Featuring music by Aaron Helgeson that collages the composers own fragmented transcriptions, this portrait album includes songs for tenor combining mentions of time in letters to Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis after JFK's assassination with scraps of Willie Nelson's country ballad "Funny How Time Slips Away," piano music made from broken shards of preludes by Debussy and Ravel, clarinet translations of sounds from the San Francisco Bay Area, and a soprano soliloquy mixing the 583 words spoken by Hermione in Shakespeare's last play The Winter's Tale, all interspersed with Helgeson's arrangements of traditional Norwegian Hardanger fiddle tunes.
| # | Audio | Title/Composer(s) | Performer(s) | Time |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Total Time | 53:21 | |||
Once a While in Time |
||||
| Ryan Townsend Strand, tenor, Karina Kontorovitch, piano | ||||
| 01 | Once... | Once... | 1:59 | |
| 02 | ...a while... | ...a while... | 2:37 | |
| 03 | ...in time | ...in time | 4:54 | |
| 04 | Hardanger Transcriptions: Sven i Sy’ Garde | Hardanger Transcriptions: Sven i Sy’ Garde | Modney, violin | 3:01 |
| 05 | Through Glimpses of Unknowing | Through Glimpses of Unknowing | Donald Berman, piano | 10:18 |
| 06 | Hardanger Transcriptions: Thomasklukkud’n på Filefjell | Hardanger Transcriptions: Thomasklukkud’n på Filefjell | Modney, violin | 3:57 |
| 07 | A Place Toward Other Places | A Place Toward Other Places | Eric Umble, clarinet | 10:44 |
| 08 | Hardanger Transcriptions: Den Store Salmen | Hardanger Transcriptions: Den Store Salmen | Modney, violin | 1:20 |
| 09 | A Long While | A Long While | Sharon Harms, soprano, Donald Berman, piano | 14:31 |
Aaron Helgeson takes a thoughtful approach to the modernist penchant for deconstruction. Pulling musical ideas apart and examining them to assemble something new is not merely an exercise of dispassionate observation in his hands, but instead a practice of engaged inquiry. Whether it be using fragments of public letters in response to a catastrophic event, recontextualized gestures from the piano music of Debussy or from field recordings in the Bay Area, or selected texts from a fraught character in a Shakespeare play, Helgeson sees in these component parts the potential for an illumination of the whole, not just from the standpoint of scientific wonder, but as a key to understanding a deeper essence, or a more beguiling mystery, surrounding his chosen subject. The patiently unfolding works on As I Write This bear this out, eschewing teleology in favor of structures that evolve at their own pace and with their own internal expressive logic.
Helgeson takes an inventive approach to Once a While in Time for tenor and piano, a work broadly about the JFK assassination, but more specifically about encapsulating something of the collective emotional, internal response to the tragic event. Letters written by members of the American public to Jacqueline Onassis Kennedy provide the source text, as Helgeson extracts fragments of the letters that reference time. Musically, he takes a similar deconstructive approach to Willie Nelson’s “Funny How Time Slips Away,” which was on the Billboard charts in a cover version by Billy Joe Royal the week of the assassination. The song was recorded by many pop, country, and R&B artists, including Elvis, Al Green, and Nelson himself. Helgeson weaves a musical tapestry of shards taken from these recordings and words lifted from the public’s letters to create a haunting time capsule of this pivotal event in US history in three brief, poignant movements.
The Norwegian Hardanger fiddle is a four string bowed instrument with five sympathetic resonating strings inside the instrument’s body. Helgeson transcribed performances recorded in 1977 by virtuoso Hardanger fiddler Torleiv Bolstad and in the process discovered an intriguing detail; Bolstad’s feet were stomping in a rhythm that seemed to be disconnected from the fiddle material itself. This inspired Helgeson to organize these transcriptions in such a way as to capture this internal dissonance, notating the meter and the melody in different subdivisions. Intitially part of the solo violin part in what Helgeson calls his anti-cantata, Snow Requiem, the remaining two transcriptions were dedicated to violinist Modney whose stylized performances are shaped by a background playing fiddle repertoire. The second and third are both in alternate tunings, one somber and the other exuberant and joyful, and are interspersed througout the program.
