Ryan Muncy: ism

"The isms" was a phrase used by conservatives in mid-nineteenth century America to collectively disparage the radical social movements of the day. For art historians the term refers, rather, to the various art movements at the turn of the twentieth century, united by their aesthetic innovation, political engagement, and ephemerality. Both objects of the term, then, desired social transformation, often under the guise of contrarian manifestos and moral indignation at the status quo. Both involved ideology, a term which, in order to be understood, must remain qualitatively neutral, encompassing both abolitionism and prohibitionism, socialism and fascism.

This moment of ideology has passed, which is to say that our ideas seem less and less able to change the world. In other words, nothing has happened: we are living in our failure to enact change, though our world is more ideological than ever. The period of potential transformation, Modernism, has birthed a cynical stepchild who denies the possibility of change. This cynic, Postmodernism, masquerades as the transcendence of ideology, the last –ism, throwing disinterested jabs at the world it cannot comprehend. It declares, ultimately, that we live in the best (and worst) of all possible worlds.

It takes a certain kind of barbarism to look happily upon this state of affairs, just as it takes courageous despair to recognize it for what it is. Fortunately for us, Ryan Muncy chooses the latter. His album's six tracks explore various strands of contemporary composition, showcasing not only his virtuosity on the instrument, but our own forms of discontent: there is hardly a joyful note on the hour of music presented here, yet it remains multi-faceted, emotionally charged, and challenging.

The album's opener, James Tenney's Saxony, can properly be called ism's centerpiece. It functions as Muncy's thesis, the conceptual framework of the album. In New Focus Recordings' own words, the aim is "to cast the ‘-ism’ onto the ever-increasing breadth of tremendous new works for saxophone" (not the most clarifying statement), perhaps better reformulated as using solo saxophone as a lens onto the disconnected –if not fractured– landscapes of contemporary classical music. Saxony is a shining example of late-modernism which announces its own demise.

The piece uses arch form, or what Tenney refers to as "swell." Schematically, it is a long crescendo followed by a long diminuendo, with the digitally delayed saxophone layering improvisatory runs into an ever more dense patchwork. We hear the full capability of the sax family throughout, from the earthy Eb fundamental which begins the piece to the fluttering soprano runs higher in the harmonic series. Indeed, it is Muncy's timbral variation which astounds here, assuming the guise of a clarinet, trumpet, violin, accordion, even a synthesizer, throughout the piece. No novice of improvisation, Muncy adds new textures to the soundmass with apocalyptic calmness. He drops out the bass register at precise moments to clarify the confusion above, to devastating effect. In terms of structure, one could say that nothing changes during the piece, and a lesser player would have difficulty maintaining the necessary variety of sounds. By contrast, Muncy's stylistic breadth is on full display here as he leads us from the dawn-like intro through passages which evoke first plaintive birdsong, then screeching vultures. A Stravinskian melodic line wanders in around 15:00, announcing the denouement after this climax. It takes ten minutes for Muncy to extricate himself and return to the drone fundamental that he started with.

Within the circumscribed parameters, Muncy is given the freedom to encapsulate the whole of music. Ism would be significant for Saxony alone, and does in fact "resurrect one of the instrument's forgotten masterpieces," as the label suggests. The pieces following it are brave shots in the dark, attempts to shape the canon of solo saxophone works. And though, as miniatures, the pieces which comprise the second half of the album lack the mature scope of Tenney's modernist opus, they further demonstrate Muncy's astounding versatility as a performer.[1]

We descend into Erin Gee's Mouthpiece XXIV, the aural equivalent of spelunking for the first time. The two performers (this is the only track on which Muncy is joined by percussionist Ross Karre) plunge into the piece with a nervous energy, producing hollow, watery, cavernous sounds drenched in reverb. What little melodic content the piece contains is handled by the percussion, repeating little ostinatos against a backdrop of ugly saxophone tones: Karre dips bells into water, for example, and the microtonal shifts produce strange effects against the unstable texture. The sax here is more percussive, with Muncy's pops and tongue rolls echoing through the sonic space like creepy cave creatures.

