A stimulating music synthesis

Gernot Wolfgang's Vienna and the West: Road Signs, Passage to Vienna, Route 33, Windows, Impressions, From Vienna With Love

From Bill Evans' use of the Viennese Trichord (in "What Is This Thing Called Love?", from his 1960 album Portrait in Jazz) to Don Byron & Aruan Ortiz's latest album, Random Dances & (A)Tonalities, there has been a significant, consistent influence from the Second Vienna School on jazz. The harmonic and melodic innovation of Schoenberg and the stripped-down aesthetic of Webern meet jazz from the 60s and film scores since then, in this excellent new album from Grammy-nominee Gernot Wolfgang. Wolfgang brings his usual high-flying Los Angeles-based team of studio musicians, expert in both classical and popular idioms. For these fine musicians he's provided a diverse groups of pieces. "Groove-oriented chamber music" is an interesting term, but it doesn't *quite* capture the wide range of music included here.

We begin with the witty Road Signs, about Los Angeles's idée fixe: traffic. This features the bassoon, which so often seems to be having way more fun than every other instrument. Bassoonist Judith Farmer's touch is light when it needs to be, but she doesn't hesitate to stick the best jokes. The piano trio Passage to Vienna is a more serious work, dealing with the Old World/New World dialectic that has given us so many great works of art, from Henry James to Heitor Villa-Lobos. This is Anton Webern played late at night, after Dave Brubeck and Paul Desmond have finished their final set.

The program concludes with a clever and touching piano quartet, From Vienna With Love, which is based on a theme from a sketch Gustav Mahler made for his Piano Quartet of 1876. There's a real tango feel to the piece, with contrasting aggressive and sentimental themes, though the folkloric content is Eastern European rather than Latin. Once again jazz-inflected passages alternate with more erudite ones, but in this piece especially Wolfgang achieves a real synthesis, I think.  It's a great end to a stimulating, and fun, album of music.

The wind symphony put through its paces

The music on this new disc from the North Texas Wind Symphony, conducted by Eugene Migliaro Corporon, is very diverse, which isn't a surprise considering the broad range of styles in which each of these composers works and the flexibility of the wind symphony format. The players of this superb ensemble, a large group of nearly 70 musicians, combine the expressive capabilities of woodwinds, the power of brass and a dizzying array of rhythms from the percussion. Military band, film music, and cool and hot big band sounds are all here, showing off virtuoso playing but also virtuoso composition.

We open with a stirring piece by that modern master of stirring music, John Williams. His work written to commemorate the 215th anniversary of the United States Marine Band, For the President's Own, is a patriotic classic. Master orchestrator Michael Daugherty cleaned up in the 2017 Grammys with three awards, and his 2015 composition Winter Dreams is a great example of his art. In fact, I was well into this piece before I realized there were no strings. Daugherty wrote this to commemorate two Iowa artists: painter Grant Wood and poet Jay Sigmund.

The most extensive work on the album is John Mackey's Wine-Dark Sea, a full-scale symphony with Homeric themes. This is stirring music with an exciting, vivid sound palette. Mackey also provides a short, fun, virtuosic bit of slapstick entitled The Ringmaster's March, which I expect will be challenging bands across the nation for many years. Bruce Broughton's World of Spirits is very evocative; he calls it "ballet without the dancers or a movie without the screen". The ability of music to program our minds' inner choreographer/film director has always been of great interest to composers and audiences, and Broughton brings to mind both the films of John Ford and Martha Graham's dancing, alongside the Great Plains landscapes and Comanche encampments.

I loved Gernot Wolfgang's Passing Through (2016), which was nominated for a Grammy this year (beaten out by a Daugherty disc). His Three Short Stories is the highlight of Inventions for me. Originally written for viola and bassoon, the transformation to a full big band is amazing. These little pieces have really good bones to wear these flashy new orchestrations so lightly! Here is Uncle Bebop in the original scoring; you'll have to wait until the new disc is released on May 12, 2017 to hear it in its new form.

Rich, colourful music from a diverse musical ecology

Gernot Wolfgang's new recording Passing Through is as thoughtful and entertaining as any 21st century music I've heard this year. Wolfgang's experience as a film composer and arranger has given him a facility with open, emotional music, a variety of instrumental colours, and melodies - whether film-shorthand leitmotifs or longer folk- and pop-inspired tunes - that linger in the memory.

My first exposure to Wolfgang's music was his piece Low Agenda, on the 2011 Matthias Kronsteiner disc Modified: Music for Bassoon. I got that disc for its excellent version of Villa-Lobos's Bachianas Brasileiras no. 6, but Wolfgang's jazzy piece for bassoon and string bass left a strong impression.



The new disc begins with a similar bassoon work, this time with piano:



I'm sure Wolfgang is well aware of the great film music of Jerry Goldsmith, Bernard Herrmann, Alex North. You can hear influences of each, as well as some more classically oriented composers.  The three-movement Passing Through, for oboe and bassoon, for example, has the same kind of popular/classical mix and quirky effect as Villa-Lobos's wind chamber pieces: Choros no. 2 for flute & clarinet, Trio for oboe, clarinet & bassoon, and the aforementioned BB#6 for flute and bassoon. But Wolfgang definitely has his own sound, and he's hit upon the mix of musical techniques that together produce the Gernot Wolfgang style.

My favourite piece on the album is String Theory for string quartet, an appealingly diverse suite, with folkloric roots, landscape painting and allusions to Bartok and country music. As Wolfgang explains in his excellent liner notes, once the music was finished he thought of the almost jokey title, String Theory, and then went about learning more about its meaning in physics. When musical and particle physics theory entangled, "that's when I started to feel good about naming my piece String Theory."

Composition isn't the only positive expression of film music in this album. So many of the musicians on this disc are as familiar with film and television recording studios as more traditional concert and recording venues. Gifted musicians from LA's vital music scene come together to provide the highest possible performance standards on this disc; Wolfgang seems to know them all!

In his 1940 essay "Film Music" Aaron Copland expressed concerns about taking film music out of the studio and onto the concert stage:

... it is only natural that the composer often hopes to be able to extract a viable concert suite from film score.  There is a current tendency to believe that movie scores are not proper material for concert music.  The argument is that, separated from its visual justification, the music falls flat.

It turns out, of course, that Copland needn't have worried. Modern movie audiences are much more aware of film scores than they were in Copland's day, and high quality orchestral and chamber music is heard by a much larger and more diverse audience in the Cineplex than in a concert hall or classical album or streaming service. Meanwhile, today's classical music is invigorated and made more relevant by the scene-painting, emotional nudging and character-shading work done in the Hollywood studios. This gives us a much richer musical eco-system, enriched by so many streams, to engage so many more people. This new album is a grand example of this richness.