It is always a rare,
invigorating and wonderful experience
to find something that can be considered
both wholly new and unexpected while
remaining ancient and familiar. When
I first looked at this album by Hornhoh,
a group consisting of four Alphorns,
I was expecting a folk music CD at best,
a Ricola commercial at worst. Within
seconds I was treated to a truly interesting
and innovative fanfare announcing the
arrival of a music that was at once
thoroughly contemporary as well as ancient
and medieval.
In short, I found myself
in the midst of something truly special.
The pieces themselves use a great amount
of modality due to the limitations of
the instrument. The alphorn is not designed
as a chromatic instrument, and has no
keys or slides in order to change key
or give much control over pitch. The
players of Hornroh compensate through
choosing horns that are in different
keys and using a medieval technique
called "hocketing" whereby
two or three players will jump in at
different times to produce a single
seamless melody. Also, due to the instruments’
limitations, they are often playing
modally, creating pitches that some
listeners more familiar with the baroque
or early romantic eras would consider
"wrong." Fans of early music,
Brahms, and third stream jazz, however,
will be familiar with the Lydian and
Mixolydian modes heavily employed here,
and will find themselves intrigued by
the melding of the ancient and the modern.
In a similar vein,
Hornroh uses the limitations of the
instrument to their advantage harmonically
with the different instruments producing
some incredibly modern sounding chords.
They often choose dissonances to create
tension in ways reminiscent of early
Stravinsky or late Stan Kenton. Thus,
theoretically, the music remains totally
tonal while employing some music theory
that was not advanced until the middle
part of the 20th century.
In the piece "Arb", Hornroh
intentionally push their instruments
slightly out of tune with each other
to create "beats" that are
then used rhythmically. The instruments
are then pushed to their outer extremes
in order to give a more varied texture
and interesting melody. The end result
is something that somehow feels primal
but would be best understood as extremely
modern.
As the album continues,
the pieces become more experimental.
There is one work where the instrumentalists
stop playing to vocally imitate their
horns. There are several occasions in
the final five tracks where the alphorns
are pushed to such extreme ranges as
to make it seem that the players have
fundamentally changed the timbre of
their instrument. The net result, however,
is to show the alphorn, which seems
on the surface to be mostly an instrument
for a shepherd to call for help at a
distance, to be an instrument capable
of creating highly emotive, evocative
and experimental music that can challenge
the listener intellectually while engaging
on the most visceral of levels.
As I write, I find
myself increasingly at a loss to describe
this album. I can say that without some
foreknowledge, I would never have purchased
this. Finding this in my stack of recordings
to review I decided that I was intellectually
interested in seeing what music could
be with such a limited instrument. As
the album began I found myself intrigued.
I was soon awash in wonderment at the
variety of sounds and the magic that
such virtuosity can bring. If you are
a fan of only the most familiar of sounds,
you should peruse the Beethoven. However,
if you have even the slightest sense
of adventure, you will enjoy this magical
adventure into the Alps. The weight
of millennia mated with the adventure
of the most modern is meshed together
on this truly fantastic album. If you
only buy one recording of new music
this year, you wouldn’t go wrong by
choosing this one; I cannot recommend
it highly enough.
Patrick Gary
All compositions written and arranged by
Hornroh