Jonathan Fitzgerald - Luminescence (2023)

Australian based Jonathan Fitzgerald releases this collection of new works for electric guitar informed by his background primarily as a classical guitarist. These works approach the wealth of possibilities that the classical guitar’s amplified cousin affords composers. Featuring music with and without electronics by Gulli Björnsson, Alison Isadora, Victor Arul, Eve Beglarian, Moses Kington-Walberg, Luminescence is a refreshing snapshot of how composers are approaching this relatively young instrument and exploring its potential. Several of the works also have a corresponding audio-visual component linked to in the program notes, providing evocative imagery to accompany these colorful works.

The album opens with Gulli Björnsson’s atmospheric Svart-Hvít Sky Á Himni (Black-White Clouds in the Sky) for guitar, live electronics, and visuals. Björnsson focuses on the dual nature of clouds, beautiful and willowy in good weather, but often harbingers of violent weather. The live electronics manage the trajectory of this transformation, gradually morphing the ambient harmonies of the opening into pulsations and later into rough, rhythmic timbres that strip the initial texture of nearly all their pitch content. The piece closes with the halo of sound with which it began, as the ominous face of the clouds turns docile once again.

Alison Isadora’s For Wiek shares much in approach with contemporary classical guitar works, making use of a wide timbral palette, rich harmonies, implied counterpoint, and harmonics. Isadora uses an octave pedal to expand the register of the instrument, an e-bow to extend the sustain of select notes, and a whammy bar to modulate the pitch. The work has a searching, improvisatory character that remains throughout, framing even its more pointed moments within a pervasive melancholy.

Victor Arul’s Akrasia for two electric guitars, live processing, and live visuals, contains the most avant-garde music on the album, involving placing one of the guitars on a table, prepared with alligator clips and played with a metal rod, twine, and a bass bow. Influenced by the temporal experimentation of Morton Feldman and the New York School of composers, Arul subverts conventional expectations of linear direction in structure. The opening section centers around a ricochet gesture on the prepared guitar, developing it into evaporating, swirling gestures through processing. Ethereal long tones signal a transition to an expansive middle section of tolling notes and dramatic, multi-timbre swells. Cathartic distorted sonorities mark the final section, obscuring a sense of direction within their dense mass of pitch information. A virtuosic ascending tremolo figure closes the work with a performative flair that Arul consciously avoided in the piece’s initial eleven minutes.

Eve Beglarian’s Until it Blazes has become a staple in the electric guitar and effects repertoire, its iconic relationship between insistent rhythmic motifs and layered, polyrhythmic delays defining a now familiar profile of an expanded guitar. Fitzgerald brings a finely honed sense of dynamic and articulation to his performance, creating a hypnotic three dimensionality to the texture.

The title track in three movements by Moses Kington-Walberg is the only chamber piece on the recording. Like Akrasia, the score calls for two guitars, one of which is placed flat and played with e-bows, glass rings, and a MAX patch, as well as violin, and bass clarinet prepared with paper. Inspired by underwater bioluminescence, Kington-Walberg writes cinematic, evocative textures that capture the wonder of the marine landscape. The opening movement, “Threads of Sunlight,” opens with luminous pitches and slow glissandi played on guitar with the e-bow before introducing delicate arpeggiated chords that usher in a final spry violin flourish. The bass clarinet plays a solo introduction in “Wine-Dark Depths,” with repeated low notes that gradually evolve into skittering gestures mixing key clicks with growling articulations. When the violin and guitar join, they develop a texture of swells that evoke hollow marine mammal calls and drier gestures that conjure images of crustaceans. As in the first movement, lush guitar arpeggios create an expansive contrast to the more timbrally based material. In the final movement, “Drifting Constellations,” fragile, droning textures allow individual pitches to emerge and recede. A looped siren-like swell gesture in the guitar processing lays an unsettling foundation for nervous figures in the violin and guitar.

Despite the broad range of aesthetics on display on Luminescence, the album retains a sensual orientation throughout, highlighting the electric guitar’s capacity for creating enveloping, textural sounds. Fitzgerald handles the subtle demands of this repertoire beautifully, and gives listeners a window into how the repertoire for this evolving instrument is developing in the unique musical landscape of Australia and New Zealand, standing apart from but certainly responsive to more centralized new music communities in Europe, Asia, and the Americas.

– Dan Lippel