Violin duo String Noise (Pauline Kim Harris and Conrad Harris) team up with composer Eric Lyon, Deerhoof drummer Greg Saunier, and the International Contemporary Ensemble for this release of Lyon's Giga Concerto and his re-imagined versions of Brahms' op. 105 songs for violin duo and drumset. Lyon's exuberant Giga Concerto revels in quotation, stylistic diversity and orchestral color, and the Brahms' songs provide a thought provoking counterpart and a springboard for creative synergy between three versatile musicians.
Artists find myriad ways to grapple with tradition and bring it into a contemporary context. On Giga Concerto, composer Eric Lyon employs what one might call a mashup or collage approach, pitting canonic melodies, conventional textures, and forms directly against experimental techniques and stylistically hybrid material. Joined by colleagues String Noise (Pauline Kim Harris and Conrad Harris, violins), Deerhoof drummer Greg Saunier, and the International Contemporary Ensemble conducted by Nicholas DeMaison, Lyon weaves together strains of inspiration from the virtuoso concerto form, Brahms songs, and his reaction to current political events to craft an album that is exuberant, occasionally irreverent, and appropriately schizophrenic for our dizzying cultural moment.
The Giga Concerto was originally composed for String Noise as soloists with the String Orchestra of Brooklyn, and adapted in this version for the International Contemporary Ensemble. In six movements, the work highlights the virtuosity and synergy of the violin duo, offsetting the soloists with colorful writing for this small orchestra of fifteen players. While Lyon was composing the work in 2018, Donald Trump was flirting with Kim Jong-un and North Korea’s nuclear arsenal. As a response to this perilous and absurd reality, Lyon embedded quotes from topical songs into the work, among them, “Nuclear War” by Sun Ra and “Rocket Man” by Elton John.
Giga Concerto opens with a vigorous march before leading to a neo-baroque sequential passage featuring the soloists. Throughout this opening movement, Lyon establishes textures that begin in familiar fashion before slowly introducing destabilizing musical elements. By the end of the movement the steady march that opened the piece has become irregular and marked by disjunct interruptions. The glissandi that open the second movement take on a cartoonish quality, interspersed with off kilter interjections, before a steady driving rhythm supports grinding overpressure bowings in the solo parts.
Read MoreThe third movement returns to the martial character of the opening. Scalar motifs dart through the ensemble, conjuring a circus-like physicality. After an initial passage in the fourth movement that features chords sliding up and down through arrival harmonies, the athletic passagework from the middle of the third movement returns. In the middle of the fourth movement we find the most reflective music of the concerto, a contemplative, post-minimalist chorale of flowing arpeggiations and wispy melodies. Not one to linger in stasis for long, Lyon begins to destabilize this reverie with polytonal material in the guitar, catalyzing a steady unraveling punctuated by three accented notes in the strings that wake the listener from the brief dream. The movement closes with an echo of the gooey, gliding harmonies with which it began.
A flamenco-esque flourish anchors the fifth movement, as the string soloists provide kaleidoscopic, proto-Baroque fortspinnung. Lyon is adept at fixing our attention on a building block component of the musical fabric, here scale passages, and then slowly distorting it by adding rogue elements. The final movement is the concerto’s longest, and doubles down on Lyon’s collage juxtaposition of material, giving ample space for String Noise to raise the temperature with blistering solo lines. The vigorous rhythmic context is primed for hocketed figures, syncopated interruptions, and infectious grooves. Throughout, Lyon takes every opportunity to obscure and toy with expectations once he has established an idea. The ensemble continuity is briefly interrupted for a short series of solos that eventually congeal into a joyful chaos from which the movement never fully recovers. The ritornello for this last movement quotes the main theme from Deerhoof’s song “Giga Dance,” providing a shared link to the Brahms op. 105 song arrangements that alternate with the concerto movements throughout the album.
