David Laganella: The Calls of Gravity

, composer

About

David Laganella's music is intensely focused and rhythmic, often swirling around around a central pitch, as objects swirling around their gravitational center. Featuring performances by the Prism Quartet, Marilyn Nonken, and Ensemble CMN.

Audio

"Gravity, magnetism, waves, wind — the common denominator in these natural phenomenon is a strong, forceful core of power. Much music that draws inspiration from nature is visually evocative, and paints a picture of natural scenes. David Laganella’s work is focused on a more elemental approach, opting instead to build the texture of the music itself around a fundamental energy that is the essence of the relationship between the earth, the oceans, and the heavens. A sense of gravitational force drives these compositions, pulling and pushing in sound and gesture around an elemental, immovable presence.

For Laganella,“The Calls of Gravity is a reference to a technique that is prevalent in many of my works in which musical objects are attracted towards each other, some objects with greater mass than others. The tidal cover image is an apt metaphor for my musical process, where gravity dictates the movement of sounds that swirl like waves around a central core of energy or the power that pulls waves on to the shore line then decimate to transparency, ultimately pulled back to repeat the process.” - Peter Burwasser

Recorded 5/42006 in Rock Hall, Temple University (The Hidden River and Persistence of Light) and 8/7/2006 (Sundarananda), 6/20/2009 (Unattainable Spaces), and 6/52010 (Leafless Trees) at Rose Recital Hall, University of Pennsylvania.
Produced by David Laganella
Engineering and Digital Editor: Eugene Lew, Equal Loudness Recording
Post Production: Ryan Streber www.oktavenaudio.com
Liner Notes by Peter Burwasser and David Laganella
Design by Tina Laganella www.interactivedesigner.com
Personnel:
Leafless TreesThe Prism Quartet
The Hidden River, The Persistence of Light: Marilyn Nonken
Unattainable Spaces: Beverly Shin, violin; Sang Hyun Mary Yong, viola; Naomi Gray, cello; Joshua Kovach, clarinet; Gabe Globus-Hoenich, percussion; Jeremy Gill, conductor
Sundarananda: Erin Lesser, flute; Joanne Lin, cello; Daniel Lippel, guitar 

David Laganella

Composer / electric guitarist David Laganella (b. January 10, 1974) has been commissioned to compose for Americas leading new music artists including Marilyn Nonken, The Auros Group for New Music, Flexible Music, and Odd Appetite. Notable ensembles and artists who have performed his music include The Serafin String Quartet (at Carnegie Hall), The Concordia Chamber Players, and The Haddonfield Symphony (winner of their 2001 Composer Competition). In 2003, Laganella served as the Composer in Residence for the Bergslagens Chamber Symphony (Stockhulm, Sweden) who premiered his double concerto, “Once on a Fall Fell Red for Guitar, Soprano and String Orchestra.”

Laganella has received honors from numerous organizations including ASCAP, Meet the Composer Fund, The Pennsylvania Council of the Arts, The Orchestra Society of Philadelphia, The Society of Composers, and The American Composers Forum. He hulds degrees in music composition from New York University and the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of the ground breaking book, The Composers Guide to the Electric Guitar (available from Mel Bay Publications), which is a manual addressing all performance practices and notational issues for the instrument. Laganella is the Artistic Director of the Chamber Music Now Annual Concert Series in Philadelphia.

19 Apr, 2021

New Focus featured in Print and podcast

New Focus has been featured recently in some great contexts: Vanessa Ague wrote a label profile for Bandcamp Daily https://daily.bandcamp.com/label-profile/new-focus-recordings-label-profile?utm_source=notification Seth Boustead featured New Focus on two episodes of his Relevant Tones …

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Reviews

5

Sequenza 21

These recent works by composer David Laganella feature a constant nattering of activity full of motion and gestures and with very little stability or repose. Leafless Trees is an energetic and coloristic set of miniature toccatas for saxophone quartet. The Prism Quartet are clearly at home here as they make the acrobatics and difficult timbral shifts sound fluid and organic. The quartet is a showy virtuosic piece and I found that I wanted to listen to the individual sound worlds of each movement for a greater amount of time that Laganella had composed.

Marilyn Nonken’s two performances (The Hidden River and The Persistence of Light) features almost constant activity and flow as is fitting to the compositions’ inspirations. Both pieces function with their own internal logic through a linear form that eschews repetition for constant development. These pieces are based on textures instead of gestures with broad dramatic shapes to guide the listener. Harmonies are dense clusters which occasionally relax into softer sounds. As a whole, Laganella uses the piano as a single voice with very little use of large-scale polyphony. The smaller gestures that make up the whole composition are again appropriate given his inspirations of water and light.

Unattainable Spaces stays true to the sound world that Laganella has presented thus far. Tight dissonances are the glue that bind this ensemble (string trio, clarinet, and percussion) into a single unified instrument. The language is equally sinewy and slippery as it progresses from one moment to the next. In a refreshing change of pace, the final composition played by Ensemble CMN has smooth edges and a more tender touch. Sundarananda for flute, cello, and guitar, is a compellingly understated piece built of slower moving lyrical lines sometimes punctuated by more hectic activity. The trio waxes and wanes and is full of breath. Short spiky gestures that become the mainstay of Laganella’s later compositions (this work is the earliest on the disc – 2004) are given resonant space. A tight control over the dramatic arch is still maintained. I’m not sure what has happened in the past 7 years to move Laganella’s music into a more hectic and manic direction but I hope he will still draw upon the serene contemplations he had when composing Sundarananda.

-Jay Batzner

5

Secret Geometry

Gravity Calling

"David Laganella has released a disc on the New Focus label entitled The Calls of Gravity. The composer writes that the title “is a reference to a technique that is prevalent in many of my works in which musical objects are attracted towards each other, some objects with greater mass than others.” This plays out in music that is more interested in fierce gestures and active textures than melody or harmonic progression. In Leafless Trees, The Prism Saxophone Quartet creates molten sound images, with bent pitches, carefully shaped vibrato and alternately frantic and static gestures. The deformations of sound that make sax piece so striking are less accessible on the piano, and The Hidden River is less successful for it. I found The Persistence of Light, the second of the two piano pieces on the disc, to be more effective because of the clarity of the dichotomy between aggressive and lyrical modes of expression. Sundarananda, a trio inspired by woodworker George Nakashima, is the exception to the aggressive tone that predominates on the disc, being gentler and more lyrical, with hints of folk melody. Laganella has enlisted some superb performers here, including Ensemble CMN, but especially Prism and pianist Marilyn Nonken who bring plenty of fire to their performances."

-James Primosch