Jeff Anderle: Warp & Weft

One might think of Marc Mellits' music as malleable minimalism. We hear repeated motives that would be at home in a Steve Reich piece, but in Mellits' hands, they become elastic, stretching and compressing like putty. Meter is his preferred tool for motivic development; his metric organization is modular and accordion-like, inviting addition and subtraction. Each new contextualization of a musical cell changes its semantic meaning in the rhythmic tapestry. In these two ensemble works, each featuring Jeff Anderle's powerful presence on bass clarinet, we hear this hallmark of Mellits' style mapped onto two different instrumentations, creating distinct harmonic and expressive worlds.

Tight Sweater, for bass clarinet, marimba, and piano, is a six movement work that treats the trio as a composite organism, building new interdependent textures in each movement. In "Exposed Zipper," a motoric, interlocking figure is the foundation for Mellits' characteristic rhythmic play. "Trans Fatty Acid's Rein" riffs on a moderate tempo, propulsive 7/8 groove, fading the focus in and out of a rhythmic figure anchored by the bass clarinet, while the keyboard and the percussion play rangy, moto perpetuo figures. "Mara's Lullaby" is reflective and inward, a bass clarinet melody singing over a steady alternating eighth note line that reminds us of the constant passing of time. "Pickle Trousers" is funky and driving, with a main motivic figure that alternates between 3/4 and 4/4, with furious virtuosic passages emerging in the keyboard and marimba. Haruka Fujii's marimba opens "Evil Yellow Penguin," a torrent of scalar figures that cascade like numbers flying across a stock ticker screen. "Mechanically Separated Chicken Parts" features raw, rhythmic unison passages between the bass clarinet and marimba that shift metrically, never settling into a predictable pattern.

Titan for string quartet and bass clarinet, featuring the Friction Quartet, and is also in several short movements. While we hear many of the same motoric figures as in Tight Sweater, Mellits' style adjusts slightly in his writing for strings, featuring more sustained durations and layered textures. "Saturn" opens the piece a with three note figure that alternates between straight and syncopated treatments, gleefully anchoring the movement. In "Vänern Kivu Hammar" we hear echoes of fiddling traditions, with subtle grace note inflections, and brief soloistic flights by the violins. "Harada" is an expansive chorale, with lush string chords supporting a poignant violin and clarinet duo. "Hyperion Choroid" features propulsive, bariolage string oscillations over shifting harmonics outlined by the bass clarinet, the Baroque era peaking its head into the piece momentarily in this movement. "Liquid Methane Rain" paints a vivid picture with hazy, swelled chords and languid melodic lines. "Dispersed Retina" is in a rolling triple meter, providing pointillistic contrast as the strings shift to pizzicato for the second half of the movement as the bass clarinet is tacet. "Velvet Kickbox Hydroxy" returns to the driving mixed meter fabric that is a Mellits staple, with dramatic rests separating phrases. The arpeggio driven "Phoebe & Janus" closes the work with exuberance, leaning into a chromatic flat VI chord in a repeated progression that adds color to the harmony.

Mellits writes, "Tight Sweater is music that is tightly composed, with rapidly shifting patterns of notes and rhythms. Each one of the six movements explore relationships between the instruments, combining them in unique ways that each create vivid sound worlds. The instruments themselves are treated as only one small part of a larger combined instrument. Linear melodic lines are formed from vertical sounding harmonies; funky bass lines can dictate harmonic textures while chordal sounds can inspire melodic writing occurring between the instruments. Tight Sweater was commissioned by 'Real Quiet' and the Muzik 3 Foundation.

"Titan is Saturn's largest moon. It is a mammoth icy world with a dense, golden, hazy atmosphere.. It has rivers and lakes of liquid methane, and an active cycle of rain flowing to the surface, and then evaporating back into the sky. It is the only other known body in space, other than Earth, to have stable bodies of lakes and seas. Within this cold and formidable land, there is also otherworldly joy, full of inspiration: The music in my Titan is in eight, short, interconnected movements of play depicting a joyful life for our fictional interstellar friends. The motives of music also circulate, like rain, throughout all eight movements, and form eight different bodies of sound. The Bass Clarinet serves as an anchor, and a 'Titan,' for which the rings of music circle. All musical material stems from the sound of the integration of the Bass Clarinet within its four rotating, golden, hazy, and 'string-like' atmospheric rings. Within this world, Phoebe and Janus might not be able to see very well, but they love to swim in the healing methane lakes of Vänern, Kivu, and Hammar."

– Dan Lippel

Recorded at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, San Francisco, CA
Recording and mixing: Cory Todd
Mastering: Zach Miley
Producer: Jeff Anderle
Design and layout: Samantha Godoy