Through Glimpses of Unknowing for solo piano, performed here by Donald Berman, was inspired by an installation by artist Chiharu Shiota titled In Silence, involving a burnt piano and many dense layers of long black thread surrounding a seated audience. Helgeson found his own “layers of thread” in Debussy’s iconic solo piano Preludes, focusing on trills, tremolos, and various sound objects in those pieces and then manipulating them and reassembling them in this work. The result is splashes of pianistic color and impression, resonances built upon each other to form elusive, watery pastels of sound that evolve ever deeper into themselves, with occasional flashes of brilliant luminosity in the higher register.
The solo clarinet work A Place Towards Other Places, written for Richard Hawkins and performed here by Eric Umble, is a portrait of Helgeson’s sonic observations of two contrasting environments, the urban environment of San Francisco and the pristine parklands on the northern peninsula of San Francisco Bay. Helgeson recorded and transcribed sounds in both locations, building the sound vocabulary for the clarinet part, sometimes combining them into hybrid gestures (as with the fragile, alternating multiphonics at the opening of the work, a merging of a fog horn in the city with the song of a mysterious wild animal in Muir Woods). As the work evolves, Helgeson establishes a dialogue between the different kinds of material—oscillating trills, repeated clarion calls, swelled sustains—creating a kind of non-linear structural journey reminiscent of some of Takemitsu’s output.
The final piece on the album, A Long While, draws from one of Shakespeare’s last stage works, The Winter’s Tale, freely assembling the text from the 583 words spoken by the character Hermione in the course of the play. One of the Bard’s most wrenching character trajectories, Hermione is sentenced to death for an adultery she did not commit, reemerging into society after sixteen years of captivity. Fusing his compositional and textual approach, Helgeson established a piece-specific vocabulary of disembodied, repeated musical and text fragments that evoke the emptiness of an indeterminate, interminable period of enforced isolation. The keyboard writing, performed again by Donald Berman, makes extensive use of the brittle, percussive notes in the highest register, often in tandem with the haunting lowest register, as if to avoid the overtly effusive expressive character of the piano’s vast middle. The vocal part, sung by soprano Sharon Harms, is arranged in a series of charged ruminations, lingering on unanswerable questions with truncated phrases whose lyricism is persistently interrupted before it can flower into fully fleshed out melismatic phrases. Instead, structural arrivals are marked with repetition, of a stark arrival on a high note, or the striking registral distance between voices in a detached piano motive, mining minimal expressive energy for maximal expressive output.
– Dan Lippel
Once a While in Time recorded May 5, 2024 at Montclair State University, Montclair, NJ
Hardanger Transcriptions recorded July 11, 2024at Montclair State University, Montclair, NJ
Through Glimpses of Unknowing recorded January 14, 2025 at Yamaha Artist Studios, New York, NY
A Place Toward Other Places recorded June 3, 2024 at Columbia University, New York, NY
A Long While recorded September 2, 2024 at Montclair State University, Montclair, NJ
Producers: Aaron Helgeson & Murat Çolak
Engineer: Murat Çolak
Program Notes: Aaron Helgeson
Photos: Sam Gehrke
Design: Marc Wolf, marcjwolf.com
Funded in part by a generous grant from Montclair State University.
Hardanger Transcriptions transcribed by Aaron Helgeson from performances by Torleiv Bolstad. All other works written and published by Aaron Helgeson (ASCAP), © 2012-2024
Composer Aaron Helgeson (b. 1982) uses transcription, adaptation, and collage to mix contemporary sounds with historical sources like wax cylinders, medieval psalms, and unfinished manuscripts.
Described as “eerily beautiful” (Cleveland Classical) and “virtuoso display of engaging drama” (New York Times), Helgeson’s music has received awards and grants from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Fromm Music Foundation, Aaron Copland Fund, New Music USA, Barlow Endowment, ASCAP, and American Composers Forum.
