Daniel Lippel: Mirrored Spaces

One disc I’ll certainly not be able to do justice in this limited space is guitarist Daniel Lippel’s double CD “Mirrored Spaces”. I would normally be daunted by the prospect of two and a half hours of solo guitar music, but to my delight Lippel has produced such a diverse program that I didn’t notice the time passing. First and foremost, let me state that although he is a truly accomplished classical guitarist, from the dozen composers represented here, there are very few offerings that would be at home on a traditional Spanish guitar recital. Even in pieces such as Lippel’s own Reflected with its quasi-Renaissance feel, our equilibrium is thrown off-kilter by rapid microtonal passages. A number of the pieces involve electronics, live or otherwise. One that particularly struck me was Christopher Bailey’s Arc of Infinity in which I found myself wondering “What if?” the subtle electronic part was transcribed for live cimbalom – how different would that piece be? At any rate, it is extremely effective. While most of the recital is played on a traditional nylon string acoustic guitar, a number of tracks employ an electric instrument, from the gentle harmonics of Sidney Corbett’s Detroit Rain Song Graffiti, to the distortion, feedback and note bending of Lippel’s concluding Scaffold (live). Interspersed throughout the two discs are the nine movements of Kyle Bartlett’s Aphorisms, all using a traditional Spanish guitar, but utilizing a number of extended techniques. If you think you already know what a guitar sounds like, or think that a double CD would be a bit “much of a muchness,” I urge you to check out this remarkable disc.

- David Olds, 11.28.19, The WholeNote

Even if Lippel never released another album under his own name, we would all owe him a debt for his wise and generous steering of the ship that is New Focus Recordings, which issues a seemingly endless stream of great albums each year. And that's not to mention his superb work within many ensembles, ICE and counter)induction among them. But here he has followed up last year's remarkable "...through which the past shines" with yet another gift, a vast collection across the possibilities of guitar music as sprawling and adventurous as the White Album, featuring pieces by Orianna Webb, John Link, Kyle Bartlett, Douglas Boyce, Ryan Streber, Ethan Wickman, Christopher Bailey, Dalia R. With, Sergio Kafejian, Karin Wetzel, Sidney Corbett, and Lippel himself. From solo acoustic gems like Wickman's Joie Divisions to electro-acoustic works like the alternately sparkling and serrated Like Minds by Link, Lippel wants us to hear it all, feel it all, and marvel at it all.

The project has its roots in a 2008 performance, represented here by a live recording of Lippel's own Scaffold for electric guitar, full of moody string-bending, feedback and distortion, which will echo in your head long after the album ends. I'll leave it to the sociologists to look into why, after a peripatetic series of collaborations, premieres and recording sessions, "Mirrored Spaces" comes to us in the same season as "All Mirrors" by Angel Olsen or mirrored heart by "FKA Twigs", but I will say it is as vital a reflection of our times as either of those fertile and exploratory journeys into the heart of pop expressionism. I will be listening to, and taking nourishment from, "Mirrored Spaces" for quite some time. I suggest you start now.

-Jeremy Shatan, 11.30.19, An Earful

Some albums have such a voluminous and well-defined yet complex conceptual framework that doing justice to it all within the limited time and space of a blog article seems daunting. Such a release I feel is most definitely at hand with virtuoso New Music guitarist Daniel Lippel and his two-CD album Mirrored Spaces (New Focus Recordings FCR239).

The idea of Mirrored Spaces took shape initially in a Lippel guitar concert of 2008 that forwarded three "Experiments in Co-Composition." which to varying degrees involved a compositional collaboration between performer (Lippel) and composer (others, Lippel). The present album expands the idea to a richly varied tapestry of works, including the original "Mirrored Spaces," "Descent," and "Scaffold" by, respectively, Orianna Webb and Lippel, Ryan Streber, and again, Daniel Lippel.

From there we hear another nine single- or multi-movement works here, all stemming from the collaborative idea and benefiting greatly from it.

