Kyle Bruckmann: of rivers

A solo recording by oboe and English horn virtuoso Kyle Bruckmann is like a communique giving news of the latest stages in those instruments’ ongoing musical evolution. Like his colleague and sometime collaborator bassoonist Dana Jessen, Bruckmann has taken a leading role in inventing and developing new techniques for a venerable if sometimes overlooked orchestral instrument, and in the process adapting it to the high-tech environments of contemporary composition and improvisation.

Bruckmann’s latest, of rivers, contains one composition by Bruckmann in addition to five other works, some acoustic and some electroacoustic, by five other composers. What all have in common is a willingness to push Bruckmann’s instruments and instrumentalism to the limits of their musical possibilities. This is apparent from the very first piece, Jessie Cox’s AT[ou]M, an acoustic work that sets extreme leaps of register as well as a number of extended techniques – overblowing, multiphonics, pitch bending – within an open-textured, fragmentary structure. Hannah A. Barnes’ Dis/inte/gration matches oboe with live interactive phase vocoder in a work that, despite its title, gradually integrates both instruments into an evolving texture of increasing density that culminates in an assertive rush of electronics and oboe lines evoking a frenzied soprano saxophone improvisation. Helen Grime’s Arachne is a brief, thematically beautiful solo for oboe that brings out Bruckmann’s more conventionally expressive side. For the electroacoustic DROP, Linda Bouchard created a graphic score whose figures are based on the sounds of water in its various states. Bruckmann’s interpretation of Bourchard’s score, played out against an abstract electronic backdrop, affords him the opportunity to create a virtuoso performance drawing on his wide-ranging technical resources. Bruckmann’s own Proximity, affect, is a solo piece reflecting its origin in the isolation of the Covid lockdowns. For this electronic work Bruckmann recorded and manipulated sounds originating from different parts of the oboe. The instrument’s presence is largely submerged in the processing, but occasionally the sounds of key clicks or breath blowing through the tube make themselves known. The album closes with Christopher Burns’ Mutiny of Rivers, a long piece featuring electronics artist Ernst Karel interacting with Bruckmann. As on DROP, Bruckmann improvises an exciting solo line on the basis of suggestive compositional material. In duet with himself via Karel’s electronic manipulations, Bruckmann’s warm acoustic voice dramatically counterpoints its processed double.

— Daniel Barbiero, 3.14.2024

Composer, improviser, oboist, and longtime sfSoundGroup comrade Kyle Bruckmann’s gorgeous new album, of rivers, is now available on CD, digital, and streaming, via New Focus Recordings. The record unfolds a contemporary oboe recital, featuring solo and solo-plus-electronics pieces by Jessie Cox, Hannah A. Barnes, Helen Grime, and Linda Bouchard, alongside one of Kyle’s own compositions, and demonstrates the incredible breadth of Kyle’s interests and capabilities as a musician.

The album concludes with The Mutiny of Rivers, a piece I wrote for EKG - Kyle’s electroacoustic duo with Ernst Karel - in 2010. It’s a pleasure to share their brilliant recording with the world, and especially in the thoughtful and compelling context of Kyle’s disc.

In hindsight, The Mutiny of Rivers was a crucial piece in my development as a musician - opening up new ways of thinking about improvisation, and new modes of collaboration, that eventually led to the formation of ensembles like Minor Vices and Tanngrisnir. I’d be grateful if you gave it a listen, doubly so if you wanted to purchase of rivers and support Kyle’s work. And I’d like to spend a bit more space here reflecting on the piece and its creation.

A trip upriver

The composition of The Mutiny of Rivers began with an email invitation from Kyle. While EKG had existed from the late 1990s as an improvising group, with no need for scores or other compositional input, they were looking for new challenges, new ideas, and new provocations. Kyle wrote, “the ideal is pieces suitably idiosyncratic (eccentric?) to account for who we are as an ‘ensemble’; i.e., …things that somehow incorporate modularity, improvisation, interpretation, live electronics, sketchy and half-broken equipment, etc.” I don’t know if every composer would find that particular creative challenge to be catnip, but I was hooked.

