Celestial Forms and StoriesJohn Aylward & Klangforum Wien

The composer John Aylward seems committed to the idea of pushing the language of music into unchartered territory. His work consistently suggests that only the relatively extreme is interesting. In all of the radicalism that this soundscape suggests, Aylward also manages to remain true to bright sonorous textures evoked in vivid phrases that leap and gambol with elliptical geometry. Yet every so often the percussive impact of his work transforms its flowing character into a kaleidoscopic melee of scurrying voices which are built up layer upon layer.

His suite Celestial Forms and Stories reimagines characters and narratives from Ovid’s classic, Metamorphosis. The five pieces have been arranged in the form of an atmospheric suite inspired as much by the Latin epic poem as it is by the dissertation, Ovid and Universal Contiguity, by Italo Calvino, itself an iconic treatise, epic in breadth and scope.

Celestial Forms and Stories begins with Daedalus and the darkly dramatic voyage of Icarus, its lofty melodic line ascending rhythmically into the heat of the rarefied realm. The transcendent motion of Mercury exquisitely evokes the winged messenger colliding with the obdurate Battus. The suite melts into the buzzing, swooning mayfly, Ephemera. Narcissus follows, trapped in the glassy tomb with Echo. The suite climaxes in the restless drama of Ananke with its forceful, tumbling rhythmic changes. The remarkable musicians of Klangforum Wien perform this work with vivid orchestral colours and preeminent virtuosity.

— Raul da Gama, 4.21.2022

The title of John Aylward’s five movement suite, performed on a New Focus disc by members of Klangforum Wien, comes from a 1979 essay, Ovid and Universal Contiguity, by the Italian writer Italo Calvino. Just as Calvino explores the Roman poet’s style – ‘Terrestrial forms and stories echo celestial forms and stories, but each entwines the other by turns in a double spiral’ – so the American composer builds his pieces using transformational techniques inspired by Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

The movements evoke figures in Greek mythology (Daedalus, Mercury, Narcissus) as depicted by Ovid and philosophical concepts (Ephemera, Ananke), all of which Aylward shapes with a keen ear for narrative contrast and instrumental colour. Much of the material is generated from the central movement, ‘Ephemera’, whose vivid interplay of bass clarinet and cello progresses from darting figures and tremolos through moments of repose, insistent motifs and sonic extremes.

The spiral aspects of Ovid as discerned by Calvino can be heard throughout Aylward’s suite, which is so varied in atmosphere and activity that the ear is constantly drawn to some expressive flourish or instrumental combination or conversation. The music demands active listening to appreciate the arc of each piece’s flights of fancy; and though the ensembles are never larger than septets (with wind players on multiple instruments), the writing in four of the movements is complex enough to require the services of a conductor.

It is well worth paying close attention. Aylward’s suite is at turns mysterious, iridescent and daring, and the virtuoso players of Klangforum Wien are alert to every nuance and volatile utterance.

— Donald Rosenberg, 4.06.2022

Few products of the imagination have had the endurance of the mythological figures of the classical Mediterranean world. Whether as archetypes, allegorical figures, proxies for natural forces, or just examples of behavior not to emulate, the gods, heroes, and anti-heroes of the Greek world have gone through many metamorphoses and shifts in significance, but through it all they have been kept alive through a centuries-long tradition of commentary, interpretation, reinterpretation, and misinterpretation. With his musical cycle Celestial Forms and Stories, composer John Aylward makes his own contribution to the tradition via Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Italo Calvino’s analyses of Ovid’s narrative style.

What Aylward was most interested in was the structure of Ovid’s work as Calvino described it—a set of simple elements undergoing combinations and transformations—and crafted a suite of five movements based on that principle. The suite is realized here in a series of excellent performances by members of Klangforum Wien in various combinations.