The entire program, as Daniel states in the liners, makes metaphorical use of the idea of mirroring in our "appearance driven culture," with collaborations that give an alternate mirroring centered on the sound qualities and potential of the guitar, "its electronic doppelgangers," plus structure, progammaticity, history and usage of materials. Underlying this are factors regarding special tunings (scordatura), microtones, electro-acoustic aesthetics and the extended voice of the electric guitar.

Such concerns, taken all together, animate and inform the music yet too the results are quite a bit more than the sum of these conceptual parts in that the excelling comes out of the compositional-performative doing. That of course is how it always must be, nonetheless what is remarkable about this program is the how as much as the what.

From the first listen I was taken with it all. The works for electric guitar especially caught my attention because I have long thought there was great potential in an electric-New Music nexus. So the retuned electric springs forward dramatically in works by Sidney Corbett ("Detroit Rain Song Graffiti") and Ryan Streber ("Descent"). A live recording of Lippel's "Scaffold" is another great example of the electric and special tunings along with sustain worthy of the classic psychedelic guitar tradition. Note should also be made of Ethan Wickman's "Joie Division" and how it relates nicely to the electric idea with a combined acoustic part and simultaneous electronic counterplay. It is fascinating and dexterous, truly. There are many other gems too numerous to mention.

All of the program is fascinating and musically rich, showing great inventive and performative imagination, locking in a way of thinking about New Music and the guitar in a single breath, with a wide breadth for today (pardon the phrase). The collaborative idea indeed pays off with guitar-centric advancement that is informed by Lippel's intimate involvement with the instrument and the creative impetus of the composers to spur forward what the contemporary situation can give us.

It is a tour de force for an appealing and intensive synergy between the guitar and the latest compositional Modernisms. Hurrah!

-Grego Edwards, 12.19.2019, Gapplegate Classical-Modern Music Review

From guitarist Daniel Lippel comes a two-CD set containing a generous collection of recent work for solo guitarist. On the recording Lippel, a virtuoso specializing in the contemporary repertoire for guitar, plays both nylon string classical guitar and electric guitar, conventionally and with extended technique, with and without electronic augmentation. But no matter the instrumental set-up or the musical setting, Lippel’s performances are characteristically deft and assured.

A dominant theme on Mirrored Spaces is the use of alternative tunings and microtonality. The title work, a six-part suite co-composed by Lippel and Orianna Webb in 2006-2008, draws on quarter-tone tuning. The quarter-tone discrepancies create a wobbly choric effect, giving parts of the suite a strangely unstable feeling. Other parts sound like more conventional, albeit beautifully adventurous, classical guitar playing.

Ryan Streber’s Descent for scordatura electric guitar and two amplifiers was also a collaborative composition. The piece, which detunes the guitar’s four lowest strings from standard fourths tuning to the cello’s fifths tuning, has as its central trope the subtle incongruity of having an electric guitar played with classical technique. The piece slowly descends from the instrument’s upper to lower registers and in the process dresses it up in an increasingly overdriven, distorted sound.

Other pieces exploring alternative tunings include Christopher Bailey’s Arc of Infinity, a multi-faceted work for guitar and three layers of electronic sounds that uses overtones in standard tuning to create harmonies in Just Intonation, and Lippel’s own Scaffold, which incorporates three guitars using three different tunings.

Extended technique is more-or-less taken for granted on many of these performances, but they come to the fore particularly on From Scratch, a 2017 electroacoustic work by Sergio Kafejian, that envelops its skittering runs and fragmentary phrases in aggressive, percussive gestures, string scraping, snap pizzicato, and plucking behind the bridge.

No brief review can do justice to the rich variety of music in this collection. One can only say: Listen.

-Daniel Barbiero, 11.4.19, Avant Music News

Classical guitar player and composer Daniel Lippel just released "Mirrored Spaces" via New Focus Recordings, and it’s a massive one, at over two hours long! The album regroups many composers, but the centrepiece is definitely Lippel’s eponymous hexaptych. Mirrored Spaces uses a quarter-tone tuning— microtonality is a very present theme throughout the album — and many extended techniques suitable for an avant-garde album such as this one. It’s a highly admirable and respectable double-album.