In that email, Kyle also invoked my decade of experience performing Luigi Nono’s La Lontananza Nostalgica Utopica Futura, and in doing so set the The Mutiny of Rivers on a very specific path: “...the elegance and brilliance of Nono’s approach to composing for live electronics (the gist being that the part is crystal clear while not being hardware-specific, and while still retaining ample space for interpretation, musicality, PERFORMANCE: you know, as if it’s a “real” instrument or something....)”

With that encouragement and/or provocation, I began the piece using La Lontananza’s template: written music for Kyle to perform on English horn, plus a reservoir of pre-recorded “tape” material from which Ernst could select and mix specific elements. That said, I sought to increase the level of interpretive freedom beyond what Nono provided. I asked Ernst to process the pre-recorded material though his modular synthesis rig - license he used to shape and distort those recordings in ways that I never would have imagined, but found thrilling. I found other ways to provide latitude in the written music - unordered pages of material for Kyle to put into sequence, deliberately unspecified tempi, and the option to apply live-electronic manipulations at any point. And while some of the leaves of music used conventional notation, others provided instructions in prose, using the layout of the text to reinforce the ideas and constraints. Here’s one page:

That approach to material, specified via text-plus-graphic-design, would later become the sole basis of another piece written for Kyle. Alligator Char, embodied in a deck of 158 “playing cards,” eventually became the foundational text of Milwaukee-based ensemble Minor Vices, and that group’s activity led to a whole sequence of projects exploring unconventional types of scores (everything from flowcharts to computer-controlled lighting designs), and the spaces between traditionally “fixed” compositions and wholly “open” improvisations.

For all of the ways in which The Mutiny of Rivers represented something new and generative in my artistic trajectory, it also expressed one of my core aesthetic values: the idea that an overloaded, information-dense experience could invite a variety of interpretations from both performer and listener. The Mutiny of Rivers is designed such that there can’t be a singular “correct” way to perform the work, and I hope that same multiplicity extends to the act of listening. With so many details to observe and possible paths to consider, the listener is compelled to make choices, forming a unique experience by attending to whatever elements they find most interesting in the moment. Even as a fixed recording, the music strives to reward relistening.

— Christopher Burns, 3.15.2024

As someone who’s been listening to music of oboist Kyle Bruckmann for several decades, through different projects and styles, his mixture of rigor and humility have been constant. Although he’s a marvelous improviser, he’s been spending more and more time working with composed material, both in Dana Jessen’s Splinter Reeds and with solo work. Of rivers falls into this second category, with a variety of composers taking advantage of Bruckmann’s technical range and his willingness to aim for the impossible. The collection opens with Jessie Cox’s “AT[ou]M,” a knotty miniature in which creaky multiphonics; short, jagged phrases; and warped pitches are plotted within silence, which the composer calls “the way in which spaces make sound come to our ears. Composer Hannah Barnes uses electronic interventions to destabilize Bruckman’s playing on “Dis/inte/gration,” which cuts through viscous, slow-moving noise with phrasing both jaunty and harsh—the two elements make peace…sort of. “Arachne,” by Helen Grime, is built from the myth of the title character and Minerva, moving from nonchalant confidence to frenzied struggle before scampering away like the spider the titular character becomes. In “DROP” Linda Bouchard asks Bruckmann to interpret a graphic score made from different analysis of water sounds and, combined with the electronics, we can deduce crackling ice, sibilant blasts of steam, and more abstract sonified liquid. Bruckmann’s own “Proximity, affect” was inspired by the isolation of pandemic-era performance, with close-miked extended techniques and throbbing electronics reflecting the performer’s sensation of playing within “a psychosocial gerbil ball.” The final piece reunites the oboist with Ernst Karel, his electronics partner in EKG, as they navigate Christopher Burns’s “The Mutiny of Rivers,” an electroacoustic hornet’s nest inspired by Luigi Nono’s La Lontananza Nostalgica Utopica Futura.

— Peter Margasak, 4.03.2024

Oboist, composer, and electronic musician Kyle Bruckmann is a dedicated advocate for contemporary concert music. One of the founding members of Splinter Reeds, he currently plays in a number of ensembles in the San Francisco Bay area, including sfSound, San Francisco Contemporary Players, and the Stockton Symphony. Bruckann teaches oboe and contemporary music at University of the Pacific.

