Ensemble Dal Niente - Chris Fisher-Lochhead: Wake Up the Dead (2023)

On Wake Up the Dead, Chris Fisher-Lochhead’s music seems to jump through the speakers and grab the listener’s proverbial collar, demanding not only attention to its own construction, but a vigilant kind of listening. In his instrumental writing, Fisher-Lochhead shows an affinity for vigor, gravitating towards gestures that pack a lot of drama into short durations. When Fisher-Lochhead’s music explores sustained textures as in the two works for the vocal group Quince Ensemble, he embeds intensity inside durations — the music is always growing and imbued with urgency. This is music that takes an unspoken but almost polemical stance against complacency.

In stutter-step the concept, Fisher-Lochhead creates a musical ecosystem of independent, but interrelated, organisms. The dry, pizzicato harmonics of the strings, overblown utterances and sighing gestures in the winds, and terse high-hat figures evolve according to their own quasi-semantic logic, but meanwhile catalyze accumulation and development in other parts. One is invited to listen either to the journey of one line or the composite resultant phrases of the various timbres as they interact with one another. As the piece evolves, we hear the sonic jungle come “alive” with pops, exhortations, and cries. As it closes, it coalesces into a lilting chorale of gently swelling voices.

Fisher-Lochheadincludes two Precarity Songs on the album, both performed by the Quince Ensemble. The first, “Précis,” is a wordless vocalise that explores harmonic and timbral color changes that are triggered by subtle shifts in inner voices and diction. Later in the program, “Four Until L8” explores some of the same techniques but this time with text. Here Fisher-Lochhead treats the ensemble more strictly, limiting it primarily to passages in rhythmic unison before a lush, melismatic phrase closes the song.

The JACK Quartet performs two works on the album, Funktionslust and After Bessie Smith. The opening of Funktionslust bristles with compressed energy that erupts in brief, focused spikes of sound. The intensity of the music is generated as much by an unseen (or unheard) force restraining a powerful impulse as the sound of it releasing in spurts, like a controlled eruption. The middle section is marked by brief soloistic flights supported by percolating pizzicati. As in stutter-step, Fisher-Lochhead closes the piece with longer lined material, haunting sustained sonorities that morph and refract within their duration. After Bessie Smith uses transcriptions of several recordings of the song “Backwater Blues” as source material for a range of creative interpolation techniques. Fisher-Lochhead subjected the transcribed material to different processes, including time-stretching, spectral analysis, and layering, to distill something of the essence of the song and embed it in this bracingly severe work for string quartet. We hear the intensity of Bessie Smith’s musical personality in the malleable, elastically vocal string parts, an echo of the earthy cry at the heart of so many blues performances. But with the ponticello swells, jarring accents, and destabilizing glissandi, Fisher-Lochhead has fractured the original material from the mooring of the blues song structure, leaving only the poignant aching that is at the heart of its expression. As the piece ends, the threads of pitch that Fisher-Lochhead has stretched throughout congeal into one taut unison pitch, ending dramatically with a final ripping gesture.

grandFather for solo bassoon, performed by Ben Roidl-Ward, revels in a burly side of the instrument’s sonic vocabulary. The piece opens with a series of snarling multi-phonics that shroud an impassioned, cathartic melodic shape. Fisher-Lochhead expands the traditional range of the instrument as furious passagework explodes into pointed shouts, breath sounds, and key clicks which are all deftly woven into the virtuosic texture. At times, Roidl-Ward’s instrument sounds like it is being processed through a ring modulator, so profound are the timbral shifts that occur in these passages of multi-phonic clusters.

The trajectory of Wake Up the Dead is naturally balanced by the repeated instrumentation works for Quince Ensemble and JACK Quartet. One one hand, the string quartet pieces are kinetically charged. The vocal works, while gentler in tone color, share a similarly lean approach, eschewing extraneous material in favor of taut treatment. The large ensemble work that opens the program displays how Fisher-Lochhead allows independent voices to coalesce into a larger musical organism, while grandFather demonstrates how he can manifest a wide ranging sonic palette on just one instrument. Throughout, Chris Fisher-Lochhead keeps the heat on, writing music that is bracing and commands attention.

- Dan Lippel