Wang Lu: Urban Inventory

I’ve listened at least a dozen times to the composer Wang Lu’s new album, “Urban Inventory” (New Focus Recordings), and remain happily lost in its riotous maze of ideas and images. Every moment is vividly etched, drenched in instrumental color, steeped in influences that range from ancient Chinese folk music to the latest detonations of the European avant-garde. A starry array of ensembles, including the Ensemble Intercontemporain, Alarm Will Sound, and the International Contemporary Ensemble, bring the music to rambunctious life. The flow of events is so rapid and so variegated that nothing settles into the groove of the familiar.

Some listeners might find this aesthetic overloaded, but Wang Lu is not some facile mixmaster of a kind that was too prevalent at the end of the last century. Beneath the tumult of sounds is a more contemplative, integrative layer—one that becomes fully audible in “Past Beyond,” the piece with which the album ends. Before that comes “Cloud Intimacy,” in which she offers a richly sardonic instrumental portrait of Tinder and other dating apps—what she calls the “frantic digital reality” of “endless notification sounds” and the “theatrics of swiping.” Brooding behind the scene is the Liebestod from “Tristan und Isolde,” the ultimate music of restless, unfulfilled longing. The sense of loneliness that emerges at the end of “Cloud Intimacy” lurks behind all of Wang Lu’s meticulous frenzies: it is of a piece with the essential solitude of composing, of sitting in silence and dreaming of a music that has never been heard.

— Alex Ross, 5.17.2018

Urban Inventory opens with a sense of awakening to the environment — the ambient noise of a Chinese city park. Interspersed with the Third Sound ensemble's chamber quintet of Western instruments, the music is playful and distinctly diasporic, juxtaposing inside and outside perspectives. It makes a fitting opening to this collection of Wang Lu's works, easing the listener in to the brilliant colour, activity and engagement with different cultural environments that defines her music.

From the first second of the five-movement titular work, the instrumental parts are defined by a consistent motion that becomes familiar to the ear as the album continues — an emphasis on treble lines that fold in and over one another, threaded with flashes of quotations and imitative references to speech and field recordings. There is a building intensity to a frantic climax, where the live instruments are joined by a tinny, antiquated recording of a traditional chorus and ensemble in full cacophonic majesty. It is an imaginative collision between different time periods, cultures, and life experiences that carries through the speechlike-dreamlike third and fourth movements, which play on the melody of Chinese languages. More eerie still is the final movement —a popular song played in reverse, with a slow and mournful instrumental accompaniment that is taken over in the final seconds by human-less mechanical industrial sounds. Third Sound's performance is marked by a vivid commitment to the swirling intensities of light and movement, boldly exploring the sometimes-unforgiving com-posite timbres. They interact with the tape part as the sixth ensemble member of the group, making it sound as though it emerges as a natural consequence of the textures and lines of the music they play.

Of the four works on this disc for large ensemble, Wailing calls for the greatest instrumental forces. The full orchestral might of the Holland Symfonia clacks, clangs, and keens to evoke a memory from the composer s childhood in a remote town of mountainous Northern China, of hearing two processions of peasants wailing and crying and loudly playing folk brass and percussion instruments. The first time she heard the sounds it was because a beloved member of the community had passed away; the second time was to celebrate the marriage of a young woman. She writes that: 'They sang the same tunes for both funerals and weddings as if they were telling people that life is only a drama of birth, paging, ailing an eventually dying. Backstory is more gently lush, reminiscent of the early film scores of Korngold but coloured by references to traditional musics and jazzlike impressionist harmonic motions. Sweeping figures become more dancelike as the work progresses, although always lilting and limping, with a sense of dialogue that is rudely inter-rupted by the characteristic shrill winds. There is a shrinking quality to the last minutes, a quiet timidity that is still a little cheeky. Alarm Will Sound bring out the shimmering colours and jazz influences of the work.

