Christopher Trapani: Waterlines

Delta blues meets avant-garde in works inspired by ideas of home in the aftermath of Hurrican Katrina. Cognitive Consonance offers the most vivid sonorities.

— Michael Beek, 12.28.2018

Rising flood waters in New Orleans as the theme. Alternate tunings, guitar vs. zither. The incomparable Longleash and JACK being given plenty of extended techniques to dig their teeth (and fingers) into. Lucy Dhegrae singing spectralism-inflected blues songs as only she can. Trapani has a thousand and one good ideas and has enlisted a fantastic slate of performers to realize them. This CD may be one of the few positives to come out of meditating on the catastrophe that was Hurricane Katrina.

— Christian Barey, 12.24.2018

My jaw hit the floor with a clunk when Lucy Dhegrae and Talea Ensemble launched into this piece at Roulette in Brooklyn. Somewhere inside I'm still reeling. The rest of the album is also wonderful, complex and conceptual, yet aimed straight at the heart.

— Jeremy Shatan, 4.24.2020

“Can’t Feel at Home” sings Lucy Dhegrae, with snarl-edged strength and warmth, in the first of five Delta Blues songs Christopher Trapani arranges, emphasizes and disturbs in his album’s title work. In important ways, this is indeed home territory for him, born in New Orleans, into a family with Louisianian origins on both sides. But home is unstable.

For one thing, what happens to your sense of home when your city is inundated, a thousand are killed, and many more have their homes wrecked, as happened in August 2005? That was what prompted this work. And how can your sense of home stay local, familiar, when you are finding echoes, reflections of it – harmonics – all over the place? In Paris when the hurricane hit, Trapani was hearing, in spectral music and the productions of IRCAM, resonances of slide guitar. “Can’t Feel at Home” starts out as a song with strummed steel guitar, but it is not long before strange counterpoints are insinuating themselves on other instruments, like bad dreams of the original melody, and the bitterness of blues is embittered further. The richness, too.

Aspects of the U.S. vernacular – chord progressions, microtonal tuning, long slow slides, the metal glint of steel strings, the aura of dissatisfaction – run through the original compositions that follow the blues songs. A four-minute piano piece, The Silence of a Falling Star Lights Up a Purple Sky (Marilyn Nonken), not only takes its title from a Hank Williams song but also sounds as if a guitar is playing through the piano’s harmonic surges and twinklings, an impression created by some damped middle-register strings. The string quartet Visions and Revisions (JACK) borrows not the tune or the pulse of Bob Dylan’s “Visions of Johanna” but rather the soured atmosphere, the phrase structure and the overall form. Passing Through, Staying Put (Longleash), a piano trio in two short movements, is typical of Trapani in contrasting continuous motion (like driving through an ever-changing landscape) with stasis (like being in the same car).

Bigger than these, being on the same 25-minute scale as the set of songs (and similarly featuring Talea, with the composer among the group’s members), Cognitive Consonance carries everything to a higher register of fascination, variety, resonance, engagement and expressive power. Again there are two main movements (plus an electronic interlude) as paired alternatives. In the first, “Disorientation”, the solo role goes to a non-western instrument, a Turkish qanûn (zither), given a quite particular tuning that makes available a whole spectrum of intervals and scales. Summoned by superhigh tones on instruments from within an ensemble of plucked and bowed strings plus percussion and electronics, the qanûn slowly descends like something at once gelatinous and adhesive but also crystalline, spectral flashes emerging from within its transparency. Having reached some kind of bottom, it seems to move in slow circles. We may indeed feel ourselves disoriented within this world of harmony, at the same time as the oriental instrument is being loosed from its geographical and cultural confinements, even if traces of these – figures, scales – cannot be expunged (nor would one wish them to be). In the second part, "Westering", the solo position belongs to an electric guitar and the music is more directed in movement, albeit through and by harmonies of delicate strangeness. On Trapani’s website, the recording is accompanied by the score.

Trapani, whose musical godfather is surely Harry Partch, sometimes audibly saluted, is in search of a new consonance that is cognitive in the sense of "engaging the faculties of association and memory". What that seems to mean, in this remarkable and haunting piece, is a music of routes without roots, or one where the roots lift into the air, and we do not know whether what lies below them is New Orleans or Istanbul.