- Dave Tremblay, 11.16.19, Can This Even Be Called Music?

This 2-CD compilation that I have in hand makes me believe, via its dark gradients and simple cover design, that I will be listening to something along the lines of minimalist pumpkin pie until I give it a whirl. Think not of a pumpkin pie but a Rorschach test version of said pie whose entire recipe delves into an analytical process of how the composers intentionally subverted the conventions of pie. Not only that, but Daniel Lippel plays all this on the guitar. No actual pie involved. Amazing.

The 15-track album just over two hours long is entitled Mirrored Spaces (New Focus Recordings) and is produced and performed entirely by Daniel Lippel, using electric and acoustic guitars and classical technique, along with unconventional tunings. So already, you've got to know that this album conjures up one mother of a Claes Oldenburg, not muslin-soaked in plaster over a wire frame, but certainly manipulated electronically through a guitar.

Lippel states that the album is "loosely organized around a metaphorical exploration of mirrors within a musical context..." with its pieces, written by various composers, including Lippel himself, all connecting as a collaborative and thematic call-and-response. Rather than go into the academic details of how each piece was composed, using a hemidemisemiquaverspoonful of sugar, a stave of flour, tempered cream and a clef of fresh pumpkin, I'm simply going to report how it sounds.

CD #1: The first piece, Amorphose 2, written by Karin Wetzel and performed by Philip White, sounds like a guitaristic version of what you might hear if you place a stethoscope to the abdomen of someone experiencing a bad case of gurgling guts, and I don't mean that facetiously at all but as a compliment. It's a superb example of guitaristic indigestion. Why not? The press release states the piece is a "meditation around central pitches created by an unorthodox [tuning] as 16 live electronic cues generate various delays and processes of the guitar, at times shadowing the performer, and at others, asserting a life of their own!" Indeed.

Kyle Bartlett's Aphorisms "Whom the Gods" opens with a singular and pensive movement, to be continued further in the album. Mirrored Spaces, the recipient of Harvard's Fromm Music Foundation grant, is a brilliant 6-movement piece written by Orianna Webb and Daniel Lippe!. The piece opens with a deliciously off-key and eerie movement "Refracted", broken by thunderously echoing whacks upon the guitar sound board. The music soars and ascends like a beautifully strange shadow of an unidentifiable varmint (cat? rat?) scaling nimbly across tiled rooftops of an old city in the dusk. The second movement, "Sturdy", conveys a stride of normal tonality, modernity, and sweetness to the point where I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop.

The third movement, "Cadences", returns to a gloriously spry tonal off-ness (described by Lippel as a quarter-tone alternate tuning) that descends into a pooling quiet and stillness before returning to its original rhythms with insistent urgency haloed by a hovering set of gnat-like harmonics. The fourth movement "Reflected" echoes the second movement's graceful tonal personality. The fifth movement, "Rondo" is punctuated and sassy in its swooping glissandos and snapping strings that evolves into a wonderful creep, haloed by the same gnat-like harmonics of the earlier third movement. The bin movement, "Song," concludes in a normal tuning with a temperate melody, merrily minding its own business, as if nothing dramatic happened at all within the past twenty-four minutes.

Bartlett's Aphorisms "When Music Itself" returns for a second, gloomily ponderous wisp of a movement that opens with a strum followed by a few sharp percussive thumps upon the guitar soundboard, concluding with querulous arpeggio. Ryan Streber's Descent opens with a tickle of electric guitar in a cello tuning, followed by rudely intense strums that ascend into a sprinkling of harmonics, more tickles and a delicate arpeggio, lashed by even more wakeful strums. The piece develops more insistence, pointed delivery and defined sharpness to its arpeggios before settling into an afternoon sugar crash of wandering doldrums and a muddied, bad mood.

