David Tanenbaum - As She Sings (2021)

For the past five decades, guitarist David Tanenbaum has championed his instrument and ushered countless new solo and chamber works into the repertoire, enriching it with his curatorial acuity and powerful and sensitive performances. As She Sings documents several of those works, from an early piece written for him by his father, composer Elias Tanenbaum, to Dušan Bogdanović’s textural song cycle Games, to the most recent work in the collection by iconic Brazilian virtuoso Sérgio Assad.

More angular and modernist than most of Assad’s music, Shadows and Light features searching, snaking lines that explore increasing dissonance and tension over a series of dense repeated chords. In an energetic middle section, a rhythmic pedal point is embellished by guitaristic fills and accented chords that are more characteristic of Assad’s Brazilian inflected writing. Sequential flourishes followed by decaying echoes offer shades of Leo Brouwer. A pensive coda echoes the voicing of the opening, but the light seems to have overcome the shadows as the dissonance gives way to expansive, consonant harmonies.

Ronald Bruce Smith’s Five Pieces for guitar and live electronics places the live guitarist in an interactive relationship to various kinds of digital processing, creating a hyper-guitar. In addition to the range of electronics processing, Smith explores different styles of guitar playing in the set. In the opening piece, variable delays capture insistent repeated notes and scale bursts, projecting them into a steely, synthetic landscape. The second piece establishes an exotic, prayerful texture over a drone evocative of Indian classical music, and features processing that modulates the initial pitch upon repeats and includes pointed bell sounds that articulate arrivals. Brusque chords, short slurred figures, and percussive effects trigger quickly decaying delays in the third piece. Motivic ideas are built upon each other additively, and midway through the movement a harmonizer contributes a lower register, shadowing the guitar part. In the fourth piece, a watery flanger effect enhances lush, extended chords, at times reminiscent of Satie. Smith describes the nature of the processing that generates the gong and chime sounds at the opening of the final piece: “resonance models that are excited by noise that is sent to them from the guitarist.” A haunting repeated figure in the guitar is sampled and provides a pad for a rhapsodic, improvisatory solo line to emerge above it. In the work’s final section we hear non-pitched extended techniques on the guitar accompanied by tintinnabulation sounds in the electronics before a final shimmering descending scale.