Alina Piechowska-Pascal is a self-described minimalist, not in
the manner of a Philip Glass, but more along the lines of an Arvo
Pärt. She likewise comes from eastern-European roots, starting
in the 1970s as a fairly conventional modernist, if the older
pieces on this disc are accurate indicators. Like Pärt, Piechowska-Pascal
eventually discarded the extravagant gestures of mainstream modernism
and developed a fascination with bell-like tones. Specifically,
most of the music on this disc is played with Tibetan singing
bowls, whose bell-like resonance casts a golden haze over the
carefully chosen notes.
Unlike
Pärt, Piechowska-Pascal does not stay within the boundaries
of traditional tonality, but her mature music does tend to focus
on a limited range of gestures and tones, working around tonal
centers. The transition from modernism in the experimental Proces
to the ritualistic Les Éléments can be heard in Meditation,
a dramatic piece where the composer truly begins to find her
voice.
The
disc opens with the composer playing piano and the bowls. Tibetan
singing bowls are made from a seven-metal alloy painstakingly
hammered into a concave shape. They resonate with the sounds
played or sung around them. The different metals and variable
thicknesses cause different bowls to ring out in different pitches.
The bowls can also be struck to create bell-tones rich with
overtones. Fleurs de l’Espace (“Flowers of Space”) bookends
this disc with a late-twentieth century equivalent of a French
baroque unmeasured prelude, the notes played slowly and freely,
calling forth the warm halo of the bowls. Those fearing a sort
of syrupy, quasi-mysticism needn’t fear, though, for Piechowska-Pascal’s
music is neither sentimental nor easy. The tones played on the
piano are questioning, ambivalent.
The
next work, Les Elements, is in five parts. The first
part, La Terre, evokes the earth with dense tone clusters
on the piano, sending the singing bowls ringing in complex waves
of sound. L’Eau brings the addition of an alto flute,
played by Florence Angelloz de la Gauthière, in water music
that is sensual, almost bluesy in places, as it hovers between
major and minor. This music sounds at times like an extension
of late Debussy, impressionistic but dark, hanging in a kind
of exquisite torture between keys, never quite committing to
one. The mood changes at 3:20 with the coming of a more glimmering
section and a change to piccolo by the player, but unfortunately
the transition is marred by a bad edit, every so slightly cutting
off the previous resonance and replacing it with a sliver of
dead air before the instruments start the new section. This
section is followed by a languorous section for the strange
and exotic bass flute. Then the opening returns to close. The
third movement, Le Feu, brings frenetic, fiery virtuosity
from the piano in music that sounds like a latter-day descendent
of Scriabin’s Vers le Flamme. Though effective, it is
also a bit wearing at close microphone perspective, which was
used throughout the album to catch the ringing of the singing
bowls. The succeeding l’Air features the composer singing
a chant-like line and ringing bowls as the flautist changes
back and forth among instruments. Alas, the ritualistic atmosphere
is compromised by the very clearly caught sounds of passing
traffic outside the church in Paris where the recording was
made. The suite ends with L’Espace, where flute and bowl
tones are joined by some Henry Cowell-style playing of the strings
of the piano by hand, adding the resonance of the piano’s sustain
pedal to the cloud of bell tones.
Au
Pays des Neiges unfolds in cascading,
sometimes violent waves over pedal tones in the bass of the
piano. Pounding bass tone clusters and cutting high-range chords
at its peak overload the close-up recording, causing some distortion.
Tolerable over loudspeakers, it can cause one’s eyes to water
over headphones. The name of the piece (“From the Land of Snow”)
refers to the singing bowls origins in Tibet, and one can’t
help but wonder if the violence of the piece is a reference
to the struggles of the Tibetan people under the dominance of
China, a reading easy to make in light of recent events, with
Tibetan protestors attacking the Olympic flame before the Chinese
games take place. Considering that the album’s title is “Music
for Peace,” it seems reasonable at the very least to take these
works collectively as a spiritual statement about the search
for peace, harmony and meaning.
Serving
as keystone to the arch structure of the album are the next
two pieces, Proces and Meditation. Cellist Barbara
Marcinkowska plays the angular, sometimes brutal lines of Proces
with verve and commitment. While fairly arresting, it also
bears the self-conscious experimentalism of the 1970s in its
relentless style. It is at least interesting to search for the
seeds of the composer’s mature style in its dense gestures.
It is followed by Meditation, from 1986, for piano and
cello, where we hear Piechowska-Pascal begin holding on to certain
tones for structural stability as the notes explore the area
around those stabilizing tones. It clearly points toward where
her music was going, even in the way piano tone clusters are
softly sounded and held out, sounding much like the ring of
the singing bowls to come in her music from the 1990s. The Chant
sans Parole from 1994, also for cello and piano, brings
this leg of the journey up to the composer’s mature style, simpler
yet more potent in gesture.
Trois
Chansons des Étoiles (“Three Songs
of the Stars”) are brief solo flute pieces making use of pointillistic
colors in the space of silence. Lotus Né de l’Eau again
joins ritualistic post-impressionistic piano writing to the
ringing bowls in a constantly shifting cloud of sound. One could
almost hear the work, with its tolled singing bowls, as a sort
of a Zen La Cathédrale Engloutie. Finally, Fleurs
de l’Espace returns to bring the arched program back to
where it began.
These
pieces sound their most fetching over loudspeakers, where the
close-up recording can make the instruments sound as if they
are in the room with you, and the occasional rough edit or overly
quick fadeout isn’t noticeable the way it is on headphones,
where the aggressive levels can distort. Over speakers, though,
it works quite well, even if the singing bowls can’t be heard
as easily.
This
Quantum disc was recorded in 1994 and originally released shortly
thereafter. Hearing Piechowska-Pascal’s ascension from relentless
gestural music to something more graceful and meaningful is interesting,
and it whets the appetite to hear what she has been up to in subsequent
years. Booklet notes are in French, with (awkward) English translations.
Not all the information on the back of the booklet, nor the titles
themselves, are translated.
Mark Jordan