Bartlett's Aphorisms "Solon the Lawmaker" returns for a brief interlude of a palate-wiping arpeggio and a grammatical ellipse of the same repeated note. Dalia Raudonikyte With's gentle Primo cum lumina solis billows like a breeze caught in a sail. Bartlett's Aphorisms "It Needs a Body" returns for a final movement of a beautifully ominous lurch punctuated by an ascending melody. CD #1 closes with John Link's Like Minds, sounds like a wordless afterthought during a busy day, ending with a gurgling pizzicato echo of Wetzel's Amorphose 2 earlier, opening bout of musical indigestion. This is, after all, a lot of pie.

CD #2: Sao Paulo-based composer Sergio Kafejian's From Scratch, distant soundboard percussion, descending percussive effect, like a series of jar lids eased and wrenched off before notes spill out. The effect of a plastic ruler scraped along the guitar strings is amusing for the first minute before it becomes repetitive. The piece shifts gears after the third minute, unleashing a sprinkling of notes played above the guitar nut, yet it devolves quickly into more uncomfortable slithering and scraping. At the 7th minute mark, the scraping concludes with galloping strums followed by evenly spaced, low chimes layered with more upper nut string dither.

Kyle Bartlett's Aphorisms "Whosoever is Delighted" continues on this second disc, spread out as they are in the first. A few raw strums trailed by pensive legato notes concludes with a trill slashed by a strum. To be honest, I couldn't really tell the difference between where track 1 of this CD ended and where track 2 started, except that the 11 minutes of track one had, at some point, expired. I had to rewind and re-listen, as the pie has become ponderous.

Sidney Corbett's Detroit Rain Song Graffiti offers sweetly chiming yet random treble notes, representing urban unease in E-flat. Bartlett's Aphorisms: "We Seek Destruction" presents a soft yet still prickly interlude, like the sonic texture of a ball-tipped hairbrush gliding through your hair rather than say, using a hedgehog.

Douglas Boyce's 5-movement Partita opens with slow introductory movement followed by notes that tinkle and burp as a more lively change-up. The third movement is resonantly muddied yet pleasant in its distant brooding. The fourth movement opens sinuously and gently before it is shaken awake by the frittered, jagged energy of the last movement that conducts itself like two lanes commuter traffic shoving and jostling past each other on subway stairs during any given night. The piece concludes with an atonally drifting sunset of notes fading on the horizon.

Bartlett's Aphorisms, "There Is No Excellent Beauty" features percussion and ascending slithering along the strings that escalates into high-pitched, frenzied wiping and a dramatic fall-off to gently-played treble notes that turn querulous before getting slapped back into timidity.

Ethan Wickman's Joie Divisions, lively jagged strumming interspersed with an ascending arpeggio. The piece turns into an elegantly modern andante that reintroduces the jagged strumming before breaking into a tremolo with a melody that turns more New Yorkers-at-rush-hour in tempo. Its a lovely piece, which, given its present company with the other tracks, may be seen as either quaintly or mercifully conventional.

Bartlett's Aphorisms," Man Comes into the World" offers a quasi-tinkle-burp ponderous interlude. Christopher Baily's 16:27 minute-long Arc of Infinity is described as placing the guitar "inside a sonic house of mirrors comprised of three 'virtual instruments', bell-like sounds, a 'dirty sampler' composed out of guitar notes from recently recorded repertoire, and flanged/delayed/filtered sounds. This piece abruptly cuts out into very intentional mutes of silence that will lead you to believe your CD-player has malfunctioned.

Bartlett's Aphorisms, "Love is Necessarily" sweetly tonal notes that quickly lose their promise of melody to sour fudging followed by more of the infamous tinkly-burps of earlier, concluding with a meandering, descending trudge.

Daniel Lippel's Scaffold, the electric guitar piece that inspired this album, is a 2008 recording that took place at The Tank, recorded in the presence of this writer, who recalls that particular performance well, as the original space had been a recently-shuttered Soho speakeasy burlesque house. The prior stage furniture, props, and bar counter had been hastily ripped up, leaving behind prominent nail holes along with lighter gradations and faint outlines upon the wooden floorboards (and much else to the imagination) where musicians now sat, performing pieces like this one: plaintive and eerie siren swoops of electric guitar.

