Michael Harley: Come Closer

If you play clarinet in an orchestra, the bassoon is your best friend. That rich and deeply grained sonority forgives a multitude of pitch variances; a well-supported bassoon sound is a perfect colour complement to the whingeing voice of its single-reed neighbour. So immediately I must declare a bias in this commentary on Come Closer, featuring American bassoonist Michael Harley playing the music of several of his colleagues from the University of South Carolina and beyond.

Listen to this album. Just go out and buy it and put it on and marvel at the title track by John Fitz Rogers. A quartet performed in multi-track by Harley, with definite echoes of Reich, Adams and Glass, it nourishes the ear, never tiresome, always delightful. Precision marries beauty. In the following piece, Miphadventures by Stefan Freund, we’re treated to a blues-infused dialogue between bassoon and piano (played with sympathy and guts by Phillip Bush). An introductory arioso sets the stage for a swinging dance in a stylish syncopated four to a bar. This is Americanism, not Americana. It’s never hackneyed, simply enjoyable. Harley allows just the barest hint of jazz inflection, which is good. Too many bends induce nausea.

If you begin to think this all sounds too like easy listening, stay tuned. The third track will satisfy your wish for tonal exploration. Alarums and Excursions by Carl Schimmel bills itself as a Puzzle-Burlesque, but really leave off the brain work and just gloat that here’s something very grabby that also avoids major and minor sonorities.

I could go on. You don’t need me to. You need to get this disc.

-Max Christie, 10.30.19, The WholeNote

A longtime member of Alarm Will Sound, now on the faculty of University of South Carolina, Michael Harley makes his monograph CD debut with Come Closer on New Focus Recordings. The program features repertoire by living American composers in a variety of styles.

John Fitz Rogers uses overdubs on Come Closer to create a four-bassoon texture in a propulsive minimalist excursion replete with repeated notes. Pianist Phillip Bush joins Harley on several pieces, providing a Gershwin-esque theater jazz accompaniment on Stefan Freund’s Miphadventures and multifaceted textures and styles on Reginald Bain’s Totality. Harbinger of Sorrows by Caleb Burhans is achingly affecting and quite beautiful.The most successful duo is Carl Schimmel’s Alarum’s and Excursions, an energetic and often virtuosic tour-de-force.

The sole solo on the recording, Fang Man’s Lament, is an excellent extended work that involves overtones, vocalization, and microtonal inflections. Come Closer’s final piece, Yonder by Jesse Jones, is for bassoon, string trio, and piano. It combines post-minimal and alt-folk gestures in a finely wrought ensemble work that one hopes will gain wider currency.

Harley has done a double service with Come Closer, presenting music by some of the finest young and mid-career composers currently at work in the United States and substantially enlarging the repertoire for bassoon with his advocacy. Recommended.

- Christian Carey, 1.6.20, Sequenza21

Michael Harley teaches bassoon, coaches chamber music, and is artistic director of the Southern Exposure New Music Series at the University of South Carolina. He is also a founding member of the contemporary music chamber orchestra Alarm Will Sound., so he has a firm commitment to modern music, which I appreciate.

Part of this album’s aesthetic is described by Harley in the liner notes thus:

Classical music being written today lives in a post-genre world. It is not uncommon to hear the influences of, say, minimalist master Steve Reich, avant-garde icon John Cage, and Led Zeppelin converge on the same program – or even within a single piece.

But this is where Harley and I have our strong differences of opinion. I, for one, don’t want to hear rock music influence in ANY music, classical or jazz, because it doesn’t fit. Both types of music are, or at least should be, music that develops, whether it be from the composer’s pen or the spontaneous improvisation of a jazz soloist, but rock music doesn’t develop at all, not even when one of their whiny electric guitarists start “jammin’” during a piece. The reason is, as jazz great Roy Eldridge pointed out in the 1960s, “The jazz beat goes somewhere. The rock beat stays somewhere,” thus within those parameters you simply can’t have it both ways. You either stagnate rhythmically and musically or you move forward and develop. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

