Mirza creates interactive zones that highlight various ways that instruments (and instrumentalists) interact with each other. We hear imitation, continuity, discontinuity, complementary textures, and textures in opposition. By focusing on the manner of play instead of the material, Mirza calls our attention to fascinating depth and variety intrinsic to a time-tested string trio instrumentation.
Adam Mirza’s curiosity as a composer shines through each one of his pieces in this collection. He is an artist who is invested in digging deeper, beyond an expected template, to discover new possibilities that reveal something about the way performances take on a life of their own and the way in which we as listeners are participants in the creative experience. Each work, in its own way, challenges norms of notation and performance practice, but nevertheless preserves a cohesive quality. Moreover, by taking an individual approach to conceptualizing each piece, Mirza invites us to listen in multiple ways, both to the resultant work as well as the unfolding process as it occurs.
– Dan Lippel
A strong interest avant-garde music-making in the 21st century is de rigueur for appreciation of the works of Adam Mirza on a New Focus Recordings release featuring pieces written between 2006 and 2022. Mirza is avowedly devoted to experimental music, electronic and otherwise, as his handling of vocal material makes abundantly clear. The deliberately peculiarly titled Reading: (A Mish-Mash) For a Man/I Will Never includes a vocal portion of, yes, reading, with wide-ranging exclamatory bits and pieces of musical notes tossed about by members of the no-capital-letters ensemble loadbang (trumpet, trombone, bass clarinet, and baritone voice). The piece might make an interesting theatrical exercise – perhaps the spoken words could be projected on a screen as the various parts proceed at their different speeds – but as a recording, it simply seems discordant and disconnected (which, of course, may be part of its point). The six remaining works here, all with much shorter if not inherently more intelligible titles, go beyond the vocal realm entirely. Triangles (played by Alice Teyssier on flute, Josh Modney on violin, and Cory Smythe on piano) is the longest piece on the CD, lasting nearly 13 minutes, and focuses on individuation of the instruments rather than any ensemble playing that might make this seem like a more-conventional trio. Growth is for clarinet, violin, cello, piano and electronics and is performed by a group calling itself Unheard-of/Ensemble. An early clarinet exclamation bears a passing resemblance to something from Gershwin’s An American in Paris, which may even be intentional, since the piece is intended as a collage expressing the spirit of Atlanta, where Mirza grew up. There are real-world sounds such as airplane noise throughout, often electronically modified, and here as in other works for multiple players, Mirza seems mainly interested in keeping the performers separate and having them mingle rarely, if at all. QXTR is a brief string quartet (played by the Mivos Quartet) in which the musicians endeavor with some success to sound like electronics rather than performers on acoustic instruments. Cracks uses two players (the Bent Frequency Duo Project) in what is intended as stereo (antiphonal) positioning for theatrical purposes, with the version heard here focusing on wind and percussion exclamations that remain mostly separate – as is clearly common in Mirza’s music – while occasionally coming together long enough to clash. Shared for string trio (the Amorsima Trio) features a wide variety of performance techniques with essentially no musical content, as if the players’ objective is to show the ways in which they can perform on their instruments – whose sound is continually pushed beyond the norm – while not actually engaging, singly or together, in the presentation of any organized aural material at all. And Time Patterns for solo violin (Olivia de Prato), which concludes the disc, takes a similar approach to a single stringed instrument: there are skitterings and stutters, martellato and legato elements, creation of extreme notes designed to sound electronic, and other characteristics that Mirza likes to bring forward as if to indicate that musique concrète is not only alive and well but also omnipresent. Mirza’s emphatic devotion to avant-garde sounds and to assertion of non-melodic, non-rhythmic aural exclamations by all instruments makes this disc strictly an offering for the like-minded and for those interested in sonic production, by voices and instruments alike, that is independent of the usual forms of engagement and continuity with which composers have traditionally sought to reach out to audiences.
— Mark Estren, 11.07.2024
New Focus Recordings is an artist-led collective label featuring releases in contemporary creative music of many stripes, as well as new approaches to older repertoire. The label was founded by guitarist Dan Lippel, composer Peter Gilbert in 2004, and composer/engineer Ryan Streber in 2004, formed …Read More …
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