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Phonogrammar

by Antanas Rekašius

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1.
Epitaph I 01:53
2.
Epitaph II 02:48
3.
Epitaph III 01:36
4.
Epitaph IV 01:26
5.
Epitaph V 02:18
6.
Atonic VII 01:11
7.
Atonic III 00:55
8.
Atonic I 02:19
9.
Atonic X 01:51
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
Atonic II 01:47
16.
Atonic XI 02:59
17.
Atonic V 02:23
18.
Atonic XII 02:42
19.
20.
Atonic IV 01:10
21.
Atonic VIII 02:00
22.
Atonic VI 00:39
23.
Atonic IX 03:05
24.
25.
26.

about

Here I am, trying to write about the music of the Lithuanian composer Antanas Rekašius (1928-2003), which in some ways is difficult for me, it's like a form of musical archaeology. But isn't it always like that, when the composer is gone and all we have left is their scores? By all accounts and from archival film footage I have seen, he seemed to have been an exceptional, larger than life figure, with rich, rapid, emotional and physical transformations, pulling and dragging his music out of performers and jettisoning it into acoustic space.

The photographer Robert Frank once talked of observing through his window in the 1950s the painter Willem De Kooning, pacing his New York City studio, making a mark on the canvas, sitting, waiting, pacing some more and then making another mark. 'I was a very silent unobserved watcher of this man at work. It meant a lot to me. It encouraged me to pace up and down and struggle.'

To us today, this may seem to fit the romantic view of the struggling artist, but what interests me is the notion of creativity being as much about waiting as acting. With the actual performance of music, we don't wait much, we act. But the composer sets it all up, mentally pacing the floor, making marks on music paper, scratching out ideas, reaffirming and altering the eventual sonic process.

For me, Rekašius worked like a painter with his materials, scratching surfaces, splattering paint, overlaying colours and textures, moulding melodic gestures, etching the curvature of sounds and exploding harmonic sonorities with glee and joyful abandon. The painterly analogy is apt perhaps, paint is wet and visceral, alive almost and has that instant potential for marking the mind's eye.

Rekašius's calligraphic pen work flows elegantly across the page, an inky identikit of expression. In the majority of the chamber works on this album he adopts aleatoric methods of organising material using (often) chaotic repetitions, with pitch and timbral alterations. This results often in an exhilarating montage of sounds, jostling in and out of focus. There are some passages which resemble some kind of alien jazz, with mournful melodies, grotesque rhythmic machinations and a sinuous pitch bending. There is humour also, not a subtle, winking humour, more the crazy japes of vaudeville and Buster Keaton. Rekašius likes to play the clown, but watch Bruce Nauman's clown in action and you will perhaps have a startling point of reference. There is a darkness and melancholy embedded in this music. The scores' notations exhort the performers to experiment with sound production and go beyond conventional instrumental techniques. He wants to let the music be free, fresh and improvisatory, blurring the boundaries between notation and interpretation. Some elements of these compositions come close to a composer such as Anthony Braxton and few if any other composers come to mind as a point of comparison.

About the works on this album; firstly, 3 works for a trio of saxophone (playing flute and clarinet also), cello and percussion. Rekašius left few indications to the type and nature of percussion instruments his music required, so each of these works has a suitably enigmatic array of percussion. Often comprised of short movements, Rekašius favours pithy block forms over development, focusing on mechanistic riffs, mournful song-like utterances and an often bizarre juxtaposition of sounds, akin somewhat to a Jean-Michel Basquiat-like artist on a dreamlike band tour of Lithuanian hinterlands. Secret signs, scribbles, scrawls, enigmatic semantic dead-ends, scratched out words, cyphers and richly coloured melodic detritus, littering the sonic landscape.

The remaining two works for solo piano and cello with synthesizer explore different territories. 'Fluorescences' is a 'concerto' for cello and organ (ex-changed for synthesizer here, enabling a 1980s period authenticity and allowing a wider range of keyboard effects). Here, a strange, throbbing harmonic world is circumnavigated with ecstatic cello melodies of a melancholic disposition, the synthesizer part redolent of Vincent Price's organ playing in the 70s horror movie 'The Abominable Dr. Phibes'. On and on it goes, increasing in intensity, until finally extinguishing itself in a hail of white noise and cluster chords.

'Atonic', 12 Preludes for piano, is perhaps the most conventional work on this album. But is it? Heartfelt, bleak, song-like, with hints of insouciant jazz, it is obsessive music, often savage in its bright bell-like intensity, with crashing waves of chords and subtle, distant folk echoes of 'sutartinės' days.

But the endings, how can a composer end pieces like that?

Oh, he did…

Anton Lukoszevieze, January, 2016

credits

released December 31, 2016

APARTMENT HOUSE:
Frank Gratkowski - saxophone (1-5, 24-26); saxophone / flute / clarinet (10-14)
Simon Limbrick - percussion (1-5, 10-14, 24-26)
Anton Lukoszevieze - cello (1-5, 10-14, 19, 24-26)
Philip Thomas - piano (6-9, 15-18, 20-23)
Kerry Yong - synthesizer (19)

Recording engineer - Simon Reynell
Design and layout - Aušra Vismanaitė
Executive producer - Gailė Griciūtė

. . .

Supported by the Lithuanian Council for Culture and the LATGA Association

℗ & © Music Information Centre Lithuania, MICL CD 089, mic.lt

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miclithuania Vilnius, Lithuania

A niche label, covering the diversity of Lithuanian art music, ranging from extreme experiments to contemporary classical innovations and practices.

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