Music in the Barns: Bolton - Godin - Oesterle

Classical traditions seldom come together so gloriously with the unpredictability of the avant-garde than on this disc titled after its contributing Canadian composers Rose Bolton, Scott Godin and Michael Oesterle. When that happens, it somehow seems fortuitous that Toronto’s Music in the Barns – a quintet where violinist Lance Ouellette and violists Carol Gimbel and Pemi Paull sometimes play musical chairs – should be tasked to play their repertoire.

Bolton’s The Coming of Sobs is a particularly intense work. But even here the musicians make the black dots literally fly off the page intensifying the experience that the composer has written into the work. After a relatively quiet opening the music develops – through a series of pulses and crescendos to a shattering fortissimo that emphasizes its darkly dramatic and veritably vocal human cry as brilliantly expressed by the string ensemble.

Godin’s work, all that is solid melts into the air, is more ephemeral and calls for a more nuanced performance, one which Music in the Barns delivers in spades. Breathing their way into the composition that spans over 150 years of humanity, the ensemble traverses a work bookended by the visceral world of Charles Baudelaire and the beguiling symbolism of master-builder Robert Moses with transcendent splendour.

The disc comes to an end with Oesterle’s Daydream Mechanics. The quintet brings a near-rhapsodic reverie inspired by the spare lyricism of Nicole Brossard’s poetry into a sensuous awakening on a disc to die for.

-Raul da Gama, 8.28.19, The WholeNote

Il y avait vers la fin des années 1990 à l’Université McGill un bouillonnement créatif singulier d’interprètes et de compositeurs qui commencent à nous être plus familiers aujourd’hui. Rose Bolton, Scott Godin et Michael Oesterle étaient de ceux-là, Oesterle étant par ailleurs le cofondateur de l’ensemble Kore, qui a vécu de belles années. Ce sont ses hypnotiques Daydream Mechanics (2001) pour quatuor à cordes, que l’on connait déjà par un enregistrement du Quatuor Bozzini, qu’on trouve ici. Rose Bolton explore avec la même formation une relation entre les époques baroque et romantique, tandis que c’est un quintette à cordes qui livre les réflexions de Scott Godin sur la modernité. L’ensemble torontois Music in the Barns poursuit admirablement le travail amorcé par l’avant-garde montréalaise.

Approximate translation:

By the end of the 1990s, McGill University had a singular creative ferment of performers and composers who are becoming more familiar to us today. Rose Bolton , Scott Godin and Michael Oesterle were among them, Oesterle was also the co-founder of the Kore ensemble, which had a great year. These are his hypnotic Daydream Mechanics (2001) for string quartet, which we already know by recording the Quatuor Bozzini, found here. Rose Bolton explores with the same formation a relationship between the baroque and romantic periods, while it is a string quintet that delivers Scott Godin's reflections on modernity. The Toronto ensemble Music in the Barns continues admirably the work begun by the Montreal avant-garde.

-Réjean Beaucage, 6.12.19, Voir

Music In The Barns are a Canadian new music ensemble and like South Of The Circle their album Bolton-Godin-Oesterle focuses on works from their homeland, specifically ones by what the sleevenotes describe as "a transitional generation" of composers who were "moving away from avant gardism and re-embracing popular forms''. Rose Bolton's The Coming Of Sobs doesn't sound especially weepy, no matter what the composer may say in the sleevenotes; its three movements are quite energetic, even excited, with the violins sweeping past like whirling shoal of fish as the cello provides a steady drone, like a massive field of seaweed swaying back and forth.

On Scott Godin's four-part all that is solid melts into the air, the quartet become a quintet with the addition of a second viola. The music is dedicated to Charles Baudelaire, Michel Foucault, Le Corbusier and Robert Moses, all of whom are associated with modernism albeit in very different ways — some shaped the physical world, while others altered the way we perceive it or think about it. Despite this, the piece has a romantic and even pastoral feel, almost resembling folk music at times.