Yet liked some of the music on this album. John Fitz Rogers’ Come Closer is a case in point. Written for four bassoons, it is played here only by Harley, who multiple-tracked himself using a click track. This is very much a minimalist piece, and although I know that minimalism is really big with younger listeners nowadays, I tend to shy away from it for the same reason I shy away from rock: it doesn’t really develop, though it does change a little more often. This piece is a perfect example. It’s ebullient and fun to hear but doesn’t really “say” anything; it’s just a collection of staccato notes bouncing around in your ear. Nonetheless, it wasn’t a bad opening piece despite the fact that it went on too long (11:24).

By contrast, Stephan Freund’s Miphadventures is a more lyrical work with a tiny bit of a blues-jazz feel in the piano part. The piece is divided into two sections, titled “Longingly” and “Excited,” the second of these featuring some unusual time signatures such as 7/8 and 5/8. Yet this piece works in exactly the way that Come Closer does not, in that the music is well and interestingly developed. Incidentally, there haven’t been many players who could swing on the bassoon, so Harley is scarcely alone there. The only one I have heard make the bassoon swing were multi-reed player Adrian Rollini, who was also the only man who could make the bass saxophone and the “hot fountain pen” swing, as well as Frank Tiberi and Ray Pizzi. Fortunately, Harley has the assistance on this one of pianist Philip Bush, and he is excellent at what jazz musicians used to call the “slow drag” beat. I found this to be an exceptionally interesting piece, well written and with real development both thematically and rhythmically. Harley does a good job on it. This piece is over 13 minutes long, but there’s not a wasted second in it.

Next up is Carl Schimmel’s Alarums and Misadventures, which starts with a loud, ominous piano flourish before moving into slower, moodier music, in some of which the bassoon slithers around through chromatic glissandi. Again, pianist Bush helps to push bassoonist Harley through edgy syncopated passages with aplomb. This one sounds a little like the Loch Ness monster suddenly ingesting a wad of LSD and not knowing how to handle it. There are ups, downs, and even dead stops in the music. Some of it sounds organic and developed, some of it doesn’t, such as the serrated bassoon figures played at the 7:30 mark, but overall it’s a fascinating work.

Fang Man’s Lament is described as “The album’s most sonically adventurous work.” Adventurous it most certainly is, calling for the soloist to play buzzed chords through his reed in his entrance and other unusual effects, but effects are all you get in this piece. As Gertrude Stein once observed, “There’s no there there.” Or, as Charles Mingus once said, “You can’t improvise on nothing.” You also can’t hang a bunch of odd effects together and call them a composition.

Reginald Bain’s Totality for bassoon and piano combines the kind of modern music I refer to as “schlumph,” a string of edgy motifs, with minimalism. Some of it is interesting and works, but in several places I felt that Bain ran himself into the center of his own musical maze and couldn’t quite figure how to extricate himself except to move on to yet another theme or motif and hope for the best. Fortunately, pianist Bush’s excellent sense of linear playing helps to pull most of this together. This, then, was an instance of the performance succeeding where the actual notes on the paper did not. Divided into four sections, I felt that it was just a bit too episodic with no real affinity or continuity between the episodes. The occasional detours into minimalism didn’t really help.

Caleb Burhans’ Harbinger of Sorrows is a real piece with a genuine theme and real development. Indeed, as the piece went on, the sad, slow melodic line underwent some intriguing and ingenious permutations while the repeated piano chord sequence seemed to remain the same.

We end our excursion with Jesse Jones’ Yonder for bassoon, piano and string trio. This was clearly one of the most complex and well-developed pieces on the album. As the notes put it, it traverses “Sacred-Harp hymnody and balletic dance rhythms, across lugubrious pits of Stravinskian mud, to ecstatic major-chord vistas and back again.” Clearly a well-thought-out and well-developed piece in addition to having some genuinely exciting moments. I especially liked the section beginning around the five-minute mark, in which Jones wrote some genuinely inspired polyphony using the five instruments that weaves in and around itself. This is good stuff!