Those arrangements, initially conceived as duo versions before adding Deerhoof drummer Greg Saunier, magnify the gleeful deconstruction at the heart of this record. Brahms’ long limbed central European melodies become recontextualized as music for a post-modern, neo-vaudevillian sideshow, primed to catch and hold the listener’s attention. The balance between Saunier’s percolating, textural drumming and String Noise’s old school, heart on the sleeve approach to these melodies creates a fascinating amalgam of nostalgia, sarcasm, and aesthetic cognitive dissonance. At one poignant moment in the final arrangement, “Verrat,” the maelstrom of the trio stops and all we hear for a brief moment is a disembodied, unresolved major seventh double stop in one of the violins, as if to pull back the curtain and reveal, just for an instant, the underlying conflict driving this bombastic reclaiming of a hundred and forty years’ old repertoire.
Try as many artists may to escape, elude, or dismiss them, we are all working within a series of interlocking traditions, laden with the weight and baggage of history as they may be. In the music on this recording, Eric Lyon steps squarely to the canonic plate and engages with tropes of classical repertoire, first by embracing, and then twisting and distorting them. In the process, he captures something of the grind of our contemporary aesthetic conundrum, where the ubiquity of content from every documented era tacitly invites us to digest the old and the new simultaneously, flatlining the trajectory of evolution that chronicles the evolution of musical style. In Lyon’s music we hear both the internal tension as well as the liberation of allowing a deconstructive impulse to run free.
— Dan Lippel
Recorded, mixed, mastered, produced by Ryan Streber at Oktaven Audio on Sep. 7 – 8, 2019
Cover art: “The Coming Storm”, 2014 by Will Cotton
Design: Chippy (Heung-Heung Chin)
Eric Lyon’s work focuses on articulated noise, chaos music, spatial orchestration, and computer chamber music. He is the author of “Designing Audio Objects for Max/MSP and Pd.” His publicly released software includes FFTease and LyonPotpourri, collections of externals for Max/MSP and Pd. His music has been recognized with a Giga-Hertz prize, MUSLAB award, the League ISCM World Music Days competition, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Lyon has composed for such artists as Sarah Plum, Margaret Lancaster, The Noise Quartet, Ensemble mise-en, String Noise, The Crash Ensemble, Esther Lamneck, Kathleen Supové, Marianne Gythfeldt, and Seth Parker Woods. Lyon has taught computer music at Keio University, IAMAS, Dartmouth College, Manchester University, and Queen’s University Belfast. He currently teaches in the School of Performing Arts at Virginia Tech, and is a faculty fellow at the Institute for Creativity, Arts, and Technology.
String Noise, New York’s most daring violin duo comprised of violinists Conrad Harris and Pauline Kim Harris, has expanded the repertoire with over 50 new works since their debut at Ostrava New Music Days in 2011. Nearly a decade later, they continue to break down the boundaries of traditional expectations and inspire innovative compositions, displaying formidable virtuosity, integrating multi-media art, electronics, improvisation, video projections, opera and dance. Premieres by String Noise include works by George Lewis, Christian Wolff, Michael Byron, David Behrman, Alvin Lucier, John King, Phill Niblock, Caleb Burhans, Catherine Lamb, David Lang, Petr Kotik, Du Yun, Annie Gosfield, Bernhard Lang, John Zorn, Greg Saunier, Alex Mincek, Tyondai Braxton, Richard Carrick, to name some.
With a commitment to cultivating a more curious and engaged society through music, the International Contemporary Ensemble – as a commissioner and performer at the highest level – amplifies creators whose work propels and challenges how music is made and experienced. The Ensemble’s 39 members are featured as soloists, chamber musicians, commissioners, and collaborators with the foremost musical artists of our time. Works by emerging composers have anchored the Ensemble’s programming since its founding in 2001, and the group’s recordings and digital platforms highlight the many voices that weave music’s present.
