Richard Cameron-Wolfe's Passionate Geometries features eight of his chamber works written over a thirty year period, displaying the wide range of aesthetic approaches at play in his music, from his theatrical micro-operas to deeply felt settings of instrumental works that explore microtonality. Cameron-Wolfe's musical voice is rarefied and unique in its precise detail, injecting pathos and brilliance into the smallest of gestures as they come together to convey rich narratives.
# | Audio | Title/Composer(s) | Performer(s) | Time |
---|---|---|---|---|
Total Time | 71:24 | |||
01 | Heretic | Heretic | Marc Wolf, guitar | 15:20 |
02 | Time Refracted | Time Refracted | Caleb van der Swaagh, cello, Gayle Blankenburg, piano | 10:36 |
03 | Mirage d’esprit | Mirage d’esprit | Oren Fader, guitar, Daniel Lippel, guitar, Jay Sorce, guitar, Matthew Slotkin, guitar | 5:48 |
04 | O minstrel | O minstrel | Stephanie Lamprea, soprano, Daniel Lippel, guitar | 4:19 |
05 | Telesthesia: 13 episodes/deliberations on multi-planar syzygy | Telesthesia: 13 episodes/deliberations on multi-planar syzygy | Antwerp Cello Quartet, Shuya Tanaka, cello, Jan Sciffer, cello, Peter Devos, cello, Cèlia Brunet Vila, cello | 10:14 |
06 | Kyrie(Mantra)IV | Kyrie(Mantra)IV | Roberta Michel, flute, Daniel Lippel, guitar | 9:09 |
07 | Lonesome Dove: a True Story | Lonesome Dove: a True Story | Geoff Landman, tenor saxophone, Umber Qureshi, watcher | 7:07 |
08 | Passionate Geometries | Passionate Geometries | Nina Berman, soprano, Roberta Michel, flute, Daniel Lippel, guitar, Caleb van der Swaagh, cello | 8:51 |
“I want to tell you what’s going on here. You don’t want to know… Is art just a substitute for what we’ve lost?” In his micro-opera Heretic, Richard Cameron-Wolfe’s enigmatic protagonist breaks the fourth wall, and in the process gives us a window into his artistic vision. Through exploration of dramatic and narrative subtlety in his micro-operas and text settings, expressive shadings of pitch in his use of microtonality, and finely etched treatment of timbre and gesture, Cameron-Wolfe reaches for the ineffable, something embedded in what we’ve “lost” or perhaps an essence of something that we can never possess. Throughout these chamber works, written over a thirty year period, we hear him calibrating his expression towards the mystery that lives between and beyond the sounds, obscuring the transparent surface in favor of the ambiguities of creative uncertainty.
Heretic introduces the listener to a format that has become a core component of Cameron Wolfe’s work, the dramatic micro-opera for one performer. Performed with precision by guitarist Marc Wolf, also the score’s diligent editor, the piece demands an embodied dramatic performance alongside, and often concurrent with, the intricate instrumental part. Cameron-Wolfe engages with the inherent tension between live performer and audience and the balance between inward and outward impulses in art making. The guitar part is woven into the wide ranging vocal part, including wordless vocal effects, spoken dramatic text, and sung passages.
Read MoreOriginally conceived as a piece to be choreographed and performed with dancers, the pacing and organization of Time Refracted for cello and piano reflects that initial intention. Cameron-Wolfe establishes a quietly enveloping pad from the opening, in alternating gestures between oscillating figures in the piano and poignant double stops in the cello. One can imagine dancers responding to the moment to moment dialogue of ideas as well as the overall searching quality that pervades the piece.
Opening with the same quartal harmony that begins Heretic, Mirage employs an alternate tuning of instruments with a standard fretting setup, achieving a scale of 48 equal divisions of the octave through the four guitars. His use of the microtonal tuning goes beyond local expressive color, becoming a structural pillar for the unfolding rhetoric of the piece, developing ideas through microtonal variations across the ensemble. A folkloric melody characterized by an upright dotted rhythm is distorted through an “out of tune” presentation and rhythmic diminution and wobbling bent notes are punctuated by pointillistic interjections.
O Minstrel appears on its own in this collection, but is also the opening movement of a chamber cantata for soprano and ensemble. The ritualistic song sets a text by 13th century Sufi poet Fakhruddin Iraqi entreating a minstrel to grace the protagonist with the inspiring gifts of art and love. The voice and guitar lines are in equal dialogue, with Cameron-Wolfe using the instrumental line to paint the text with fleet passagework, rich block chords, and haunting tambour gestures.