— Paul Griffiths, 5.09.2021

Christopher Trapani is one of America’s musical prospects. Still in his thirties (just about), Trapani has studied at IRCAM, the Royal College of Music, Columbia and Harvard and in Turkey. Along the way he has won the prestigious Gaudeamus Prize and has just won a Guggenheim Fellowship. With his apprenticeship finished, this debut shows what he’s about.

An important strand in Trapani’s music is his New Orleans heritage. It shines through on the titular song-cycle Waterlines (2012), for mezzo, guitar, small ensemble, and electronics, given a lively performance by Talea and Lucy Dhegrae. Following the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, Trapani wrote Waterlines using material from vintage New Orleans country and blues recordings. In the opening song ‘Can’t feel at home’, the mezzo’s mixolydian ballad is gradually joined by a finely wrought texture of instrumental strums and whisps and microtones. If at times (as at the opening of ‘Poor boy blues’) I couldn’t help wondering whether an African American blues singer might give more heft, the musical detail keeps you coming back; ‘Poor boy blues’, for example, teasingly mixes Romantic woodwind filigree, blues vocals and spectralist harmonic sculpting.

Precursors for such use of American folk music come readily to hand, from Copland to Partch. Trapani’s style, though, is lively, up to date and distinctive. I was lucky enough to hear the JACK Quartet premiere the string quartet Visions and Revisions at Wigmore Hall in 2013. Listening to Visions and Revisions on this record, it is every bit as enigmatic and introspective. Ever-so-brief lyrical shards of Bob Dylan’s ‘Visions of Johanna’ are analysed and resynthesised in spectralist manner; glassy harmonics, bow bounces and string sweeps, along with close counterpoint, articulate a mercurial tapestry.

A general theme of itinerancy culminates in the album’s standout work. Cognitive Consonance (2010) explores links between Turkish classical, European classical and rock. The opening section, ‘Disorientation’, centres on the qanûn, a plucked Turkish dulcimer tuned microtonally. We’re treated to a wonderfully rich acoustic palette through virtuoso playing and mobile harmonic polarities. The second movement, ‘Westering’, centred on hexaphonic electric guitar, is of the more familiar post-spectralist style heavily mined at IRCAM. Where, as often, the music shoots free of such influences it is at its strongest. Trapani’s debut whets the appetite for what will come next.

— Liam Cagney, 6.17.2019

While it’s usually terrible when visa problems derail a concert, it was actually to my benefit when Talea Ensemble had to shift gears for their slot at last month’s Resonant Bodies festival. Instead of playing a world premiere by a European composer, the group decided to revisit Trapani’s Waterlines. As a board member of Talea, I saw this happening in real time but still had no idea what to expect as I had missed a previous performance of the piece.

“Home is the pull of a tonic chord,” Trapani writes in his liner notes for Waterlines, “Home is the warm glow of consonance, radiating through a hissing layer of noise.” He then goes on to describe the gestation of the piece, from being in Paris and watching Katrina hit his home city, to seeking solace in the old country and Delta blues records that animate this five-song cycle, especially ones about the great flood of 1927, to finding parallels between those old shellacs and the spectral music of Gerard Grisey and others.

I felt that pull and warmth right from the first strummed dulcimer chords that open the first song, "Can’t Feel At Home", a feeling that only increased when Lucy Dhegrae began singing with the perfect combination of real feeling, theatricality and classical control. Waterlines brought me back to the first time I heard Barstow by Harry Partch, to that feeling like it had been with me all my life. All five songs in Waterlines were riveting and I marveled at the fractured vernacular, the lean orchestration, which has a few unusual instruments (fretless Turkish banjo) but no gimmicks, the quotes from Mahler and others that somehow fit just right...before it was over I knew I was in the presence of an instant classic. Dhegrae was fantastic throughout and Talea's playing, led by conductor James Baker, was intricate, powerful, and immaculately balanced. And now we have this recording featuring the same forces and I cannot recommend it highly enough.

There are four other excellent works here as well. Passing Through, Staying Put is a tart piano trio stylishly played by Longleash, who put such a stamp of greatness on Scott Wollschleger's Soft Aberration last year. The JACK Quartet takes on Visions And Revisions, elucidating its harmonic and melodic ties to Dylan's Visions Of Johanna with what sounds like great affinity for the music. There's further magic in the way Marilyn Nonken's sparkling piano in The Silence Falling Star Lights Up A Purple Sky segues into the final work, Cognitive Consonance.