The opening movement is Daedalus (2016) for a quartet of flute, clarinet/bass clarinet, violin and cello. Daedalus casts its elements as melodic fragments distributed among the four instruments, often taking the form of a single line passing through a spectrum of instrumental colors. Aylward handles unpitched timbral effects in a similar manner, juxtaposing air notes, pops, and snap pizzicato to create coherent aggregates. Mercury (2014) follows with the same instrumentation and hence covers similar timbral territory. Its sound is skittering and driven by underlying trills and glissandi; its arrangement is as a coincidence of soloists, with each instrument pursuing independent lines ultimately tied together by overlapping dynamics. Ephemera, also from 2014, is for the duo of cello and bass clarinet. It continues and expands on the atmosphere created by Mercury, employing some of the same gestures while exploiting the dramatic effects facilitated by the timbral differences of these two instruments of close compass. Despite the minimal instrumentation, the piece has a full, almost lush, sound. Narcissus (2018) is for a seven-piece ensemble of flutes, oboe, clarinet/bass clarinet, string trio of violin, viola, and cello and percussion. Appropriately enough, the piece creates a sonic mirror effect with repeated and varied lines reflected back and forth among the instruments. The tuned percussion add a nice anchoring presence to the winds and strings. The last movement is Ananke (2019), named for the goddess of necessity—the most powerful figure in Greek mythology. Aylward scores the piece with the same instrumentation as Narcissus, but with piano substituting for percussion and playing a key role in driving the music. Ananke is urgent, forceful, insistent, and altogether compelling—like its namesake.

Celestial Forms and Stories follows Angelus Novus, Aylward’s 2020 album for voice and chamber ensemble. Like Angelus Novus, Celestial Forms is an ambitious work that aims for thematic and structural coherence and like Angelus Novus, it succeeds—and in doing so embodies the ancient Greek quality of arete: “excellence.”

— Daniel Barbiero, 2.11.2022

The musical expression of a literary analysis of classic Roman retelling of Greek myths, John Aylward brings musicians from Klangforum Wien for the classical and chamber fueled creativity.

“Daedalus” starts the listen the fuses a unique chamber experience, where alto flute is met with Vera Fischer’s bass flute, Andreas Lindenbaum’s graceful cello and Sophie Schafleitner’s diverse violin for the very unpredictable delivery.

“Mercury” follows, and showcases Olivier Vivarés’ quivering clarinet and bass clarinet in the cinematic and flowing climate, while “Ephemera” pairs clarinet and cello for a very atypical and lively interplay, where both instruments gesture towards each other with awe.

“Narcissus” lands near the end, and emits a more tense mood, as Markus Deuter’s oboe, Dimitrios Polisoidis’ viola and Bjorn Wilker’s percussion contribute much to the precisely layered album highlight, and “Ananke” exits the listen with Florian Muller’s dancing piano amid the playful oboe and trio of flutes populating the short chords and low registers.

Regardless of your interest in Greek mythology, this is a fascinating listen where bowed strings, dramatic keys, and rich winds weave in and out of dramatic and intimate areas of exploration.

— Tom Haugen, 5.08.2022

John Aylward is yet another composer who was born, started writing music without attending a conservatory or having a teacher, and yet has his music performed and wins awards all over the place. What a lucky guy!

Although written in different years ranging from 2014 to 2019, this is sort of Aylward’s “space album” although he doesn’t think of these pieces in terms of a suite. Judging from the opening, Daedalus, he is one of those modern composers who likes to use the “edgy-startling” style, presenting us with stiff, staccato rhythms played and spit out by various instruments, but as the piece develops we realize that this was just to set the rhythm for the first section. Indeed, as the music develops, Aylward slows things down and phrases his music with a legato feeling, showing that he has more than one “voice” as a composer. Indeed, by the 3:18 mark the music has become rather complex, using the bass clarinet to play a staccato counterpoint to the goings-on in the top line; several lines are in fact played simultaneously, creating a polyphonic web of sound. It is thus not music of great or personal emotions, but rather a very clever contrapuntal piece with lyrical interludes (mostly played by the violin and/or cello), yet I found it very effective music nonetheless.

Interestingly, although Mercury shares several traits in common with Daedalus, the approach is different enough to alert you that this is a different piece, and I appreciate that.. Aylward does, however, continue to rely on quick contrapuntal figures to make his points; apparently, this is his thing. Here, it sounds as if the cello is slapping its strings with the bow to create its own percussive sound at one point. (Maybe it’s just me, but at one point my mind flashed back to Marius Constant’s Twilight Zone theme music.) By the end of the piece, the music seemed to be more ambient (but in a good way) than structural.

