Borderlands Ensemble: the space in which to see

This new album by the Tucson-based Borderlands Ensemble represents the efforts of horn player Johanna Lundy, five gifted string players, a guitarist and a historian to explore ‘the shared cultural identity of Arizona and Mexico through the lens of newly composed classical chamber music’ and a selection of older classics.

The sad, angular beauty of Anne Leilehua Lanzilotti’s title-track sets a powerful tone, exploring the composer’s indigenous identity with an unconventional sense of time (ending one movement with 20 seconds of silence), beautiful writing for the horn and a sequence in which Lanzilotti’s already spectral harmonies are themselves haunted by untuned ghost harmonies alongside.

Jay Vosk’s Passing Ships features extended horn solos, the last of which culminates in an extraordinary trill. Charles Daniels’s Dream Machine takes a while to get going but by the end suggests a mobile music unit à la Monty Python – for horn quintet. Alejandro Vera’s Ometéotl is a spectacularly angry tour de force based on Aztec and Mixtec mythologies about creation energy.

Vivian Fine’s Songs and Arias from 1990, commissioned by David Jolly for Portland’s Chamber Music Northwest, has a wonderful 20th century warmth and generosity about it, for the string players as well as for the horn. Her Rabelaisian ‘Rupert’s Aria’ from a non-existent opera is a show-stopper.

Borderlands offer three encores including Lundy, sultry in the Los Panchos bolero hit ‘Sin un amor’ from 1948 and reasonably graceful in Juventino Rosas’s circus tune ‘Sobre las olas’ from 1888. The CD cover is illustrated with intense, vivid paintings by Jessica Gonzales inspired by the four new works.

— Laurence Vittes, 10.07.2021

The Tucson, Arizona-based Borderlands Ensemble is oriented towards diverse communities. This CD explores Arizona-Mexico musical connections, featuring four premieres from 2019. Participants include artistic director-hornist Johanna Lundy, violinist Ellen Chamberlain and other string chamber musicians, plus cross-disciplinary collaborators. Performances are excellent: Lundy’s versatile mastery and the able string players (with guitar sometimes) produce a unique, compelling recording. Anne Leilehua Lanzilotti’s title composition carries expressive power. Its four sections explore aspects of Indigenous identity and place. Especially striking are opening string drones with crescendos and silences, and percussive or pitched strings plus vocal breathing around clarion horn notes in the following part.

Charles Daniels’ Dream Machine gathers diverse material into a convincing, well-timed three-part work. Perpetual motion sections, the second having more complex rhythms, frame a pensive centre. Still chords close this beautiful work. The longer Ometéotl – named for the Aztec creation god – by Mexican Alejandro Vera brings a variety of musical material both more ancient and more modern than this disc’s other works. Passing Ships by Jay Vosk is intended to represent the experience of migration, often setting the horn (i.e. ship) against the string quartet. The piece made me compare land migration experiences in the Borderlands to those by sea of my own ancestors. Songs and Arias by noted American composer Vivian Fine (1913-2000) is clever but I found it dated. Attractive arrangements of three well-known Mexican songs complete the recording.

— Roger Knox, 10.28.2021

Opening an album with a world-premiere recording of a piece by Anne Leilehua Lanzilotti is a sure way to grab me. Her title piece (2019), four short movements setting a poem by Layli Long Soldier, an Oglala Lakota, is equally rigorous and dramatic, with a dark undertow that is one of her signatures. Like many of the pieces here, it also foregrounds the horn of co-founder Johanna Lundy, who plays with a creamy tone that breathes marvelous life into Jay Vosk's Passing Ships (2019), which seeks to depict human migration in melancholic fashion. Part of the Borderlands brief is to connect the culture of their home base, Tucson, Arizona to that of Mexico, which bears remarkable fruit in Ometéotl (2019), in which Alejandro Vera pays homage to the Aztec god of creation. With tense strings and a dialog between Lundy's discursive horn and the terse guitar of Dr. José Luis Puerta, it has a careful solemnity that seems to be holding back the forces of nature. There are more delights on this well-curated debut, including stylish adaptations of Mexican folk songs, and I urge you to explore the whole landscape.

— Jeremy Shatan, 11.02.2021

The Borderlands Ensemble, led by Johanna Lundy, brings us cultured songs from Arizona and Mexico here, where their easily accessible version of classical music highlights the works of Anne Leilehua Lanzilotti, Jay Vosk, Vivian Fine, Charles Daniels and Alejandro Vera.