David Reminick's Gray Faces brings us back aboveground, though this piece isn’t drenched in sunshine, either. It’s built around simultaneously humming and blowing into the sax, producing a raw distortion effect like a harmony that's fighting itself. A melody develops around diminished seconds, hobbling along; you can hear Muncy hover near the microphone, pressing the keys down. There is a sense of anxious intimacy to the piece, like a toy soldier lost in the woods, and the title brings to mind a childlike revulsion for sameness. The melody almost reaches a point of clarity towards the end, as if settling into solitude, before drifting sparsely off.

The next piece, masked by likeness, takes a more aggressive stance. Composer Morgan Krauss' background in noise music comes through, as the long, slow, breathy tone vibrations which introduce the piece patiently assault the listener. One hears the reed straining in Muncy's lips, foreboding and inhuman as electric signals: microphone feedback, radar blips, and a flat EKG are just some of the images the piece evokes. The faint vocalizations above the noise only accentuate the inhuman atmosphere, gradually developing into a machine-like lurch by the last third of the piece. It doesn't let up.

So we've had three shorter pieces, each exhibiting different extended techniques, each approaching its subject differently, each imparting a different sort of discomfort. Yet it's impossible not to register a continuity here: we have not heard a "traditional" saxophone note in 22 minutes. The fractured identity of Postmodernism peeks over our shoulder.

Which brings us to Evan Johnson's Largo calligrafico / “Patientam”. Other reviewers have noted a Beckettian character to Johnson's music, and Muncy's grunts, moans, gargles, and hisses certainly communicate an inability to communicate. The closest I can come to describing how this piece sounds is a cello being examined by an extraterrestrial: wooden breaths, pops, long reverberations, short stutters. Again, it is noteworthy that Muncy can get these alien sounds from his horn. This is perhaps the most difficult piece on the album, and one worthy of attention, but the point I'm trying to make (in a magazine called Cacophony, no less) is that even difficult music has its limits. Listening to the album for the second time, the thought crossed my mind during Johnson’s piece: I can't go on, I'll go on.

The grayscale atmospherics of the album's second half range from anxiety to horror, and this, coupled with the short breaks between tracks, does get a bit gloomy. I started this review off with some gloom, and I applaud Muncy for staring into the abyss. I am a fan of gloom. But I am also a fan of disparate aesthetics, and I remember holding my breath when I saw Muncy play an Alex Mincek piece two years ago: precise, labyrinthine notes shot from his sax like machine gun bullets. Where is that sort of virtuosity? That rhythmic precision?

We do get a taste of it in the last track on the album, Lee Hyla's short and sweet Pre-Amnesia. It's a wonderful closer, dynamic and brash, showing a hint of jazz (more Braxton than Cannonball), despite the heavy "composed music" feel of the rest of the album. Oddly enough, it contains the one and only true overblown screech on the record, so no one can accuse Muncy of making one of those albums. He has, in fact, produced the most nuanced, forward-thinking saxophone album in recent memory. And he ends it the only way it should be ended: with a nice loud honk. - Tamas Vilaghy, Cacophony Magazine, 9.2016

To understand the full historical sweep of Ryan Muncy's solo saxophone disk ism, you have to go back to the late sixties. Around 1968 sax-composer Anthony Braxton came out with the 2-LP set For Alto, which was nothing but Anthony's alto sax in a series of structured improvisations, each of which made full use in one way or another of the many extended techniques Braxton had mastered and which now find their way into just about all avant sax masters' arsenal of expressive means, whether it be in the free jazz zones or the new music classical realms. Braxton was by no means the first to use these various harmonics, overtones and other richly timbred techniques (John Coltrane was among the most prominent and earliest) but Braxton was the first to do it all solo and he did have sound(s) all his own.

Another key innovator was La Monte Young, whose later '60s recordings of drone based pieces for soprano sax, viola etc. were not widely circulated when they were made but ultimately were very influential.

These are some of the key roots that Ryan Muncy expands upon in ism. He is not copying these early pioneers so much as he is expressing what has become part of the zeitgeist of our era. And so accordingly he plays some six works for solo sax--tenor, alto and baritone--written in the modern, sound color manner by the likes of James Tenney (1978), Eric Gee (2015), David Reminick (2011), Morgan Krauss (2014), Evan Johnson (2012), and Lee Hyla (1979).

