Will Mason Quartet: Hemlocks, Peacocks

There are some oblique quotations of Young’s composition in Mason’s piece, but it’s the fluidity and improvisational spirit of The Well-Tuned Piano that first endeared Mason to the work. More than anything else, this high degree of pre-compositional care toward performance is the thread that unites Mason’s composition with Young’s. In Hemlocks, Peacocks the just intonation tuning system of Young’s The Well Tuned Piano is set at two pitch levels on two separate keyboards, one rooted on C and the other on 436Hz (a slightly flat A). This allows for the use of the 5/4 just major third, which Young’s tuning system deliberately omitted. But it also allows for an array of clusters and shadings of pitches. Especially in the improvisational context of much of this music, this lends the keyboard a flexibility and expressivity that is not normally available to performers.

Hemlocks, Peacocks was written specifically for the group of performers assembled here: Anna Webber, Daniel Fisher-Lochhead, and deVon Russell Gray. Webber’s compositional work has encompassed just intonation tuning systems, as in her band “Shimmer Wince.” Fisher-Lochhead is a longtime collaborator with Mason, having played on his 2015 album “Beams of the Huge Night.” Gray is a polyglot musician, who works as a free jazz pianist, composer of contemporary music, and performs with the hip hop group Heiruspecs. In other words, everyone in the band is a composer-performer with omnivorous musical tastes. The album not only showcases the skills of its seasoned musicians, but also the acoustics of the cavernous chapel in Norton, Massachusetts where the album was recorded. The keyboards are modeled on the sound of the Fender Rhodes—an instrument that might cheekily be called microtonal no matter what its tuning system. The characteristic bark and bright beating of overtones that define that instrument are amplified and mutated by the reflections and reverberations of the chapel, all painstakingly captured by engineer Joseph Branciforte.

Hemlocks, Peacocks draws programmatic inspiration from the Joan Mitchell painting “Hemlock,” (1956) and from the Wallace Stevens poem “Domination of Black,” (1916) which inspired Mitchell. The Stevens poem obsessively traces and retraces a series of images, many of them evocative of death: poison hemlock, darkness, celestial bodies, all punctuated by the cries of peacocks, traditionally symbols of divinity and immortality. Mitchell’s painting is a flurry of bold emerald-green and black brush strokes against a faded background. Each stroke bends downward, as though freighted by snow. Flashes of azure and red punctuate the painting, evocative of Stevens’ peacocks.

Mason’s composition obliquely traces themes common to all three of the works which inspired it: an oscillation between repetition and perseveration on the one hand, expansive stillness on the other. Opening track “Hemlocks” is entirely through-composed, built around shadings and transpositions of a trilled 63:64 septimal comma (the interval between a justly-intoned natural seventh and an equal-tempered minor 7th). “The Fallen Leaves, Repeating Themselves” opens with a shifting sax duet that transitions from equal temperament to just intonation, before a melancholy just intonation melody. After an alto saxophone solo from Fisher-Lochhead, a strong and declamatory climax gradually loses steam. “Twilight” is structured around dense clustered chords in the keyboard whose pitches die out in irregular and unexpected ways; shadings of the blues appear and vanish in the murk. “Turned in the Fire,” which begins with a solo from Webber, loops a small series of chord progressions inspired by material from Young’s original composition, but expands and contracts them across a shifting series of meters. “Hymn,” a duet between Gray and Mason, riffs on three just intonation harmonizations of a sacred harp melody. “Planets” begins with a noisy improvised trio between Webber, Fisher-Lochhead, and Mason, before Gray enters with a quasi-canon of perfect fifths juxtaposed across the C and A436Hz keyboards. The final movement, “Peacocks,” sets a gentle contrapuntal melody in the keyboard against an insistent repeating saxophone line, which spirals out into a cloud of just intonation harmonies, and then into noise, and then into the slow fade of the drums, marching steadfastly into silence.

– Will Mason