In 2016 he received an Ohio Arts Council Award for his Snow Requiem, an “anti-cantata” based on author David Laskin’s book The Children’s Blizzard about the Homestead-era snowstorm of the same name combining original transcriptions of Norwegian-American immigrant folk music with sonifications of weather data using orchestral tone clusters, wordless vocal chorales, and percussive noise.
His choral cycle The Book of Never for Grammy Award winning chorus The Crossing collages ancient hymns from the Novgorod Codex (a medieval book of Kyivan Rus psalm chant overwritten hundreds of times with heretical sermons by an excommunicated Pagan missionary) with contemporary texts by writers in various states of exile.
Other recent projects include Poems of Sheer Nothingness commissioned by soprano Susan Narucki using fragmented realizations of ancient Occitan troubadour poems, Calls of Close and Away for Imani Winds on 19th-century French hunting calls and 20th-century American military signals, and Echoes of Always for Ensemble Dal Niente assembled from scraps of Baroque opera overtures and bits of Helgeson’s own previous music.
Helgeson serves as Associate Professor of Composition and Music Theory at Montclair State University’s Cali School of Music, previously serving as department chair of composition and music theory at the Longy School of Music of Bard College. He also taught as Assistant Professor of Composition at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, with visiting appointments at the Hartt School of Performing Arts, University of Chicago, New York University, and the University of California Washington Center. He holds degrees in music and theater from the University of California San Diego (Ph.D., M.A.) and Oberlin College (B.Mus., B.A.).
Tenor Ryan Townsend Strand is praised for his “beautiful vocalism” (San Francisco Chronicle) and “expressive poise” (Chicago Classical Review). Known for his storytelling across oratorio, opera, and ensemble repertoire, he has appeared as a soloist in many of Bach’s cantatas and performed widely in both staged and concert works. Recent credits include his Ravinia Festival debut in a featured solo recital entitled Letters To Jackie. Operatic credits include roles with Lyric Opera of Chicago, Haymarket Opera Company, Chicago Opera Theater, and Northwestern Opera Theater, with performances in works by Monteverdi, Handel, Adamo, Gordon, and Glass, among others. He made his professional operatic debut in Haymarket’s Gli equivoci nel sembiante. A versatile ensemble artist, Strand sings regularly with Music of the Baroque, the Chicago Symphony Chorus, Bella Voce, the Grant Park Festival Chorus, and has been seen with the Grammy Award-winning ensemble The Crossing under Donald Nally. He is a founding member and executive director of Constellation Men’s Ensemble, a Chicago- based tenor/bass vocal group dedicated to distinct performances in unique spaces, engaging with the next generation of singers through education, and expanding the repertoire for tenor/bass ensemble music through the commissioning of new works. He lives in Chicago with his husband P.J. and their calico cat Charlie.
Karina Kontorovitch was born in St. Petersburg, Russia. At the age of five, she started attending the Music School for Gifted Children, where she continued to study piano with Olga Manukyan until the family immigrated to the US in 1991. Ms. Kontorovitch has taught at the Music Arts School in Highland Park and has been on the faculty of the Merit School of Music in Chicago from 2001-2017. She was on the Voice Faculty as a Coach/Accompanist for the National High School Music Institute at Northwestern University from 2005 until 2010. Since 2001, she’s been serving as a collaborative pianist, vocal coach and Russian diction coach at Northwestern University’s Bienen School of Music, where she collaborates with Voice and Opera Department students across all studios, preparing and accompanying recitals and other performances, co-teaching Russian Repertoire and Oratorio classes. Ms. Kontorovitch is a member of the Chicago Piano Vocal Score Ensemble and Tresillo, whose performances have taken her from Chattanooga to Buenos Aires. She’s very active as a collaborative pianist throughout the Chicago area. She was on the coaching staff of the Castleton Music Festival in Virginia where she worked with the festival’s founder, the late Maestro Lorin Maazel. As a soloist, Ms. Kontorovitch was heard with the Waukegan Symphony Orchestra under Maestro Stephen Blackwelder in a performance of Mozart’s A Major Piano Concerto, K 488.
