Reiko Füting's newest release Broken Song alternates choral settings of poetry by his long term collaborator Kathleen Furthmann with a solo piano performance of his introspective work, Five Meditations on Music from Luigi Rossi’s Collection, by pianist Jing Yang. Füting frequently uses quotation and references to early music as a jumping off point in his work. The choral works are sung by Vocalconsort labia vocalia, conducted by Füting himself.
| # | Audio | Title/Composer(s) | Performer(s) | Time |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Total Time | 69:43 | |||
| 01 | weht – umweht | weht – umweht | Vocalconsort labia vocalia, Reiko Füting, conductor | 10:26 |
| 02 | ...broken song | ...broken song | Jing Yang, piano | 15:30 |
| 03 | “und wo Du bist” | “und wo Du bist” | Vocalconsort labia vocalia, Reiko Füting, conductor | 11:58 |
Five Meditations on Music from Luigi Rossi’s Collection |
||||
| Jing Yang, piano | ||||
| 04 | Meditation 1: Öffnen des Raumes (Partite sopra Zefiro) | Meditation 1: Öffnen des Raumes (Partite sopra Zefiro) | 6:42 | |
| 05 | Meditation 2 | Meditation 2 | 3:54 | |
| 06 | Meditation 3 | Meditation 3 | 3:22 | |
| 07 | Meditation 4 | Meditation 4 | 2:20 | |
| 08 | Meditation 5 | Meditation 5 | 7:03 | |
| 09 | “in allen landen” | “in allen landen” | Vocalconsort labia vocalia, Reiko Füting, conductor | 8:28 |
Reiko Füting’s music establishes reverent spaces. There is a theme of quotation and reference to past repertoire that runs through his work; the canon serves as a point of departure that is grounded in a familiar approach to beauty. It is from this space that Füting explores, fragmenting and deconstructing materials to illuminate new corners in a rich sonic architecture. On Broken Song, we hear this approach through the lens of two contrasting, but equally intimate instrumentations, a capella choral music and solo piano works. The vocal works set texts by settings of poetry by his long term collaborator Kathleen Furthmann.
weht - umweht opens with three minutes of luminous contrapuntal music drawn from Hans Leo Hassler’s Ach weh des leiden. Füting then approaches the material with characteristic deconstruction, using register, extended vocal timbres, harmonic development, and repetition with variation to take fragments of the opening material into new, haunting terrain. As the piece closes, the phrases become increasingly truncated, eventually fading into an oscillating ascending major second and a closing minor chord that elides into a whisper.
The title track for solo piano is based on material from Canzon francese del Principe by Carlo Gesualdo. Füting establishes multiple layers of activity immediately with punctuated pizzicato and sustained harmonies. Brief shards of Gesualdo’s score emerge from the sparkling texture, interrupted by glitchy, angular bursts of texture. It is as if we are hearing repeated, gentle short-circuits of our musical memory. Other moments in the work are marked by repeated cells of material, like a skipping record player opening a brief wormhole in the fabric of time.
“...und wo Du bist” brings the listener immediately into Füting’s multi-layered compositional approach to voices. Non-pitched sounds expand the timbral boundaries of the texture and enhance and extend the text. The primary melodic lines rely heavily on large intervallic leaps, lending the piece a sense of verticality and expansiveness.
Five Meditations on Music from Luigi Rossi’s Collection borrows from the Italian Baroque composer as a basis for music that examines subtle transformations. In the first movement of the set, a cyclical harmonic progression is embellished with increasing density of contrasting textural materials. The second is set in minor, emphasizing ominous central pitches in harmonics and plucked notes on the strings of the piano. An insistent, repeated pitch that alternates between damped and naturally played anchors the third movement, eventually highlighting the overtone series contained within its fundamental. In the fourth movement, Füting manipulates figures from Rossi’s score, presenting them in rhythmic irregularity and unpredictable repetition. The final movement opens with two heroic chords followed by a resultant, sustained sonority that is carefully managed with the pedals and subtle removal of notes from the chord. The texture evolves in a similar fashion, with phrase iterations sounding progressively closer together.
“in allen landen” contains the album’s most jubilant material. Percolating rhythmic figures in extended vocal textures propel the music forward, with punctuated, high register proclamations sounding like train horns. The choir comes together with flowing counterpoint in a quotation from a chorale by Martin Behm, underscored by sustained pitches that remain in the choir, as if stuck in the air. The bright, horn-like punctuations return towards the end of the work, and it ends with an unsettling closely spaced interval in the middle register. It is a fitting close to the album, one in which Füting hears the present through the past, filtering its musical elements through a contemporary sensibility.
