Scott Wollschleger: Between Breath

If I’ve comparatively less to say just now about Between Breath, the newest album by composer Scott Wollschleger, chalk it up to a feeling that I’ve yet to give this collection its temporal due—which is fine, really, since Wollschleger has always been an artist whose creations reveal themselves fully over time.

That’s not to say the four pieces on the album don’t make an immediate impression, especially as delivered by the assemblage of champions at hand: you can’t fail to register the bristling violin/viola duo Violain; the visceral thump and howl of the titular composition, for piano and trombone; the enigmatic voice-and-piano piece Anywhere, where threads go, it all goes well, or the staggering violin monodrama Secret Machine no. 7.

According to a note by New Focus label boss Daniel Lippel, Wollschleger envisioned these disparate works coming together as a single extended narrative. The more I listen, the more I grow convinced. It’s not music for casual backgrounding, but give it your full attention and you’ll be amply rewarded.

— Steve Smith, 6.24.2024

I became a charter member of the Scott Wollschleger fan club some time ago, and have been enjoying each new record as it comes out. A rare chance to hear a favored composer develop in real time!

In the liner notes of Between Breath, just out on New Focus Recordings, I am quoted as describing his music as, “Morton Feldman meets Thelonious Monk meets H.P. Lovecraft.” Certainly true.

Between Breath offers three duos and a solo. Wollschleger worked closely with his performers on innovative extended techniques. The duos sound vast, it is hard to believe two performers in an acoustic setting are making all this sound.

Wollschleger writes:

The album is the culmination of artistic collaborations with a cast of extraordinary musicians, each of whom commissioned the compositions and are featured on this album. Each piece requires a huge amount of physical stamina and concentration; many passages push the musicians to their physical limit. They are the true heroes and navigators of this journey.

To state the obvious, this is “challenging” music. But I always find Wollschleger to be a pretty easy listen. Each note is correct, and major events turn up at the right time.

Violain is in two parts and features violinist Maya Bennardo and violist Hannah Levinson, the members of andPlay. The work begins in the middle of things, an assault of sound. Soon a “gentle” theme counters the roar. Wollschleger: “Many of the sounds are a result of very fast gestures with unconventional bowing techniques.” The second movement is a bit more rhythmic, almost a gigue; at times a minor ninth goes off in one of the strings like an air horn.

Between Breath is for trombonist William Lang and pianist Anne Rainwater. “The opening trombone sound is the musical version of the scream I felt inside my head at that time….Throughout the work the trombone uses a special kind of overpressure invented by Will. We ended up calling this ‘Dirty Split Tone.’” Part of the effect is generated by harmonics that end up being microtonal; even the well-tempered piano gets into the action thanks to special preparations.

It’s a great piece, maybe my new favorite Wollschleger. Throbbing on a piano string can be banal but this is fresh. In the middle, a not-quite plain C seventh chord gets a workout, the “Thelonious Monk” element I mention above.

Anyway, where threads go, it all goes well is a song for soprano Lucy Dhegrae and pianist Nathaniel LaNasa. Wollschleger lets himself be inspired by anything, and in this case it was a fake post from the “John Ashbery” twitter bot account. Both performers also play chromatic pitch pipe. Dhegrae has a beautiful voice and offers flawless control within this insane environment. Some of the piano chords are dense, some are gentle.

The final piece is the longest. Wollschleger explains:

Secret Machine no. 7 was completed after a series of workshops with violinist Miranda Cuckson over a two-year period. The piece uses a metal mute and has a scordatura, tuning the violin’s G string down to an E. The mute allows for the violin to emerge and fade into nothing.

Much of the music was conjured by dreaming, and it gave me the feeling I was chan- neling something telegraphed in from the outside. The material is organized in an ever-expanding, wave-like song form, and correlated to a wave-like expansion of the violin’s range. The piece’s hyper-virtuosity generates an unusual, cool glow of resonance. While writing, I often imagined Miranda performing the music while hovering over a blue-glowing portal, with the sounds of her violin communicating in a secret cosmological language to activate it.

It is rare for Wollschleger to write conventionally “tonal” music, but Secret Machine no. 7 definitely begins with a major triad in open position, a classic violin sound. Of course, this is just the starting point for denial, extension, and imagination. The work explores a whole world of violin possibility. I know both Scott and Miranda pretty well, and it is fun to imagine them in the workshop together creating this magnum opus.

As good as the record is, music this visceral is even better live. Again, the record-release concert is at Roulette two days hence…

— Ethan Iverson, 6.25.2024

Way back in 2017, when confronted by Soft Aberration, the debut portrait album of composer Scott Wollschleger, I noted that “…it’s rare that you hear such command of structure and orchestration in any idiom.” When it came to his next album, 2019’s American Dream (performed by Bearthoven), I praised “…his single-minded focus on creating an emotional landscape.” It was my #10 album of that year. Then came the “glimmering contemplation” of Dark Days, a collaboration with pianist Karl Larson, which landed at #3 on my Top 25 for 2021. Cutting to the chase, Wollschleger is one of my favorites and one of the best American composers of recent years.

