John Cage/ Apartment House — Hymkus

Here is a CD bringing together three John Cage pieces recently played by the highly respected and versatile modern ensemble Apartment House. Two tracks are later works"Two" &  "Hymnkus", and in between them is "Thoreau Drawings" from the 1970s.

The CD appears on the always dependable Sheffield-based label Another Timbre, who releases the best and most intriguing releases from within the modern classical/ modern composition scenes. The disc is presented in the labels house style plain white mini gatefold, which features on its front cover a layered shape and line-based painting by Apartment House’s director Anton Lukoszevieze.

The performances here were recorded between January and April of this year, and as we’ve come to expect from a release on Another Timbre the clarity, depth, and range is perfect on all three pieces featured here.

We open with 1987’s “Two” which is for Flute played by Kathryn Williams, and piano played by Mark Koop. This piece was the first of the ‘number pieces’ composed by Cage in the last few years of his life. It uses randomly determined time brackets which specify pitches, and in this case dynamics, but leave the exact duration and timing of the sounds to the performer’s discretion. The track runs at the 10.15-minute mark and is built around slowly picked and spaced piano notation, which is hovered by on & off sustained flute pitches.  The piece managers to be both stark, at points almost lullingly jarring in its feel- which is certainly an interesting contrast and makes for a most compelling listening experience. With both Williams and Koop playing been patiently and beautifully realised.

Next, we have 1974’s “Thoreau Drawings” which is for a Septet- featuring Anton Lukoszevieze-cello Mira Benjamin & Gordon MacKay- violins, Kerry Yong- keyboard,  Gavin Morrison- alto flute, Heather Roche- clarinet, and  Raymond Brien- bass clarinet. Later in the composition, a fair length of field recording is utilized- which moves from traffic or water recordings, to later bird song. This piece is very rarely performed- it’s based around twenty unnumbered pages on which the composer drew shapes onto a grid of six systems, each divided into 5+7+5 parts, which followed the form of a haiku. The version here runs at the 27.35 mark. As you’d expect with a piece with kind of set-up/ composition the work is decidedly spaced, complex, and at times sudden darting and busy- as we get sudden swoons, swipes, guilds, blows, and general musical flirts. Yet it never feels random or unstructured, with keen patterns and sonic events occurring. So as a result, it's very much of a wonderful puzzle of a piece, which over repeated plays you start to comprehend more of its shape and scope. Again, wonderful realized by the players, and when the field recording elements appear it pushes the piece into deeper yet still intriguing puzzlement.

Finally, we 1986’s “Hymnkus” which is for a sextet- taking in Anton Lukoszevieze- cello,  Mira Benjamin- violin, Gavin Morrison- alto flute,  Heather Roche- clarinet, Raymond Brien- bass clarinet, and Kerry Yong- piano. This composition features fourteen instrumental parts, any number of which may be used in performance. There is no overall score. For this realisation seven of the parts were used. The title combines the words ‘hymn’ and ‘haiku’: hymn because the piece contains repeated parts, like verses in a hymn, haiku because each of the ‘verses’ contains seventeen elements, which are repeated four, five or six times at different tempi. The version here plays at 30.02 mark, and it certainly is a beautiful wrong footing and dizzyingly dense work-  which consists of various hazed pitches, tolling key darts, neck-like shifts and scrapes. It is a work that feels both mysterious and lulling primal in its hazed droning, piping, and dragging flow- yet it never feels mean-less or pointless, with a real hypnotic pull to the whole thing.

So, in finishing- this is a release that highlights three very different sounding Cage compositions, all of which are played with such skill, focus, and commitment by the Apartment House- so really an unmissable release! To get hold of a copy of this direct drop by here.