Telesthesia for cello quartet was written in memory of the composer’s friend Harold Geller who passed away in 2019, and captures the phenomenon of feeling the presence of one we have lost in our ongoing life. As with Mirage, gestural accumulation is achieved by subtle displacement of rhythmic simultaneity and extended vocal and percussive techniques broaden the sonic palette. Telesthesia uses contrasting characters and an episodic structure as its organizing principles.
Cameron-Wolfe’s Kyrie (Mantra) has gone through several iterations; the version heard on this recording was transcribed by Ukrainian guitarist Sergii Gorkusha and effectively integrates components of the prepared piano version. The work is divided by three extended flute solos, the first is an evocative introduction that features extended techniques (the original seed for the piece). The guitar enters with a sound vocabulary that evokes the sound world of the keyboard preparations – polyrhythmic tapping passages, bartok pizzicati, and left hand hammer-ons. The second and third flute cadenzas are separated by a passage of bell-like harmonics in the guitar, and migrate from virtuosic bursts to sustained multiphonics.
The second micro-opera on the recording, Lonesome Dove - a true story for “tenor saxophone, watcher, and portable darkness”, dramatizes an experience Cameron-Wolfe had in graduate school listening to a dove singing in the early morning. While he first thought two birds were singing responsively he eventually realized it was simply one dove relocating and answering itself, creating a spatialized performance of its own song. Cameron-Wolfe embeds this mysterious dialectic into the piece, building implied melodic and timbral counterpoint into the saxophone part, as well as planning a mobile staging wherein the performer, a dancer, and an eight foot tall black screen move to simulate the unseen movement of the dove.
In Passionate Geometries for soprano, flute, cello, and guitar, Cameron-Wolfe re-engages with the theme that underlies Heretic, the nature of and desire for the “poetic life.” Here, he sets his own text about a poet who is struggling with a crippling writer’s block under the weight of earthly disappointment. Cameron-Wolfe divides the work by using various instrumental combinations: a cello solo opens the piece, a short ensemble passage leads into a duo between soprano and flute, which sets up an instrumental trio phrase, and so on. The two middle strings of the guitar are tuned a quarter tone low to allow for shadings of pitches within that range. Cameron-Wolfe’s ensemble writing alternates between tightly coordinated rhythmic mechanisms and looser, more fluid dialogues with the voice. This dichotomy balances the piece between rigor and expression, an apt analogy for the forces shaping the struggle of our protagonist poet.
— Dan Lippel
Tracks 1-2 & 6-8 recorded at Dreamflower Studio, Bronxville NY, March 2019 (6), June 2021 (7), October 2021 (1), January 2023 (8), May 2023 (2)
Tracks 3 & 4 recorded at Adelphi University, June 2021 (4), September 2022 (3)
Track 5 recorded at MotorMusic, Mechelen, Belgium, June 2023
Engineer: Geert De Deken (avinspire.be/fr)
Recording producer: Richard Cameron-Wolfe
Engineer: Jeremy Tressler (except 5)
Mixing and mastering: Jeremy Tressler (dreamflower.us)
Editing co-producers: Marc Wolf (1), Gayle Blankenburg (2), Daniel Lippel (3, 4, 6, 8), Jeremy Tressler (5), Roberta Michel (6), Geoff Landman (7)
Design, layout & typography: Marc Wolf (marcjwolf.com)
Publisher: American Composers Edition, composers.com
The score for Heretic, edited by Marc Wolf, won the 2024 Revere Award from the Music Publishers Association
Cover Art: Kevin Teare
Composer-pianist Richard Cameron-Wolfe was born in Cleveland, Ohio, USA and received his music training at Oberlin College and Indiana University. His principal piano teachers were Joseph Battista and Menahem Pressler; his composition teachers included Bernard Heiden, Iannis Xenakis, Juan Orrego-Salas, and John Eaton.
After brief teaching engagements at Indiana University, Radford College (Virginia), and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Cameron-Wolfe moved to New York City, where he performed and composed for several major ballet and modern dance companies, including the Joffrey Ballet and the Jose Limon Company. In 1978 he began a 24-year Professorship at Purchase College, State University of New York, teaching music theory and history, composition, and music resources for choreographers. He resigned in 2002 - while he could still walk and think - relocating to the mountains of northern New Mexico in order to dedicate his life to composing.
