Lei Liang: Six Seasons: Instrumentation Lab

Six Seasons: Solos

Composer Lei Liang never stops exploring and expanding the possibilities of music and sound – including instruments.

Yet how new, or original, is the music on the new two-CD set Six Seasons: Instrumentation Lab? It’s a tricky question.

In my experience, the lengthier and more obscure the liner notes, the emptier the music. What to make of writing like “Liang has fashioned a syntax of symbiosis in flux…his compositions eschew teleology in favor of distillation and reconfiguration…Liang composes convergence in reiteration. Never content with what is as is, he listens and re-evaluates.” Yes, it’s possible to parse meaning from such hyper-Latinate writing. But then, to try to map that meaning to what you’re hearing – can it be done? is it worth the effort?

Recently, urban rats chewed up chunks of my car engine, sending the vehicle to the shop for a completely new engine harness. It was the second time I’d had a vehicle thus attacked on the streets of Manhattan. I thought of this as I listened to the piano movement of “Season 1: Darkness,” the first main section of “Six Seasons: Solos” from the double album. This, I thought, is just what it might have sounded like under the hood as the rodents ate away at my soy-based insulation and chewed through my wiring.

There are sounds in the music that clearly come from a piano, derived directly from the strings or through sympathetic vibration if not via the keyboard. But most of the piece is toneless.

And when the next part begins and the source shifts to the harp – which, admittedly, resembles the skeleton of a piano – it’s hard at first to notice a transition. Strings, wood, pedals – check. Contact mics? Ultimately there is more tonality in the harp movement. The instrument’s nature makes itself known. We also hear what sound like muted vocals. Still, it’s only marginally more “musical.”

Not surprisingly, sounds derived from the passage of air rather than the vibration of strings distinguish the bassoon movement.Ben Roidl-Ward) produces squeaks and whispers and dual tones. But there’s little to grasp onto in these five minutes. Where did that time go?

“Season 3: Sunrise” starts like pouring rain, ironically suggesting a morning on which the sunrise isn’t visible at all. The rest of the short, anxious track consists of hissing, piping, and scraping sounds.

An acoustic-electronic language of sorts seems to be trying to emerge from Andrew Kozar’s trumpet in “Season 4: Migration.” Eerie, descending electronic dives and chirpings pile on top of one another, some suggestive of analog synthesizer sounds, together with warbling from a (presumably muted) trumpet. It adds up to something that could be part of a sci-fi soundtrack.

Baritone Ty Bouque produces an extended guttural croak in “Season 1: New Ice.” He returns for the first part of “Season 5: Cacophony.” But in the latter piece, for a while there isn’t much that resembles the normal workings of a human voice. Halfway through, toneless sighing and groaning arrive to intermingle with the electronics.

The Body Electric

It’s useful to reflect on the similarity between the human body as a sound source and the musical instruments we build. Vocal cords that vibrate, air that passes through various chambers, percussively resonant hands and thighs – in a sense, creating instruments is just enhancing ourselves.

Thus, there’s not a big gulf between Bouque’s moans and the keenings of William Lang’s trombone in the next section, or some of the prattling of Adrián Sandí’s bass clarinet in the one after that. When Lang blows toneless air through the trombone’s brass tubing, how different is that from the sounds that human lungs can engender on their own? Sandí’s squeals aren’t so different from what a human being choking on grief (or just choking) might sound like.

Tyler J. Borden’s moans on the cello could almost be a distorted human voice, and there are animal noises (from elephants and gorillas, for example) that resemble some of the accompanying higher-pitched whines.

Jesse Langen delivers the more metallic “Season 6: Bloom” on the electric guitar, the only difference here being that there’s less audible parallel with the human somatic instrument. Pianist Stephen Drury’s single notes and monkey-like screams from the “Prelude” return for a brief final “Postlude.”

Having finished two listens, I lean back in my armchair and reflect: I don’t know, man – I feel like people were doing this same sort of stuff back in the 1950s, if not before.

Six Seasons: Ensemble

The cycle on the second disc, divided into six pieces with the same titles as the first, plus a coda, holds more interest, mostly because the larger ensemble varies the sound palette. The group nec[shivaree], the New England Conservatory’s avant-garde ensemble, here includes French horn, viola, cello, contrabass, electric guitar, and two pianists. Once again the music dispenses with rhythm and, for large stretches, with tone. Once again extended techniques dominate.

And once again the quieter parts, as in “Darkness,” sound like small animals snuffling around trying to ferret something out.

But the grumbles of “Sunrise” are shot through with piercing harmonics. A viola melody tries to snake to the surface. The bass tries hesitantly to provide a floor, even a hint at an ostinato. Percussive sounds emanate from non-percussion instruments. Woodwind sounds percolate from an ensemble with no woodwinds. Waves of static sound like water. Periods of activity persist.

