Curtis K. Hughes: Tulpa

Curtis K. Hughes’ music is redolent of mystery, wit and adventure, set in a world that is both concrete and abstract. Its harmolodic and rhythmic architecture is expressive, and because it is inspired by the humanity around him (real and imagined) it is never still and dances in graceful movements that are often not simply balletic, but also dizzying.

The repertoire on Tulpa adds another exciting layer to the character of Hughes’ musical oeuvre, being as it is, evocative of a kind of otherworldly erudition. The title of every work represented here comes not only with an aura of rhythmic mystery but always leads the listener to a luminous musical world, often dappled with many-splendoured tone-textures.

Beginning with the solitary majesty of flagrant, we soon find ourselves surrounded by a whole battery of percussion colourists nestling cheek by jowl in antechamber. But Hughes, being a ubiquitous master of surprise, constantly switches tonal and structural gears in the music that follows.

Percussion instruments give way to the gravitas of the bass clarinet and moaning cellos; back again to the rich woody tones of the clarinet and piano before he turns his attention – and most definitely ours as well – to a large, grander palette in the four-part suite, tulpa. Through this, the album’s apogee, Hughes demonstrates an uncommon character which is inward looking and outward bound, woven together with melodic, harmonic and rhythmical elements, and unexpected colours and patterns sweeping through everything musical.

— Raul da Gama, 6.29.2021

Curtis K. Hughes is Professor of Composition at Boston Conservatory. Tulpa is his second portrait CD and the programmed works span from 1995 to 2017. There is a consistency from the earliest to most recent works, with the principle change being an ever more assured compositional voice and a major work in Tulpa, a 2017 piece for ensemble.

The program is designed with several miniatures between the larger works, serving as interludes. Flagrant (2008) is a snare drum solo. Despite the reduced means at his disposal, Hughes imaginatively deploys various techniques and an overall approach to strikes on the drum that bring out a number of colors in zesty gestures. This segues nicely into the percussion ensemble piece Antechamber (2015). Played by the Boston Percussion Group, the piece is both colorful and varied in gestural profile. Some parts adopt fulsome grooves, while others are pointillist, with seamless transitions between demeanors.

Lesson Plan (2007) is a piece for bass clarinet dedicated to Lee Hyla on his departure from Boston for Chicago. Since the composer’s untimely passing, it serves as an affectionate homage through various quotes and a buffo blues cast. Merger (2016), for two cellos, is one of the finest pieces here in terms of construction. Angular counterpoint and hockets between the instruments are offset by piquant harmonies.

Wingtones (2009) for clarinet and piano, is cast in two movements. The first is a loose rondo. After a potboiler introduction, there is a Hindemithian fugue opener that is gradually discarded for a swing section. A slower paced fantasy ensues that once again returns to the swing section followed by a coda with flutter tongue and unison melodies. The second movement is more reflective, a fantasy that part way through speeds up and interpolates the swing from the previous movement. Despite occasional interjections of fast music, cascades of arpeggios and altissimo clarinet playing are reasserted. The piece closes with lush harmonies and tremolandos.

It Was Not Raining (1995) is the final interlude, a piece for solo marimba that features rhythmic canons and multi-mallet technique. This is followed by the title work, a piece for large ensemble cast in four movements. The first movement, “i. telophase,” features pitched percussion and piano creating a swath of disjunct melodies. The other instruments join in a contrasting lyrical section. Gradually the two strands merge in a propulsive stream now buoyed by ostinatos. A brash unison melody provides the first climactic passage of the piece. Things go sideways in “ii. (manufactured for a purpose),” with a section for low winds followed by a tantalizing brief violin solo interrupted by a cadenza for piano and percussion. Winds and percussion cohere into a fast-shifting section of glinting harmonies. The strings, led by two low cellos, are then added to the proceedings, providing a syncopated backdrop for a more straightforward ostinato by clarinet, percussion, and piano. Gradually, their disparate grids combine into a fulsome workout, which leads directly into “iii. ‘un amour inconnu…’,” an evocative setting of a short passage from Proust’s Swann’s Way, sung with impressive microtonal inflections by soprano Rose Hegele. The final movement, “iv. the number of completion,” begins with a bassoon solo that is quickly succeeded by vibrant percussion, into which it reinserts itself,both gradually taking up a unison theme before the entire ensemble takes up disjunct fast lines that are passed from instrument to instrument. The piece concludes with a ferocious pileup of thick chords in repeated eighth notes. Tulpa is engaging throughout, and seems to be a culmination of the other, smaller, compositions on the CD. Whether for soloists or writ large, Hughes writes compelling music that is artfully crafted and energetically appealing.