Acclaimed as “America’s foremost new-music group” (The New Yorker), the Ensemble has become a leading force in new music throughout the last 20 years, having premiered over 1,000 works and having been a vehicle for the workshop and performance of thousands of works by student composers across the U.S. The Ensemble’s composer-collaborators—many who were unknown at the time of their first Ensemble collaboration—have fundamentally shaped its creative ethos and have continued to highly visible and influential careers, including MacArthur Fellow Tyshawn Sorey; long-time Ensemble collaborator, founding member, and 2017 Pulitzer Prize-winner Du Yun; and the Ensemble’s founder, 2012 MacArthur Fellow, and first-ever flutist to win Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Prize, Claire Chase.
A recipient of the American Music Center’s Trailblazer Award and the Chamber Music America/ASCAP Award for Adventurous Programming, the International Contemporary Ensemble was also named Musical America’s Ensemble of the Year in 2014. The group has served as artists-in-residence at Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart Festival (2008-2020), Ojai Music Festival (2015-17), and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2010-2015). In addition, the Ensemble has presented and performed at festivals in the U.S. such as Big Ears Festival and Opera Omaha’s ONE Festival, as well as abroad, including GMEM-Centre National de Création Musicale (CNCM) de Marseille, Vértice at Cultura UNAM, Warsaw Autumn, International Summer Courses for New Music in Darmstadt, and Cité de la Musique in Paris. Other performance stages have included the Park Avenue Armory, ice floes at Greenland’s Diskotek Sessions, Brooklyn warehouses, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and boats on the Amazon River.
The International Contemporary Ensemble advances music technology and digital communications as an empowering tool for artists from all backgrounds. Digitice provides high-quality video documentation for artist-collaborators and provides access to an in-depth archive of composers’ workshops and performances. The Ensemble regularly engages new listeners through free concerts and interactive, educational programming with lead funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Curricular activities include a partnership at The New School’s College of Performing Arts (CoPA), along with a summer intensive program, called Ensemble Evolution, where topics of equity, diversity, and inclusion build new bridges and pathways for the future of creative sound practices. Yamaha Artist Services New York is the exclusive piano provider for the Ensemble. Read more at www.iceorg.org and watch over 350 videos of live performances and documentaries at www.digitice.org.
The International Contemporary Ensemble’s performances and commissioning activities during the 2023-24 concert season are made possible by the generous support of the Ensemble’s board, many individuals, as well as the Mellon Foundation, Howard Gilman Foundation, Jerome Foundation, Fan Fox and Leslie R. Samuels Foundation, Aaron Copland Fund for Music Inc., Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, Francis Goelet Charitable Lead Trusts, The Cheswatyr Foundation, Amphion Foundation, The Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, New Music USA’s Organizational Development Fund, Alice M. Ditson Fund of Columbia University, BMI Foundation, as well as public funds from the National Endowment for the Arts, New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, the New York State Council for the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature, the Illinois Arts Council Agency, and the Shuttered Venue Operators Grant (SVOG) from the U.S. Small Business Administration. The International Contemporary Ensemble was the Ensemble in Residence of the Nokia Bell Labs Experiments in Art and Technology from 2018-2021. Yamaha Artist Services New York is the exclusive piano provider for the International Contemporary Ensemble.
http://iceorg.orgNicholas Demaison is an American conductor and composer based in New York City. Passionately devoted to the music being made in our own time, he has led premiere performances of new works for orchestra, opera, choir and various mixed ensembles with new technologies by well over a hundred living composers, and appears on albums released by New Focus, Mode, and Con d’or Records. He is currently the Co-Director of Wavefield Ensemble and Director of Orchestral Studies at the John J. Cali School of Music at Montclair State University.
http://nicholasdemaison.comGreg Saunier has written for, produced, and played with many musicians including Anthony Braxton, Mary Halvorson, Ron Miles, Wadada Leo Smith, Nels Cline, String Noise, Stargaze, Brooklyn Rider String Quartet, Dal Niente, yMusic, Jherek Bishoff, and his own band Deerhoof.