Let's face it: modern music is not about to inspire any cowboy-hatted yowling, country music sing-along cat memes unless turned Cubist, but even Cubism would be considered the more approachable cousin at this party.

This is the kind of music that forces you to listen and consider its techniques and approach-that is, if you've managed to resist any first impulse to run away. I've always been open to hearing what contemporary composers are up to on the guitar as a refreshing exchange to historical classical guitar, but I don't kid myself that just because it's contemporary and new means that it escapes bearing out its own tropes. It's a challenge to create and coordinate an album of new music that wants to defy what the ear is accustomed to hearing. When new music works, it's because it's found a way to embrace and spark the imagination rather than alienate its listener.

Lippel excels at structure and balance, not just within his own compositions but also with his careful thought in the layout of this album. A 2-disc CD set of modern guitar music speaks of Lippel's generosity as a producer to showcase a number of new contemporary voices for both solo and electric guitar.

-Julia Crowe, 11.13.19, The Guitar

This very ambitious double cd of premiere works by contemporary classical composers is going to strike you like you’re listening to ​Segovia on acid—with him being the one on acid. A set of solo classical and acoustic guitar with electronics thrown in as a side dish, this isn’t solo guitar for a romantic evening with wine, music and thou but it is a rocket set to take you to guitar galaxies beyond the beyond. Way more John Williams than Frank Zappa, this is a fine adventure for the adventurous.​

-Chris Spector, 10.26.19, Midwest Record

Guitarist Daniel Lippel presents a double CD of premieres for solo classical and electric guitar (some with electronics). The music is stylistically diverse, but there are some common threads, including explorations of the properties of acoustic and electric guitars, electro-acoustic music, alternate tunings and microtonality. There are four electro-acoustic pieces. Karin Wetzel's "Amorphose 2" opens the album with a frequently gentle interaction between classical guitar and electronics, sometimes blossoming into a chorus of guitars or a deep echo. John Link's "Like Minds" casts the electronics in a more active role, culminating in a dense pointillistic cloud. "Mirrored Spaces" (a collaboration between Orianna Webb and the guitarist) immediately establishes the striking sound of equal-tempered and quarter-tone tunings. The three electric guitar works all explore alternate tunings--Lippel's "Scaffold" closes the album with a very electronic-sounding combination of detuning, ebow and looping. - © Mark Sullivan, Minor7th

This double album by guitarist, composer, producer, etc. Dan Lippel is sort of his Yellow Brick Road, an album which listeners of a certain age know well. Elton John’s album was more about dropping the shackles of adolescence and conformity but Mirrored Spaces is more about setting aside the shackles of Lippel’s very busy life with ICE (International Contemporary Ensemble), Flexible Music, and the daunting task of producing for (the also very busy and wonderful) New Focus Recordings. Here he presents a virtual manifesto of works for solo guitar with electronics which, if only by proximity of release date, suggests a comparison with Jennifer Koh’s Limitless.

The present disc is at once a virtual CV of his interests as performer and composer as well as a forward looking compilation by which future new chamber music with guitar will be compared. It is a collection which looks like he culled the best of his current working repertoire to present a sort of photograph of his vision.

