Noah Meites: Counting

"The release of this first full-length recording of the music of Noah Meites is a genuine musical event, not merely for the composer but for the Los Angeles new music community as a whole, as Meites draws from the talents of a range of innovative, imaginative, and spellbindingly proficient ensembles and soloists working in the city.

Brightwork Ensemble, for example, known both for their performances of new work and the “classics” of the last hundred years, deftly executes the mesmerizing Cadere, while LA Signal Lab, a quartet of “young and versatile performer-composer new-music Trekkies,” as described by the LA Times — Meites is one of those Trekkies — mingles chaos and consonance in the bricolage of Voyager Golden Record. The piano duo HOCKET navigate rhythmic complexity with the telepathy of conjoined twins in Sonance, first drafted while the composer was under the tutelage of Louis Andriessen, while the saxophonists of the New York-based New Thread Quartet — recorded here during an extended residency at UCLA — bring subtlety, flash, and humor to Fracture Mechanics.

Linnea Powell and richi valitutto, artists associated with one of the more visible new music ensembles in LA, the Grammy-nominated Wild Up, handle viola and piano virtuosically in the shimmering, yet mournful, To Whom Shall I Tell My Grief. Rounding out this pantheon are a host of first-call new music and studio musicians (among them Dan Rosenboom, Mike Valerio, Jiji Kim, and the Ray-Kallay duo) on the most ambitious piece, COUNTING, itself a small anthology of contrasting styles.

Not surprisingly for a composer whose doctoral dissertation concerned the music of Andriessen, Igor Stravinsky, and Prince, Meites’ music is characterized by close attention to timbre and harmonic texture, at times mockingly simple rhythmic foundations, and by keen explorations of tonality. Though he never settles into the postmodern ironies of the pasticheur, his compositions often move boldly yet carefully through phases that can, by turns, be atmospheric, grandiose, playful, elegiac, or simply stunning. And like Prince, Meites’ melodic sense is pure, accessible, even “catchy” at times, though his greatest inheritance from the Purple One might be his ability to mix seemingly incongruent elements — think of the splashy, libidinous guitar solo over the vacant, robotic drum track in the opening of “When Doves Cry” — into a never-settled but always engaging whole.

The opening of COUNTING, a wall of brassy, brash Stravinskian fanfare, thrusts you into a Zeitgeist laced with crisis, headlines blaring that Biblical-scale powers are descending from the heavens in the guise of moneyed Fat Cats. This motif is juxtaposed — forming a sort of social dialectic — with syncopated woodwinds, piano, and hints of electric instrumentation that evoke the People, minds on trivialities and survival, skittering through the shadows of Art Nouveau skyscrapers. Meites, not afraid of modernist flourishes, brings us back to the late 1920s, when stock data rushed like salmon across the wires and Weegee raced across New York in a hijacked ambulance.

But shortly after two minutes, we are introduced to a quieter, reflective present: electric guitars counterposed with a loose cadre of solo woodwinds. Then, severing this dyad, the third major sonic element of the piece enters: a chorus of female voices that sweep like skeins of silk across the proceedings, an angelic encouragement imploring us to resist the soul-leveling of being mere statistics: “Stand up and be counted.” Jeremy Schmidt’s poem “Censuspeak,” which provides the text of COUNTING, shirks common lyrical effusions; instead, it is replete with bureaucratese, creating an internal tension — empty speech executed with passionate near-abandon — in the changeling, at times willowy, vocal textures.

COUNTING then revisits the opening motif, if anything with more throaty agitation, eventually leading to a metrically indeterminate passage in which jazzy bass and woodwinds spar with shattering piano clusters. The text of this middle section (the second stanza of Schmidt’s poem) eschews all hints of subjectivity and becomes mere enumeration — “Nineteen seventy-three nine point two seven percent,” the angels blithely intone. But in a last parry of the Biblical dark, the opening motif returns a third time, now mingled with tones of personal tragedy — macroeconomics scaling down to the human — finally emptying out into accents of fusion: a bit of funk guitar and bass augmented by flute and saxophone.

But suddenly: Meites’ already vast musical vocabulary expands, as a frantic, squiggly saxophone solo — improvised by Patrick Shiroishi, another LA-based luminary — barks its recalcitrance over what seemed the matters-of-course. The comfortable interior of the jazz combo is eventually countered by the false promises of the pursuing angels as they sing a sort of warped Facebook users’ agreement, promising that your “answers will only be used, and all particulars, for statistical purposes and no other purpose.” Yeah, sure. In the final moments, a celeste’s delicate tintinnabulation leads us into the air, and we end at a standstill.