The title track, by Anne Leilehua Lanzilotti, starts the listen with quivering strings and strategic horns that emit much mystery and an ominous quality as atypical rhythm in the cello and a stirring, often unstable environment unfolds, and Jay Vosk’s “Passing Ships” follows and blends horns and strings in a somber tone of expressive dialogue.

Elsewhere, Vivian Fine’s “Songs And Arias” unfolds over 6 movements of diverse songwriting that’s romantic, humorous and full of plenty of charm while taking nods to music of many decades ago, while “Dream Machine” showcases the strings dancing around the brass in an indeed dreamy climate.

Close to the end, “La Llorona”, an arrangement of a traditional Mexican song, displays Bill Tyers and Johanna Lundy’s classically influenced vision and “Sobre las Olas”, also a traditional, exits the listen with Lundy’s meshing of European waltzes, polka and mazurkas amid a playful spirit.

Ellen Chamberlain, Joseph Rousos-Hammond, Freya Creech, Ann Weaver, Sarah Toy, Robert Chamberlain, and José Luis Puerta accompany Lundy, and their vast talents illuminate the rich culture of the American Southwest with much intrigue.

— Tom Haugen, 9.21.2021

This diverse and unusual assemblage of modern works as played by the Borderlands Ensemble is a most welcome addition to the catalogue. My regular readers may have seen my long rant on the poor state of classical music today due to the fact that 90% of the music played by most classical musicians is old stuff which, though it may be good, is the classical equivalent of tuning in a radio station or podcast that only plays popular music from the 1920s through the 1940s. So on that score, I heartily applaud this album.

The downside is that the Borderlands Ensemble seems to take the view that biker bars and breweries are the places to attract new audiences to new classical music. I’m not sure that this approach works all that well. Better they should perform in open public spaces, like a downtown plaza or something similar, and allow whatever audience to come to them rather than trying to force the issue playing for bikers and drunks. At least, that’s how I look at it.

I detected a PC slant to the first selection, Anne Leilehua Lanzilotti’s the space in which to see, taken from a text by Layli Long Soldier of the Oglala Lakota Nation and presumably exploring Soldier’s “indigenous identity.” My view is pretty much the same as that of the late Benny Goodman in judging musical talent: “I’m selling music, not racism. If a guy has something to give, let him give it.” In other words, please stop worrying about this or that writer’s or composer’s racial background. If the music is good, that’s all that really matters. Period. The End.

As it turns out, the space opens with typically edgy string figures, the French horn blurting out-of-tune notes, and some sort of percussion (though no percussionist is listed) banging away. Eventually the horn lines coalesce a little, there is a break in the music, and the second part opens with edgy cello lines over which the other strings all seem to be playing similarly edgy figures. Here it is the horn that grounds the listener in more consonant lines, an island of form in the midst of formless music. It is, without question, a strange piece, mostly in the now-accepted modern-edgy style that originated in the 1990s with Thomas Adès but is now a universal mode of musical expression.

There seems to be very little in the way of development in this piece; it is, like so many works of this genre, music of feeling and emotion rather than form. Nonetheless, much of it is very effective if not particularly cohesive. The fourth and fifth sections, titled “The space in me you see is this place” is the most consonant and lyrical piece in this suite, though again there is little development.

Jay Vosk’s Passing Ships has the string quartet develop the music, quite slowly, while the French horn makes intermittent, and often one-note, comments. The one drawback to this piece is that it goes on far too long (11:20) and says the same things over and over.

I happened to review this CD without looking at the track listing in the booklet while it was playing, and thus sometimes missed the change-over from composer to composer. This proved to be a problem for the music included therein, as so many of the pieces by different composers sounded so much alike. For a moment, I thought that Passing Ships was part of Lanzilotti’s suite, and to be honest, “Elizabethan Song” from Vivian Fine’s Songs and Arias sounded much like Passing Ships and the last track of the space. Yet most of Fine’s suite has more musical form to it than the preceding works, thus I found it very interesting. She, at least, actually developed her music and took a varied approach to composition as she moved from movement to movement, thus providing the listener with not only more form but also more contrast in style. By far the most interesting and complex piece in this suite was “Duet (Homage to Claude Debussy)” which, ironically, sounds absolutely nothing like any of Debussy’s music. But make no mistake, Fine was an excellent composer and this suite of instrumental songs is an outstanding piece, brilliantly played by the ensemble. Bravo!