The longest piece on the album, it consists of two long movements for stringed instruments bookending a brief electronic interlude. Talea Ensemble also contributes here and the electronics were crafted at IRCAM, the electronic music incubator founded by Pierre Boulez. The first part, "Disorientation", uses a specially modified qanun (a kind of zither), played with extraordinary facility by Didem Basar, to explore a tactile landscape of immersive microtonality. I hung on every pluck and sweep of the strings, taking great pleasure from the way they interacted with the electronic textures. The second part, "Westering", is played by Trapani himself on a hexaphonic electric guitar, which has transposition controls for each string, each of which is amplified by its own pickup, allowing for great control of pitch, timbre, etc. But you won't need to think about any of that as you listen - just enjoy the journey, which has no shortage of mystery.

While Trapani's music has been played by many distinguished performers over the years, and included on some fine albums, "Waterlines" is the first album devoted solely to his work and its display of his scholarship, emotional depth and originality could not be more successful or musically satisfying. I can only imagine what he will do next.

— Jeremy Shatan, 10.07.2018

This first disc devoted to the music of US composer Christopher Trapani highlights the diversity of his outlook. It’s tempting to look at the Blues throwbacks and allusions at the core of Waterlines (a work lamenting the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina), the anonymous networks of fierce attacks that make up the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it Passing Through, Staying Put and the internalised overlapping melodic strains of string quartet Visions and Revisions and wonder whether Trapani’s aim is to create as disparate an oeuvre as possible. Yet what unites them is a powerful lyrical impulse, which regardless of whether it sings with a literal voice (as in Waterlines) or articulates itself in non-verbal ways nonetheless communicates ideas that always resound with deep emotive conviction. This finds the most extravagantly delicious expression in the three movements of Cognitive Consonance, where a collection of geographically disjunct instruments improbably come together to play, in every sense of that word. Trapani gradually opens out the piece and the players from quasi-warm-up exercises to increasingly extended bursts of high floridity to introspective episodes of microtonal closeness, culminating in a very different immersion from the tragic one that opens the disc, surrounding us in the most gorgeously dreamy and fragrant opulence.

Christopher Trapani is a composer from New Orleans. ‘Waterlines’ is the first CD dedicated entirely to his compositions. The cd consists of five works, composed between 2005 and 2013. The CD opens with Waterlines: Five Songs about the Storms and Floods, referring to the damage caused by Hurricane Katrina. Trapani takes influences from blues and country for his eclectic songs arranged for voice and a small ensemble. For Visions and Revisions, Bob Dylan’s 1965 song ‘Visions of Johanna’ was a departing point. Instead of reducing, Trapani tries to maximize aspects of popular music, in order “to capture the richness of sonority”, as he explains. It is a beautiful composition; powerful and eloquent. Illustrating that Trapani is a very interesting composer with a strong voice and an original musical vision.

— Dolf Mulder, 12.03.2018

Christopher Trapani is a composer who enjoys working in microtonal and other non-traditional tuning systems. His music uses a wide range of instruments that can produce such sounds, particularly strings (and, in the opening work, the human voice) as well as his “hexaphonic” electric guitar and the quanûn, in fact two quanûns, the second a microtonal instrument devised by Frenchman Julian Jalâl Eddine Weiss. This quanûn uses a system of 15 accidentals based on a Pythagorean system in each of its strings. Pretty out-there stuff!

In addition, the opening work, inspired by the devastation that befell New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina (caused, at least in part, by FEMA’s ill-advised decision to break the levees, which poured thousands of gallons of water on an already-flooded city), uses the inspiration of Delta blues records made in the late 1920s in the aftermath of the 1927 Mississippi River flood. The end result is a strange mixture of the blues, with its bent notes within an essentially diatonic scale, sung against the sliding microtonalism of the Talea Ensemble. The opening song, "I Can’t Feel at Home", sounds only somewhat strange through its first half, but the downward gravitic pull of the shifting harmonics eventually affect one’s mood and the character of the music. By the second song, "Wild Water Blues", we clearly aren’t in Kansas anymore. I was a bit put off by what seemed to me a bit of rock influence, but the music clearly encapsulates a feeling of panic and helplessness in the midst of disaster. Trapani cleverly vacillates between tonal, blues and microtonal modes throughout the suite; in "Poor Boy Blues", he tosses in a lick from Mahler’s Songs of a Wayfarer. In "Falling Rain Blues", he introduces a sound like an old 78-rpm record scratch in the background of the opening music. It’s a very interesting piece. Singer Lucy Dhegrae has a pure soprano voice with good diction, but clearly doesn’t sound like a Delta blues singer despite her blues inflections.