In Cadere, a stately, if ghostly, opening leads into sparse, rhythmic percussion figures, introducing us to an investigation of external, maybe even suburban, spaces. Shimmering strings threaten an Appalachian Spring, as if dawn were slowly rising to reveal a scene of Middle American bliss. Harpsichord and piano flurries slowly widen the scope, but then a cacophonous burst of strings intrude, insistently announcing that Cadere isn’t a meditation on rebirth at all — the focus, instead, collapses onto a silhouette of the Bates Motel perched next to a forgotten, crumbling ravine. Did we really see it?

“Cadere” means “to fall” in Latin; from it we get the words “accident,” “cadence,” and “cascade,” which is fitting, as the piece moves elegantly among the three: moments of tonal assurance — anchored by subtle quotations from Josquin des Prez’s 15th-century motet Ave Maria, Virgo Serena — keep us perched just above the edge of the mental abyss that is Norman’s basement. Remarkably subtle shifts in color characterize the last half: a haunting violin figure and tripping woodwinds, verging on atonality, contrast with a falling piano line that softly, paradoxically, seems to aspire upward toward closure.

A piece for two pianos, Sonance starts sparely, though eventually two melodic poles emerge, one lingering in the higher octaves, the other in the lower. Midway, fecund polyrhythms take the foreground, with an unhinged walking bass line shifting between octaves grounding the percussive, discordant chords that strike, parry, or seduce by turns, evoking Nancarrow strolling through Coyoacán dodging traffic while protecting his piano rolls. In the final moments, a new timbre is introduced in the form of slow, koto-sounding plucks of the piano wires, dissolving foreground and background, before sprightly figures in the higher registers lead us to the outro, a measured if aggressive descent into angular primitivism.

Fracture Mechanics starts with an ambient excursion into the breathier sides of the saxophone, but soon melodic lines metamorphose out of the harmonics like animals from forest mists. What follows is a propulsive, Schubert-inspired section that resembles the type of neoclassical score one might hear over a scene of a woman rushing through Hammacher Schlemmer trying to buy last-minute Christmas gifts while pursued by a Ginsu-wielding former lover. The whispering extended techniques return — our shopper in a brief period of LSD flashback? The coda slows into a trickle of sound, as if the brief bursts of ambulatory life were but a dream after all.

To Whom Shall I Tell My Grief, inspired by the proto-absurdist 19th-century short story “Misery” by Chekov, starts with inky, sustained piano chords highlighted by sporadic color bursts. A viola line reminiscent of Schnittke taunts like a dance of the dead intruding upon a stolen evening in a bombed-out Ukrainian library. The viola trips between the upper and lower registers, never quite able to establish dominance, while the piano lurks behind the crumbling columns, amused but scornful. But there’s an underlying minimalism to the whole, as a basic two-note motif provides an ashy skeleton to the tripping sound clusters before becoming starved of variation and simply having to stop, like a set of train tracks in an abandoned mine.

The second movement of To Whom Shall I Tell My Grief starts with the viola and piano sparring to out-dissonance each other — not a florid argument, more a bickering over the last of the fresh produce. But soon we are compelled down darkened alleys — parries, shifts, quick sightings — as if in pursuit of the Third Man. The viola makes a stab at going it alone, but the minimal two-note melody has only herky-jerky, misaligned legs upon which to run. Spare piano figures shoot one last mote of light into the darkness, including final notes that suggest an antique music box running out of tension. We end with what could be the last bubbles of air escaping from the bottom of the pond.

Voyager Golden Record starts with a slow crescendo that introduces a loose commingling of timbres that echo, if not parody, James Milton Black’s Methodist hymn “When the Roll Is Called Up Yonder,” but then it yokes itself to the beat of a hammered piano — a snippet sampled from an earlier composition by Meites — that operates as a coarse pulse over which a collage of voices and instruments start to swirl. Spectrally, the late Jimmy Carter intones the message sent with the Voyager disc into space: “We are attempting to survive our time, so that we may live into yours…” In fact, Carter never uttered these words, at least not in that order; the sample is the product of a feat of devilish editing by Meites, culled from audio of the former president.