On his latest recording, Bruckmann programs a number of pieces that incorporate wildly challenging extended techniques and, in some, electronics. Bruckmann’s own Proximity, Affect features the latter, as well as deconstructed instruments. Thrumming bass and harmonics derived from it, succeeded by scraps of bleeps, bespoke instrumental interjections, and white noise open the work. Gradually, a bass passage an octave higher is introduced, along with a steady stream of repetitions. It is distressed by snippets of the middle’s material. The big bass returns only to have its ostinato hijacked by a percussive variant

Jessie Cox’s AT(ou)M is a festival of multiphonics, microtones, and altissimo register playing. Its concept is the exploration of resonant spaces. The reverb imparted to the oboe attacks makes a point of this. Its concomitant idea is the exploration of the silences between attacks as they decay. This is an important component, as it invites the listener to hear the piece as more than its sounds, to experience slices of time with minimal transitions. Cox is a thoughtful composer, and AT(ou)M is a signature example of this. Here, as elsewhere, Bruckmann displays consummate technical skill, even in the most challenging elements of the score.

Hannah A. Barnes samples the oboe, put through a vocoder, and uses this material for the electronics part of Dis/inte/gration. The title is a good clue, as the piece begins with the foundational gesture of the tuning pitch, gradually moving away from it in sinuous scalar passages and angular leaps. The electronics arrive and begin to augment the proceedings with sounds that range from low octave grumbles to a choir of oboe glissandos. Its conclusion is described by Barnes as, “exacting change, and forcing the material to collapse in on itself, a ‘bacteria of voices.’”

Helen Grime used to be an oboist herself, and Arachne (spider) displays her familiarity with the instrument, particularly in her awareness of how note choices and the use of various fingerings abet artful lines. The piece has an incantatory quality, with beguiling ascending runs and cascades of trills – all seeming to weave a web of modernist counterpoint. An insistent upper note becomes an idée fixe, only to dissolve in the piece’s denouement.

Drop by Linda Bouchard, for solo improviser and electronics, starts off with howling high notes, soon to be followed by water sounds: droplets, waves, and ice breaking, which are juxtaposed with terse rejoinders from the oboe. In one of the best moments, fleet runs directly respond to the flurries of rainwater in the electronics. Drop is an example of an organic use of sampling, and Bruckmann’s response to the recorded sounds is well-considered and abundantly chops-laden.

Christopher Burns prefers to work closely with the interpreters’ of his music, creating a personal, collaborative experience as part of a composition’s gestation. The Mutiny of Rivers is written for EKG, Bruckmann’s duo with electronics musician Ernst Karel. Karel usually employs analog electronics, while Burns works in the digital domain. The composer combines both of these, and Bruckmann plays English horn, playing both composed and improvisatory passages. This agglomeration of elements proves to be the best of all worlds, with Karel’s analog instruments, typifying EKG’s “slowly unfolding textures and timbral nuances,” and Burns’s digital “spiky and multi-layered aesthetic,” combine in an intricate sound palette of microtones, timbral variety, and glissandos. Bruckmann, in turn, uses an instrument with additional low notes, yet plays in the altissimo register with aplomb.

Burns also intends The Mutiny of Rivers to contain puzzles and even traps. One is that he gives Karel six tracks of sampled audio to use, some of which may be chopped or suppressed in performance. With versatile approaches and abundant aleatory, one can readily hear this as a playfully earnest way to provide a measure of trapeze walk to the piece. Burns cites Luigi Nono’s La Lontananza Nostalgica Utopica Futura as a totem work and although The Mutiny of Rivers contains its own panoply of sounds, the shared intent is manifest.

Bruckmann’s of rivers is a formidable and satisfying recording, one of my favorites thus far in 2024.

— Christian Carey, 5.06.2024

For most oboe players, mastering orchestral parts and the occasional solo stand might be satisfying. Not for Bruckmann, who tackles the gnarly, the conceptual, and the noise with equal flair. Working with boundary-pushing composers like Jessie Cox, Hannah A. Barnes, Helen Grimes, Linda Bouchard, and Christopher Burns has led Bruckmann to expand the sound world of the oboe. Perhaps the composer taking the least pity on the performer is Bruckmann himself, with his Proximity, Affect combining ear-splitting expulsions and ragged intakes with alien synth work. Standard-setting stuff.

