Daniel Lippel: Adjacence

Adjacence is the new album from guitar virtuoso Dan Lippel, playing solo as well as in the company of individual players and chamber groups of various sizes. The selection here is very rich: fourteen compositions by thirteen recent and contemporary composers, including two composed or co-composed by Lippel.

The stylistic diversity of the album’s music clearly demonstrates Lippel’s versatility as a performer. For example, there is Ken Ueno’s Ghost Flowers, a mostly sound-based work of scraped strings and plucked notes in just intonation, for guitar, viola (Wendy Richman), and dulcimer (Nathan Davis); Moments, the elegant five-movement duet for acoustic guitar and piccolo (Roberta Michel) by composer Tonia Ko; Tyshawn Sorey’s darkly atmospheric Ode to Gust Burns for small ensemble, which combines composed and improvised passages; Carl Schimmel’s The Alphabet Turn’d Poster Master for electric guitar, tenor saxophone (Timothy Ruedeman), piano (Eric Huebner), and percussion (Haruka Fujii), a work of fragmentary motifs and intricate unison lines; the dissonant minimalism of Peter Adriaansz’s Serenades II-IV, with Lippel overdubbed on electric guitars and electric bass; and Tania León’s dramatic Ajiaco for piano played inside and out (Cory Smythe) and Lippel’s reverb-soaked electric guitar, spinning out deconstructed jazz-like lines.

Among the album’s many highlights is Charles Wuorinen’s Electric Quartet (2013) for four electric guitars. The piece was commissioned by the guitar quartet Bodies Electric, of which Lippel is a member; the performance here is theirs. The piece contains a complex skein of lines, as one would expect from Wuorinen; Bodies Electric’s realization is a model of polyphonic clarity. Another is Nico Muhly’s propulsive Wedge, which features Lippel on classical guitar and Jeffrey Irving on vibes and other percussion playing additive and subtractive variations on short motifs over shifting time signatures.

In a bit of structural symmetry Lippel’s Utopian Prelude, which features the composer on electric guitar and microtonal classical guitar and Ryan Streber on electronics opens the album; Dystopian Reprise for Lippel on solo guitar, co-composed by Lippel and Adriaansz, closes it.

Adjacence is a fine survey of what the guitar is capable of at this moment in musical time.

— Daniel Barbiero, 11.09.2024

Also out yesterday, this sprawling, adventurous, *essential* collection of new chamber works for guitar. Featuring 14 pieces and 12 premiere recordings, this will become a bible for new music guitarists!

— Jeremy Shatan, 11.16.2024

American guitarist Daniel Lippel has premiered more than fifty new solo and chamber music works, many of which were written for him. He has recorded several of these on the independent label New Focus Recordings, which he co-founded and runs.

With this album, he offers good insights into the contemporary guitar repertoire, including works for solo guitar, acoustic guitar and tape and electric guitar as well as chamber music.

The energetic and minimalist Wedge by Nico Muhly, the original and interestingly composed Moments by Tonia Ko and the sonically exciting Serenades by Peter Adriaansz with its electronic treatment stand out from the first part.

In the second part, the atmospheric Five Prayers of Hope by Sidney Marquez Boquiren, which is so different in its moods, deserves attention. Sophisticated interpretations and good sound recordings are further plus points of the double album.

— Norbert Tischer, 11.22.2024

Adjacence is the recent release from New Focus Recordings of solo and chamber compositions featuring guitar from a variety of contemporary classical composers. The one hundred and twenty-eight minute double album is available in both CD and digital format, and it includes a booklet with liner notes by Daniel Lippel, a guitarist on all the pieces showcased in the album. In addition to Lippel, the album features an extensive group of performers, specifically guitarist Oren Fader, guitarist John Chang, guitarist William Anderson, soprano Nina Berman, soprano Elizabeth Weigle, bassist Randall Zigler, clarinetist Amy Advocat, flautist Roberta Michel, dulcimerist Nathan Davis, violist Wendy Richman, violist Jessica Meyer, percussionist Jeffrey Irving, percussionist Haruka Fujii, percussionist Clara Warnaar, pianist Eric Huebner, pianist Karl Larson, pianist Cory Smythe, pianist Renate Rohlfing, saxophonist Timothy Ruedeman, violinist Nurit Pacht and bassoonist Rebekah Heller.