As a composer, one of his particular interests is micro-opera, a very short theatrical work of 5 to 15 minutes duration, developed through the collaboration of composer, writer (preferably a poet), a scenic/costume designer (preferably a visual artist), and a videographer. The work is intended to be staged in small spaces and could be broadcast on television or the web.
https://composers.com/richard-cameron-wolfeThe human voice is prominent in Passionate Geometries, a collection of composer Richard Cameron-Wolfe’s works spanning three decades for small ensembles. Two of the featured compositions are what Cameron-Wolfe describes as “micro-operas” – brief, dramatic vocal works for a minimal number of performers. But voice in its various dimensions permeates the album and the guitar is prominent as well, as the instrument figures in no less than five of Passionate Geometries’ eight compositions.
“Micro” is indeed the word to describe Heretic, Cameron-Wolfe’s “opera” for a single performer. Guitarist Marc Wolf not only plays an intricate instrumental part, but delivers the text telling us “what’s going on here” (“here” possibly referring to the performance, possibly referring to the world at large) in a mixture of unvoiced exhalation, spoken and shouted word, and singing. The guitar part is fragmentary yet technically difficult, a difficulty no doubt compounded by the guitarist’s having to fill the dramatic vocal role as well.
One of the album’s highlights is the duo O Minstrel, a setting of a text by Fakhruddin Iraqi, the 13th century Sufi poet. This is another work for guitar and voice, albeit of a more conventional sort. Here the guitarist is Daniel Lippel, joined by soprano Stephanie Lamprea. Cameron-Wolfe structured the piece as a dialogue between the two performers, with Lamprea taking the lead and Lippel nimbly responding. The timbral contrast between Lamprea’s liquidly sung lines and the spikier sounds of the nylon-string guitar lend the piece a dramatic tension.
A similar dynamic is at work on Kyrie (Mantra) IV, another standout piece. This duet for flute and guitar is played by flutist Roberta Michel with Lippel on guitar once again. Like the other compositions on Passionate Geometries this is a demanding virtuoso piece. Cameron-Wolfe has Michel bending and slurring notes suggesting the sound of a shakuhachi; overblowing; playing multiphonics and voiced notes; and further drawing on a rich vocabulary of extended techniques. Lippel responds with his own repertoire of extended playing, leveraging tapping, left-handed plucking, snap pizzicato, and harmonics that foreground the staccato precision of the nylon-string guitar’ articulation. Cameron-Wolfe originally wrote the piece for prepared piano; the essence of that instrument’s perverse percussiveness is effectively conveyed by the guitar part in particular.
Mirage d’Esprit is an intriguing microtonal work for four guitars tuned to yield an octave of 48 equal divisions. The guitars’ tunings produce strange choric effects, creating harmonies that can be disorienting at times, but not to worry: as the spoken interjection in the middle of the piece asserts, “it is real.” Telesthesia is another work for four instruments of the same type, this time cellos. The episodic work was written in memory of a friend of the composer’s; it blends movingly somber harmonies with extended instrumental techniques as well as wordless vocal gestures.
Passionate Geometries also includes the title composition, a “micro-opera” for soprano, flute, guitar, and cello; Lonesome Dove for solo tenor saxophone, dancer, and moveable screen; and Time Refracted, for cello and piano.
— Daniel Barbiero, 7.04.2024
There is abundant imagination in these eight chamber works by Richard Cameron-Wolfe but sometimes a winding path to appreciating them. In his composer’s note he makes clear that this is a legacy project spanning three decades from 1992 almost to the present. During that time, Cameron-Wolfe laid down long experience with micro-operas, a new term to me. The three examples offered here feature only a solo singer (sometimes not even a singer), which pushes the boundary of what we typically call an opera, although there is a famous precedent, Poulenc’s La voix humaine. Also unusual are two quartets creating their own sound worlds, one for four guitars, the other for four cellos. Most examples in the genre consist of arrangements.
All of this will intrigue general listeners who possess some curiosity. What makes things more difficult is that Cameron-Wolfe belongs to the experimental wing of New Music, which leads to a challenging listen unless you are willing to go wherever his ear leads, however strangely. In the case of Heretic, the first micro-opera on the program, many performers resisted what Cameron-Wolfe calls a “cursed” piece. “Heretic, commissioned and composed in 1994, [was] rejected by its commissioner and a nearly 20-year procession of other guitarists.”
