SCOTT WOLLSCHLEGER - Soft Aberration

In the postwar years, America had the singular merit of being able to make a tabula rasa of much of its previous artistic culture: while Europe was still splitting into clearly defined factions on the musical front, torn between post-romanticism, serialism and electronic experimentation, across the ocean the doors were thrown open to an expression truly free of the rigour of traditional compositional schemes, finding new points of contact with performance and dance.

The new generations of American composers, then, don't need so much to pick a side as the intelligence and curiosity to push a step further the ground already won in the name of that infinite potential from which an ever-new concept of music can spring.

“Bring Something Incomprehensible Into This World”: this is also the title, by way of a poetic statement borrowed from philosopher Gilles Deleuze's dictum, of the odd three-part piece for soprano and trumpet (2015) included in the first collection of compositions by Scott Wollschleger, born in 1980. The varied chamber repertoire selected for “Soft Aberration” has an obsessive, elusive character, as if constantly trying to dodge the listener's attempts at interpretation. The repetition of patterns and harmonic micro-cells does not feed into any process of progressive meaning-making; if anything, it only underscores the elusive nature and self-referentiality of the signifiers themselves.

The piano trio “Brontal Symmetry” (2015) channels fragments discarded from other possible scores back into the same sinister main theme, a sphinx-like riddle whose sly unfolding plays out between the two extremes of the keyboard, while violin and cello chase phantom trajectories with gestures that are at times composed, at other times nervous and jagged.

“Soft Aberration no. 2” (2015) is an unperturbed mental landscape in the manner of Feldman, whose apparent motion is driven by the rough ripples of the viola in dialogue with the drops and rings in the water sketched out by the piano; a desolation that may appear painful yet is somehow foreign to the emotional taxonomy of the real – an aberration, indeed, but one with gentle contours.

A brilliant, unorthodox compositional practice, influenced by Cagean chance procedures, gave rise to the solo piece “America” (2013): over two years, Wollschleger and cellist John Popham exchanged the various pieces of the work-in-progress as email attachments; a few lines of score would be performed by Popham, recorded on a smartphone and sent back to the sender, generating fleeting interpretations and small smudges that fed back into the final writing; the result is a dynamic exercise in differential repetition and micro-variations arising from playing identical pitches on different strings. The composer recounts that “the original plan was to keep the email/fragment process going until America collapsed, but we opted to finish the piece instead once we realized the world would end before the country did.”

The second string quartet, “White Wall” (2013/14), already signals in its title a clear kinship with monochrome paintings, opening with a first movement of minimal markings, akin to the spontaneous traces etched into canvas textures, followed by a development in equally inconsequential vibratos and glissandos, (un)resolved in the end in the most fragile suspension in the void.

Showing the same command over quiet, poetic registers as over passages of refined virtuosity, the versatility and compositional intelligence of Scott Wollschleger come through immediately, aided by the playful spirit – though never naif – of certain inventions that attest to his full belonging to the contemporary scene. A revelation that has already won the praise of star critic Alex Ross in the pages of the New York Times, and which, with a little more effort to make its way into concert hall programs, will soon earn the attention it deserves.

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google

28/12/2017