There is a further cinematic feel to Cross-Around, written to accompany Leighton Pierce's film Number One, but also as a standalone work as performed here by Le Nouvel Ensemble Moderne of Montreal. It is built on the complexity of chance encounters — the second-to-second crossing paths of stars, people, events, thoughts and sounds: 'infinite orbital cycles of sameness and similarity, moments of interaction are certain yet unpredictable. An old Chinese myth says that a look from a stran-ger to another person takes hundreds years of discipline in previous lives . The opening chimes and chords belie the approaching cataclysm of shrieking clarinet, bellowing brass and resounding Chinese cymbals offset by the cracking whip. Le Nouvel Ensemble Moderne erupt into a momentous wall of sound, with life breathed into every corner of the score. Thumping piano bass notes are sliced clean through by a piercing piccolo line; a grandiose trumpet fanfare emerges triumphant from the texture, cut off once again by the ear-splittingly loud piccolo. It is an immensely physical performance, drilling deep into the earth to pull forth all manner of ecstasy and despair.

Cloud Intimacy presents an abrupt shift in subject matter and sonority. Here Wang Lu muses on internet dating, parodying ideas of traditional romance with a drunkenly mutated quotation of the liebestod from Wagner's Tristan and Isolde punctuated by notification tones, typing and camera shutters. Electric guitar and saxophone take extended and virtuosic solos, illustrating excitement and frustration. It is a funny but touching work that brings forth the materiality of modern dating, performed with the vigour and intensity that can be expected from ICE. The final work on the disc is past beyond for large ensemble, played by the Ensemble Intercontemporain. The influence of East Asian traditional musics is apparent, with references to Tibetan and Thai ritual incantations realised in resonating brass sonorities and large gongs. Speech and conversation also make their way into the music, perhaps meeting points — chance encounters across cultures and walks of life. The play with heterophony and dramatically building textures that feature across all of these works is artfully explored here, rounding out a satisfying experience of this unique compositional voice.

— Hannah Reardon Smith, 6.12.2021

Is Chinese musical creativity caught prisoner to a polarity between folk styles, imitations of a dated European avant-garde and a post-Soviet art pompous style? Wang Lu belongs to a generation which finally manages to set itself free, thanks to open-minded, international education. This album reveals her strong personality and vivacious spirit, supported by very solid technique. It also reflects the young pianist and composer’s various sources of inspiration.

The disc opens with urban ambiances: Urban Inventory (2015), for flute, clarinet, violin, cello and piano, consists of five snapshots in which street recordings (pop songs, words, laughter, a most likely patriotic female chorus) are intermingled with airy, clear and colorful instrumental writing, energetically rendered by New York’s Third Sound Ensemble. The third piece, Gifts of Gab, divulges Wang Lu’s particular interest in the tonalities of the spoken voice, confirmed in Cross-Around (2010) and especially in Past Beyond (2012), in which a phoneme-free arc encounters the rawness of a brass- and cymbal-rich orchestration, clearly yet peripherally evoking Tibetan rituals. The astringency of this episode is well-suited to the Ensemble Intercontemporain.

The cries in Wailing (2009) echo childhood memories—a Chinese village in which young peasants alternately weep and, at weddings and funerals, play poorly tuned brass and folk instruments and percussion. Here, the melodic contour of an a priori non-musical sound is key, but also leans on the improvised jazz sounds of clarinet glissandi.

The subject of Cloud Intimacy (2016)—a virtual existence on social networks, an oversaturation of images and messages—could have yielded an anecdotal piece. Instead, Wang Lu pitches the International Contemporary Ensemble an ideal scenario in which to exercise its responsiveness. Frenzy, permanent switches, jingles and the invasion of notification tones build up an extremely coherent and controlled narrative. This is a particularly exhilarating anthology of scores and collaborative ensembles.

Translated by Alice Teyssier

Wang Lu is one of the new generation of Chinese composers, born and brought up in China after the Cultural Revolution, who studied and now lives and works in the USA; she is currently on the staff of Brown University, Rhode Island. Unlike the older generation of Chinese composers who have settled in the West and who deliberately set out to fuse (or, in some cases, simply juxtapose) musical and cultural elements from both East and West, these younger composers have no such desire to promote their Chinese-ness and are happy for it to seep out of their music in more subtle ways. Still in her early 30s, Wang Lu is evolving a musical language which is underpinned by her Chinese roots and background, but seems more concerned with taking its cue from what she sees around her. It has been said of her that she sees music as integral to the fabric of life itself, where the past and present coexist, and where cultures, ages, and languages freely intermingle in a kind of cosmopolitan goldfish bowl. Her music is clearly a reflection of a society where ethnic and sociological differences are consciously blurred in an endeavour to create cultural integration. Which is not to say that elements from Chinese traditional music are not to be found in Wang’s music.