Dream Machine is by Charlie Daniels, a composer born in 1985 and thus not to be confused with the country singer of the same name. This is a somewhat minimalist piece, with a lot of moving parts that stay on one chord for as long as one can possibly stand, though there is development in the music which takes it out of the minimalist genre. Moreover, Daniels changes the tempo from medium fast to slow for a middle section of surprising originality and great beauty.

Personally, I didn’t “get” Alejandro Vera’s Ometéotl at all…not that I didn’t understand his intention to write a piece “based on the Aztec god of creation and the duality of Mixtec mythology” (whatever the latter is), but that Vera just seemed to be just tossing notes and phrases up against a wall to see what sticks. Some of the musical ideas are interesting, but as a complete piece it is rather formless. Perhaps that was his intention. Vera’s explanation is that his piece “mixes pre-Hispanic rhythms and imitations of sonorities of ancient instruments with a modern aesthetic.” In short, a jumble of sounds, interesting in and of themselves but rather scrambled as a composition. Towards the end the strings drop out as the French horn indulges in a splattering of notes that have no connection with one another, but just seem to exist for the sake of existing.

We then get some Mexican music, much of it traditional, starting with the melodic and very old-fashioned-sounding waltz La Llorona. It’s very pleasant to hear but neither modern nor classical. Although pleasant to hear, it’s just pop music, no different than listening to Wayne King’s band play The Waltz You Saved for Me. Sobre las Olas, by the way, is our old friend Over the Waves; and yes, it was written by Mexican composer Juventino Rosas and not by Waldetufel or Strauss, as many people assume.

Definitely a mixed-bag album, then, with two really excellent pieces (the Fine and Daniels works), some interesting moments in the others, and a Mexican waltz festival at the end.

— Lynn René Bayley, 8.07.2021

A New Focus Recordings release featuring the Borderlands Ensemble has interlocking causes, as hinted at in the performers’ name: it seeks to explore relationships between American (specifically Native American) and Mexican music and also wants to blur the distinction among genres to create a new blend that reaches across the social boundaries reflected in various groups’ preferences for different forms of music – the latter aim also being an element of the Apollo Chamber Players’ CD. However lofty these goals (which are common ones in music today), these pieces too reach out successfully only to the extent that they work as music rather than social dogma. Anne Leilehua Lanzilotti’s the space in which to see (no capital letters – a not-uncommon affectation) is on the topic of Native American feelings and identity (it is based on a text by a member of the Oglala Lakota Nation). The music is of course unsettled, dissonant and athematic, its most interesting element lying in the “blended genres” area, since it uses a bit of Stravinsky here and there. Jay Vosk’s Passing Ships is more aurally accessible: a horn weaves a consistently expressive, rather dour sound above a string quartet. The work wears out its welcome rather quickly (it goes on for 11½ minutes) and does not directly reflect on the migrant experience, which is what it intends to do – but this is well-constructed music, even if it is a touch on the self-important side. In Songs and Arias by Vivian Fine, the blending and contrasting of genres is very direct and at times amusing (humor tends to be noticeably absent from “cause” music). One of Fine’s seven movements pays direct homage to Debussy; two others, more lightheartedly, present material from a nonexistent opera and a nonexistent sort-of-Bach-like cantata. The mildly sarcastic material, for what it may be worth, is not all that different from music created in all seriousness by other contemporary composers – there may be a lesson in that somewhere. After this, Dream Machine by Charles Daniels is textural rather than rhythmic or thematic, and it is intended not as parody but as a reflection of dream experiences. Then, Alejandro Vera’s Ometéotl, the title being the name of the Aztec god of creation, comes up with some interesting effects to indicate ancient belief systems and very old instruments (which are imitated, not actually used). The work is one of those formless-and-of-the-void pieces for which György Ligeti was well-known. The disc concludes with three arrangements of Mexican music – which, like the arrangements of Armenian folk tunes played by the Apollo Chamber Players, prove to be more aurally attractive and more directly communicative than the more-sophisticated, carefully composed works on the rest of the CD. This is not merely a matter of pleasant sounds, although certainly these three pieces have those (Sobre las Olas is a very well-known waltz tune indeed) – it is a matter of unassuming music, music that does not seek to force engagement of the audience with a specific cause or attitude, being better able than more-intense works to communicate a sense of style and cultural connection.