I cannot think of another example of a recording artist or group who simultaneously released three newly-recorded albums on three different labels — which the New York-based, self-styled “classical avant-punk,” husband-and-wife violin duo String Noise (Conrad and Pauline Kim Harris) has just done. (The closest one that comes to mind is the Beatles in early 1964 with records on Capitol, Vee-Jay, and Swan, but those were singles). Now that the tight grip the major labels once had on the classical market is history, will we be seeing more of this sort of thing from small groups and feisty independents?
String Noise’s string of albums leads off with a piece called Giga Concerto by Eric Lyon (New Focus Records), who clearly has a fine, irreverent sense of humor. His task was to compose a six-movement double concerto for two violins and chamber group alternating with five deconstructions for two violins and drum kit of the set of Brahms’s Op. 105 Songs.
The first thing drummer Greg Saunier writes in his liner notes is that his father always said that Brahms gave him constipation — which some of us who occasionally have OD-ed on too much turgid meat-and-potatoes Brahms can relate to. This piece does away with all of that, for sure.
The first movement is a march-like neo-Baroque episode with satirical touches that are pretty funny and go to strange places, with dissonant streaks, repetitions, and near-chaos at the end. Brahms’s songs are chopped up by Saunier’s assertive, occasionally rock-influenced drumming, sometimes going against the Harrises, or in “Verrat,” the drums follow the fiddles, not really fighting with them. “Klage” becomes a mad German march with two violins and drum kit breaking them up.
So it goes throughout the piece’s 40-minute span, with 15 members of the International Contemporary Ensemble led by Nicholas DeMaison sounding delighted with the polystylistic excursions that conjure the ghost of Alfred Schnittke. Supposedly, there are embedded quotes from Sun Ra’s “Nuclear War” and Elton John’s “Rocket Man” — a response to recent saber-rattling between the U.S. and North Korea — but I couldn’t find them. Great fun, nonetheless.
— Richard S. Ginell, 6.21.2021
Frenetic energy and whirling pastiche permeate throughout Eric Lyon’s Giga Concerto. Performed by the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), with guest soloists, this six-movement work is certainly a fun ride. The composer notes that the music of Brahms is decidedly “gloomy” and aims to avoid this attribute in his own music. The Giga Concerto does exactly that: the obvious polar opposite of gloom. The listener is treated to pure giddiness as Lyon enjoys many jaunty moments in each movement of the piece. The joviality of mood is unrelenting with many sarcastic string slides and punchy percussive romps. This release is truly a carnival dance in a not-to-distant land. The International Contemporary Ensemble, soloists Conrad Harris and Pauline Kim Harris (also known as the duo String Noise) and percussionist Greg Saunier execute the piece with supreme musicianship and technical mastery. The Giga Concerto is wonderfully buoyant – the perfect listen on a gloomy day.
— Adam Scime, 6.29.2021
I’ve come to think about the three count ’em three new albums the violin duo String Noise issued on March 26 as a glimpse of an abundant past, a pragmatic present (or, optimistically, near past), and an idealized future. Of course, it doesn’t really seem so likely that Pauline Kim Harris and Conrad Harris explicitly intended this effect. Then again, here’s a pair of married fiddlers with busy individual careers, transforming the violin duo from a too close for comfort venture into an ensemble equally suited to the expressive vulnerability of Alvin Lucier’s Love Song and the hoodoo yawp of “No More Beatlemania” by Half Japanese. So really, nothing’s out of the question.
Giga Concerto represents the ghost of business past: a carnivalesque punk-Baroque concerto grosso by Eric Lyon, whose original works and indie-rock arrangements defined early String Noise recordings and shows. Originally composed for the duo to play with the String Orchestra of Brooklyn, it’s adapted here for the broader options of the International Contemporary Ensemble, whose members are conducted by Nicholas DeMaison.
The concerto’s six movements are infused with raucous humor, even timely in-jokes; nods to Elton John’s “Rocket Man” and Sun Ra’s “Nuclear War” evoke the brinksmanship-turned-bromance of Donald J. Trump and Kim Jong-un. They’re interleaved here with five Brahms songs stripped down by Lyon and recast for String Noise with Deerhoof drummer Greg Saunier. Sumptuously recorded by Ryan Streber in Sept. 2019, Giga Concerto takes a listener back instantly to a time when we could enjoy luxuries like ribald humor, raucous arrangements, and cramming close to 20 musicians into a recording studio at the same time.