The astonishingly riotous tapestry of sounds which constitutes the headline work here, Urban Inventory, includes Chinese ethnic music and instruments, albeit taken from pre-recorded samples. But more especially the most obvious characteristic in her music, as evidenced by this release, is an almost riotous maze of disparate sounds, including imitations of sirens and animal calls (Past Beyond) and actual mobile phones in text mode (Cloud Intimacy). You do not need to spend much time in a Chinese community to recognise this kind of multi-layered noise as a fact of daily life.

As the recording information reveals, this CD is more in the nature of a compendium of performances – most of them live – given over the past decade, of pieces which span Wang’s entire creative career, from the autobiographical orchestral piece Wailing of 2008 through to Backstory and Cloud Intimacy scored for 16 and six musicians respectively and both dating from 2016. As such it charts the evolution and development of a distinct musical voice.

The autobiographical element of Wang’s first work for large orchestra, Wailing, is explained in her own booklet notes. It was, she tells us, inspired by “my experiences in a small remote town in a mountainous area of Northern China when I was five years old”. It is heavily scored, to recreate an occasion when “some young peasants were wailing and crying desperately while others were playing out-of-tune brass and percussion folk instruments in all ranges and with full force”. The music is nothing if not vividly descriptive of this scene, with occasional episodes evoking Chinese folk melodies, and the performance on this disc, given by the Holland Symfonia during the 2010 Gaudeamus Music Week, is powerful and vivid, the contrast between the raucous and reflective vividly conveyed despite a less than sympathetic acoustic setting.

Chronologically, the next work on the disc is Cross-Around commissioned by the Nouvel Ensemble Moderne and first performed in Montreal in November 2010 – this recording is of that premiere performance. As with the earlier work, the music is vividly descriptive of its non-musical inspiration – in this case the continual movement of “stars, people, events, thoughts, sounds … crossing each other [and where] moments of interaction are certain yet unpredictable”. Again there is the vivid contrast between hefty orchestral sonorities (the work calls for a 15-piece ensemble) and distant, almost intimate sounds, and the overall impression given by this performance, is of a work which both glitters and astounds in its scope.

Dating from 2012, Past Beyond was commissioned by Ensemble Intercontemporain who gave the first performance in Paris – which is recorded here. In it we encounter a style of writing which seems to have become Wang’s own hallmark; a juxtaposition, rather than integration, of a huge array of diverse elements to create a tapestry of sound which is both invigorating in its vitality and quite astonishing in its textural richness. Opening with sliding chords form violins above rumbling figures from the basses, the work draws on, according to the composer, “Tibetan and Thai rituals” which have “kindred therapeutic and spiritual properties”. The music is to do with healing both medically (Wang spent a period in hospital during the work’s composition) and socially (by bringing together ideas from a large array of cultures and, particularly, linguistic groups). Shimmering sounds akin to swarming insects, birds, chattering incantations and various street noises (perhaps we can identify things here which evoke nothing other than ambulance sirens) assay our ears. It is highly effective and this is certainly a most compelling performance.

Urban Inventory is perhaps the ultimate example of Wang’s multi-layered style of writing. Cast in five movements and scored for a quintet of players on flute, clarinet, violin, cello and keyboard alongside a background of pre-recorded street sounds, the music depicts in the most vivid terms, the noises of a Chinese city at dusk, including a baby crying, children playing, people walking and a street busker. Included in this amazing kaleidoscope of sounds are a recording from a 1990s Chinese pop idol, and, again to quote from Wang’s own note, “broken instruments mixed with songs of praise to western and eastern gods”. This is probably the most accomplished work here, and it is certainly given a very fine studio performance by the work’s dedicatees.

