Music Review: Lei Liang – ‘Six Seasons: Instrumentation Lab’

Six Seasons: Solos

Composer Lei Liang never stops exploring and expanding the possibilities of music and sound – including instruments.

Yet how new, or original, is the music on the new two-CD set Six Seasons: Instrumentation Lab? It’s a tricky question.

In my experience, the lengthier and more obscure the liner notes, the emptier the music. What to make of writing like “Liang has fashioned a syntax of symbiosis in flux…his compositions eschew teleology in favor of distillation and reconfiguration…Liang composes convergence in reiteration. Never content with what is as is, he listens and re-evaluates.” Yes, it’s possible to parse meaning from such hyper-Latinate writing. But then, to try to map that meaning to what you’re hearing – can it be done? is it worth the effort?

Recently, urban rats chewed up chunks of my car engine, sending the vehicle to the shop for a completely new engine harness. It was the second time I’d had a vehicle thus attacked on the streets of Manhattan. I thought of this as I listened to the piano movement of “Season 1: Darkness,” the first main section of “Six Seasons: Solos” from the double album. This, I thought, is just what it might have sounded like under the hood as the rodents ate away at my soy-based insulation and chewed through my wiring.

There are sounds in the music that clearly come from a piano, derived directly from the strings or through sympathetic vibration if not via the keyboard. But most of the piece is toneless.

And when the next part begins and the source shifts to the harp – which, admittedly, resembles the skeleton of a piano – it’s hard at first to notice a transition. Strings, wood, pedals – check. Contact mics? Ultimately there is more tonality in the harp movement. The instrument’s nature makes itself known. We also hear what sound like muted vocals. Still, it’s only marginally more “musical.”

Not surprisingly, sounds derived from the passage of air rather than the vibration of strings distinguish the bassoon movement.Ben Roidl-Ward) produces squeaks and whispers and dual tones. But there’s little to grasp onto in these five minutes. Where did that time go?

“Season 3: Sunrise” starts like pouring rain, ironically suggesting a morning on which the sunrise isn’t visible at all. The rest of the short, anxious track consists of hissing, piping, and scraping sounds.

An acoustic-electronic language of sorts seems to be trying to emerge from Andrew Kozar’s trumpet in “Season 4: Migration.” Eerie, descending electronic dives and chirpings pile on top of one another, some suggestive of analog synthesizer sounds, together with warbling from a (presumably muted) trumpet. It adds up to something that could be part of a sci-fi soundtrack.

Baritone Ty Bouque produces an extended guttural croak in “Season 1: New Ice.” He returns for the first part of “Season 5: Cacophony.” But in the latter piece, for a while there isn’t much that resembles the normal workings of a human voice. Halfway through, toneless sighing and groaning arrive to intermingle with the electronics.

The Body Electric

It’s useful to reflect on the similarity between the human body as a sound source and the musical instruments we build. Vocal cords that vibrate, air that passes through various chambers, percussively resonant hands and thighs – in a sense, creating instruments is just enhancing ourselves.

Thus, there’s not a big gulf between Bouque’s moans and the keenings of William Lang’s trombone in the next section, or some of the prattling of Adrián Sandí’s bass clarinet in the one after that. When Lang blows toneless air through the trombone’s brass tubing, how different is that from the sounds that human lungs can engender on their own? Sandí’s squeals aren’t so different from what a human being choking on grief (or just choking) might sound like.

Tyler J. Borden’s moans on the cello could almost be a distorted human voice, and there are animal noises (from elephants and gorillas, for example) that resemble some of the accompanying higher-pitched whines.

Jesse Langen delivers the more metallic “Season 6: Bloom” on the electric guitar, the only difference here being that there’s less audible parallel with the human somatic instrument. Pianist Stephen Drury’s single notes and monkey-like screams from the “Prelude” return for a brief final “Postlude.”

Having finished two listens, I lean back in my armchair and reflect: I don’t know, man – I feel like people were doing this same sort of stuff back in the 1950s, if not before.

Six Seasons: Ensemble

The cycle on the second disc, divided into six pieces with the same titles as the first, plus a coda, holds more interest, mostly because the larger ensemble varies the sound palette. The group nec[shivaree], the New England Conservatory’s avant-garde ensemble, here includes French horn, viola, cello, contrabass, electric guitar, and two pianists. Once again the music dispenses with rhythm and, for large stretches, with tone. Once again extended techniques dominate.

And once again the quieter parts, as in “Darkness,” sound like small animals snuffling around trying to ferret something out.

But the grumbles of “Sunrise” are shot through with piercing harmonics. A viola melody tries to snake to the surface. The bass tries hesitantly to provide a floor, even a hint at an ostinato. Percussive sounds emanate from non-percussion instruments. Woodwind sounds percolate from an ensemble with no woodwinds. Waves of static sound like water. Periods of activity persist.

There’s a brittle coldness to “Ice.” Birdlike sounds flutter across “Migration,” along with actual harmonies. “Cacophony” sounds like a small orchestra setting up in a disorganized recording studio underwater; as on the first disc, it’s no more “cacophonous” than any other movement and less raucous than some. Toward the end it even seems to grope towards establishing a key.

“Bloom” has quite a bit of life – use your imagination and you might discern birds, monkeys, a lion, an elephant. You might even focus undefined noises into sound-pictures of flowers in bloom.

Wordy Rappinghood

Here’s what I take from Marc Medwin’s interminable (and annotated!) liner notes: Liang creates and realizes music using, and inspired by, nature, electronics, and technology as well as instruments; reimagines what an “instrument” actually is; and blurs the line between improvisation and composition. That’s digestible.

Whether, as Medwin writes, the present cycle “brims with possibility, with the permeability of discovery in rediscovery, as the brilliantly malleable form reshapes, redefines and reimagines its structures and boundaries” – well, that’s something the listener is welcome to grapple with. This listener doesn’t have the time or the brainspace. To put it another way: Huh?

Lei Liang has been prominent for years in the fields of new and Indigenous music, both as a composer and a musicologist. He has won many awards and received prestigious commissions. What he composes, and what he has to say about it, is always worth a listen and a look. My impression of the music on this album is that it raises the process of creation to such an esoteric level that its substance thins out almost to the vanishing point. My other birds-eye-view thought is: Is he really doing anything new here?

Six Seasons: Instrumentation Lab from Lei Liang is out now on New Focus Recordings and available at Bandcamp.