Modney is a composer and violinist working at the nexus of composition, improvisation, and interpretation. A “new-music luminary” (The New York Times) hailed as “one of today’s most intrepid experimentalists” (Bandcamp Daily), Modney is a foremost interpreter of adventurous contemporary music, and has cultivated a holistic artistic practice as a composer, solo improviser, bandleader, writer, and collaborator. A highly detailed relationship to sound production on the violin is foundational to Modney’s creative practice, with a particular interest in complex timbres, Just Intonation, and in exploring the perceptual space between improvisation and notation. Modney has released three albums as a composer-performer: Ascending Primes (Pyroclastic Records, 2024), Near To Each (Carrier Records, 2022), and Engage (New Focus Recordings, 2018). Modney has received awards from The Shifting Foundation and Millay Arts. Modney is the violinist and Executive Director of the Wet Ink Ensemble, and a member of the International Contemporary Ensemble.
A multidimensional pianist, pedagogue, and scholar, Donald Berman has won tremendous acclaim for his “stupendous abilities, both athletic and intellectual” (Boston Sunday Globe) and performances hailed as “stunning, adventurous, and substantive” (New York Times).
With an emphasis on presenting American music of the 20th and 21st centuries, Berman’s inventive recital programs have been featured on the U.S.’s biggest stages for contemporary music — from Carnegie’s Weill and Zankel Halls to Nation- al Sawdust and (Le) Poisson Rouge — as well as major venues across Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. An enthusiastic commissioner of new music, he has added more than 200 works to the contemporary canon — many of which he performs alongside classical repertoires to provoke new and fascinating revelations and connections across periods and styles.
Berman’s body of work as a recording artist demonstrates the breadth and depth of his engagement with the music of our time. His albums have included numerous world-premiere recordings as well as illuminating performances of previously unknown works of 20th-century American composers, includ- ing Charles Ives (The Unknown Ives, Vols. I & II), Carl Ruggles (The Uncovered Ruggles), and Elliott Carter and Roger Sessions (Americans in Rome). As concerto soloist and chamber musi- cian, Berman’s discography includes collaborations with the Boston Modern Orchestra Project (George Perle: Serenades), soprano Susan Narucki (This Island, The Light That Is Felt: Songs of Charles Ives, and the Grammy-nominated The Edge of Silence), and the Borromeo Quartet (The Worlds Revolve). Upcoming albums include a survey of Elena Ruehr songs with baritone Stephen Salters and a new recording of Ives’s Concord Sonata and Impression of the St. Gaudens in Boston Common, to be released on Avie Records during the composer’s sesquicentennial celebrations in 2024.
A former fellow of the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, Berman currently serves as Chair of Keyboard Studies at Longy School of Music of Bard College and leads Tufts University’s New Music Ensemble. He is also the General Editor of three volumes of Ives’s Shorter Works for Piano — a titanic project representing 30 years of work — and President and Treasurer of the Charles Ives Society, where he is leading an extensive expansion of the Society’s digital archives on charlesives.org.
Berman’s trajectory as a musician and scholar was set in motion by four important teachers: Mildred Victor, George Barth, John Kirkpatrick (who premiered Ives’s Concord Sonata in 1939), and legendary pedagogue Leonard Shure.