The short piano trio, Passing Through, Staying Put, uses downward chromatic string portamento against the piano, playing four-note chords using “voice-leading principles.” It’s interesting music but not particularly cogent to my ears. In the string quartet Visions and Revisions, microtonalism seems to meet a bluegrass sensibility, based on a Bob Dylan song titled Visions of Johanna. Essentially, the music sounds like a string quartet that is falling apart, with the players trying desperately to replace the strings as they break.

Next comes the atonal piano piece, The Silence of a Falling Star Lights Up a Purple Sky, its strange progression somehow meant to convey the sadness felt in the death of country legend Hank Williams. The pianist apparently plays a prepared piano, as there is a lot of string-twanging involved.

Cognitive Consonance is a tighter-constructed piece, written for a diverse group of instruments including the afore-mentioned quanûns (one the standard trapezoidal zither, the second the “prepared” microtonal instrument) and Trapani himself on “hexaphonic electric guitar.” The music sounds somewhat disjointed because of the microtonal base but is in fact very well- constructed. A third of the way through part 2, “Westering,” the music takes on an almost Indian feel. This is an exceptionally creative piece, and I really liked it.

A strange album, then, with some really remarkable music in it. Definitely worth hearing!

— Lynn René Bayley, 9.25.2018

Waterlines comprises a handful of contempo/new music works by composer/NY resident Christopher Trapani, whose CV includes obtaining a masters at the Royal College of London, working with IRCAM, Paris, and also with spectralist types George Friedrich Haas and Tristan Murail. His scores, meanwhile, have been performed by the sinister sounding ICTUS, ZWERM and the more innocuous BBC Scottish Symphony Ork amongst others. The collection’s flagship opener and title track is built around the tragedy of 2005’s ‘Hurricane Katrina’ which, if memory serves, was largely ignored by the George Dubyah administration. A major catastrophe that wasn’t catastrophic enough obviously. As New Orleans was the focus of this storm, it only seems right and proper that the blues, the state’s first musical language, should be used in the construction of this piece. That involved Trapani sifting through pre-/post-war blues and country recordings for a telling couplet or a particularly meaningful stylistic device or two. Those expecting dreadful cut ‘n’ paste hackwork a la Moby’s hijacking of blues records some time back needn’t reach for the tranquilisers. Instead, standing centre stage is soprano Lucy Dhegrae’ backed by the twenty-strong N.Y.-based Talea Ensemble.

Now it’s not that tight-assed/overly formalised as that set-up might suggest as Lucy’s folk-shaded tones show a sure-footed empathy for the twelve-bar genre and that really comes to life with ‘Devil Sent the Rain Blues’ (with text by pre-war blues legend Charlie Patton and the Lonnie Johnson-derived ‘Falling Rain Blues’ with its perfect backdrop of digital haze and stray electric crackle. Being considerably more of a statement piece (as mentioned before…) the title track does put some of the other compositions in the shade somewhat. However, ‘Visions and Revisions’ has enough high-register neurosis to warm the cockles of Bernard (Psycho) Herrmann’s heart and then there’s also the ectoplasmic trails of ghostly piano on ‘Passing Through, Staying Put’. But it’s ‘Cognitive Consonance’ that easily secures this disc’s silver medal and again showcases The Talea Ensemble, conducted by James Baker. Employing customised and traditionally constructed Turkish zithers, elements of classic ethnic-tinged Krautrock, Limbus 4, mid-period Embryo and even Kalacakra crowd the mind, bringing this to a pleasing and somewhat surprising conclusion, all things considered…

— Steve Pescott, 1.18.2019

Waterlines is Christopher Trapani’s premier portrait release, consisting of five pieces composed between 2005 and 2013. Master performers abound, JACK Quartet, vocalist Lucy Dhegrae, pianist Marilyn Nonken, and Longleash are featured, among others.

Trapani draws from a respectable array of influences from folk forms and Bob Dylan to spectral composition and microtonal approaches. He composes for combinations of traditional acoustic and electronic instruments, voice, and folk instruments and idiosyncratic string instruments. To be honest, this all reads as “sounds that could be particularly offensive to me”, and as such, I approached Waterlines with great caution. Even so, I came to enjoy Trapani’s aesthetic more and more with each successive listen.