This first half of Voyager Golden Record is the “Revolution No. 9” of the collection — at moments, the clamor nearly rises to the pitch of the giddy misreading of Stockhausen that was the White Album’s most controversial effort — but then, a little after two minutes, elegy takes over. Trumpet momentarily occupies the foreground, followed by a childlike melodic figure in the saxophone and flute playing together somewhere in the depths of the harmonics. “Let us labor for the Master / from the dawn till setting sun,” the returning strings implore, if through parched throats. Are we being mocked for our thoughtless march toward annihilation, or being lured back into innocence?"

– Brian Kim Stefans

Composer Noah Meites wrote his doctoral dissertation on affinities between the music of Prince, Igor Stravinsky, and Louis Andriessen. This fact might lead one to assume his music is an amalgam of the three, and while one hears influences of their work in his, Meites has decidedly charted his own path. What his scholarship topic does indicate however is a broad range of practice in his musical background, from commissions and premieres by many ensembles and festivals in the new music firmament, to a certificate in jazz trumpet performance from a university in France, to co-founding LA Signal Lab, a stylistically diverse ensemble specializing in the intersection between improvised and pre-composed music. This flexibility and wide range of experience comes across in Meites’ music in an entirely natural fashion. His collaborators on this album are many of Los Angeles’ most active musicians in the contemporary music scene, including Brightwork New Music, HOCKET, New Thread Quartet, and a host of top freelancers. The music on this collection is finely crafted and each piece defines its own aesthetic terms in organic ways, demonstrating an artist who has a broad tool set but does not feel the need to brandish it gratuitously.

COUNTING opens the album, a tour-de-force work for nineteen instruments and four high voices. Meites uses the relatively large new music ensemble forces to great effect, with ecstatic towering chords led by the brass, percolating, off-kilter rhythmic cells driven by a cadre of saxophones and an extended rhythmic section, and ethereal clouds of harmony framed by the vocal quartet. The choice of instrumentation, reliance on rhythmic devices to vary and develop material within a regular pulse, and harmonic and stylistic language demonstrate the deep impact Andriessen had on Meites. The piece’s expressive world vacillates between vigorous propulsion and evocative soundscape. The vocal quartet often functions as an austere, homophonic chorus, intoning the foreboding text from Jeremy A. Schmidt’s Censuspeak with chilling neutrality. The prevailing rhythmic grid is offset by free gestures in the keyboard, electric guitar, and high winds at select moments in the work to loosen its skeletal infrastructure. Prince’s influence is felt strongly at the fourteen minute mark, with a repeated ostinato growing out of the fretted electric instruments featuring a funk rhythm guitar part that migrates throughout the ensemble into a simmering groove. From that pad, saxophonist Patrick Shiroishi ignites into a blistering improvised alto sax solo. COUNTING ends with an incantation, led first by the vocal quartet and closing with a series of bell-like attacks in the piano, percussion, and guitars.

A drone in the strings and winds, dotted by tolling attacks in the vibraphone, begins Cadere, an emerging consonance trying to peak out from behind obscured clouds. A plaintive clarinet solo provides a bridge to the introduction of brief, frenetic tutti outbursts. The leaner sextet instrumentation leads Meites to distinguish individual voices, developing complex heterophonic dialogues that explore multiple contrasting characters at once. Pitched percussion plays a pivotal role in the work, coloring prevailing harmonies, signaling formal transitions, and supporting primary melodic ideas with imitation and counterpoint. A gentle, prismatic chorale coalesces around a repeated Morse code like figure in the flute. The texture diffuses as the piece winds down, individual parts disentangling from each other like figures splitting from a group and going on their independent paths.

Sonance, for two pianos and played by the HOCKET duo, is pointillistic at first, with delicate sonorities interspersed with sudden, nimble figures. The interaction between the two keyboards creates a complex web of contrapuntal activity across registers that unfolds linearly as it develops vertically. A semi-regular walking figure emerges in the middle register and provides forward direction, occasionally stuttering in a slightly faster speed. Sparse attacks muted inside the piano create anticipation before the suspense is shattered by dramatic, widely spaced forte chords. The mechanical texture that emerges suggests a slightly rickety player piano, one which seems to increasingly rebel against its predetermined role, careening towards an explosive close.

Fracture Mechanics for saxophone quartet balances post-minimalist imitative textures with an exploration of timbre. After an atmospheric, fragile opening featuring multiphonics and swells, Meites brings in a circular, hocketed figure, and the quartet almost sounds like it is chasing the tail of its own phrases. Accents and dynamic contrasts up the stakes of these ensemble passages, before a cathartic squeal emerges from the quartet, an explosion of unhinged energy referencing free improvisation. The outburst is immediately reined in with a genteel section featuring the baritone sax over elegant, pointed accompaniment. The disembodied multiphonics return for the close of the piece, embracing the music in between a hazy cloak.