Eric Umble is a Brooklyn-based clarinetist and DJ, praised for “nuanced and coloristic playing” (The Clarinet). They remain active as a performer and advocate for new music, having performed with the New York Philharmonic, International Contemporary Ensemble, and Lucerne Festival Academy and Alumni Orchestras. Eric has performed around the world including appearances in Seoul, Hong Kong, Havana, Mexico City, Berlin, Paris, Hamburg, and Köln, among others. Eric holds
Bachelors and Masters degrees from the Manhattan School of Music. He studied with Stephanie Zelnick, David Krakauer, and Anthony McGill. As a DJ and promoter, Eric is the founder, lead producer, and curator of the FACETIME and QUALITY TIME parties, cultivating uplifting and inclusive nightlife events that help build a thriving electronic music community in New York City. He explores the intersections of multiple musical genres in his sets to create Techno-forward sonic worlds that evoke queerness, modernity, and urban life while striving to articulate our shared contemporary culture in today’s world. He has DJ’ed at BASEMENT, Nowadays, Mansions, Detroit’s Orange Room, and Philadelphia’s VOID, among others.
Sharon Harms is a versatile soprano known for her radiant tone and deep commitment to contemporary music. She has become a vital interpreter of new vocal works, collaborating closely with composers and ensembles across the U.S. and abroad. The work featured on this album was written for Sharon and premiered with pianist Katherine Dowling at the 2014 Resonant Bodies Festival in Brooklyn, NY. Her collaboration with Aaron Helgeson reflects a shared artistic language grounded in subtlety, complexity, and emotional honesty. She has performed with the International Contemporary Ensemble, Talea Ensemble, Ensemble Recherche, Momenta Quartet, Lyris Quartet, the Juilliard Center for Creative Technology, and the Met Orchestra Chamber Ensemble, and appeared at Tanglewood, Carnegie Hall, the American Academy in Rome, and the Mozarteum. Her recordings include It Happens Like This by Charles Wuorinen, Jesse Jones’ Ephemera, Gabriela Ortiz’s Aroma Foliado, and Charles Ives' Songs and Solos with pianist Jacob Greenberg. In addition to performing, Sharon is a dedicated mentor and educator, working with programs such as New Music on the Point and the Composer’s Conference at Avaloch Farm. This recording is part of her ongoing exploration of what the voice can say — and how quietly, fiercely, or unexpectedly it might say it.
It’s been a long wait since 2016’s “sublime” portrait album, Poems of Sheer Nothingness, which had the Talea Ensemble performing two extraordinary vocal works by Helgeson. This collection is more kaleidoscopic, featuring a selection of vocal and instrumental works assembled around the concept of time. Helegson’s approach incorporates an oblique view of nostalgia, with references to letters written to Jackie Kennedy after her husband’s assassination and Willie Nelson’s classic song, "Funny How Time Slips Away." There is also time as a tool of disorientation, as in the three transcriptions of Norwegian Hardanger fiddle improvisations, which feature an exquisite acknowledgement of the temporal dissonance within the music. The performances, featuring singers Ryan Townsend Strand and Sharon Harms, pianists Karina Kontorovitch and Donald Berman, violinist Modney, and clarinetist Eric Umble, are universally excellent. Helgeson may be a deep thinker, but he is also deeply musical, leading to many pleasures for the open-minded listener.
— Jeremy Shatan, 7.26.2025
Listening to contemporary music one must maintain an open mind. To this writer’s mind, As I Write This, a new collection of music by Aaron Helgeson, satisfies on a number of counts. But not all the music carried me away into new creative landscapes.
Helgeson’s starting points range from traditional Norwegian fiddle to Shakespeare to Debussy. But the collection opens with three evocative lieder inspired by something more recent. In “Once a While in Time,” commissioned for a project called “Letters to Jackie,” the composer compiles texts from letters written to Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis following the assassination of John F. Kennedy. All the selections are references to time.
Tenor Ryan Townsend Strand, accompanied by pianist Karina Kontorovitch, brings out the Sondheim-ian Romanticism in Helgeson’s melodies. The songs reveal a musical strength of character, built up from snippets of text that reflect people’s emotions and gut memories: “As I write this…as we watched for more than three hours…Do you remember when we went, when we saw him…when I heard it was true?” Strand sings with a fluid ease that strengthens, by means of opposition, the evocation of trauma.
Woven through the music are elements of melody from the Willie Nelson-penned hit “Funny How Time Slips Away,” which is quoted directly at the end of the third song. The melody flows nicely with Helgeson’s own creations.