— Christian Carey, 4.13.2021

A collection of work that spans over two decades of Curtis K. Hughes’s creative output, there’s solo, duo and much larger situations present, as some of Boston’s finest musicians help cultivate rich textures, sparse beauty and plenty of unpredictable song craft that illuminate Hughes’s inimitable vision.

“flagrant” starts the listen with just snare drum from Aaron Trant that’s both bare and playful, and “antechamber” follows with the Boston Percussion Group displaying their dynamic and skilled noisemakers blending in a dizzying display of abstract rhythm.

Further down the line, “wingtones I. (with giddy ferocity)” radiates with Amy Advocat’s clarinet and Yoko Hagino’s piano as both elegance and firmness are showcased amid their inner dialog, while “it was not raining”, one of the album’s best, illustrates Matt Sharrock’s marimba prowess in a subdued, dreamy climate.

The album exits on 4 chapters of “tulpa”, where vibraphone, violin, clarinets, cello, bassoon and many other instruments inject a chamber, orchestral and classical hybrid that’s flowing with innovation and an unparalleled execution.

A very diverse listen that embraces atypical harmony and a skill set that includes both forceful and soothing musicianship, there isn’t a moment to be found here that isn’t exhilarating.

— Tom Haugen, 4.22.2021

The intent is variety of both effect and instrumentation on a New Focus Recordings release of music written over a 22-year time period by Curtis K. Hughes (born 1974). This too is in some ways a collaborative venture, with Hughes working closely with the performers who bring his works to life; and this too is a variegated recording, because the seven works offered on it not only date to different time periods but also use very different instrumental complements. The sound of the instruments seems itself to be the main point that Hughes makes in many of these pieces, as in the opening snare-drum solo, Flagrant, which is an intriguing concept piece that highlights more sounds than the snare drum usually produces – but which wears out its welcome well before the end of its three-and-a-half-minute time frame. Rhythmic variation as much as sonic differentiation is at the heart of Antechamber, which is played by the Boston Percussion Group (Matt Sharrock, Brian Calhoon, Greg Simonds, and Aaron Trant) and which, again, shows Hughes’ command of writing for differing sonic combinations but which, also again, continues longer than its content can justify (nearly 14 minutes in this case). Next on the CD is Lesson Plan for solo bass clarinet (Amy Advocat), and this is a pleasant miniature that nicely contrasts more-lyrical and more-pointed material. It is followed by Merger for two cellos (played by “Sentient Robots”: Bri Tagliaferro and Ben Baker). This is one of those competition-plus-cooperation pieces in which the cello’s inherent warmth and exceptional range play second fiddle (so to speak) to special effects and extended performance techniques. The work structurally somewhat resembles the duet that appears next on the CD, Wingtones for clarinet (Advocat again) and piano (Yuko Hagino). This is a two-movement piece in which the instruments’ contrasting sounds are used mainly for purposes of destabilization rather than emotional or tonal consonance. As in Merger, the focus is more on technique than on expressive communication. Next on the disc is the short marimba solo, It Was Not Raining, played by Sharrock and based on Samuel Beckett’s bleak and self-referential novel The Unnamable – whose interior-monologue style it does not, however, reflect in any significant way. The final work on this disc, and the longest, is the four-movement Tulpa, for soprano (Rose Hegele) and a 10-piece chamber ensemble conducted by Sharrock. Instead of a response of sorts to a novel of sorts, Tulpa is Hughes’ response to a film: David Lynch’s Twin Peaks. It is impossible to get the full flavor of Hughes’ work without being familiar with the 18-hour version of Lynch’s film, and without that familiarity, listeners are left simply with four oddly titled movements characterized mainly by contrasts between brief lyricism and strident dissonance – plus, in the third movement, a soprano quoting Proust’s Swann’s Way. The movement titles, all non-capitalized, are telophase, manufactured (for a purpose), “un amour inconnu…” (with ellipsis), and the number of completion – the last of which focuses on combinations of all 10 performers. There is a good deal of intriguing sound in Tulpa; the title word refers to the concept in mysticism of a being created through pure mental or spiritual power. But the whole piece is so much a personal expression and reaction by Hughes to a very personal film by a frequently deliberately obscure director that Tulpa feels as if it was written as a kind of intimate conversation between two auteurs who care little for anything beyond their own egos. Indeed, all the Hughes music on this disc seems written mainly for the composer himself, secondarily for the performers, and in only a tertiary way for anyone else.