Further proof arrives today in the form of Between Breath, a new collection of four chamber works meant to be experienced as a whole. It begins with the jagged yet high-fat Violain, a two-movement work that puts AndPlay, the redoubtable violin/viola duo of Maya Bennardo and Hannah Levinson, through their paces. Also included is Anyway, where threads go, it all goes well, featuring the great soprano, Lucy Dhegrae, and pianist Nathaniel LaNasa, meditating on the pseudo-John Ashbery quote of the title phrase, which Wollschleger spotted on Twitter. The final piece is Secret Machine No. 7, an astonishing solo violin piece that uses tones (a detuned G string) and techniques (a metal mute) to wrest new expression from the instrument. Miranda Cuckson dashes it off with fiery grace, engaging equally with its dance rhythms and moments of echoing loneliness.

But my focus today is on the title track, a wild and witty - and ultimately gorgeous - ride for piano (Anne Rainwater) and trombone (William Lang). It starts as an utter tantrum, with Lang blatting away while Rainwater uses the keys and her fingers to produce angular sounds from the piano strings.

It gradually calms down to what my father might have called “a dull roar,” still mad at the world but deliquescing to acceptance. Perhaps beauty can be made of anything, Wollschleger seems to posit, even anger, rage, and sorrow - not to mention noise. By halfway through the piece, Rainwater is exploring nearly jazzy complex chords while Lang purrs away in the background. It gradually fades out, becoming part of the atmosphere around you, before disappearing entirely.

The whole piece is a wonder, as is the album, as rich and varied a collection as one could hope for.

— Jeremy Shatan, 7.14.2024

https://www.wgte.org/radio/local-podcasts/classical-conversations/scott-wollschleger-between-breath?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR16tx3NS6oDEGXdWJ2Cnp3mBNLYfZ_l0Kmij8K81gvhHNpZ--rKGwkqARA_aem_ChPBY_5AOqu_LHkkWLKGRQ

— WGTE, 7.25.2024

Alex Ross of the New Yorker is committed to the New Music scene, and a nod from him is a significant boost for any composer immersed in the welter of contemporary action downtown and in Brooklyn. Scott Wollschleger, who is Brooklyn-based, must have been thrilled when he was singled out by Ross in a 2017 roundup of New Music recordings. I’ll take advantage of a quote that I can’t improve upon. Ross wrote, “On the atlas of new music, Wollschleger lands somewhere in the borderland between Minimalia and Feldmanistan: obsessive repetitions of stripped-down materials bring to mind minimalism, while spells of hushed, cryptic beauty recall the great American modernist Morton Feldman.”

Wollschleger, who is in his mid-forties and holds a master’s degree from the Manhattan School of Music, has found a distinctive voice, which comes through unmediated in this, the fourth CD dedicated solely to his music. His style zeros in on “discovering the sensation of an object” as a form of art that is “basic and human.” What this translates into for the listener is intense, spare, repetitive gestures that create a single-minded effect. The ear must be prepared for obscure, edgy, often harsh or peculiar sounds from familiar instruments like the violin and trombone. Where Ross found “cryptic beauty,” I’d place the emphasis on cryptic, because the conventional hallmarks of beauty in music (melody, tonality, consonant chords, traditional structure) are generally set aside.

I realize that this description will be off-putting to general listeners, but in the spirit of frankness, this release is for New Music fanciers. For others wanting to enter these pieces, which are otherwise totally abstract, New Focus offers a possibility, pointing to Wollschleger’s “glitchy sounds that are evocative of the sonic tapestry that has populated our mechanical and tech-saturated age.”

The vast majority of Wollschleger’s output consists of solos and duos, very occasionally expanded into a larger format like the string quartet or saxophone quartet. I’ll treat these four pieces—three duos and a solo violin work—as they come. His experimentalism is restricted, according to an online catalog, to acoustic instruments. We open with Violain, a duo for violin and viola commissioned by andPlay (Maya Bennardo, violin, and Hannah Levinson, viola), which can serve as a rite of passage, since it begins with an aggressive assault of rapid sul ponticello bowing that couldn’t be more wiry.

The works’ two parts explore other forms of unusual bowing. Wollschleger, who writes his music by hand, assembled Violain (a typo that he liked enough to adopt as the title) as a collage from pieces of manuscript paper that he pasted on his walls, each one an experimental sound. The result is ingenious, and there’s no problem in letting these intriguing sounds wash over you. I also want to point out that the composer considers this entire release to be “a super playful and intense sonic adventure.” The creative process for him is joyful and celebratory, even if many listeners will find the result unlike that.