The remaining pieces are variants on these motifs and ideas, modern, contrapuntal music with no set tonality and an imaginative use of the small forces involved (seven each on Narcissus and Anake but only two musicians on Ephemera). I was fascinated by the way Aylward was able to balance the various instrumental textures in the last two pieces; these show that he has a very fine ear for instrumental color, and in Narcissus he even uses some microtonal passages for the strings. Aylward also varies the rhythms a bit more in Narcissus. In Aneke, Aylward creates swirling, looping figures that give the impression of a musical kaleidoscope.

As is often the case with modern composers nowadays, one or two pieces in a concert including others’ music would make an interesting effect, but the continually challenging aesthetics demand so much close listening that a full program may wear on the listener. Nonetheless, this is a CD worth investigating. At least it’s not Chopin!

— Lynn René Bayley, 2.09.2022

The five-movement work in concert music is as old as music itself and John Aylward’s new recording, “Celestial Forms and Stories” — containing five separate and distinct sections — conforms, in its structure, to the works of Mozart and Beethoven. It is written, however, for chamber ensemble rather than full orchestra.

Inspired by the stories contained in Ovid’s “Metamorphoses,” the pieces — Daedelus, Mercury, Ephemera, Narcisus, and Ananke — were written over a period of six years, from 2014 to 2019. Composer Aylward seems to struggle with melody, employing the form but fighting all the way. He manages to give live musicians playing traditional instruments an almost electronic sound through his tricky and sometimes difficult harmonies. Fortunately, he has the excellent musicians of the Klangforum Wien, under the direction of Finnegan Downie Dear, to play this score.

John Aylward lives and works in Northampton, Massachusetts. Born in 1980, he has enjoyed many successes; this is his second recording of new works. He teaches and concertizes as a pianist. Part of the joy in listening to this recording comes from the content of the five sections, especially from the third movement, Ephemera, the Scherzo section, a joke really. Featuring two members of the ensemble, bass clarinetist Olivier Vivares and cellist Andreas Lindenbaum, the music vibrates from giggle to gag and back again over nearly nine minutes. Melody intrudes periodically in Aylward’s best fashion, but it never pauses or relents. This is typical of the work but is never as clear, clean, and obvious anywhere else.

In addition to the two musicians mentioned above, the Klangforum Wien consist of Vera Fischer (flute), Markus Deuter (oboe), Bernhard Zachhuber (clarinet), Sophie Schafleitner (violin), Dimitrios Polisoidis (viola), and Bjorn Wilker (percussion). This isn’t music you’ll play in the background of other activities; it requires listening to and is better on repeat hearings than it is the first time. The fifth section, Ananke, is the closest to lyrical this work ever gets, and its extended length of 15 minutes is well justified.

— J. Peter Bergman, 2.18.2022

Contemporary composer and Clark University associate professor John Aylward had been captivated by the Classic Roman poet Ovid's "Metamorphoses," a retelling of stories of Greek mythology, since his older brother gave him the book while he was growing up in Arizona.

Now with the album "Celestial Forms and Stories," released last month by New Focus Recordings, Aylward rewrites the myths that Ovid immortalized through a five-piece suite of atmospheric chamber music. The music is performed by the Viennese chamber orchestra Klangforum Wien with members in different chamber formations for the movements.

"I want it to feel like an immersive experience," Aylward said.

Aylward, who is associate professor of music composition at Clark, had given some thought to musically adapting "Metamorphoses" over the years but didn't want to put into music "another one of those artful takes on great myths if I didn't have my own avenue," he said.

But reading an analysis of Ovid’s style by the late Italian writer Italo Calvino gave Aylward some ideas of his own. The pieces that make up "Celestial Forms and Stories" were written over a period of six years, 2014-19.

In Ovid's "Metamorphoses," each story contains some sort of transformation (or metamorphosis) as the link that ties them all together. The transformations can be violent or exotic and ever-surprising. "It's such a fantastical poem," Aylward said. "Things can happen on a dime. A hand becomes a talon. A nose becomes a beak."

When he came upon Calvino's analyses, "they were the impetus," Aylward said. "(I thought) 'This is it.' I can deconstruct with some sort of new understanding."

Calvino wrote about a set of simple elements in Ovid's work undergoing combinations and transformations.