– Dan Lippel
Producer/Publisher: Reiko Füting (reikofueting.com)
Co-Producer: Carsten Gerth
Tracks 1, 9:
Recorded May 19, 2012 at Andreaskirche Berlin-Wannsee (andreaskirche.info)
Recording Engineer: Sebastian Pank (fratoj.de)
Track 2:
Recorded May 20, 2022 at Oktaven Audio (oktavenaudio.com)
Recording Engineer: Ryan Streber
Track 3:
Recorded June 14, 2009 at Peter-und-Paul-Kirche Groß Ammensleben (kath-kirche-grossammensleben.de)
Recording Engineer: Thomas Zieler (zielophon.de), Andreas Tatus
Tracks 4-8:
Recorded June 6, 2022 at Oktaven Audio (oktavenaudio.com)
Recording Engineer: Ryan Streber
Cover Image: Sean Curran (swtcurran.blogspot.com)
Design: Marc Wolf (marcjwolf.com)
Reiko Füting Portrait: Hojoon Kim (hojoonkimimages.com)
Jing Yang Portrait: Alice Huang
Text Editor: Bradley Colten (bradleycolten.com)
Post-Production Advisor: Daniel Lippel (danlippel.com)
memoria: Marko Meissner (1968-2021)
Reiko Füting was born in 1970 in Königs Wusterhausen in the German Democratic Republic. Füting has collaborated with a wide range of musicians, ensembles, and orchestras, with a special interest in vocal ensembles and ensembles performing on period instruments. His compositions are primarily released on the New Focus Recordings label in New York City and exclusively published by Verlag Neue Musik Berlin.
Since 2000, Füting has taught composition and theory at Manhattan School of Music, where he currently serves as Dean of Academic Core and Head of Composition. He has also taught vocal accompanying at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater Rostock and has served as a guest faculty and lecturer at universities and music conservatories throughout Europe, the Americas, and Asia.
Füting studied composition and piano at the Hochschule für Musik Dresden, Rice University in Houston, Manhattan School of Music in New York City, and Seoul National University. Some of his most influential teachers have been composers Jörg Herchet and Nils Vigeland, and pianist Winfried Apel.
“With my music, I aim to explore the psychological nature of memory, as it is projected onto the compositional device of musical quotation. By realizing this device in the entire musical spectrum of assimilation and dissimilation, integration, disintegration, and segregation, while moving freely between clear borders and gradual transitions, quotation and memory may function as a means to reflect upon contemporary artistic, cultural, social, and political phenomena.”
http://www.reikofueting.deVocalconsort labia vocalia was founded in the spring of 1991 by voice students from the Institute of Music at the Otto von Guericke University in Magdeburg, Germany. Over the course of its existence, the ensemble realized numerous concert projects — primarily with music from the Middle Ages to the early Baroque.
A particular focus for the group has been rediscovered works that are related to the musical history of the city of Magdeburg. Numerous first performances of compositions by, among others, Magdeburg cantors of the 16th and 17th centuries and by the Magdeburg music director Johann Heinrich Rolle (1716-1786) bear witness to this commitment.
The ensemble, which has given successful performances at the Magdeburg Telemann Festival, the Telemann Sunday Music series, the “Magdeburgisches Concert” festival, the Johann Michael Bach Days in Gehren, and the Middle German Baroque Music Days, is primarily project focused since 2001 with a core of accomplished singers of early music. Over the last few years, the ensemble has also become increasingly committed to the performance of contemporary vocal music.
Praised by New York Magazine as “...so young but so accomplished...”, Jing Yang is recognized as a solo pianist, chamber musician, and ensemble player. After her New York City debut at Carnegie Hall in 2006, Jing launched her career with a solo recital tour in North America and Europe, as well as recitals organized by the New York Times. In her homeland China, her concerts have brought her to major concert halls, universities, and important cultural/ art events throughout the years. She has appeared as a soloist with the Saint Petersburg Philharmonic Symphony, DePaul Symphony Orchestra in Chicago Symphony Orchestra Center, and New Juilliard Ensemble in Lincoln Center. In 2014, Jing performed as the soloist for the Opening Ceremony of Youth Olympic Games in Nanjing, China.
As a chamber musician Jing has performed extensively with vocalists and instrumentalists. Jing has also been a frequent advocate of contemporary music, working collaboratively with composers and new music ensembles. She performs chamber music for piano and erhu, a traditional Chinese instrument, with her father Yihe Yang.
Jing has won prizes at the Tchaikovsky International Piano Competition for Young Musicians, the Eastman International Piano Competition, the Beijing Piano Competition, the Chopin International Piano Competition in Taipei, and the St. Petersburg International Piano Competition.
Jing holds a bachelor's degree and a doctoral degree of musical arts from Manhattan School of Music. She received her master’s degree at The Juilliard School. Jing teaches at the Extension Division of Mason Gross School at Rutgers University and at the Manhattan School of Music’s Distance Learning Program. She also serves as staff pianist for the Zukerman Performance Program at Manhattan School of Music, as well as piano and chamber faculty for the Young Artist Program at National Arts Center in Ottawa, Canada.