— Steve Smith, 3.26.2021
After a decade straddling and shredding avant-classical and punk worlds, the New York violin duo went all in with three albums of new music. They’re all distinct: Alien Stories bends right angles, A Lunch Between Order and Chaos has some fancy composers attached (Caleb Burhans, David Lang, Philip Glass). I am most drawn to Giga Concerto for two reasons: one, on a superficial level, cotton-candy pink clouds on the cover are gonna get my ears. But mostly, I love when composers blur classics (in this case, Eric Lyons with Brahms’ Op. 105) into fuzzy forms — familiar, but sideways. Baroque gestures swirl in tufts of torrid waltzes, drummer Greg Saunier (Deerhoof) punctuates and punches through stately marches and the International Contemporary Ensemble bursts through these arrangements like a mosh squad in its finest concert hall clothes.
— Lars Gotrich, 5.14.2021
In an inner sleeve note for Giga Concerto, Greg Saunier describes Eric Lyon's music as “fun and exciting” to play, think, and talk about. It's also, however, great fun to listen to, a quality that's generally undervalued in a genre where seriousness reigns. A number of very smart decisions help make the recording so pleasurable. For starters, its eleven exuberant movements weigh in at a compact forty minutes, which makes for an intense, breezy, and bloat-free ride; even better, Lyon interspersed the concerto's six formal movements with re-imaginings of Brahms' op. 105 songs; accenting the contrast between the two components, the former pairs String Noise (violinists Pauline Kim Harris and Conrad Harris) with International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), whereas the latter couples the duo with Deerhoof drummer Saunier. The concerto's an irreverent animal too, as Lyon applies an audacious mashup approach to its construction such that canonic forms and classical tropes merge with brash experimentalism and quotes from songs by Sun Ra (“Nuclear War”), Elton John (“Rocket Man”), Deerhoof (“Giga Dance”) and others. The dizzying result grabs the attention instantly and holds it for the duration.
Lyon's not your typical classical composer, as indicated not only by the material on the release but the brief bio accompanying it that describes his music as drawing on “chaos, digital intervention, post-hierarchies, and the inspiration of performer-based creativity.” He's well-matched by Saunier and String Noise, the latter sometimes pitched as an avant-punk violin duo. If the concerto's six movements are a little less frenetic than the trio treatments, they're no less engrossing when String Noise mixes it up with sixteen ICE members (including conductor Nicholas Demaison). Playing alongside the larger ensemble, String Noise executes its parts with the same high-wire bravado it brings to the Brahms renditions. The latter are hardly punk treatments, yet they do exhibit the manic energy of the form, especially when Saunier's playing amplifies the anarchistic spirit in play. It's refreshing hearing the composer's melodies fractured through the trio's irreverent prism.
In its opening movement, Giga Concerto marches determinedly into position before pivoting to a robust neo-baroque passage featuring the soloists. In truth, we're not all that far removed at this juncture from traditional classical, but things switch up thereafter as the music grows destabilized by Lyon's interventions. String swoops and eruptive gestures signal the transition into disruptive territory, which the first Brahms treatment (“Wie Melodien Zieht Es Mir”) is only too happy to take up. As wild as String Noise can be on its own, wildness increases exponentially when Saunier's barrelhouse rambunction is folded into the mix. Sour notes and elegant figures collide in the concerto's second movement, with string glissandos draping roller-coaster runs across a pumping backdrop of French horns and woodwinds.