The title track, Between Breath, is nominally a duo for trombone and piano, but its tapestry of peculiar sounds from the trombone (buzzing, growling, snorting, breathing) creates the main effect, which is generally true of all four pieces here. The piano is mostly restricted to drumming repetitions without variant. The third duo on the program is for soprano and piano, cryptically titled Anywhere, where threads go, it all goes well. The title also constitutes the text expertly vocalized by Lucy Dhegrae—conventional singing is only part of the effect being created. Repetition of basic musical gestures constitutes the principal method of composition.

The program ends with Secret Machine no. 7 for unaccompanied violin. Developed in workshop over a two-year period with Miranda Cuckson, who performs it here, the sonority has a novel technical foundation, as described by the composer. “The piece uses a metal mute and has a scordatura, tuning the violin’s G string down to an E. The mute allows for the violin to emerge and fade into nothing.” The effect is at once strange and fragile. Wollschleger is an imaginative writer, and his notes are absorbing and articulate. For example, he says of Secret Machine no. 7, “Much of the music was conjured by dreaming, and it gave me the feeling I was channeling something telegraphed in from the outside.”

One might say that reading such persuasive commentary primes the pump for anticipating equally arresting music. Each listener will have to decide about that personally. Clearly Wollschleger wants to make a human, emotional connection, as he repeatedly underlines. Good intentions count, but it takes a dedication to novel sounds and abstruse compositional devices to fully appreciate what he has created.

Four stars: Total immersion into the laboratory of experimental sounds from familiar instruments

— Huntley Dent, 7.24.2024

These four disparate pieces by New York composer Scott Wollschleger are commissions distinguished by close communication with all of the performers. Violain, which dates back to 2017, was written for the bold violin-viola duo andPlay, who bring slashing intensity to its mixture of visceral scratch tones and wiry pizzicato, hushed repose and unhinged fury. Wollschleger developed the piece as a series of motifs and ideas splayed out on scraps of manuscript paper, which he masterfully assembled into a thrilling ride which seems to start as if we’ve just dropped in on a spirited conversation. Even the title follows suit, an accidental conflation of “Viola and Violin,” that lands perfectly. No less rambunctious and stately is the title composition, written for the duo of pianist Anne Rainwater and trombonist William Lang, whose deft use of an extended technique he dubs “Dirty Split Tone” unleashes a biting, spectral, harmonic quality echoed in the prepared piano passages which ground it to produce a dialogue that veers between contemplative calm and vibratory turbulence. The composer’s patchwork conception re-emerges on Anywhere, where threads go, it all goes well—named for a tweet on a bogus John Ashbery account—with singer Lucy Dhegrae elucidating the phrase in terse, repeating gestures over spare piano echoes played by Nathan LaNasa, with stark post-Morton Feldman serenity. The album concludes with Secret Machine no. 7, a powerful solo work that requires violinist Miranda Cuckson to use a metal mute and scordatura tuning to transmit a series of outwardly radiating variations on a haunting gestural phrase that deftly reflects its genesis as a sonic dream.

— Peter Margasak, 7.31.2024

Between Breath, the New Focus label’s fourth release devoted to music by Scott Wollschleger, contains four premieres written over a period of seven years, and, according to the composer, ‘woven together here as a complete work’. Wollschleger describes the project as the culmination of an intense collaborative process with the commissioning artists who are featured on the album. One immediately gleans this by perusing the scores. In Between Breath, for example, trombonist William Lang provides a detailed preface explaining his extended performance techniques of ‘overpressure’, ‘split tones’ and ‘dirty split tones’, which Wollschleger incorporates into the notated part with surgical precision. Similar attention to detail applies to the various piano preparations and the harmonics that ensue; the final section requires nothing less than two small battery-operated vibrators wrapped in Blu-Tack. By contrast, Violain (written for and performed by violinist Maya Bennardo and viola player Hannah Levinson) offers the performers ad lib opportunities at certain junctures, yet these, too, are subject to painstaking directives on the composer’s part.

So what does the music sound like? Violain’s first part begins with rapid flautando passages that quickly give way to slow-moving muted lines spiced with pizzicato punctuations. These gestures walk a thin line between slow and static, perhaps intentionally slow. However, the piece’s second part proves far more varied and rhythmically engaging.

Happily, the elaborate notated blueprints laying out Between Breath’s extended techniques translate into fascinating sonorities, especially where the trombone’s gritty low-register long tones support harp-like plucked single notes from inside the piano, sometimes giving the impression of an electronic soundtrack. For all the ingenious sound design, the fleeting moments when Anne Rainwater goes into ‘unprepared’ piano mode to play sparse single notes and chords move me the most.