Aylward's composition has a foundational movement, "Ephemera" for clarinet and cello, out of which preceding and ensuing movements develop ("Daedalus," "Mercury," "Narcissus," "Anake").

The opening movement, "Daedalus," is for a quartet of flute, clarinet/bass clarinet, violin and cello with melodic fragments distributed among the four instruments. "Mercury" has the the same instrumentation.

"Narcissus" is for a seven-piece ensemble of flutes, oboe, clarinet/bass clarinet, string trio of violin, viola, and cello and percussion. Lines are "repeated and varied lines reflected back and forth among the instruments." "Anake" scores the piece with the same instrumentation as "Narcissus," but with piano substituting for percussion and moving things forward.

Aylward has said that "Textures, gestures, harmonies, and formal aspects recur across the pieces, aspects of them all sometimes visible, sometimes clouded, quickly passing or elongated under more mercurial material, always transformed to suit new circumstances, but holding threads of their origin."

The sound, perhaps appropriately for a work titled "Celestial Forms and Stories," is almost out of this world.

"I can see that. I've always been a big fan of science fiction, so maybe it's a nod to that," Aylward said jokingly.

However, "I do hope that the listener will be entranced by the mythologies," he said.

"You can hear the material recurring like characters in a new scene. You can treat the instruments as characters in the world I've made."

"Celestial Forms and Music" was also a true collaboration with the Austrian contemporary classical ensemble Klangforum Wien, Aylward said.

The ensemble is actually made up of 24 musicians from 10 different countries.

"We talked a lot about the music. At first I asked them if they would be interested in doing it," Aylward said. "'Do you want to do a recording project? We could do a recording pod.' They had many performance canceled (because of COVID). We had a very rich back and forth about it in the recording process. It was a very fruitful process. This brought my compositional practice to another level," Aylward said.

"Celestial Forms and Stories" was entirely produced, recorded, edited and mastered remotely due to COVID restraints.

Still, "I've heard many different interpretations of performances (of my work) and this ranks among the best," Aylward said.

"Celestial Forms and Stories" is the second album of music that Aylward has had released during the pandemic.

In the 2020 album "Angelus" by the contemporary music group Ecce Ensemble, Aylward, Ecce's artistic director, composed a monodrama that evoked journey, displacement, resilience, despair, feelings of transcendence and unreality reverberating through a stunning 10-movement monodrama.

In 2014, Aylward had accompanied his mother, Monika, on her first journey back to Germany since she was a World War II refugee. While in Europe, they also spent a couple of days in Paris, including visiting Centre Pompidou and viewing Paul Klee’s striking 1920 monoprint "Angelus Novus." Inspired by this painting and specifically its central image of the Angel of History, Aylward discovered German Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin's text that powerfully describes this work of art and his own interpretation.

Now, with the heartbreaking events in the Ukraine, "Angelus" has resounding relevance.

In 2020, Aylward said, "This work is dedicated to my mother and to all those who have been displaced by violence and war, to their resilience and search for meaning in darkness."

It was also noted, at the release of "Angelus" in 2020, that its atmospheric, sometimes brooding discordance made it a work that seemed fitting for a world suddenly shut down by coronavirus.

Aylward's music has embraced solo works, chamber music, orchestral work and music for film. He has received numerous awards.

He grew up in Tucson, Arizona, and with his Southwestern background, his music has often explored concerns related to that landscape and culture such as ancestral concepts of time, appropriations of indigenous cultures into surrealism and impressionism, and the connections between native traditions and Greek and Roman mythology. He has received a number of commissions including from members of Klangforum Wien and Court-Circuit, Icon, the Washington Square Contemporary Music Society and from Open Space. The Boston Globe has described him as "a composer of wide intellectual curiosity" who summons "textures of efficient richness, delicate and deep all at once."

He came East to be a graduate student at Brandeis University, where he earned a doctorate in music composition and theory. He currently lives in Northampton.

Another reason for exploring Ovid and "Metamorphoses" was that "I teach in the liberal arts. I don't teach in a conservatory, and I like it that I grew up with a liberal arts education. When you teach long enough in the liberal arts you are surrounded by the classics. It's foundational," Aylward said.

But perhaps picking up a theme from "Metamorphoses," Aylward said, "I feel artists change and are always changing. I would like to think I will always be changing."