This double album highlights works by composers from across the landscape of 'contemporary artists', to use Lippel's terminology, though it appears to focus specifically on the established academy-supported subgenre of contemporary classical music in the United States that often identifies itself as 'New Music', based on the composers and sonic profiles included. (Lippel himself does not use this identification here.) This idiom is, one might say, characterized by a kind of maximalism in miniature. There has evolved within academy-adjacent circles a compositional vernacular which intentionally and regularly brings to the fore the full range of modern and contemporary sonic innovations in Western art music, compressed in scale for the purposes of cohesive presentation and study in an intimate studio setting by would-be contemporary composers. It is this New Music vernacular which is audibly present throughout this album. Within this audible context, Lippel articulates the goal of this guitar project as 'a chronicle of an attempt to make music not in opposition to any one credo or in uncritical embrace of another, but on an adjacent path', the implication being that the art form in question otherwise trends toward ideological motivations which remain unnamed in the booklet essay. In any case, such ideological associations are what this project seemingly aims to transcend by reframing these pieces of music through a novel perspective of pure sonic focus. To this end, Lippel has assembled an astonishing diversity of creative voices contributing to the guitar repertoire in the New Music context.

The album opens with Daniel Lippel's Utopian Prelude for electric and microtonal classical guitar, a freely atonal piece juxtaposing polyphonic and homophonic textures.

This is followed by Cantione Sine Textu (meaning 'song without text') for soprano, clarinet, bass clarinet, flute, piccolo, alto flute, bass and guitar, composed by Mario Davidovsky on the text of the piece's title itself. Another freely atonal work, the piece continuously alternates between dense and sparse ensemble textures.

Next is Ghost Flowers for violin, dulcimer and guitar, composed by Ken Ueno. This composition showcases a fast landscape of scraping glissando gestures punctuated by accented plucked single notes. Gradually the plucked notes themselves emerge as the dominant landscape material before further developing into masses of melodic imitation. The following piece is Peter Gilbert's Neñia (Canción Fúnebre) for guitar and soprano, a lyrical and comparatively diatonic setting of a poem by Carlos Guido y Spano which recounts the War of the Triple Alliance in South America. This is followed by Nico Muhly's Wedge for percussion and guitar, a quasi-minimalistic pandiatonic piece for guitar and percussion in which a looped motif gradually transforms its melodic and metrical content in various registers.

Next is Moments for piccolo and guitar, a piece in five movements composed by Tonia Ko.

Movement one, 'Momentum', is fast-moving and freely atonal, while the next movement, 'Légèreté (on two cadences by Couperin)', is slow, quiet and hesitant. Movement three, 'Interlude', is slower and quieter, while movement four, 'Crossing Paths', proceeds with a medium tempo and an imitative texture. The fifth and final movement, 'Memento', has a slightly louder dynamic at medium tempo with the piccolo leading the guitar.

The first disk closes with Serenades II to IV (No 23) for electric guitars and electric bass, composed by Peter Adriaansz. 'Serenade II', the first of these three, is a medium-tempo minimalist movement made up of alternating blocks of sound. Here the frequency of transitions between the blocks of sound itself becomes a centrally expressive composition parameter. 'Serenade III' is a slower movement with a similar conceptual structure to the previous one using dense pandiatonic harmonies. The last of the three movements, 'Serenade IV', has a medium tempo and a two-against-three polyrhythm.

Disk two opens with Ode to Gust Burns for bassoon, percussion, piano and electric guitar, composed by Tyshawn Sorey. Here, masses of sound glacially unfold with varying internal organization of textural, timbral and dynamic material. This is followed by The Alphabet Turn'd Posture Master, or The Comical Hotch Potch for percussion, piano, tenor saxophone and electric guitar, composed by Carl Schimmel. Here we hear rapid alternation among numerous ensemble textures, such as monophony, polyphony and homophony.

Next is Five Prayers of Hope for violin, viola, piano and guitar, a piece in five movements composed by Sidney Marquez Boquiren. The first movement, 'Beacon', is characterized by an undulating landscape of tremolo and glissando. Movement two, 'Bridges', showcases a lyrical layering of notes emphasizing diatonic subsets within freely atonal pitch collections. The third movement, 'Silence Breakers', is fast-paced, showing imitative polyphonic interplay between instruments. Movement four, 'Sanctuary', is a comparatively long and slow-pulsing movement with an aria-like melodic line.