The album’s longest piece, “A Long While,” features soprano Sharon Harms and a libretto of fragments of text adapted from the character Hermione from Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale. The music too is fragmentary, discrete pieces of melody separated by empty spaces, and with sparse piano accompaniment. The texts evolve from melodically hesitant questions (“will I be better and be more…when will I weep?”) to statements, where the melody opens up. (“I’ll own the world, I’ll undo the world.”)
In the next section the singer asks a series of half-sensical, stichomythic “why” questions. Gertrude Stein comes to mind. Here the vocal part grows quite abstract, the piano more prominent. Despite a slow pace, the piece sustains its intensity through 14 minutes, suggesting, per Helgeson’s apt inspiration, Hermione’s years of obscurity.
The Norwegian Hardanger fiddle with its under-the-fingerboard sympathetic strings creates a sound world beyond the reach of the standard violin. But Helgeson has transcribed for the latter instrument three 1977 performances by Torleiv Bolstad of traditional Hardanger fiddle repertoire. The three short pieces spotlight the virtuosity of violinist Modney (who goes by just one name) and the rhythmic interest, along with the charm, of this folk music. It’s much more energetic than the contemplative music on the rest of the album, so it was wise to intersperse the fiddle tunes between the other pieces.
“Through Glimpses of Unknowing” riffs on Debussy’s Preludes. Pianist Donald Berman creates reverberant clouds of sound across the whole range of the keyboard. But amid the deep atmospherics, I find myself asking, “To what end?” A firmer statement arises from “A Place Toward Other Places,” which uses the various tones, techniques, and spatial characteristics of the clarinet to conjure a collage of natural, urban, and otherworldly sounds. Warbles, sirens, synthesizer-like wobbles, dyads, and a mix of harsher and gentler timbres alternate to create an intriguing solo narrative performed with clarity and an eerie kind of soulfulness by Eric Umble.
As I Write This is an excellent sampling of Aaron Helgeson’s distinctive methods, wide-ranging inspirations, and thoughtful sensibility.
— Jon Sobel, 9.10.2025
American composer Aaron Helgeson (b. 1982) has created a special niche through his technique of fragmentation and collage, using various original sources to create his signature style of transcriptions. The result is never less than intriguing and striking. As succinctly summarized on the New Focus website, “This portrait album includes songs for tenor combining mentions of time in letters to Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis after JFK's assassination with scraps of Willie Nelson's country ballad, "Ain’t It Funny How Time Slips Away," piano music made from broken shards of preludes by Debussy and Ravel, clarinet translations of sounds from the San Francisco Bay Area, and a soprano soliloquy mixing the 583 words spoken by Hermione in Shakespeare's play The Winter's Tale, all interspersed with Helgeson's arrangements of traditional Norwegian Hardanger fiddle tunes.”
All of this needs unpacking, naturally, but I hasten to add that a technique that sounds at first to be daunting and abstract provides more accessible and expressive performances than you’d expect. This is made clear in the touching three songs revolving around letters sent to Jackie Kennedy in Once a While in Time. The letters came from the public in the wake of the Kennedy assassination, now stored in the Kennedy Presidential Library. They include a poem written by a 10-year-old girl, a letter from an Army private, and another from a woman in Pennsylvania who waited for three hours in the cold in order to shake Kenneyd’s hand. The text is broken down into fragmentary reference to time, from literal dates or a phrase like “on a Saturday” to indirect expressions like “as he sat thinking” and “when those parts of us were changed.”
Yet from this refracted assortment Helgeson’s collage is evocative and touching, not at all disjointed. The tender mood of the songs is owed, first, to the sweet-toned, sensitive singing of lyric tenor Ryan Townsend Strand, who commissioned them. The other compelling aspect is Helgeson’s diatonic idiom that links the fragments in both the piano part and vocal line. The musical fragments are collaged from the Willie Nelson song noted above.
