Loeb--Between Sea and Sky
A Sled Named Pre-1918
Perhaps my best bit of imaginative music criticism--
Between Sea and Sky is like Citizen Kane.
Between Sea and Sky opens with a wisp of a tune--four notes rising stepwise. 100% pre-1918.
The opening gets the tune under our skin but also starts to turn it upside down. The heart of the piece is descending music, almost unbearably sad. A gnostic wasteland of descent.
I can get lost in the sad descending music, but listening carefully, phrase by phrase, I understand each gesture.Surprisingly the composer finds something in those depths, in those desperately sad descending, expiring lines.
The return of the modestly rising opening tune is the Citizen Kane moment translated into David Loeb's musical vocabulary.
Orson Wells responds to Jorge Luis Borges' review
"We all know that a party, a palace, a great undertaking, a lunch for writers and journalists, an atmosphere of cordial and spontaneous camaraderie, are essentially horrendous." (Borges review of Citizen Kane"
I think:
Likewise, a century of wars and revolutions-musical and political revolutions. Loeb didn't join any of the 20th C. musical revolutions, but he acquire the appetite for harmonic labyrinths. He recentered that on pre-1918, but even more pre-Renaissance and Asian musical idioms. A syncretist's syncretist.
When we embrace integration to this degree, revolutions the merest blip.
Srdjan Berdovic, Carlo Valte, Mariano Aguirre, guitars
from Loeb's website--
Although David Loeb began composing at the age of six, he destroyed everything he had written prior to beginning his studies at Mannes (not to mention some things written much later). Nevertheless the works written since then now number well over one thousand, and he continues to produce new compositions in diverse media frequently. Moving back and forth between residences in New York and Kyoto and often making shorter trips from both places actually increases his output rather than slowing it down. Changes of climate, cuisine, culture, language, art, and above all music seem to provide considerable stimulation for creativity.
Loeb created his unique international style. Each instrument is a mask. When he writes for guitar, the mask is part biwa and shamisen, part Renaissance lute.
Another performance--
William Anderson
I compose, play plucked instruments, run ensembles, produce concerts, and advocate for new music, I soaked up contemporary American music for 30 years, working directly with composers from all over the map. In the last 20 years I began composing works that draw on that experience, with a particular concern for finding a coherent way to make reconciling musics that were sealed off from one another. How to make embarrassingly simple and charming music work with the most complex musical modalities? Tipping in this direction has made me aware of the dangers of grasping too firmly onto any one notion.
I've come to Macherey's vision that our shadow (what we're *not*) is radiantly present in our work. So it's perfectly reasonable to *love everything*. We're imbricated. --
**The true necessity of the text manifests itself in the fact that not a word of it can be changed and nothing can be added, even though it appears at each moment as though a new topic could be chosen, an alternative narrative selected. But it is precisely this ceaseless shadowy presence of other possible phrases which could be pronounced, this ineradicable sense that things could have been other than they are, which enforces the constraining necessity of the text we actually have before us.**--Macherey