— Jeremy Shatan, 6.10.2024

No genre is more arcane than avant-garde oboe music, which is the thrust of this recital by oboist-composer Kyle Bruckmann. It is even more remote that the six works on the program are for solo oboe in an experimental idiom (there is extensive employment of electronics in most of the pieces). This is a program designed for appreciation by a New Music coterie, but I admire Bruckmann’s adventurous imagination, and his playing is superb.

With that mixed message aside, a piece for unaccompanied oboe launches the recital. In her composer’s note, Jessica Cox writes that AT[ou]M is about “the sound of space,” beginning with the way different sounds decay and resonate in the space around the performer. “In other words, space is the notness of things.” This conceptual background doesn’t help clarify what amounts to three minutes of peeps, slides, pitch bends, and scraping sounds seemingly produced at random by Bruckmann’s oboe.

A melancholy view of modern existence seems to underlie the piece by Hannah A. Barnes, about which she says, “Dis/inte/gration consists of inherently unstable gestures in crisis and collapse.” The music begins unpromisingly as a series of sustained notes without variance, and what follows sounds disorganized. Eventually variety is added by electronic passages, as explained in the notes: “Although it may not appear so, all electronic material is present in the live oboe part, processed and played back through a phase vocoder at impossibly slow speeds.” The electronic interjections constitute a “disruptive force,” but what the ear picks up is a soft cacophony of twiddles, hums, and ingeniously distorted oboe tones behind Bruckmanan’s acoustic part. The mélange has a moment-to-moment appeal, especially if you don’t think the oboe has a raucous side.

As a contrast to experimentalism, Helen Grime’s Arachne is more conventional, featuring quasi-melodies and no extended performance techniques. The source is the mythical Arachne in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, who has the misfortune of challenging the goddess Minerva to a weaving contest. The goddess is angered by Arachne’s weaving, which depicts the Olympian gods as violent debauchers. Minerva beats Arachne brutally, after which she takes pity when the mortal hangs herself. Arachne is transformed into a spider, hence the term arachnids. The tale is more interesting than Grime’s piece, which is a pleasant series of instrumental gestures that leaves no lasting impression.

We return to experimentalism in Linda Bouchard’s DROP, which she describes as a “Live Structure for solo improviser and electronics.” This is one of 13 works inspired by water. The improvisational element is produced in a specific way. “The musician performs from a graphic score created from the analysis of different water sounds: droplets, waves, ice breaking, etc.” The principal appeal here is technological in the textural backdrop of water sounds that are poised between sounding natural and artificial. The oboe’s improvised acoustic part largely consists of short, abrupt gestures that appear very occasionally. Some of these are highly virtuosic, however, which adds interest. Overall, DROP feels like the most assured and rewarding piece so far.

During the pandemic year of 2020 Bruckmann delivered a remote performance of his 20-minute electronic work Proximity, affect, in which he, the engineer, and the listeners were in separate locations. The result is as impenetrable as his descriptions of his intentions (a sample: “I ‘welcomed’ similarly isolated audience members into the suffocating intimacy of my psychosocial gerbil ball”). Although he performs on English horn, there is no acoustic effect—the soundscape is entirely processed electronic sounds with no discernible relationship to music. The piece is therefore purely an experimental exercise.

The English horn returns, this time entirely recognizable, in the final work, Christopher Burns’s The Mutiny of Rivers. This is the longest piece on the program at 22 minutes and was specifically written for the duo EKG, which consists of Bruckmann and electronics performer Ernst Karel. Burns describes his approach to tailoring his piece to them: “It combines composed materials with improvisational flexibility, blends digital audio with analog electronics, and smashes together aspects of my own spiky and multilayered aesthetic with the slowly unfolding textures and timbral nuances I hear in EKG’s work.” In common language, we hear a wide range of techniques on English horn and oboe that merge into a tapestry of electronica, a recognizable entry in the electro-acoustic genre.

These six works require considerable background information, which is probably the most useful way to approach them. I haven’t offered many critical judgments, leaving it to adventurous listeners to judge for themselves. Bruckmann has carved a very specific niche for himself, and if you are drawn to the experiments I’ve outlined, he takes the oboe on a unique journey and a tough listen at the same time.

— Huntley Dent, 6.21.2024