Indeed, he said he's currently working on a chamber opera, but since he started it he's also been writing two other pieces.

As COVID seems to be easing, at least in these parts, "I am looking forward to getting back to more public events and not worrying so much," he said.

Asked if COVID has changed him as a composer, Aylward said, "I do think it has changed me. Partly, I don't know how it's changed me yet."

And there are other happenings now which may change us, and the world.

"There are so many issues going on around me," Aylward said.

That's what he's been writing about. With feelings of dramatic dislocation and transformations, there may be soulmates to be found in "Angelus" and "Celestial Forms and Stories."

Avant Music news said in its review of "Celestial Forms and Stories" that like "Angelus" it is "an ambitious work that aims for thematic and structural coherence and like 'Angelus' … it succeeds — and in doing so embodies the ancient Greek quality of arete: 'excellence.'"

Aylward said that as he was writing "Angelus," he was also separately developing the movements that would become "Celestial Forms and Stories."

"'Angelus' was very personal, something I wanted to do as a way of exploring my mother's history," Aylward said.

"I was writing 'Celestial Forms' at the same time. I didn't know where they were going. I didn't know the 'Celestial' pieces were going to accrue. One is very personal, one is more curious. It's interesting that they were both slowly unfolding at the same time."

— Richard Duckett, 3.22.2022

There is a passage in the booklet supplied with this excellent new recording that describes John Aylward’s music as sounding like “Elliot Carter dreaming of Debussy” and I think that is an apt description of its immaculate poise between the bracing modernity of the American and the sensual delights of the Frenchman. It gives little idea, however, of just how distinctive Aylward’s own voice is and it speaks eloquently and clearly in this suite of chamber pieces inspired by Ovid.

What Ovid and Aylward share is an irrepressible fecundity of inspiration. The music like both the subject and the poetic form of Ovid’s metamorphosis, is in a constant state of transformation with each twist revealing new delights. If a particular section doesn’t take your fancy never fear because Aylward is not the kind of composer to make the listener sit around enduring something for the sake of a mathematical algorithm. He conceals his art in favour of entrancing sounds and textures. Given this quality what is remarkable is the way he is able to pull this all together into a coherent structure. The question for me with all new music is: does this need to be said? In the case of these pieces, the answer is an enthusiastic Yes!

The scale of Aylward’s vision matters. This may be chamber music but in no way is it limited in terms of scope or colour. I found myself thinking that this is yet another path forward from the pared back orchestration of late Mahler pieces such as Das Lied.

The piece that begins this album, Daedalus, commences with probably the most cliché modernist sounds on the disc and I can imagine some listeners abandoning it with the exclamation’Not more huffing and puffing into a flute!’ This would be an immense pity as the piece quickly settles down and becomes much more distinctive and immensely more interesting. I am not going to indulge in speculation as to the link between music and myth as if this were some kind of musical narrative. What it sets underway is a series of mutations of the material starting with a passage of static music that offers us a very broad horizon indeed. I was put in my mind of looking at photographs of deep space studded with billions of stars. The rest of the work alternates tireless movement in transforming the music in ingenious ways with the recurrence of moments of stasis.

Having set out his stall, Aylward really starts to enjoy himself in the delicate, quizzical textures that open the second piece, appropriately named Mercury. The trickiness that is clearly part of Aylward’s musical personality is given free rein here. If the language is modernist, the mood isn’t that of grim earnestness that sometimes besets contemporary classical. Possibly because the metal Mercury is liquid at room temperature, there is a lot of fluidity to the writing. The music for flute and clarinet flows delightfully. This is music to charm and fascinate as well as to set the mind boggling. The occasional glimpses of something deeper serve to remind us that the god Mercury, in his role as psychopomp, mediated between Hades and the upper worlds.

The central work of this five movement suite is provocatively titled Ephemera. I presume this refers to the transitory nature of music itself, it sounds and is gone, but also to the way in which, despite that transitory nature, music stays with us. In a group of pieces inspired by Ovid and transformations of all sorts, musical and mythological, it also seems to make the point that nothing ever stays the same. Being is becoming. It is the briefest of the sections and the most concentrated. It provides most of generative material for the other movements but this is not something the listener is going to be aware of. I was put in mind of the similarly ‘here one minute, gone the next’ nature of the music of Webern though Aylward’s language is less severe and rarified than the Austrian’s and his approach decidedly less dogmatic. The end of the piece brings a startling and unsettling collapse into silence. The fate of all music?