The general template established, Lyon's material advances through the recording's eight subsequent parts according to plan, alternating as it does between concerto movements and trio renderings. A madcap tone infuses some parts, though quasi-serious passages appear too. Still, as light-hearted as Giga Concerto is, it's substantially more than a ribald mix of sarcastic quotes and other tomfoolery. Consider the fourth movement, for example, where moments of stark beauty crystallize at its middle in the form of a lyrical chorale of minimalistic arpeggios and string figures—even if the episode is accompanied on each side by rapid jump-cutting. And anyone seeking an example of String Noise's violin prowess needs look no further than the fifth movement's rustic fiddling and deft intertwining of neo-Baroque patterns. Capping the work, the fragmented, collage-styled sixth revisits the martial material in the first, with this time String Noise adding scintillating runs and Lyon's material splintering into shards. A more dizzying forty-minute work would be hard to find, and one imagines a live performance would leave performers and audience alike exhausted at its close.
— Ron Schepper, 4.30.2021
The acclaimed composer Eric Lyon is aligned with the violin duo String Noise, i.e. Pauline Kim Harris and Conrad Harris, as well as Deerhoof drummer Greg Saunier and the International Contemporary Ensemble for this very imaginative interpretation of four of Brahms’ op. 105 songs for violin duo and drumset and Lyon’s Giga Concerto.
“Giga Concerto I” starts the listen with dancing strings, firm percussion and an overall quivering, exciting landscape of adventurous, baroque sounds, and “Wie Melodien Zieht Es Mir” follows with a quick blast of imaginative indie-rock meet orchestral ideas that are both chaotic and cautious.
Closer to the middle, “Giga Concerto III” presents a tense display of powerful, even ominous musicianship that flows with a cinematic appeal, while “KLAGE” makes great use of creative textures, precise violin and marching band style drumming. “Giga Concerto IV”, one of the album’s best, then leads calm and meditative before bursting into avant-garde, energetic dynamics that manipulates tone and pitch flawlessly.
Residing near the end, “VERRAT”, one of the busiest tracks, pairs Saunier’s inimitable drumming with String Noise’s fascinating violin work in a fury of alternative, classical song craft, and “Giga Concerto VI” exits the listen with dizzying string acrobatics that unfold in an almost sci-fi sort of way amid unpredictable songwriting.
You’re not going to hear anything quite like this anywhere else, as Lyon’s highly imaginative vision and String Noise’s unmistakable talent shines in this post-minimalist, collage driven and atypically rhythmic effort that is a source of constant surprises amid unclassifiable sounds you can’t help but be enamored with.
— Tom Haugen, 4.04.2021
The duo String Noise consists of two violinists, Conrad Harris and Pauline Kim Harris, who are also married. They’ve been around for a decade, since making their performance debut at Ostrava Days in the Czech Republic in August 2011. Their work encompasses a broad range from modern classical and chamber music to arrangements (by Eric Lyon) of punk songs by Flipper, the Minutemen, Bad Brains and more. Last year, they released a CD of three pieces written specifically for them by Alvin Lucier; we reviewed it here.
The duo have chosen to celebrate their 10th anniversary with three albums, all released simultaneously but each very different from the others.
The third String Noise album of spring 2021 is completely different from the others. Eric Lyon‘s Giga Concerto features the duo as part of a large ensemble that also includes Saunier on drums and the International Contemporary Ensemble. The ICE lists close to 40 members on their website, but only 15 play on this recording, which calls for two violins, a viola, two cellos, bass, harp, classical guitar, flute and piccolo, clarinet, saxophone, bassoon, French horn, trombone, and percussion.
The concerto has six movements, which feature the entire ensemble. They are separated by versions of Johannes Brahms‘ Fünf Lieder (Five Songs) performed by just String Noise and Saunier. Three of the five are less than 90 seconds long, so they really serve as short bridges rather than stand-alone pieces. The last one, though, Verrat, is almost four minutes long and driven at times by a forceful backbeat. The six sections of Lyon’s concerto are sometimes quite reminiscent of Philip Glass movie scores, and also sweeping and romantic at times. The two violins are the lead instruments at all times, but the orchestra comes in and out in dramatic fashion, sometimes adding just a murmur of horns or a percussive punch, but other times rolling in like a wave. It’s highly melodic music, with a wide emotional palette and plenty of memorable “hooks” and rapid shifts. In some ways, it recalls Carl Stalling‘s scores for Warner Bros. cartoons of the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s, but it has greater coherence than those works, which were a series of stings pegged to specific visual cues. Lyon has composed an entire work designed to stand on its own, then intertwined it with Brahms.