There’s a brittle coldness to “Ice.” Birdlike sounds flutter across “Migration,” along with actual harmonies. “Cacophony” sounds like a small orchestra setting up in a disorganized recording studio underwater; as on the first disc, it’s no more “cacophonous” than any other movement and less raucous than some. Toward the end it even seems to grope towards establishing a key.

“Bloom” has quite a bit of life – use your imagination and you might discern birds, monkeys, a lion, an elephant. You might even focus undefined noises into sound-pictures of flowers in bloom.

Wordy Rappinghood

Here’s what I take from Marc Medwin’s interminable (and annotated!) liner notes: Liang creates and realizes music using, and inspired by, nature, electronics, and technology as well as instruments; reimagines what an “instrument” actually is; and blurs the line between improvisation and composition. That’s digestible.

Whether, as Medwin writes, the present cycle “brims with possibility, with the permeability of discovery in rediscovery, as the brilliantly malleable form reshapes, redefines and reimagines its structures and boundaries” – well, that’s something the listener is welcome to grapple with. This listener doesn’t have the time or the brainspace. To put it another way: Huh?

Lei Liang has been prominent for years in the fields of new and Indigenous music, both as a composer and a musicologist. He has won many awards and received prestigious commissions. What he composes, and what he has to say about it, is always worth a listen and a look. My impression of the music on this album is that it raises the process of creation to such an esoteric level that its substance thins out almost to the vanishing point. My other birds-eye-view thought is: Is he really doing anything new here?

— Jon Sobel, 5.04.2026

And speaking of intermingled sounds, they are very much the point of a very extended work called Six Seasons by Lei Liang (born 1972). New Focus Recordings offers the two-hour piece on two CDs, the first (Solos) lasting an hour and a quarter, the second (Ensemble) taking up the remaining time. Rather than being continuous, Six Seasons consists of a series of short works, ranging in length from less than one minute to more than 10. Most are not music in a traditional sense – the opening Prelude, for example, starts with the call of a beluga whale, followed by electronic-keyboard chords. The following items include a baritone solo featuring indrawn breath that sounds like an extended scream of pain, a trumpet-and-trombone item that sounds like percussion, and then pieces for piano, harp, bassoon, ensemble, trumpet, voice, trombone, bass clarinet, piano, cello, and electric guitar. The point made again and again is that he instruments do not sound like what listeners will expect them to sound like: Liang explores soundscapes that insist on being something beyond the “merely” aural, reaching out to – well, what they reach out to is far from clear. The sounds emanating from all the instruments are altered, filtered, overlaid, switched, expanded or contracted, and generally transformed into something recognizable as sound but not in terms of its point(s) or instrument(s) of origin. Liang’s idea involves taking ocean sounds (recorded off the coast of Alaska) and mingling them with highly modified instrumental sounds and extended performance techniques in order to produce a sense of immersion – presumably within the ocean, although this is never made explicitly clear, with some sections sounding more as if they are transporting listeners to the innards of a toilet bowl or the workings of a thunderstorm’s clouds. Both animal calls and instrumental sounds are occasionally intelligible, but their clarity comes within a sonic environment designed to distort perception and undermine the reasons for being of animals, instruments, and performers. The first part of Six Seasons ends with two pieces labeled Postlude, one sounding like gentle rain interrupted by a crash and the other like a small shriek with tiny bits of piano sprinkled on it. Liang’s determination to be perceived as extremely avant-garde is everywhere apparent, and the notion that only the cognoscenti can possibly appreciate the depth and richness of his tone-and-noise painting pervades the project. The second, “ensemble” part of Six Seasons is entirely for grouped instruments and consists, unsurprisingly, of six elements – which share their titles with six of the parts of the “solo” material. However, it is not always apparent that there are multiple instruments involved in these items, since the alterations worked in the “solo” material are also used in the “ensemble” elements, and the intentionally extensive electronic manipulation does an excellent job of concealing the source of whatever is being modified. The primary difference in the “ensemble” segments is length: they are much longer than the individual pieces in the “solo” realm. But they produce exactly the same impressions by using exactly the same methods of distortion, overlay, extension, textural modification, and so forth. Two hours of this is a lot of it, and if Liang was looking to reach an extremely rarefied audience and take listeners on a long, long journey to realms whose connection with any traditional notion of music is obscure at best, he has certainly succeeded. Six Seasons demonstrates, if any such demonstration is still necessary in the 21st century, that contemporary composers are quite as capable as slightly less-recent ones of producing material that will be extremely off-putting to the vast majority of potential listeners while making a tiny subgroup of fans feel as if its members are part of an inner circle of auditory superiority.

— Mark Estren, 5.07.2026