As befits its title, Narcissus is the most immediately seductive of the sections. Here the Debussy part of Aylward’s voice is most audible. It sounds like music that is enjoying its own loveliness and ingenuity! Whilst I enjoyed all the pieces on this disc, this one is lipsmackingly good.

The final section is entitled Ananke which means Necessity. The sleeve notes relate this to a consistently repeated though transformed musical figure that runs through the piece. The same notes liken this to the role of es muss sein figure in Beethoven’s last quartet. In other words, it enacts the infinite capacity of life to adapt and move forward. The music of this section, therefore, is the most mobile as well as being the most diverse and digressive. In parts it is the most violent but in others places it contains music of exquisite refinement.

A final word about the inexhaustible energy and imagination of Klangforum Wien. In much the same way that we are now grateful to Columbia for their Stravinsky edition, I believe that future generations will be grateful to them for their services, presumably for little thanks or reward, to the music of today. This present recording is a prime example since it is played and recorded with immense care and great joy in making such wonderful music.

— David McDade, 3.31.2022

It is worth noting that some vocal inspirations can lead, interestingly, to entirely non-vocal works, whose composers believe the underlying verbal material is better communicated through purely instrumental means. That is the attitude of John Aylward in his Celestial Forms and Stories, a set of five pieces performed by members of Klangforum Wien on a New Focus Recordings CD. As so often in contemporary music, an understanding of the basis of the compositional approach is necessary for listeners to have a full appreciation of the material. The works are based on Greek myths, an apparently still-inexhaustible source of thoughtfulness, learning and amusement. But Aylward’s approach is, by design, two steps removed from the original myths. First of all, he works from a Roman retelling of the stories: Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Secondly and more significantly, Aylward’s interest is not in the tales themselves but in Italo Calvino’s analysis and interpretation of them. Thus, a listener who hopes fully to absorb the ideas and approaches of Celestial Forms and Stories needs to be familiar with Greek myth, Roman retellings of Greek myth, and Calvino’s approach to Roman retellings of Greek myths. This is a lot to ask of an audience, although no more than other composers today seem to consider their due (or their works’ due). The question for listeners is whether the music, so remote from the words that inspired it, is a worthwhile experience – indeed, whether hearing the music on its own will encourage listeners to learn more about its foundations, explore them, and then re-hear what Aylward has created. Listeners who start with the music itself will find out for themselves how deeply they want to go into Aylward’s source material and his worldview. On the CD, Daedalus (2016), for clarinet, flute, violin and cello, is the usual contemporary mixture of plucked and stroked and glissando-ed notes, initially individuated and later given at greater length. Mercury (2014), for the same instruments, has none of the speed and sprightliness usually associated with this god (as in, for example, Holst’s “winged messenger” movement in The Planets), although it does have enough shifting of sound and harmonic lines to deserve to be called mercurial. Ephemera (2014) is a duet for clarinet and cello: these two warm-sounding and emotionally trenchant instruments are here used in ways that undermine their typical sound, creating a work of textural dialogue that is wholly without lyricism. Narcissus (2018) is for flute, oboe, clarinet, violin, viola, cello, and percussion, and uses an unsurprising structure in which different-sounding, differently grouped instruments are heard in opposition (but not really in reflection, which might be expected in a work of this title). Ananke (2019) uses a single percussion instrument, the piano, rather than a group of them, but otherwise has the same instrumentation as Narcissus. Ananke was the goddess of inevitability and had, in a sense, more power than the other gods, although not in as dark a way in Greek myths as is the case with the overall structure of Norse legends. With inevitability comes a level of compulsion, if not quite predetermination; and in this piece, the most interesting of the five heard here, Aylward has the music veer hither and thither, confusingly but compellingly, with short phrases contrasted with longer ones and a quiet, moody section followed immediately by a bright, intense one. The question for listeners is whether Ananke and/or the other works here stand effectively on their own as music, or whether it is only through understanding and exploring Aylward’s foundational verbal inspiration that it is possible to get as much out of the music as he has put into it. The reasonable followup question, to which each listener will have to form a personal answer, is whether further exploration sufficiently enhances the musical experience to be worth the time spent studying and investigating the roots of Celestial Forms and Stories.