I am particularly taken with the disc’s two lengthiest pieces, “Waterlines” and “Cognitive Consonance”. “Waterlines”, written in response to Hurricane Katrina’s destruction of Trapini’s hometown of New Orleans, features settings of five songs about flooding from the delta blues cannon. One senses reverence for the source material rather than a sort of musical gentrification on these recordings, a pleasant surprise to say the least, due in no small part to the artistry of Dhegrae and Talea Ensemble / James Baker. “Cognitive Consonance”, the jewel in the crown of Waterlines, also references source material, this time traditional Ottoman classical music, as studied by Trapani while in Istanbul. Featured on the piece are seemingly disparate elements Turkish qanûn performed by Didem Başar, icy and spectral electronics, and compelling and tripped-out micro-tonalities courtesy one hexaphonic electric guitar that Trapani himself plays on this recording.

Despite reservations, I’m so glad I gave Waterlines a fair shake, uncovering a massive and unique talent in Trapani, and one I will continue to follow. I anticipate that many of you who choose to dive in will feel similarly.

-Kevin Coultas, 1.21.19, In On the Corner

— Kevin Coultas, 1.21.2019

American composer from New Orleans, Christopher Trapani studied at Harvard, at Columbia University with Tristan Murail and Georg Friedrich Haas, as well as in London with Julian Anderson and in Paris with Philippe Leroux and Yan Maresz. His music plays with strongly defined and contrasting material from multiple sources (drawn from many voyages around the world), woven together with extraordinary mastery into phantasmagoric storylines, hyperkinetic, rich with vivid detail, built with periodic structures, limpid harmonies, and extended instrumental techniques.

In Waterlines (2005-2012), inspired by his hometown’s devastation by Hurricane Katrina, musical traditions from Louisiana, which the composer associates with a sense of “home,” are mixed with a myriad of varied musical influences: it features five songs (Can’t Feel at Home, Wild Water Blues, Poor Boy Blues, Devil Sent the Rain Blues, Falling Rain Blues), richly orchestrated (bringing Berio’s Folk Songs to mind), blending Delta Blues and spectral music, lieder and New Orleans jazz, cabaret and echoes of Mahler, in an electrifying and imaginative mixture, invigorated by the extraordinary interpretation of soprano Lucy Dhegrae and the Talea Ensemble.

Ottoman classical music, on the other hand, inspires Cognitive Consonance, a piece for ensemble from 2010, composed after a period of study in Istanbul: the first, “oriental” movement, dominated by the sound of the qanûn (a zither with 78 strings from the Arabic classical tradition) fades into a second “Californian” movement, with a solo electric guitar (whose pickup emits six separate signals, generating subtle microtonal variations), with echoes of Harry Partch, Joni Mitchell’s folk, the psychedelic rock bands of the Haight-Ashbury. The lazy cadence of a blues guitar seems to peep out also in The Silence of a Falling Star Lights Up a Purple Sky (2005) for piano (dedicated to Hank Williams, an icon of country and rock’n’roll), but it is in fact an effect obtained by preparing the middle register of the instrument. A Bob Dylan song, Visions of Johanna, is the basis of Visions and Revisions (2013) for string quartet (remarkably performed by the JACK Quartet), which keeps the formal and tonal structure of the song, but more distorted and disharmonious with each repetition.

— Gianluigi Mattietti, 2.01.2019

As cliches go, “unclassifiable” is wonderful to hide behind. However, Trapani’s album is in actuality hard to pinpoint because of the seamless blend of spectralism, Delta Blues, Turkish instruments (and tuning), and good old-fashioned Rome Prize creds. Waterlines would not have been written if it weren’t for Katrina’s devastation. The song cycle reflects the disaster, although it is lively and perplexing with agitated singer and backup. The rest of the release suggests a different composer, but the same playful energy prevails. Passing Through, Staying Put is a miniature two-part piano trio whose contradictions are difficult to pin down. Visions and Revisions holds folksy tunes disguised with pizzicato, flashing glissandos and other modern string quartet maneuvers. The Silence of a Falling Star Lights up a Purple Sky might be the only piece here limited to a conventional tuning even though the piano is lightly prepared (dampened strings). The cleverly titled Cognitive Consonance breaks the concerto mold. A microtonal Turkish qanûn (zither) steps forward in the first movement, Disorientation. A dazzling but brief electronic interlude leads to Westerling where the composer himself struts on a hexaphonic guitar (each string can resonate independently).

— Grant Chu Covell, 3.31.2021