The two most recent works are Backstory and Cloud Intimacy. The former was first performed by Alarm Will Sound at the Mizzou International Composers Festival in Missouri during July 2017 – this live recording seems to be of that first performance. It is lushly scored for the 16 musicians of the ensemble and is predominantly reflective in its language. Wang writes of “seemingly loose yet tightly wound blocks of sound”, but these blocks are held together by various flights of instrumental fancy which weave around almost like spiders spinning intricate webs between the branches of a tree. Unique among the works on the disc in that it has no clear story and sets out to invite the listener to “experience a series of constantly developing situations”, as an exploration of instrumental sound without external interference, it is a highly effective work superbly performed here.

On a personal note, I find Cloud Intimacy the most fascinating and intriguing of all the works included on this CD, and this is certainly one of the most arresting and compelling performances. Alongside Urban Inventory, it is the only studio recording here, and the fact that it was recorded by Wang’s colleagues at Brown University possibly gives the performance a greater sense of conviction. Whatever the reason, this is a work which unfolds beautifully, only gradually releasing itself from a long-breathed, mystical, almost Messiaen-like opening (by means of a gorgeous Gershwin-esque clarinet riff) into a frantic maze of weird and wonderful sounds including that incredibly annoying wolf-whistle which certain mobile phones give off on receipt of a text message. Its symbolism here lies in the “cloud” of the title; it is the digital cloud where, for many, the only true life now exists. Wang talks of the “unbounded and uncommitted intimacy” created by so-called dating apps, and of how everyone “has a chance to construct a perfect social profile separate from the imperfections of reality”. It is a social issue which concerns many for its negativity; here it is vividly used as a distinct and alluring force for musical positivity.

— Marc Rochester, 8.03.2018

Composer and pianist Wang Lu grew up in China in a musical family with strong Chinese opera and folk music traditions. She teaches at Brown University and composes for Western and Chinese ensembles. ‘Urban Inventory’ offers five of her compositions, all composed between 2008 and 2016. It is her first full-length release. The album opens with the title piece, a work played by the Third Sound Ensemble. Ensembles like Ensemble Intercontemporain, Alarm Will Sound, perform other compositions. These are top ensembles that give lively and virtuosic interpretations of Lu’s compositions. These have a lot to offer. Lu has a playful and creative mind. She mixes influences of Chinese traditional and modern music with Western avant-garde. Makes good use and combinations of pre-recorded sounds with orchestra. For sure a strong voice. There is an attractive lightness in her complex compositions. And the arrangements are very colourful. Sparkling music!

This portrait recording features six of Lu's compositions performed by a starry array of ensembles including Third Sound, ICE, Alarm Will Sound and the Ensemble Intercontemporain. Their involvement is a tribute to Lu's dazzling music, which shows a complete mastery of orchestration and dynamics as well as a polyglot style based on a broad field of influences. Listening is like being in the hands of a great storyteller as each piece pulls you through its narrative in a series of musical page turners. The vignettes of the title piece may be based on Lu's formative experiences in Beijing but her sonic translations are universal enough that any city dweller will feel a burst of recognition. Urban Inventory announces the arrival of an incredible talent whose gifts will likely only continue to grow.

— Jeremy Shatan, 7.04.2018

...Finally, I’ve included albums by two young Chinese-born, American-based composers: Du Yun and Wang Lu. While some of their works include references to the musical traditions of their homeland, Sino-Western hybridization isn’t as much of an aesthetic concern for them as it was for an older generation of Chinese émigré composers like Tan Dun, Chen Yi, or Bright Sheng. Rather, Du and Wang engage with a contemporary, globalized culture, constructing digital-age collages that draw heavily on pop and electronica. Wang’s ensemble work Cloud Intimacy explores a far less abusive form of intimacy, though one marked by the cold impersonality of technology. Passionate themes from Tristan are rendered droopy and lethargic in Wang’s bastardized quotations—Wagner’s musical representations of unbridled love are constantly interrupted by samples of cell-phone text-message tones, as well as clever acoustic imitations of these cellular pings and chimes from members of the International Contemporary Ensemble.

— Joe Cadagin, 10.15.2018