To Whom Shall I Tell My Grief is an evocative work for viola and piano, with a rhapsodic, brooding opening movement and a taut, charged second movement. Melodic lines with grace note ornamentation lend the chromatic melodic material in “Restlessly” a mournful, folkloric character. Hollow harmonics in the viola extend brilliant high register keyboard attacks and create hybrid timbres, and rumbling low register figures carve out cavernous sustains. The spacious resonance of the work’s early phrases closes in on itself, as the texture becomes increasingly dense. The “Agitato” is playfully rugged, answering brusque heavy passages with light figuration. As in COUNTING, Meites uses repeated ostinatos with subtle variation as a propulsive vehicle. Strident double stops in the viola bring the movement to a peak before watery arpeggios in the keyboard lead to a simple three chord ending.

The final work on the album is Voyager Golden Record for septet and fixed media electronics. The playback part is a collage of recorded communications related to the Voyager space program. Meites’ use of the ensemble facilitates earthy improvisations that track long, structural shapes. After an accumulation during the opening two minutes, the texture clears and opens into an expansive harmonic pad, a sentimental paean to our planet, “the only one we have.” Strains of weightless lyricism float through the ensemble, fusing together into an ethereal closing hymn and a humanistic final gesture for the album.

– Dan Lippel

Censuspeak

by Jeremy A. Schmidt (2011)

Stand up, actual enumeration

stand up, every item—and all particulars required

stand up and be counted—esta es la nuestra—it counts for more than you

stand, your answers will only be used for statistical purposes and no other purpose

master address file—non-response follow-up—the whole

number of persons in each state—soon unaccountable–

print race, for example—and so—shall by law direct

a just and perfect enumeration

Seventeen nine-six—nineteen thirteen

twenty-one two-seven—nineteen twenty-eight—eight point four

four—nineteen seventy three—nine point two seven percent—nineteen eighty

fourteen point seven-three—nineteen eighty-eight—twelve point seven six percent—nineteen ninety-one

fourteen point three zero percent—nineteen ninety-two

sixteen point three seven percent in nineteen ninety-eight

and eighteen point zero zero percent of income

to the top one percent—two-thousand ten

Every item of information

every family within each district, and not otherwise

every dwelling-house—actual inquiry—randomly selected sample

every subsequent term of ten years, a just a perfect enumeration, in such manner

answers will only be used, and all particulars

for statistical purposes and no other purpose

each and every item, looked up in perfect silence

according to their respective numbers

COUNTING was recorded between December 14th, 2021 and October 15th, 2022 at Evelyn & Mo Ostin Music Center, Los Angeles, CA
Sound engineer: Stuart Schenk
Mixing: Brian Montgomery
Mastering: Zach Herchen
Text: “Censuspeak” (2011) by Jeremy A. Schmidt

Cadere was recorded October 15th, 2021 at Evelyn & Mo Ostin Music Center, Los Angeles, CA
Sound engineer: Sergey Parfenov
Mixing and mastering: Zach Herchen

Sonance was recorded November 19th, 2021 at Zipper Hall, Los Angeles, CA
Sound engineer: Francesco Perlangeli
Mixing and mastering: Zach Herchen

Fracture Mechanics was recorded January 29th, 2023 at Evelyn & Mo Ostin Music Center, Los Angeles, CA
Sound engineer: Sergey Parfenov
Mixing and mastering: Zach Herchen

To Whom Shall I Tell My Grief was recorded June 8th, 2022 at Zipper Hall, Los Angeles, CA
Sound engineer: Sergey Parfenov
Editing: Nick DePinna and Noah Meites
Mixing and mastering: Zach Herchen

Voyager Golden Record was recorded November 11th, 2017 and June 3rd, 2023 at Grandma’s Dojo and Evelyn & Mo Ostin Music Center, Los Angeles, CA
Sound engineers: Miles Senzaki and Nick DePinna
Editing: Nick DePinna and Noah Meites
Mixing and mastering: Zach Herchen

Recording producer: Nick DePinna

Artwork: Slipstream (front cover) and Untitled (back cover) by Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann

Noah Meites photo: Dania Maxwell

Design & layout: Marc Wolf, marcjwolf.com