Challenging modern music that will not be to every taste, but which will reward those desirous of moving beyond the familiar. The recording here is particularly nuanced, catching every strand of the evanescent lines.

— Barry Forshaw, 2.24.2022

I am rarely faced with music that is ingenious, highly varied, and filled with color on the one hand while being frustratingly incomprehensible on the other. Generally only one of those things is true. I will try to describe what I hear in the music of composer/pianist John Aylward, offering no assurance that I am on the right track. Yet in the end I intend to recommend this release as an attractive listen.

Celestial Forms and Stories is a five-movement suite of chamber works written between 2014 and 2019 by Aylward (who is apparently making his first appearance in Fanfare). The title suggests a cosmic dimension linked to the individual pieces and their mythological subjects. The program notes say that the music’s literary source is Ovid’s Metamophoses, whose mythical transformations were mined by Strauss for two operas, Ariadne auf Naxos and Daphne. Countless other examples occur in classical music. Aylward’s first piece is “Daedalus,” the architect who was said by Ovid to have designed the Labyrinth for King Minos with so many twists and turns that he himself couldn’t find the way out. The other ancient references move forward from there.

Taking these five pieces for what they sound like, each creates an abstract soundscape in which musical gestures come and go, overlap, clash, and modulate haphazardly. In “Daedalus,” for instance, four members of Klangforum Wien perform on violin, cello, flutes (alto and bass), and clarinet and bass clarinet. Besides the expected musical tones, there are also hollow blowing sounds, rapping, plucking, and scraping. This miscellany of noise is imaginative. At one moment a certain sadness or eeriness enters; at other points the scatter of crisp individual sounds is Pointillistic. Beyond this, I glean nothing that feels like melody, harmony, form, direction, or narrative. Yet—this is the kicker—“Daedalus” held my attention for its entire nine minutes, in the way that watching a TV screen showing four different channels might be fascinating. The other four works follow suit and maintain the same elusive moods and gestures.

Musically, one might reasonably expect the unfolding of a narrative or something describing the predicament of Daedalus; the vanity of Narcissus, who fell in love with his own reflection; or the errands of the winged messenger Mercury. Such does not appear in any form that I could recognize. It turns out that Aylward uses Ovid by raising him to a level of abstraction divorced from any program, as the booklet notes explain: “Whereas artists have traditionally mined Ovid’s overflowing imagination for subject matter for their art, Aylward is much more interested in the lessons on crafting stories that Ovid has to teach.” Ovid without stories would be like Grimm’s fairy tales with blank pages. I don’t object to imagining what the music is about if that’s what the composer wants. In this case, whatever Aylward wants, Ovid is not useful to the listener, although the program notes cite Italo Calvino’s critical writings, in which “Ovid emerges as a master of lightness, quickness, and precision.”

Aylward has mastered the same qualities in his mercurial idiom, and he has an impressive resumé to show for it. He won a Guggenheim Fellowship and accolades from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, among other prestigious sources of awards and commissions—without a doubt he is on to something. This, I think, is easy to hear. Clearing away the mythological lumber opens the view to musical abstraction that says nothing except about itself. This is reminiscent of Dada and self-enclosed imaginations like John Cage’s, or Charles Ives in his Tone Roads. Audiences are now conditioned to listen to what a new musical language sounds like rather than waiting for something conventional to latch onto. At least, that’s what contemporary composers hope for.

The feeling of these pieces is like Webern without any formal underpinnings. The ensembles vary in size up to a mixed septet of woodwinds, strings, and percussion (“Narcissus”). Aylward has a fondness for creating gentle, light atmospherics and shies away from dissonance. Here and there the music will land briefly on a familiar consonance. In a word, the soundscapes he devises are easy to approach, which is an asset for the general listeners.

I would like to say that I got beyond these rather external traits, but in any event I had a pleasurable listening experience that in the end wasn’t especially challenging, even though I can’t decipher what I heard. The performances and recorded sound are first-rate.

— Huntley Dent, 7.15.2022