I like the subtle alternations and interactions between voice and pitchpipe throughout Anyway, where threads go, it all goes well. Soprano Lucy Dhegrae is largely limited to fragmented phrases within a constricted range of notes (Morton Feldman’s Three Voices somehow comes to mind), but her impeccable intonation and word-colouring more than compensate, not to mention Nathaniel LaNasa’s supple handling of the piano part.

Finally, Secret Machine No 7 for violin solo serves up a boundless portfolio of extended techniques, sophisticated harmonics, threadbare double-stops, wispy glissandos and simultaneous arco/pizzicato passages. Frankly the piece goes on twice as long as necessary for what it has to express. On the other hand, Miranda Cuckson’s astonishing technique, pinpoint control and impeccable intonation enable her to convey a convincing sense of narrative and continuity; no wonder she’s been a new-music violinist of choice for decades. Indeed, all the performances on this album define world-class, and so does the engineering.

— Jed Distler, 8.14.2024

Composer Wollschleger was commissioned to write music for four different artists. Those artists have recorded each of those commissions for this album that is not for those who don’t want to be challenged by music.

The album opens with Violain(Parts I and II) composed for violinist Maya Bennardo and violist Hannah Levinson who performed as andPlay. That is followed by the title track performed by pianist Anne Rainwaiter with trombonist William Lang.

Mezzo-soprano Lucy Dhegrae and pianist Nathaniel LaNasa perform Anyway, where threads go, it all goes well and the album closes with Secret Machine no.7 performed by violinist Miranda Cuckson.

Fans of contemporary classical music will find a lot to admire on this album.

— Craig Byrd, 6.21.2024

Scott Wollschleger, while a new name to me, has had one previous CD devoted entirely to his piano works, which was favorably reviewed in issue 45:3 by Peter Burwasser, who found similarities in his music to the piano music of innovators Morton Feldman and Hans Otte. On the present CD, entitled Between Breath after one of the works included on it, we are offered a program of this composer’s chamber music and solo works for instruments other than piano. The opening work, the two-part Violain, draws its title from a conflation of the names of the two instruments that are involved in its performance, to wit, violin and viola. I smiled when I saw this because the title was similar to that of one of my earliest works, For one voilion, written at age seven before I learned the correct spelling of “violin.” After a busy launch, which features frenetic activity in both instruments playing fortissimo with excessive bow pressure to produce a scratchy sound, the piece settles down into a sequence of Feldman-like (i.e., subtle) bow strokes wherein silence becomes as important a part of the proceedings as are audible sounds. Sul ponticello writing produces a glassy effect that enhances the haunting quality of the work, as do certain microtonal double-stops, one of which pits the open E-string of the violin against a note on the A-string that is approximately a quarter-tone below the open E-string pitch.

I would defy anyone to listen to the second work, Between Breath, and guess which instrument is coupled with the piano (which itself is well disguised through damping of strings and other devices). The mystery instrument is a trombone, but the manner of playing prescribed for it produces unearthly and even frightening sounds that belie the usual noble character of the instrument. A second section has the trombonist producing slightly more recognizable sounds, but its sustained pitches are colored with a series of overtones. As a onetime player of the instrument (we’re talking about a good 60 years ago, when I was in junior high school), and despite the inclusion of a portion of the score of the work, I have no idea how the sounds in either part of the piece are produced, and I dare say that even some professional trombonists might be flummoxed in this regard. The closest comparison I am able to make is that these sounds are akin to multiphonics on various woodwind instruments.

When we arrive to Anyway, where threads go, it all goes well, there is a movement to a degree of the traditional production of sounds, albeit this time in soprano and piano. The text, drawn from a fake Tweet, appealed to the composer due to its ambiguity. The work is the next thing to Minimalism because of its economy of means, but I find it quite effective and appealing. Feldman’s ghost makes its strongest appearance in this work, and the soprano sings in a “white” (i.e., vibrato-free) style throughout. The recital’s concluding Secret Machine No. 7 calls for but a solitary violin, but one that employs a metal mute throughout. The density of the metal mutes the sound emitted from the instrument a good bit more than do traditional wood mutes, creating a particularly mysterious sound. Additionally, the lowest (G) string is scordatura, tuned downward by a minor third to the pitch E, and this pitch in its various octave displacements is clearly a central focus in the work. The composer informs us that the piece was largely conjured up in his dreams, wherein its material is arranged in a sort of ever-expanding wave pattern. I found it interesting that the piece was composed in bits each morning as the composer awoke, and on the violin that he keeps at his bedside. Many composers compose at the piano, but relatively few do so with other instruments in hand. This work is also rather drawn into the world of Minimalism since its relative paucity of distinct gestures requires significant repetition of them.

Wollschleger has created his own sonic universe in these works, which will appeal a good bit to those who are looking for new and nontraditional sounds. This music will consequently appeal largely to those who are seeking to expand their musical horizons, and it is to them especially that I recommend this evocative disc.

— David DeBoor Canfield, 11.29.2024