T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” was at the same time the most influential and the gloomiest of modern poems, and what appears to be one of the gloomiest lines in it is “These fragments I have shored against my ruins.” The link to a new aesthetic isn’t obvious, but it exists, as explored in this collection of divergent works by the contemporary German composer Reiko Füting (b. 1970). The divergence comes from the alternation of solo piano pieces and those for a cappella chorus. In both modes Füting relies on the past as a springboard. After quoting old music by a composer as famous as Gesualdo or as obscure as Martin Behm, Luigi Rossi, and Hans Leo Hassler, Füting employs a process of fragmentation and deconstruction as a bridge to the world today.
This is the obvious link to Eliot’s “fragments,” while the deeper aesthetic connection centers on how creativity can be kept alive in even the worst of times (which dominated Eliot’s life across two world wars and the Great Depression) by shoring up the future with the past. Alfred Schnittke invented a parallel to this approach in his multi-layered polystylism, an inspired compositional technique in his hands despite the cumbersome name. Luciano Berio’s magpie borrowing in Sinfonia also comes to mind.
A pure example of Füting’s application is the opening work on the program, weht – unweht, whose first three minutes quote a chorale by Hassler from 1601, “Ach weh, dess leiden,” beautifully sung by the ten-voice ensemble, Vocalconsort labia vocalia—it was founded in 1991 by music-school voice students in Magdeburg. There is a pause, followed by Füting’s contribution, which adroitly employs counterpoint, new harmonization, repetition, etc. to comment upon and expand the old music. The fragments he works with aren’t jagged. In fact, the modernist second part of this 10-minute a cappella work elides smoothly from the 17th-century chorale. Füting, who expertly conducts the choral portion of the program, retains much of the beauty of traditional choral writing.
Hassler’s text is a lament on suffering, and this mood is amplified by Füting, who sets a 2005 poem by his longtime collaborator, poet Kathleen Furthmann; the two have known each other since high school. Here, unfortunately, a major drawback appears, in that none of the poems being set, all by Furthmann, are translated into English, nor are any of the old texts. For a vocal album this lack is crippling, and listeners without German might be decisively alienated. The booklet doesn’t provide synopses or even the briefest description of the mood or subject of the texts.
As a result, we lose entirely Furthmann’s “lyrical refraction or overwriting” of the old words, which is interwoven with what Füting is doing on the musical front. A joint aesthetic approach loses half its voice. Not every vocal work is based on the past. “… und wo Du bist” sets a Furthmann poem in a contemporary idiom that uses some extended vocal techniques. The primary effect is succinctly described in the online program notes at New Focus’s website: “The primary melodic lines rely heavily on large intervallic leaps, lending the piece a sense of verticality and expansiveness.” One is aware of whispers, muttering, shushing, and exhalation punctuating a repeated leaping melodic line. The style is original and attention-grabbing, although I’m not sure the piece sustains its 12-minute length.
The other side of the program, for solo piano, begins with the album’s title track, … broken song from 2018, a sizable work at nearly 16 minutes. The basis is material taken from Gesualdo’s Canzon francese del Principe. In the annotator’s useful description, “Brief shards of Gesualdo’s score emerge from the sparkling texture, interrupted by glitchy, angular bursts of texture.” It will be up to individual listeners to decide if the effect is “as if we are hearing repeated, gentle short-circuits of our musical memory,” but the image is too good to omit mentioning. There are plucked pizzicatos throughout, which are seamlessly woven into the regular keyboard writing by the excellent pianist Jing Yang.
The overall sonority, as well as the direct quotations from Gesualdo, creates a gently appealing piece with sparkling, at times clangorous, interjections. The same idiom and techniques appear in the other piano work here, Five Meditations on Music from Luigi Rossi’s Collection, but with significant differences. The texture is highly varied among the five movements, and often the keyboard writing is spare and repetitive, narrowly focusing on one thematic feature. The quotations from the Italian Baroque composer Carlo Rossi are more obscurely deconstructed than Füting’s treatment of Gesualdo, giving the whole suite a more abstract contour and feeling.
This release, despite its major flaw, presents New Music at its most accessible and evocative for any general listener. The ties to the past are beautifully integrated into Füting’s subtle, personal, and highly original techniques. All the performances are exemplary, as is the recorded sound. Currently Füting is an academic dean and teacher of composition and theory at the Manhattan School of Music (which makes the absence of English translation even more inexplicable), and his talents are unmistakable. He has very successfully carried out the intention behind this release, to explore the psychological nature of memory, a fascinating aspect of music past, present, and future.
Four stars: Fascinating, accessible New Music that requires German to be fully appreciated
— Huntley Dent, 6.30.2024
New Focus Recordings is an artist led collective label featuring releases in contemporary creative music of many stripes, as well as new approaches to older repertoire. The label was founded by guitarist Dan Lippel, composer Peter Gilbert in 2004, and composer/engineer Ryan Streber in 2004, formed …Read More …
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