Each of these three albums shows a different side of String Noise. Giga Concerto may seem like the easiest entry point, and A Lunch Between Order and Chaos the most challenging, but all of this music is brilliant, so the best option is to just dive in and absorb it all.
— Phil Freeman, 4.09.2021
Yet another form of connection is on display, or attempted to be put on display, in Eric Lyon’s Giga Concerto on a New Focus Recordings CD. There are two connections created or sought here, actually, one with Brahms and one with contemporary sociopolitical issues. If those sound like uneasy combinations – well, they are, and that is at least part of Lyon’s intent. The six movements designated I through VI of Giga Concerto alternate with Lyon’s instrumental arrangements of the five songs from Brahms’ Op. 105, each played by violin duo and drumset. The songs sound, not to put too fine a point on it, utterly ridiculous this way, but the irreverence is certainly intentional on Lyon’s part, because Giga Concerto incorporates not only various almost-Baroque flourishes here and there but also quotations from several songs that Lyon deemed suitable for a year (2018) in which President Trump and North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un were talking about nuclear weapons. True, those discussions themselves had an aura of absurdity, even silliness, about them, despite the enormous stakes and the terrifying potential of the weapons being discussed. But specificity of contemporary references quickly renders any work of art outdated and extraneous, and that is certainly the case here. So what audiences receive in Giga Concerto is a largely deliberate mishmash of mostly upbeat, often comical material sprinkled liberally with quotations or near-quotations from various pieces, whether Brahmsian or from other sources. There are so many styles at play (or at work) here that Giga Concerto ends up having no style at all: it is an intentional mishmash that is actually fun quite a bit of the time, and that might have worked if it were 10 or so minutes long. But Lyon does not know where or when to stop, and Giga Concerto continues for 40 minutes, a length at which it quite clearly overstays its welcome. Intended both as experimental music and as social commentary, it does not success particularly well as either. It is most enjoyable for its sheer sound – those wildly inappropriate drumset elements of the Brahms arrangements are quite enjoyable, at least for a while, and the sound of the non-Brahms material is, if nothing else, creative. The sociopolitical elements of Giga Concerto are obsolete and would not have been particularly pointed in any case. The work would probably be highly entertaining to watch – the virtuosic performance by everyone involved calls up images that can be highly entertaining in their own right – but it is less so to hear, even for listeners who feel a strong attraction to contemporary music and the desire of many of today’s composers to reach back and forward at the same time in a bid to create works that will connect with an audience of some kind, somewhere.
Another fine example of the porosity between the "scholarly" and "indie rock" universes. The Giga Concerto here is the result of a friendship between a composer, Eric Lyon, engaged in the digital revolution of sound processing, two classical violinists who formed the String Noise ensemble and an all-round avant-rock drummer, acclaimed by Rolling Stone, Greg Saunier.
It started with some crazy lieder arrangements by Brahms for two violins and drums. Arrangements, rest assured, which are billions of stylistic light years from Hooked on Classics! And then, other arrangements were written for the trio, because the fun was stuck, and then a question came up: How can we make the business of demolishing the common sense agreed upon in music even more ferocious? By adding a radioactive chamber orchestra that breaks up conventions with a smile worthy of a hyperactive Joker! Welcome to the International Contemporary Ensemble.
There, we find ourselves with the Giga Concerto, for orchestra, 2 violins and drums, inspired by a piece (Giga Dance) by Deerhoof, an ecstatic rock band founded by… Greg Saunier, and which oscillates between noise, acid mimimalism and the melodic soap. In short, just good postmodern which is brought to an interesting level of scholarship here.
All this reminds me of a brilliant parody deliciously stamped by Raymond Scott, revisited by Don Byron and Arnold Schoenberg. Maybe even a little Mr Bungle, but much softer.
