Christopher Whyte: Cold Stability

Oregon-based percussionist Christopher Whyte in a varied program. Toshio Hosokawa’s 12-minute marimba solo Reminiscence begins with 4 minutes of deep rumblings, then gradually heads toward the upper register. There is some steady, enigmatic counterpoint, then a return to the disquieting depths. Psalm 1 (2009), by Sarah Hennies, is minimalist in its insistence—for almost 10 minutes—on a steadily repeated note that gradually changes as its instrument (vibraphone) slowly changes. Sometimes harmonics are stronger than the main note; and by the end, the main note itself has changed. Quite the study in acoustics! The oldest piece is Solo to Anthony Cirone (1979), by Lou Harrison, where bells— tuned to whole-number ratios (3:2, 4:3 etc) make striking, gamelan-like sounds. The big piece is Whyte’s 23-minute Cold Stability (2021), a kaleidoscopic work that is essentially a symphony for solo percussionist plus electronics.

— n/a, 3.19.2024

It occasions a double take to read in the promotional material for this percussion recital that it “explores paths to quietude.” Percussion devotees might be disappointed by this, expecting a bombastic one-man band, but I was intrigued. The prospect of a meditative percussion performance, if that’s not an oxymoron, offers a new twist. As you’d expect, percussionist Christopher Whyte is called on to produce a variety of timbres on an array of different instruments.

The path to quietude chosen by composer Toshio Hosokawa is the trance-like state induced by purely minimal means. His Reminiscence begins and ends with soft, low rolls on the marimba, and in between we get a continuous texture of what sounds like soft tremolos but which the program notes describe as “sinewy arpeggiated phrases and taut accented chords.” The effect of gentle stasis, I conjecture, might be related to Hosokawa’s interest in Zen Buddhism.

Almost unvarying repetition also lies at the core of Sarah Hennies’s Psalm 1 for solo vibraphone. Hennies has a strong interest in the timbres of instrumental overtones, and the vibraphone is rich in them. She has devised a kind of ghostly or Doppelgänger effect here—besides the note being struck, its overtones form a separate overlay of bright, floating overtones that the ear immediately picks up. However, each listener will have to decide whether 10 minutes of overtones leads to quietude or only casual interest.

So far, the album’s title, Cold Stability, seems to apply as a prevailing concept. Whyte’s composition of the same name isn’t strictly minimalist, however, despite much repetition, and there is also a secondary concept at work. As the notes inform us, A Cold Stability “draws inspiration from wine making, dividing the piece into four sections that correspond to the different stages of the process.” The stages start with the grapes ripening on the vine (heard as polyrhythmic tapping on skinned drums), followed by the precision of the winery’s sorting machines (a soft panoply of tuned percussion such as glockenspiel, vibraphone, and tuned Thai gongs). For the wine patiently maturing in the cask, we get a very soft duet for wood block and marimba, and finally, the bottling process is expressed “in shimmering bowed wine glasses and bottles.” This section brings the first appearance of the improvised percussion instruments made from household objects that is typical of New Music.

The winemaking concept fits Whyte’s location in Oregon, a major wine-producing state with a reputation for being laid-back, and this trait is given liquid treatment in the music. Until the wine glasses and bottles appear, the texture of the piece is one of soft, repetitive tapping that moves from one instrumental color to the next. The polyrhythms give us a glimpse of Whyte’s considerable technical ability, and the overall effect, another variation on quietude, is more interesting to the ear than what preceded it.

Jumping back five decades to 1972, there’s a prescient quality to Lou Harrison’s Solo to Anthony Cirone, which fits seamlessly into the contemporary works on the program by being gentle, meditative, and spare. The instrumentation is for tuned pipes tempered in just intonation. This technique reflects Harrison’s “fascination with tuning systems that established a direct connection with the overtone series.” There’s not much else to the piece, however, which comes across as a mild experiment in overtone series. Single notes proceed one after another at a moderate pace that gives enough space for each overtone to shimmer in the air.

The temptation is to run this disc in the background as a kind of Zen wallpaper, but these four works, however similar in their effect, only become involving if you pay close attention to their nuanced shifts in timbre and harmony. Not remotely as radical as Morton Feldman’s essays in time, this collection might be too basic on musical grounds. But there is a tradition of contemplative sounds, such as the Tibetan singing bowl, that appears everywhere in Eastern spirituality. In the end, that association might be the best way to approach this release and its inward gaze.

— Christopher Whyte, 5.03.2024

A collection of solo percussion works, the Oregon resident and percussion wizard Christopher Whyte fleshes out 4 pieces that dissect different paths to stillness through sound.

Toshio Hosokawa’s Reminiscence begins the listen with a bare but impactful landscape of lone marimba, where low registers and subtle harmonies comprise the 11+ minutes of dreaminess, and Psalm 1, by Sarah Hennies, follows with droning vibraphone that turns repetition into a refined science.

The title track, a Whyte original, leads the back half, and unfolds in 4 sections that used skinned drums, modular sounds and even the bottling process of wine glasses for the very unique songwriting, while Lou Harrison’s Solo To Anthony Cirone allows tuned pipes to illuminate his creative vision that manipulates pitch in its sonic cautiousness.

A listen that winds through a variety of timbres and continues to solidify Whyte’s knack for mesmerizing and absorbing song craft, the 4 pieces here radiate a very distinct, artistic quality that is particularly captivating.

— Tom Haugen, 7.05.2024