Ensemble Contrechamps - Chiyoko Szlavnics: Memory Spaces (2025) [Hi-Res]

The recordings gathered on this release bring together two ensemble works for acoustic instruments by Berlin-based Canadian musician-composer-artist Chiyoko Szlavnics, in documentary recordings by Ensemble Contrechamps designed for various spatialisations by producer Santi Barguñó.

Szlavnics’ work as a composer takes inspiration from her early mentorship in Toronto with the innovatory thinker and creator James Tenney, as well as ongoing studies of Indian Dhrupad practice in the Dagar family tradition, which Szlavnics began learning from Marianne Svašek, and continued in India and the UK with master singer Uday Bhawalkar and his students. She draws psychoacoustically manifesting lines, shapes, forms, and patterns with abstract masses of precisely-tuned frequencies, emerging and receding like breathing. The sounds bear a deep honeyed resistance that could, at any moment, glide into smooth and inexorable momentum, passing through each other like clouds of energy or colliding into explosions of perceptual details. For her, making music is observing the ever-changing manifestations of cosmic clouds, temporally disjunct forces across huge distances cohering in the mind of the listening ear’s act of cognition: beautiful in their ever-changing forms, yet without meaning and without statement.

Both recordings document sound environments that, ideally, would be experienced physically and spatially in real time, the various rationally-connected pitches fusing and moving dynamically in direct interaction with acoustical properties of the sounding listening space. The use of “just” or rational intonation (JI) is central to activating this process, and it marks Szlavnics as sharing a practice that is perhaps one of the key bridges between “experimental-spectral sound composition” in the uniquely North American sense (Partch, Cage, Lucier, Oliveros, Tenney, Amacher, Young, Schweinitz, Sabat, Lamb, Nicholson, et al.) and what I consider to be the one key question of music composition today. Namely: what is the nature and purpose of music in a multilateral, data-driven world in crisis, struggling with historical patterns of exploitation and domination? In tandem with colonial economics, the European classical music establishment propagated 12edo: a standardised system of “perfect pitch” that is at once simple, elegant, useful, and acoustically false. The revival of old-school microtonal tunings in period music practices, along with a rediscovery of older Greek, Arabic, Persian, and Indian systems, marks a return to a pluralism of harmonic and melodic possibilities.

By insisting on strictly realised, exactly tuned relations, and asking musicians to sound these, the composer is faced with a formal dilemma: to stand back from a desire to shape and control the multidimensional material, a wish to make some kind of utterance, and instead to seek an environment within which the sounds may live, unfold, open to being experienced. Tenney recognised this in moving beyond neo-classical strategies and seeking correlations between Cage’s indeterminacy, Xenakis’ formalised music, and Partch’s advocacy of JI based on higher prime identities. In his most seminal JI works: the “Harmonium” series, “Koan for string quartet”, “Critical Band”, among others, Tenney creates an intuitively composed, slowly evolving sequence of chord changes. The music features phenomena: combination tones, common-tone microtonal modulations (changes of fundamental), beating, and perceptual fusion and timbral chimeras created by closely emulating the simultaneous frequencies of an harmonic partial row or harmonic series. Tones emerge from and recede back to silence, or (at times) are clearly articulated, without ornament or modulation (vibrato, tremolo). Time is given on a slow, measured scale using minutes and seconds, allowing synchronised changes to unfold but giving open space for sounds to be “projected” into temporal spaces. This approach allows ensembles of acoustic instruments to play a precisely tuned music and has inspired other composers with a close connection to Tenney, in particular Szlavnics, Sabat, Lamb, and others. ...

Ensemble Contrechamps
Max Murray, conductor

Recorded October 2023 at Bellelay Abbey, Switzerland