This album by the Tucson-based Borderlands Ensemble grew out of a project—”Place and Identity in the Borderlands”—that delved “into the shared cultural identity of Arizona and Mexico, presented through the lens of classical chamber music”. The program includes four new works and three new arrangements. Though none of the album’s print materials suggest that the program centers on horn player Johanna Lundy, she figures prominently in all of the works and is listed as producer and editor. The new works include the opener, The Space in Which to See (2019), by Anne Leilehua Lanzilotti. Scored for horn, violin, viola, and cello, each of the four movements bears a line of Layli Long Soldier’s enigmatic poem as its title. The sounds are sparing, abstract, and sometimes non-traditional: quiet thumping by the cellist in I, little high-pitched scrapings by the violinist in II, prominent breathing (presumably by the horn player) in several movements. The 11-minute Passing Ships (2019), by Jay Vork, is “an abstract expression of human migration” for horn and string quartet. The meditative work gives the horn player thoughtful, lyrical melodies that are sometimes taken up by the string players. Things become fragmented about halfway through, returning to rather mournful sustained sounds by the end. Charles Daniels’s 10-minute Dream Machine (2019), for horn and string quintet, attempts to portray “dream logic”—that is, nonlogic—by “avoiding a recognizable main theme and freely linking musical ideas”. It is enthralling. Alejandro Vera’s Ometeotl (2019) is long (15 minutes), eerie, and marked by a long and weird passage for solo horn. The oldest selection is the 14-minute Songs and Arias (1990) by Vivian Fine. Scored for horn, violin, and cello, the seven movements are varied, dramatic, and intense. The last three works add a traditional component to what was an otherwise abstract program. Guitarist Jose Luis Puerto lends color to the ensemble in the melancholy `La Llorena’ (Wailing Woman) and the lively bolero `Sin un Amor’. The album ends with `Sobre las Olas’ (Over the Waves), the famous waltz by Juventino Rosas that one would swear is by Johann Strauss.

— Barry Kilpatrick, 11.24.2021

The Tucson-based group Borderland Ensemble, true to its name, has gathered together a program that is cross-cultural between the U.S. and Mexico. The instrumentation of string quartet and French horn is unusual, but there’s considerable variety here, and a surprising range of musical styles—surprising because the Brooklyn-based label New Focus generally devotes its releases to cutting-edge composers, which would seem to leave little room for a gentle arrangement of the Mexican-South American folksong “La llorona,” memorably recorded decades ago by Joan Baez. But the avant-garde flag flies over one work here, so in a way Borderlands Ensemble keeps a foot in all camps.

The one radical work is the space in which to see by Anne Leilehua Lanzilotti, which hearkens back to the era of Poésie concrete, in which the shape of the poem on the page is a crucial part. In this case, four lines by poet Leyli Long Soldier, who is a Lakota Sioux, form the boundaries of a square, each line addressing the concept of space. For example, “This is how you see me the space in which to place me” and “This is how to place you in the space in which to see.” The four movements of Lazilotti’s work for horn, violin, and cello take their names from one line of the poem. Since the composer is a native Hawaiian and the piece was commissioned by the Noguchi Museum in Queens, New York, I don’t see how it fits into the across-the-border theme. In any case, the musical gestures are incoherent for the general listener, so I can only say that I approached the space in which to see as a soundscape to enter and be absorbed by, if you can.

Although it gives the album its title, the work is very different from the conventional diatonic idiom that almost everything else presents. Every work features the French horn, to the point that it sticks out as the dominant voice, and the strings vary from a quartet to a trio. I’ll admit that I can find nothing of interest here, since the level of creativity is only average and often barely that, until I reached Ometéotl by Mexican composer Alejandro Vera. The title refers to an Aztec god who remained invisibly beyond this world and gave rise to all the other gods. As often happens with contemporary music, there’s no evident connection between the title and what we hear, but Ometéotl is spare and atmospheric. There are long-held pulses in the strings against an improvisational-feeling horn solo, and enough variety to set this work apart.

The program ends with three popular Mexican numbers arranged for Borderlands Ensemble: the above-mentioned “La llorona,” along with a tune from 1949 by Alfredo Gil and Chucho Navarro (they were founding members of the highly influential boléro group, Los Panchos), whose melody you might recognize even if you don’t know the title, “Sin un amor,” and a waltz you will almost certainly recognize, “Sobre las olas” by the historic Mexican composer Juventino Rosas (1868–1894)—its fame is exceeded only by its anonymity north of the border.

This album spills over with good intentions. In order to bring classical music out into the public, we are told, Borderlands Ensemble has performed in breweries, biker bars, and coffee houses in the Tucson area. I have no intention of resisting what is found on this somewhat polyglot album, but it is my duty to say that the standard of repertoire and performances isn’t of the first water.

— Huntley Dent, 3.22.2022