One reason for rejection is that the score calls upon the guitarist to multitask as an actor, vocalist, and percussionist. The enthusiasm of Marc Wolf for these overlapping roles led him to serve as Heretic’s editor, arriving by stages at the current 2023 version. If you let Heretic roll over you passively, it is quite accessible. That’s not true if you attempt to penetrate the libretto, which is abstract and full of quixotic changes. The central character, the Heretic, plays off other personas—Someone Else, Entity that has “invaded” the Heretic—all three uttering a disconnected stream of free associations.
I appreciate the composer’s sincere efforts to explain his intentions, but confusion seems to be the point. (“Is [the Heretic] performing or rehearsing? Is he communicating with us? … Are we only imagined by the Heretic? Or are we voyeurs, watching through a one-way glass?”) I regret remaining in the dark, because Wolf gives a bravura performance, and the guitar part per se is quite appealing. We move into the terrain of multi-media with Lonesome Dove: A True Story, which has no story and defies the label of micro-opera since there is no vocalist—the scoring is for “tenor saxophonist, watcher, and portable darkness.”
In essence this is music for a dancer and unaccompanied saxophone (Geoff Landman). Deprived of visuals, we sparingly hear footsteps and strange vocals from the “watcher” or breathy gestures from the saxophone. The libretto can be quoted in full. “Squawk… squawk, squawk/ Hmm… scream… scream grrrrrrrr… grrrr, grrrrrrr / No, I am alone.” Your response will depend on an appetite for pure experimentalism, but the tenor sax part makes agreeable listening. The third micro-opera is the title work, Passionate Geometries, the only example that employs a conventional singer (soprano Nina Berman), accompanied by a small ensemble of flute, guitar, and cello.
In Cameron-Wolfe’s conception, the piece revolves around the singer’s aspiration for a poetic life as expressed through interactions, “collisions as well as embraces,” between the performers. In their way the instrumentalists are onstage characters. The libretto is adapted from an early poem by the composer, again in free-association mode. But thanks to his ingenious writing for the four participants, Passionate Geometries is a success at communicating itself expressively—my attention was held throughout.
As is evident by now, it takes a lot of words just to set down basic descriptions of some very disparate works, and I’ll be brief from now on. The guitar features prominently in five of the eight works on the program. The most intimate are two duos. O Minstrel for soprano and guitar, described as “songs from the cantata ‘Breathless.’” The text is based on Sufi poetry. Purely instrumental is Kyrie(Mantra)IV for flute and guitar, the fourth variant of a solo flute piece dating back to 1972. Both duos are atmospheric and evocative.
The underpinning of the guitar quartet Mirage d’esprit is technical. “In this work, I made the transition from using microtones as a resource of expressive nuance to fully creating a work with a microtonal pitch-set of 48-EDO (48 equal divisions of the octave).” The spare, transparent interplay of plucked microtones, which at times faintly echo Indian classical music, becomes the core experience, since no formal plan is readily detected, but there are also cries of “This is real,” “Go!”, etc., along with thumps on the guitar case. The effect lies somewhere between incomprehensibility and the entertainingly outré (not a bad way to encapsulate the entire album).
The cello features in three works, including a cello quartet with the cryptic title Telesthesia: 13 episodes/deliberations on multi-planar syzygy. The explanation involves a close friend in northern New Mexico who died in 2019, after which Cameron-Wolfe had many sighting of him in spectral form, one might say. The cello’s voice is naturally elegiac, which this work takes eloquent advantage of in tonal harmonies while creating another face through ghostly intimations that employ wordless vocalizing and extended instrumental techniques.
They are familiar parts of the composer’s toolbox, which he turns to new uses from piece to piece. I found myself being immediately involved in Telesthesia, appreciating it as a moving memorial as well as musically captivating. I hope it enters the repertoire of contemporary cello ensembles—it deserves to. The performance by the Antwerp Cello Quartet is exemplary, which holds true for all of the top-flight musicians here.
Nothing on the program is less than arresting, inventive, and original. One also has the sense that Cameron-Wolfe lives like a musician without borders as a pianist, teacher, writer, theorist, and musical ambassador to faraway places. It sounds like a heady existence, not to mention that on more than one occasion he has played Satie’s 24-hour Vexations for piano. As a legacy album, this one serves its purpose admirably.
Four stars: Disparate chamber works from a long, highly original career
— Huntley Dent, 7.24.2024