The two discs are actually an overwhelming listening experience of new material. Here are the tracks:
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It’s easy to see the richness and complexity of this release from the track listing alone. Having already demonstrated his facility with minimalist classics like his wonderful recording of Steve Reich’s Electric Counterpoint he presents selections from what appears to be his current active repertoire. It is a joy to see the diversity of composers he has chosen. Clearly he confronts the new and technically challenging works with the same zeal with which he approaches his various other responsibilities as performer and producer. We even get to hear some of his chops as a composer in the live recording of Scaffold as well as his collaborative work with Orianna Webb on the eponymous Mirrored Spaces. These are unusual works, not the “usual suspects” not the latest rage but new and interesting music. Even the presentation of Kyle Bartlett’s pithy Aphorisms are scattered among the other tracks like pepper on your salad at a restaurant (personally my obsessive nature wants to re-order these tracks in sequence) demonstrating a sensitivity to alternate ways to present music. I have at best a passing knowledge of most of these composers having heard some of the work of Douglas Boyce and some of Kyle Bartlett. I know Ryan Streber via his work as a recording engineer. The rest of the name are new to these ears. And that is exactly the point of this wonderful collection. I really can’t say much useful about the individual pieces except to say that they are compelling listening. The liner notes included in the CD release are useful and informative. (Now last I looked the CD version is not available on Amazon so you will have to go to Bandcamp to order it but I highly recommend it for the notes alone.) Many of these pieces will have a significant performance life and you heard them here first. Much as Jennifer Koh defines new collaborative adventures in Limitless with her trusty violin, Lippel brings his axe down on some challenging but substantive music in this forward looking collection.

— Allan Cronin, 1.09.2020

I thought I was a decent record collector. I thought I have a good discoteque by now, especially as regards contemporary guitar music, but this record made me immediately review my positions. Do you know how many double cds I have of contemporary classical guitar? Nobody. And believe me, I have a lot of them. I did a search on Discogs.com. I haven’t found any. This album is an exception.

I come from the noise. I come from rock, from popular music. In those lands the double albums, if they are not simple compilations of successes, are viewed with a mixture of respect, unbelief and veneration. They tell complex stories. Concept albums. The sum of their passages goes beyond a simple final arithmetic. From a double album the fan of popular music expects a broad and extensive narrative, a sort of cultural manifesto, or, as often happens on live recordings, a sort of summary of the best of the best.

How does a double album behave in the context of such a specific musical niche as that of contemporary guitar music? Does it keep that concentration of energies and visions typical of the popular music or does it move on to other semantic territories? “Mirrored Spaces” by guitarist Daniel Lippel is a double world premiere album of music by American composers Orianna Webb, John Link, Kyle Bartlett, Douglas Boyce, Ryan Streber, Ethan Wickman, Christopher Bailey and Lippel himself, as well as the composers of other lands like Dalia R. With (Lithuania), Sergio Kafejian (Brazil), Karin Wetzel (Switzerland) and Sidney Corbett (Germany).

The title tells us something more about this musical panorama, it’s a different program from the usual guitar recital, something more similar to a concept album where pieces with different qualities are “mirrored” and reflect with each other increasing the listening prospects and the possibilities of exploration within classical and electric guitar, electroacoustic music, structure and form, programmatic and historical relationships, alternative tunings and microtonality.

I would like to emphasize not only the high quality intrinsic to each pieces but also the intelligent way in which they have been proposed and amalgamated, reflected between them. “Mirrored Spaces” is an album that must be listened to in a religious and exact sequence, in order not to get lost in that maze of complexity that Daniel Lippel has proudly and intelligently created.

A decomposed and casual listening would alter that series of planes and reflected surfaces whose sum shows us a decidedly more articulated structure than that of a simple recital or single listening.

A listening that led me to other thoughts and other connections. While listening to the music of “Mirrored Spaces” I was reading the book “Per Volontà e per Caso” by Pierre Boulez, where the composer talks about his life and his music in a long interview with Célestin Deliège and I came across a significant sentence, where Boulez compares the phenomenon of the historical evolution of music to the objects placed under the limestone sources.

Due to the action of the wellsprings, even a fairly simple, even banal, object becomes petrified, becoming a wonderful and balanced object. Then the fount continues to drip and, progressively, this object becomes overloaded with limestone, becoming an almost baroque object, until it becomes so saturated that it no longer has any reason for being. At that point we separate from it and look for something else. Hence a notion of history as a non-linear, but discontinuous, asymmetric, almost sinusoidal type. I think something similar is happening now in the world of contemporary guitar music, especially in academia.

