Two years ago, the newly formed independent label False Azure Records (FAR) issued its first album, the labor of forgetting. That title is itself a paradox. A recording preserves musical performances in the polycarbonate plastic of a compact disc or on nostalgic vinyl or, most often now, in some out-of-sight server farm whose footprint belies the specious immateriality of “the cloud.” A recording does the work of memory.
Presented with a shimmering meticulousness that, in aggregate and in compelling detail, achieves a profound expressivity, the labor of forgetting has stayed with me since the CD arrived in my mailbox some months ago. The album’s music is not easy to forget.
Founded by the wide-ranging and ever-busy pianist, Ryan MacEvoy McCullough, False Azure Records gainsays the doomsday predictions for independent ventures in what is still often called the recording industry. McCullough wants his label to be a forum for “intimate explorations of new and lesser-known chamber music, art song, piano (and other keyboard) repertoire, electro-acoustic hallucinations, and field recording.” This encompassing, bravely madcap mission, coupled with the unsurpassed standard of musicianship on the labor of forgetting, made me want to join on to McCullough’s campaign of sonic exploration.
I am proud to report, and should anyway disclose in this record review, that two FAR recordings are forthcoming that present organ performances by me; in the second of these ,I’m joined by the violinist, Martin Davids. These albums pursue imaginative paths through music conceived in the 17th and 18th centuries; works of the past inspire new explorations. Across the FAR catalog that is now taking shape, baroque curiosities and wonders played on old instruments can converse, sometimes collide with newer musical technologies, sounds, ideas, ways of listening. The label’s name is a reference to the deceptive blue sky reflected in a windowpane into which a cedar waxwing flies in Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire. Flight entails risk, especially when things are not what they seem.
McCullough is both hugely gifted performer and resourceful impresario. His label’s first offering, the labor of forgetting presents him on world-premiere recordings of two piano works by Dante De Silva, followed by Katherine Balch’s song cycle estrangement, which sets the poetry of Katie Ford and on which McCullough is joined by his collaborative (and life) partner, soprano Lucy Fitz Gibbon.
De Silva studied music at Humboldt State University in Arcata on California’s northern shores before working his way down the Pacific Coast, first to UC Santa Cruz for a master’s and then to U.C.L.A. for a Ph.D. in composition.
McCullough grew up in Arcata and, like De Silva, was deeply molded by the pianist and Humboldt State professor Deborah Clasquin, who died in 2009 at the age of 52. De Silva’s “Shibui: dirge in memory of my mentor” opens the album and has a deep connection to both composer and performer. The short piece has the poise of a Bach sarabande, but renounces elegiac grandeur in favor of a reverent, fragile intimacy. De Silva’s harmonic language of homage is familiar yet strange. Its sincere forthright projection is captured by the piece’s title: Shibui is a Japanese aesthetic that seeks a subdued simplicity, favoring refinement over extravagant display. Moving paradoxes proliferate on this album: De Silva’s lament is both whole and broken. Like a reglued vase, the fissures in this music glint. Held up to the light in McCullough’s hand, his touch precise but tender, the effect is almost painfully poised, a beauty of gratitude and mourning.
“Shibui” is followed by De Silvas ’s four-movement Four Years of Fog, a twenty-minute memoir of the composer’s undergraduate sojourn beyond the Redwood curtain. For this suite, the piano was re-set to De Silva’s specification for “just intonation.” In this system, some intervals are perfectly tuned, but that bargain with nature means that some tonalities will sound off-kilter, eerily close to the dominant paradigm of equal temperament but all the more distant-seeming for that very proximity to the norm. Equal temperament is not about diversity nor the inclusion of such justice-seeking aliens.
The piano of Four Years of Fog sounds like the merging of a well-maintained instrument in a climate-controlled concert hall with a bar-room wreck in a mist-enshrouded seaside town. The sonorities oscillate between purity and mongrel whines and whispers.
Under McCullough’s hands, De Silva’s music becomes an act of remembering and of forgetting, an exercise in tautness and relaxation, control and letting go. These pieces give McCullough space for his musical sensitivity and skill, from coruscating figuration to muted chords low on the keyboard; the beginning of a tenor melody brought about between the hands; toccata-like fisticuffs. Ringing, numinous effects seem to emanate from somewhere beyond. A stretch of New Age harmoniousness skids off-piste into grumbling, detuned dissonance. The music is rich in idioms and textures that welcome McCullough’s tremendous pianism, from pointed articulation, to caressed whisps of melody, from virtuosic eruptions to soliloquized ruminations. From these partly defamiliarized scales and intervals McCullough creates a geographic and personal portrait (call it, De Silva in Arcata) refracted through memory, desire, self-knowledge and self-fashioning.
Shortly before the volcanic close of Four Years of Fog there is a shocking slap to the piano.
That act of violence is a fitting segue to Katherine Balch’s estrangement. The song cycle sets Katie Ford’s poetic confrontation with Robert Schumann’s celebrated Dichterliebe, which had set poems by Heinrich Heine. In the last of Schumann’s sixteen songs, the lovelorn narrator imagines having giants build a massive coffin and putting all the old “bad songs”—about love, to be sure—in a huge wooden casket and dumping it into the Rhine.
In estrangement, which runs to an unlucky thirteen songs, it is not the manly knight of yore—jilted but still joisting, even if his romantic armor is badly dented—who sings, but a woman, scarred by love and singing of herself in the third person. The hopeful yearning of Schumann’s lush introduction to his first song, which depicts the opening of buds in May, becomes, in estrangement, a single note, a naked accounting of the romantic ledger: “Only once did she feel loved by a man.” The voice holds to that single pitch with the piano which then quickly fragments into shards below. Over the rest of the cycle, resonant Schumannesque jetsam continually bobs to the surface of the cycle’s flow and then disappears again beneath the waves.
When the lyric “she” of estrangement demands cruel candor, Fitz Gibbon’s tone can be frigid, bleak. When an alluring, Schumannesque, melody is recalled well into the cycle, many poetic lines after “Life with him quickly becomes intolerable.” The narrator does not want to remember, but music is an irrepressible conjurer of the past: “Only the song took formidable work to forget.” Here, Fitz Gibbon stutters and gasps, unable to bring herself to sing the triggering word “song.” Failure becomes a harrowing, essential mode of expression—”the labor of forgetting,” as Ford’s poetry soon intones, is not easy. Fitz Gibbon is not afraid to sound estranged even from her own voice.
Her singing embodies—envoices—another paradox: she can be coldly unsparing and warmly lush, sensual and clinical, even at the same time. She retreats into bittersweet reverie, then, in the next line, awakens in a fit of renunciation. Her vocal and emotional ranges are vast and cogenerative. A singer of astounding technical control, Fitz Gibbon deploys those gifts in service of the necessities of the poetry. In her performance, the cycle becomes an unflinching dissection of the decayed romantic body. Alongside at the coroner’s slab that is the grand piano, McCullough provides the soundtrack of the unconscious, inseparable from the narration, but uncannily apart from it—complementing, commenting, contradicting, complicating.
After estrangement concludes with the human heart evoked first by a specimen jar and then in all its tactile gore, there is a reprise of De Silva’s dirge but heard in just intonation. Time has elapsed; the piano has been re/de-tuned. Entropy has been at work on the instrument’s wire, wood, and iron. Even the CD’s plastic doesn’t last quite as long as forever. It, too, begins to forget.
(David Yearsley is a long-time contributor to CounterPunch and the Anderson Valley Advertiser. His latest book is Sex, Death, and Minuets: Anna Magdalena Bach and Her Musical Notebooks. He can be reached at dgyearsley@gmail.com.)
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