The piece ends with the fifth movement, 'Home', in which a single vibrant sound mass emerges and then subsides.

Ajiaco follows, a piece for piano and electric guitar composed by Tania León. Here, we hear an undulating sound mass with an imitative polyphonic internal structure. Next is Échange for piano, percussion and guitar, composed by Bernadette Speach. This is a medium-slow piece in which various textural and rhythmic organizational methods morph into one another, including free rhythms, polyrhythms and pointillism. This is followed by Electric Quartet for four electric guitars, composed by Charles Wuorinen, a medium-tempo piece with an imitative and freely evolving textural structure. The album closes with Dystopian Reprise for solo electric guitar, an improvisation by Daniel Lippel on one of the previously heard Adriaansz Serenades. Here we hear Lippel's improvisation unfolding over multiple layers of sustained chords.

In an era when much music created by - and for - academy-adjacent circles is done so in service to ideological debates through aesthetic avatars, a release like this stands out for its openness of pure sonic expression. It is, in effect, a collection whose message celebrates the toolbox of the musical rhetorician without the teleological constraints of rhetoricism itself. While the individual pieces featured on this album have diverse origins with original circumstances necessitating different purposes, Lippel's curation and presentation of the collection has the effect of transcending these circumstances. In this way, the album highlights their shared flexible and virtuosic vernacular of New Music using the guitar as a focal point. For this reason I consider this release a valuable and necessary addition to the recorded discography of compilation albums in the medium.

— John Dante Prevedini, 1.22.2025

Elsewhere in these pages you will find reviews of guitar-centric discs featuring “classical” composers Graham Flett and Tim Brady, and jazz guitarists Jocelyn Gould and the late Emily Remler. Each of those discs showcases, primarily, one style of music, albeit there is quite a range in each of the presentations. The next disc also focuses on guitar, but in this case it appears in many forms and contexts.

ADJACENCE – new chamber works for guitar (new focus recordings FCR 423 danlippel-guitar.bandcamp.com/album/adjacence) features the talents of Dan Lippel on traditional and microtonal classical guitars, electric guitar and electric bass in a variety of ensembles and settings. The 2CD set features the work of a dozen living composers and includes pieces by the late Mario Davidovsky (Cantione Sine Textu for wordless soprano, clarinet/bass clarinet, flutes, guitar and bass) and Charles Wuorinen (Electric Quartet performed by Bodies Electric in which Lippel is joined by electric guitarists Oren Fader, John Chang and William Anderson). There are works for solo guitar, multi-tracked guitars, an unusual string trio comprised of guitar, viola and hammer dulcimer, a variety of duets such as piccolo and guitar and percussion and guitar, and a number of quartets of varied instrumentation.

One of my favourites is Tyshawn Sorey's homage to a Seattle-based pianist/composer. Titled Ode to Gust Burns it is an extended work scored for bassoon, guitar, piano and percussion, with the bassoon adding a particularly expressive note to the tribute. Another is Lippel’s own Utopian Prelude that opens the set, on which he plays both electric guitar and a micro-tonally tuned acoustic instrument. Ken Ueno’s Ghost Flowers is another extended work, composed for the unusual trio mentioned above. It begins with eerie string rubbing sounds from the guitar before droning viola and percussive dulcimer join the mix.

The next ten minutes get busier and busier with overlapping textures and rhythms before subsiding gradually into gentle harmonics. Peter Adriaansz’s Serenades II to IV (No.23) for electric guitar and electric bass ends the first disc, with Lippel playing both parts. Sidney Marquez Boquiren’s Five Prayers of Hope is performed by counter)induction, a quartet consisting of violin, viola, guitar and piano. The haunting opening prayer "Beacon" is juxtaposed with a variety of moods in the subsequent "Bridges," "Silence Breakers," "Sanctuary" and "Home." The second disc ends with Dystopian Reprise which Lippel describes as “a fusion-inspired improvisation using the final minutes of Adriaansz’s "Serenade IV" as a canvas.” Throughout the more than two hours of Adjacence Lippel and his colleagues kept me enthralled with the breadth and range of an instrument it is all too easy to take for granted.

— David Olds, 2.08.2025