Imagine Bugs Bunny this time getting run over by the train rather than Daffy Duck. We destroy the codes, we remake the musical world in a joyful and apparent anarchy (apparent, because, in truth, it is skilfully controlled).
And then as long as we do, let's do some filling (yes!) By rearranging the Brahms lieder we talked about above for this new a little crazy collective, and here we have an album published under a resolutely contemporary scholarly label, but which will undoubtedly please the ''crowd'' of the groups named earlier, and many others.
(translated from original French by Google Translate, original below)
Un autre bel exemple de porosité entre les univers ‘’savant’’ et ‘’rock indie’’. Le Giga Concerto que voici est le résultat d’une amitié entre un compositeur, Eric Lyon, engagé dans la révolution numérique du traitement des sons, de deux violonistes classiques ayant formé l’ensemble String Noise et un batteur avant-rock tous azimuts, acclamé par Rolling Stone, Greg Saunier.
Ça a commencé par des arrangements déjantés de lieder de Brahms pour deux violons et batterie. Arrangements, rassurez-vous, qui sont à des milliards d’années lumière stylistiques de Hooked on Classics! Et puis, d’autres arrangements ont été écrits pour le trio, parce que le fun était pogné, suite à quoi vint une question : comment peut-on rendre encore plus férale l’entreprise de démolition du gros bon sens convenu en musique? En ajoutant un orchestre de chambre radioactif qui désagrège les conventions avec un sourire digne d’un Joker hyperactif! Bienvenue au International Contemporary Ensemble.
Là, on se retrouve avec le Giga Concerto, pour orchestre, 2 violons et batterie, inspiré d’une pièce (Giga Dance) de Deerhoof, bande rock ecstatique fondée par… Greg Saunier!, et qui oscille entre le noise, le mimimalisme acide et le soap mélodique. Bref, juste du bon post-moderne qui est amené ici à un intéressant niveau d’érudition.
Tout cela me fait penser à une brillante parodie délicieusement timbrée de Raymond Scott, revisité par Don Byron et Arnold Schoenberg. Peut-être même un peu Mr Bungle, mais beaucoup plus soft.
Imaginez Bugs Bunny qui, cette fois, se fait écraser par le train plutôt que Daffy Duck. On détruit les codes, on refait le monde musical dans une joyeuse et apparente anarchie (apparente, parce que, en vérité, elle est savamment contrôlée).
Et puis tant qu’à faire, faisons du remplissage (yess!) en réarrangeant les lieder de Brahms dont on parlait plus haut pour ce nouveau collectif un peu fou, et voilà qu’on a un album publié sous une étiquette résolument contemporaine savante, mais qui plaira assurément à la ‘’crowd’’ des groupes nommés tantôt, et bien d’autres.
— Frédéric Cardin, 4.01.2021
The six Giga Concertos of Eric Lyon are essentially pastiches of themes and musical snippets borrowed from a variety of sources, presented by a traditional chamber ensemble, a pair of violinists from the new music world, and all of it usually driven along by a snappy-sounding drum set. That combination melds into a synergism of energy and surprising contrasts. Lyon is a clever composer, and although there are some lovely, introspective elements to this music, it is mainly fun to listen to, and it is easy to imagine that the excellent performers are having a great time playing it. Lyon is best known for his innovative work with computers and other electronic sources, and describes himself as a “research composer focused on articulated noise, computer chamber music, and spatial orchestration.” This music is, however, purely acoustic, perhaps a kind of whimsical reprieve from his regular labor. The jumbled notes provide little useful information, so the music has to speak for itself, which it does clearly, although often with a wink and a nod.
— Peter Burwasser, 7.17.2021
New Focus Recordings is an artist led collective label featuring releases in contemporary creative music of many stripes, as well as new approaches to older repertoire. The label was founded by guitarist Dan Lippel, composer Peter Gilbert in 2004, and composer/engineer Ryan Streber in 2004, formed …Read More …
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