Tenney's "Saxony" uses digital delay to built up an orchestral density of saxophone parts that owes something to the influence of La Monte Young (and you could say that of all trance-oriented minimalism) but creates in his own way a distinctive musical world that Ryan Muncy realizes superbly.

From there we have Gee's "Mouthpiece" for sax and some subtly effective percussion--and then the pieces that follow utilize solo sax alone in a program that is as fascinating and bracing as it is well played.

I find the album holds its own after many hearings. New music and avant jazz adepts will equally find this program of great interest. Bravo!

- Grego Edwards, 9.14.2016

Saxophonist Ryan Muncy, once a key force behind Chicago’s Ensemble Dal Niente and now an integral member of International Contemporary Ensemble, possesses a messianic devotion to expanding the literature for saxophone music outside of jazz. With his spellbinding second solo recording, he’s making that case with more conviction than ever. The centerpiece of the album is a modern classic for the instrument: Saxony is a 1978 composition by James Tenney that focuses on lush overtones in the natural harmony series. The piece calls for one or more saxophones, so Muncy overdubbed lines using a full complement of different saxes, delivering a mixture of long tones and feverish flutters that pile up in dazzling combinations, a swooping arc of siren-like sound that harnesses the instrument family’s distinctive timbral richness. The album closes with another older work by Lee Hyla, the 1979 piece “Pre-Amnesia,” but in between are four newer works, whether Eric Gee’s atmospheric, Exotica-on-acid “Mouthpiece XXIV,” with percussion by ICE’s Ross Karre or Morgan Krauss’ minimal baritone exploration of sensual note-swelling “masked by likeness.” Muncy consistently takes the saxophone to new places. - Peter Margasak, Best of Bandcamp Contemporary Classical, November 2016

Muncy also gets to exercise his technical prowess on "ism," a New Focus release containing cutting-edge contemporary saxophone works. The most important of these, James Tenney's 1978 "Saxony," for sax and cumulative tape-delay, gathers density and complexity as its 27 minutes evolve into a gnarly super-aviary of hopped-up sax sounds. Too bad neither of these New Focus discs contains a word about the music. -- John von Rhein, Chicago Tribune, 4.13.2017

This one wins the prize for the most charming and unusual presentation of a review copy that this writer has ever seen. I received this rather plain looking slip case and contained therein was a little data card glued to a saxophone reed. Fortunately I have just enough tech skills to find the little data card slot on my laptop and was able to then burn a CDr.

It was well worth the effort. Ryan Muncy is a saxophone player with the increasingly venerable ICE. (That is the International Contemporary Ensemble and not the less venerable immigration and customs enforcement by the way.) He here takes the opportunity to demonstrate his considerable fluency on his instrument. The deceptively simple cover belies some serious complexity in this release.

Beginning with James Tenney’s too seldom heard Saxony (1978) Muncy decisively lets the listener know that this is a hard core saxophone album with music that demands a level of skills and interpretive ability within the reach of only the finest musicians. Tenney’s piece is a multitracked composition concerned with acoustic phenomena produced by different tunings as do many of his works. This piece is a species of minimalism, drone, even meditative music. It’s slow unfolding demands and then rewards patience as it envelops the listener in lovely, trippy sound masses. At over 20 minutes it is the biggest piece here and alone justifies purchasing this album.

What follows are 5 more tracks of similarly extreme experimental music with various extended techniques albeit on a much smaller scale. Each is like a little study focusing on one or more extended techniques. All but one are recent compositions by composers yet unknown to this reviewer. The last piece is by the late great Lee Hyla (1952-2014) and is from 1979, making it contemporary with the opening Tenney piece. Muncy demonstrates his facility with tuning, multiphonics and other creative techniques demanded by these composers.

Here is the track list:

James Tenney-Saxony (1978)
Erin Gee-Mouthpiece XXIV (2015)
David Reminick- Gray Faces (2011)
Morgan Krauss- masked by likeness (2014)
Evan Johnson- Largo caligrafico (2012)
Lee Hyla- Pre-Amnesia (1979)

Each of these pieces is seemingly a self contained universe and repeated listenings reveal more than simple experimentalism.This is a disc for serious saxophone aficianados with an appreciation for free jazz and cutting edge instrumental techniques. Truly a wonderful release.

— Allan Cronin, New Music Buff, 5.14.2017