Once you move off the main playing field, it’s easy for things to exist in their own time zones. You could say that the Steve Reich's of tomorrow have to come from somewhere but this set is a 22 year retrospective. Drumming on things, and not at all in the way you might expect, this is art for art’s sake but there’s nothing boring about it. A collection of challenging works for the listener than doesn’t want to take things lightly, the crew on board here is going to take your mind for a ride.

— Chris Spector, 3.26.2021

There has not been much of Curtus K. Hughes’s music featured in the Fanfare Archive, so it is good to hear a full disc of his music. A composer who revels in the connection with the performers who take on his music, Hughes writes music that is not just highly imaginative, it also contains something that much contemporary music misses—wit.

The first piece is flagrant (Hughes displays a predilection for the lower case in his titles), scored for solo snare drum and written in 2008. The performer here, Aaron Trant, also gave the premiere. In context here it acts as a brief percussion fanfare to what follows, and actually it also hints at an aspect of Hughes’s writing that becomes far clearer in the succeeding percussion ensemble piece antechamber: a real lightness of touch and step, an infectious dance-like quality that is most appealing. The idea is of interlocking cycles that seem to be chaotic but move from, in the composer’s words, “a scattered comedy of errors” to “something more precisely focused.” There’s more than a hint of modern, free jazz about this, and highly enjoyable it is too.

Written for bass clarinet solo and executed with a real nimble touch by Amy Advocat, lesson plan was a going-away present for the composer Lee Hyla. It offers a kaleidoscope of impressions, from Beethoven’s op. 90 to recordings by the Art Ensemble of Chicago. Rather different was the basis for the next piece, merger, which via two cellos ruminates on the merger of two institutions, Boston Conservatory and Berklee College of Music. The duo Sentient Robots (Bri Tagliaferro and Ben Baker), both members of which are graduates from the Conservatory, fully convey the warmth of affection in the music.

There is a more pronounced sense of two individuals in dialogue in wingtones for clarinet and piano, here Amy Advocat and Yoko Hagino. It is the calmness of the more reflective sections that is most memorable, however; the second movement in particular implies some sort of departure, perhaps hard won. And, as the composer himself points out, The brief it was not raining for solo marimba was originally part of a larger trio; here it acts as a sort of sonicially beautiful interlude before the larger-scale tulpa for mixed ensemble. Interestingly, Hughes identifies the Theosophist aspect of Tibetan tulpas for his piece: they are effectively sentient thought-forms. The idea of consciousness projection is translated musically as taking a musical idea and manufacturing variants thereof; simultaneously, the piece is Hughes’s tribute to the drama Twin Peaks, in particular Twin Peaks, The Return. The music is veiled, takes us down myriad blind alleyways, while the third (vocal) movement takes a text from Proust’s Swann’s Way, rather cleverly allowing a phrase to take on an almost tulpa-like sense of autonomy. Rose Hegele initially sings with a sort of white-voiced objectivity (presumably instructed to do so) before the music branches out in myriad directions. The finale opens with a wailing bassoon that sets off a sequence of manic gestures, like initiating the fall of so many dominoes.

This is fascinating music; the imagination, the wit, and the depth are all to be admired here. Performances and recording are uniformly excellent. Recommended.

— Colin Clarke, 7.17.2021

Curtis K. Hughes’s second portrait CD was released this year on New Focus; the programmed works span from 1995 to 2017. There is craft-filled consistency from the earliest to most recent works, with the principle change being an ever more assured compositional voice and a major work in Tulpa, a 2017 piece for ensemble. Tulpa is engaging throughout, and seems to be a culmination of the other, smaller, compositions on the CD. Whether for soloists or writ large, Hughes writes compelling music that is artfully crafted and energetically appealing.

— Christian Carey, 12.22.2021