Three Norwegian folk songs are the basis for a series titled Hardanger Transcriptions for solo violin. Anyone who has heard Greig’s original instrumentation for Peer Gyn will recall the rustic sound of the hardanger fiddle, a Norwegian stringed instrument close to the violin with four outside strings and a fretted fingerboard along with three to five inner strings that provide sympathetic resonance with the bowed strings. Helgeson incorporated the hardanger fiddle in his “anti-oratorio,” Snow Requiem, a choral work based on the deadly 1888 Children’s Blizzard as experienced by Norwegian Americans.
To have his sourcing as authentic as possible, Helgeson made transcriptions from recorded performances by a noted hardanger fiddler. The performer’s style included foot-stomping in a “strange hiccupping meter” divorced from the meter of the song. That feature is now duplicated in the techniques adopted for the Hardanger Transcriptions. To illustrate, Helgeson writes, “For instance, the rhythm in the second and fourth sections of Sven i Sy’ Garde (Sven of the South Lands) is written with an even triple feel, while the time signature instead matches Bolstad’s stomp of two short beats and another long one, requiring the player to temporally fit a symmetrical peg into an asymmetrical hole.” The impressive performances by violinist Modney (no other name given), being on a violin, can’t duplicate the twangy hardanger sonority, but in compensation there is a panoply of double stops, intertwined rhythms, and other devices that give a multi-dimensional effect.
The two other solo pieces on the program are for piano (Through Glimpses of Unknowing) and clarinet (A Place Toward Other Places). The piano pieces was inspired by an art installation that featured a burned piano surrounded by strands of black thread wound around the room hundreds of times. Helgeson’s version of destroying a piano, as he puts it, was to take “individual trills and tremolos from Debussy’s solo Preludes (particularly ‘Ce qu’a vi le vent d’Ouest,’ ‘La danse de Puck,’ and ‘Feux d’artifice’) [that] are cut up, stretched, warped, transposed, re-arranged, and repeated.” It hardly matters for the listener what the specific sources are, since Helgeson creates a collage of almost anonymous techniques that could derive from any composer. But there is a vaguely Impressionist atmosphere in his assemblage, which in addition offers some dazzling opportunities for pianist Donald Berman to convey a virtuoso impression.
The solo clarinet piece, A Place Toward Other Places, was sourced from field recordings and written notation of natural sounds in parklands north of San Francisco, sounds that reminded Helgeson of the city. The twin sources were then combined into materials that the clarinet could imitate in its own voice. Helgeson writes, “For instance, the dyad that begins the piece combines the memory of a foghorn heard from my apartment at night with an unknown wild animal hidden somewhere in the forest of Muir Woods.” I’d say that despite these personal associations, the resulting music is the most abstract reach of Helgeson’s collaging. The sounds skillfully produced by clarinetist Eric Umble are mostly soft, atmospheric, and spare. The absence of harmony puts the burden of expression on individual notes, trills, wobbles, and high-register squeals. The effects are striking in their own right, and Helgeson makes of them a unified continuity that is arresting.
The final glimpse in this portrait is a vocal work for soprano and piano, A Long While, the title referring to the years that Queen Hermione, the virtuous heroine of The Winter’s Tale, spends in isolation after she is unjustly sentenced to death by her jealous husband, King Leontes. Helgeson comments that most critics focus on Hermione’s return to life after posing as a statue. Raher than this improbable happy ending, Helgeson is taken by those years of Hermione’s isolation, a kind of death in life. Her fragmented speeches are set very sparingly to a piano part that Helgeson composed simultaneously with the vocal line, giving a feeling of spontaneous response to the words while retaining some of the feeling of Shakespeare’ verse. It’s a very successful endeavor, I think, and the performance by soprano Sharon Harms and pianist Donald Berman is evocative of Hermione’s lonely, inward existence. The mood is like musical suspended animation. The piece sends shivers but also prompts silent reflection.
Not every selection here is equally accessible, but the imagination that Helgeson has poured into his unique style of collage is never less than gripping—he has become the master of the special niche he created for himself.
— Huntley Dent, 11.01.2025
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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