The biggest takeaway from these two albums, beyond the brilliance of the compositions and the stunning skilfulness of the performances, is the foolishness of trying to infer anything about a nation's character from its classical music. There's nothing inherently Icelandic about the music on South Of The Circle, and nothing essentially Canadian about the music on Botton-Godin-Oesterle. If anything, the message is that beauty can be found anywhere. But based on this work, that's more than enough.

-Phil Freeman, 7.3.19, The Wire

Canadian 'new simplicity'. "In the mid-1990s a community of composers and performers came together at Montreal’s McGill University ... This group included many of today’s leading Canadian composers such as Rose Bolton, Paul Frehner, Nicole Lizée, Scott Godin, and Brian Current ... It was a transitional generation: the composers were moving away from avant-gardism and re-embracing popular forms, looking away from academia ..." These works, from the 2000s, continue this tradition. Bolton was consciously moving toward intense emotional expression and away from systems and theory in her music when she wrote The Coming of Sobs. She took Verklärte Nacht and Tchaikovsky's 6th, neither of which it particularly resembles save for a certain mystery and darkness of mood, as models. The music is tonal and straightforward of texture and form, and conjures a potent sense of atmosphere; the middle movement is a passacaglia, marked 'bleak', which it certainly is. The Godin is 'about' the idea of 'modernity', apparently, and its three movements are associated with figures who were in their own time associated with the concept. The first movement is an extended cello solo, the second is contrastingly more complex of texture, and the third, which has something to do with functional architecture and city planning is all clear lines and spare textures. Oesterle's Daydream Mechanics consists of repetitive, mechanistic, simple, tonal non-evolving cells which supersede each other, usually after a sudden brief, discordant spasm, in a different take on the idea of minimalism.

-Records International, 7.2.2019

While one no longer has to adopt postmodernism’s cheeky nihilism when referring to the past in exploratory musical domains, exhibiting this hungry curiosity in concert-music circles might still earn you the regressive neoromantic label. Toronto composer Rose Bolton addresses this threat with indifference and unvarnished earnestness in her string quartet The Coming Of Sobs (2008), which opens this new disc from Canadian chamber ensemble Music In The Barns. Announcing the release online, Bolton noted her “desire to create music in the classical genre, doing what classical music is loved for, expressing heightened emotions.” Yet Bolton is no conservative. Her chosen palette reflects tradition, but this impulse audibly extends from her own identity rather than a compulsion to reconstitute the canon. Robust, brooding harmonies occupy disarmingly rectangular shapes, modulated by terraced dynamics. There’s no shortage of expressive lyricism, but it’s filtered by Bolton’s distinctive and decidedly contemporary restraint.

Scott Godin’s string quintet all that is solid melts into air wears its reckoning with modernism on its sleeve. Although his notes cite ties to Elliott Carter’s music—the piece was premiered alongside a new Carter work in 2010, before the 2012 revision that appears here—there’s a marked stylistic distinction: Carter is mostly associated with a barbed and vivid atonality; Godin’s piece has a luminous transparency to its ensemble textures and harmonies. This is especially the case in its latter two movements whose brilliant, animated gestures recall Ravel’s Quartet in F.

Daydream Mechanics (2001) by Michael Oesterle consists of lulling loops of material punctuated by short interruptions. This juxtaposition elicits a strange tension akin to being repeatedly but gently roused from a nap. The vibratoless delivery, ornamentation, and dance-like lilt impart a vague Renaissance character, yet the obstinate repetition and jolting non sequiturs feel like a transposition of so-called glitch music into the acoustic domain.

The ensemble’s approach on these recordings artfully reconciles Romantic extroversion with the more objective model favoured by many contemporary music specialists. The fact that they manage this tricky fusion with seamless cohesion, honesty, and personality speaks to the collective’s exceptional musicianship and to leader Carol Gimbel’s vision. Moreover, it’s an interpretive approach that flatters and matches the timely individualism of the three composers.

-Nick Storring, 10.6.19, Musicworks Magazine