On the one hand, the most extreme and disruptive forms of the twentieth century of which Boulez himself was a leading exponent seem to have exhausted their creative energies, also due to a radical political and social change. At the same time, perhaps thanks to the recent commemorations of the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, I see the return of neoclassical forms, and I have no interest about them. Here it is. I believe that Daniel Lippel’s double CD goes in a different direction, perhaps not surprisingly it comes from a country like the United States where certain energies, including entrepreneurial ones, have not run out and where a certain faith in innovation has been maintained.

“Mirrored Spaces” is an album of innovative forms and, above all, it expresses a tension towards something else, towards different perspectives. In addition, it’s a double cd. It’s a lesson to be learned.

— Andrea Aguzzi, 3.23.2020

Daniel Lippel, whom I would guess is in his 40s, commenced his formal education at Oberlin and at the Cleveland Institute of Music, and earned his D.M.A. in 2006 in the studio of David Starobin at the Manhattan School of Music. His dissertation topic was on guitar works by Mario Davidovsky, and throughout his career he has been most involved with new music for guitar, both in solo and chamber music contexts. His extensive discography dates back to 2004 (Resonance, New Focus Recordings), and he is very much in demand as a performer and also a teacher.

On this new release, Lippel highlights the collaborative relationship that he has enjoyed with other composers. In 2008, he worked with Orianna Webb and Ryan Streber, among others, to assemble a program he called “Experiments in Co-Composition,” and the works they created are the basis of this new release. At that same concert, he also performed a work of his own, Scaffold, and that live performance brings the present release to a satisfying end. (I think it is one of the strongest works on this program.) Everything else appears to have been recorded under studio conditions, mostly in 2018 and 2019, although two of the recordings (the title work and Descent) are about a decade old.

Overall, the program explores mirrors as a metaphor—in Lippel’s words, “with respect to the acoustic properties of the guitar, its electronic doppelgangers, structure, programmatic, and historical relationships, and treatment of material.” At several different points in this program, Lippel uses electric guitars (sometimes more than one at a time), amplifiers, non-conventional tuning, microtonality, and “the aesthetics of electro-acoustic music.” For example, in Ryan Streber’s Descent, an electric guitar is tuned like a cello, with the two additional strings tuned to B and E. The piece starts with a capo on the frets, which raises the pitch of all six strings, but later the capo is removed, lowering the pitch, and “a slow process of revealing progressively lower pitches eventually leads the work down in register to the detuned lowest string.” Lippel also writes, “Select moments in this work were written collaboratively; Ryan provided a skeleton for where a passage was coming from and where it needed to go, and I improvised around these restraints and presented a few options to him.” (It should be mentioned that composers do not necessarily learn in music schools specifically how to write for the guitar, and are often at least partly dependent on guitarists to instruct them in what is possible and not possible.)

I took particular interest in Ethan Wickman’s Joie Divisions. It is based on an earlier work (Joie) whose themes are ornamented and extended using the 16th- and 17th-century technique of division. It also is based on "Disorder," an iconic song by the British post-punk band Joy Division, which is another form of mirroring, I suppose.

The packaging includes nine brief aphorisms by Francis Bacon, Elias Canetti, and others. These aphorisms have been wordlessly set, if you will, to music by composer Kyle Bartlett. Each Aphorism is one or two minutes long, and the nine of them have been interspersed amongst the longer works on this program as scene-changing interludes.

Despite its variety, this program makes for challenging listening. For me, it was more intellectually involving—and there is much to admire here from that perspective—than emotionally engaging, but your experience might be different than mine. Lippel, like Starobin, is one of those guitarists who views the guitar as an instrument no less capable of advancing musical frontiers than any other instrument, and his strong musicianship supports that view. Given the program’s length, more casual listeners might be intimidated, but fear not: Lippel has uploaded tracks from this release onto YouTube, so one can explore its contents with minimal risk, and make a decision about just how deep to dive.

— Raymond Tuttle, 5.03.2020