A mixed review, then, as is so often the case with modern music CDs, but the good pieces are clearly worth hearing, and hearing several times in order to examine their inner workings.

-Lynn René Bayley, 11.27.19, The Art Music Lounge

There’s more to making outsider music than just being weird and if this bassoon player takes his inspiration of Steve Reich, we don’t accuse him of manqueing around a bit. Start at the top we say. Basically turning this into music for one musician, time, tide and technology allows him to go where no soloist has gone before. A real tour de force for any serious lefty, this ear opener just doesn’t know when to quit. Outside the margins and loving it.​

–Chris Spector, 9.21.19, Midwest Record

This is bassoonist Michael Harley’s first solo album, although as a founding member of the new music orchestra Alarm Will Sound he already has made a number of recordings on various labels. Currently he is Associate Professor of Bassoon at the University of South Carolina, and is active in the United States, South America, and Europe as a performer and participant in festivals and conferences. He earned his D.M.A. from the Eastman School of Music, his M.M. from the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, and his B.A. from Goshen College.

All of the music included on Come Closer was commissioned by and composed for Harley. With programs like these, you never know what you are going to get: The results might be music only an academic could love, or they might be self-indulgently outré. This time, we’re in luck: Come Closer is consistently fresh and entertaining, and yet also intelligent, never stooping to the lazy blandishments of Classical Lite.

New Focus Recordings’ packaging includes a note from Harley, but hardly a word about the music and the composers themselves. However, if you go to Harley’s website (michaelharleybassoon.com), you will find much more information. The title work, by John Fitz Rogers, is scored for four bassoons. Played in concert by four live bassoonists, it is a polyphonic nightmare, with the four players performing material separated only by a 16th note. The results sound something like one of Steve Reich’s “phase” works—ebullient and bracing in their complexity. Here, Harley makes it all happen through multi-tracking: He recorded each part separately, and the four parts were layered on top of each other in the studio. Reginald Bain’s Totality, after a slow and quiet first movement, plays with Glass-like Minimalism in the second and fourth movements. The title is an allusion to the solar eclipse that was visible in the United States in August 2017. One more composer, Igor Stravinsky, appears to have been an inspiration for Jesse Jones’s Yonder, which enlists the support of a string trio. While none of these works opens up a unique world, musically speaking, they are attractive—allusive enough to be comfortable, and new enough to be interesting.

I liked the other works as well. Fang Man’s Lament asks the bassoonist to sing—sometimes between bassoon notes, and sometimes as he is playing the instrument. If this isn’t difficult enough, the text is Chinese, and it presents a ghost’s anguished recollections of the pain he experienced in life when his wife poisoned him. Carl Schimmel’s witty Alarums and Excursions (“A Puzzle-Burlesque in Four Polymythian Acts”) is structured like a wordless drama in which the main characters are a range of emotional states. Stefan Freund also is a member of Alarm Will Sound, and Miphadventures is his affectionate portrait of the bassoonist and of their “shared adventures.” Finally, composer Caleb Burhans writes this about Harbinger of Sorrows: “While the title is both an homage to Metallica and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the piece is my response to the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States.” ‘Nuff said!

Harley is a versatile performer who shatters stereotypes of the bassoon being nothing more than clownish or gloomy. In works such as Harbinger of Sorrows, he shows off his singing tone and his range of colors. In the title work, even with the benefit of multi-tracking, he also shows off his precision and laser-like focus. Pianist Phillip Bush, a veteran of the Philip Glass Ensemble, and another member of the University of South Carolina faculty, has his work cut out for him in works such as Alarums and Excursions, but he never loses his sparkle. The string trio that ably joins Harley in Yonder also comes from USC.

Not just for bassoonists, Come Closer is an enjoyable program—one that highlights Harley’s masterful playing, as well as the creativity of the composers, who have written intelligent music that has something to communicate to any open-minded listener.

— Raymond Tuttle, 5.02.2020