Tomás Gueglio

The title of Tomás Gueglio’s debut portrait album, Duermevela, is the composite of two Spanish words for sleep and staying awake. It captures Gueglio’s aesthetic perfectly — his music lives between evocative dream states and a taut sense of vigilant attention. This collection of chamber works written between 2013-2017 is reflective of that dichotomy, as well as the duality in Gueglio’s artistic life between his hometowns of Chicago and Buenos Aires.

Violinist Austin Wulliman performs the opening track on the recording, Mil Panaderos. An initial, skittering jété sets the tone for this impetuous piece. Quick swells, glissandi, fast arpeggios, and scalar passages are combined in a linear counterpoint of motivic ideas. Deliberative pauses between ideas frame the content, a component that moderates the manic unfolding of material.

The opening solo violin work is the seed that grows into the second track, Apostillas a Mil Panaderos, a sextet for soprano sax, clarinet, percussion, piano, violin, and cello, written for and performed by Latitude 49. The process of transcription and adaptation softens the original musical material, as if rough edges of an uncut gem are being polished by the added color from the ensemble. Gueglio makes beautiful use of the punctuated attacks of percussion, piano, and pizzicato in the strings to articulate endings of sustained phrases and create hybrid instrumental gestures. As the piece evolves, the initial idea of expanding upon ideas from the solo violin piece grows into a more symbiotic texture. A high register ostinato grounds the final two minutes of the piece, as the characteristic swelling figure is passed around the ensemble.

1901: Un Oiseau for two bass flutes follows, a sensual work in two movements that incorporates an extended technique vocabulary on the instrument and in various vocalizations. The two flutes open the piece with very similar pitch and textural material, mapped onto different rhythmic contours. Not unlike Mil Panaderos, the result is a contrapuntal organization of information, with various threads defined by timbre, register, and central pitches. We can hear the weaving of these two lines as a sort of loose, arhythmic canon, wherein material that happens in one part will emerge non-systematically at some point in the other. Towards the end of the second movement, the texture briefly turns toward a contemplative drone before a brief, playfully lyrical coda.

After L’Addio (a reference to Sciarrino’s solo harp work, L’Addio a Trachis) opens the work with one of the harp’s most recognizable gestures, the glissando, combining it with a technique developed with harpist Ben Melsky, cheekily dubbed the “Guegliando,” involving a calloused finger dragging across the strings. The dry, obscured contour of the Guegliando is splashed with the color of fully pitched glissandi, trills, and accented notes, creating a multi-dimensional, multi-registral texture. Felt (referencing material used by the harpist to produce a modified attack on the strings as well as a subtle sustained sound on the body of the instrument) stands in opposition to the opening work in its use of mitigating material between the player and the instrument. The music is spacious and introspective, unfolding in contemplative phrases, each separated by a brief pause.

The final work on the album for guitar quartet, Canción en Duermevela, was written for the Nuntempe Ensamble. Gueglio binds the four movements of the piece together through a shared cantus firmus of sorts, presented in chromatic clusters. A range of scraping sounds, glissandi, tapping techniques, and plucks behind the nut create a multi-dimensional pad around which this processional melody unfolds. Gueglio occasionally embeds brief polyrhythms into these background textures, injecting the music with rhythmic direction. The prevailing affect is one of delicate wonder, as the intimate timbres of the four guitars intersect with an ever emerging composite melody.

Tomás Gueglio creates musical environments that facilitate subtle examinations of timbre, phrase, and gesture. He eschews bombastic surface activity in favor of substantial multi-layered textures. The results are beguiling and moving, music that lives in a space that is balanced between the visceral and tactile on one side and the curated and meticulous on the other.

—Dan Lippel

Chicago based Ensemble Dal Niente releases confined. speak., a collection of works the group programmed in streaming performances during this past year. Despite the formidable hurdles associated with ensemble playing during the lockdown, Dal Niente presented concerts and took advantage of the ability to collaborate across vast distances. This album chronicles highlights from those events, featuring music by Melissa Vargas, George Lewis, Tomás Gueglio, Hilda Paredes, Igor Santos, and Andile Khumalo that reflects broad geographic influences from South America, North America, and Africa.

As with many new music groups, Chicago based Ensemble Dal Niente drew on deep resources of invention during the last couple of years to continue to present work that channeled our contemporary moment into sound. confined.speak. documents that work, specifically featuring six works that they championed during this period. These works reflect stark dichotomies that shaped these last eighteen months — enforced isolation and restricted movement mixed with a neutralizing of distance and geographic hurdles due to the migration of most activity to the virtual realm. The result is a rich snapshot of one ensemble’s fruitful work in the time of Covid, with composers representing three continents who share a sensibility of digging beneath the expected and discovering a fresh way to manifest forces pulling us in many directions.

Igor Santos’ title track expresses confinement in various ways — through constricted timbres such as the use of mutes, variegated bow pressure techniques, and inside the piano textures; through taut repetitive loops that mechanize the texture; and through a limited pitch language. Watery chord clusters in the piano accompany poignant muted double stops in the violin, an aria echoing off the walls inside one’s own mind.

Hilda Paredes’ kaleidoscopic harp concerto, Demente Cuerda (translated as either “demented string” or “of sound mind”) explores the intersection and divergence between the harp’s delicate timbre and the diverse colors of the ensemble. The work has a rhapsodic spirit, with vibrant, composite instrumental gestures melding together to create sinewy hybrid lines. The ensemble seems to grow out of the lush sound of the harp, indeed creating a large extended hybrid instrument of sorts, shadowing its twists and turns.

Tomás Gueglio’s Triste y madrigal is the first of three works featuring voice on the program. Soprano Amanda DeBoer Bartlett adopts a silvery, quasi-straight tone approach over a murky, ambiguous accompaniment of nocturnal utterances and interjections in the ensemble. This sonic bog gradually becomes more animated and engaged with the foreground melodic material before the texture is suddenly interrupted by an automated voice overlaid with orchestral interludes and voice clips from 1940’s melodrama. The cool, detached quality of the main voice and ensemble material juxtaposed with the nostalgic flashback to a bygone time echoes what many of us experienced during lockdown, a yearning for a richer emotional experience that we could only access through memory.

On Merce and Baby, George Lewis imagines the music that may have resulted from a documented collaboration between choreographer and dancer Merce Cunningham and jazz drummer Baby Dodds. Short imitative gestures bounce through the quartet like bird song, energized by a vigorous, off-kilter percussion part. Embedded within the texture is a microtonal quotation of John Cage’s solo piano work Cheap Imitation. An extended lyrical violin solo passage and subsequent interwoven trio section provides a contrasting energy. By reimagining this historical meeting of the minds, Lewis shines light on one of many fruitful intersections between creative music in the white and black communities that have not been adequately recognized.

Melissa Vargas’ Es casi como el inicio... y comienza is written in non-metrical notation, instead orienting the pace of material around a clock timer. Deliberately drawn out instrumental gestures lay a foundation for wild, melismatic syllabic passages in the voice.

Andile Khumalo’s Beyond Her Mask confronts violence against women in his native South Africa. Khumalo used spectral analysis of the percussion instrument the Lion’s Roar and the human voice to generate material for the score. An impactful spoken text is painted by dramatic, coloristic orchestration in the ensemble. Khumalo creates an ethereal, surreal musical landscape, aptly capturing the line in the text, “Reality melts into a symphony of feelings and fleeting moments.” What a resonant image indeed for an album that chronicles a moment in time when our collective reality became suddenly suspended and driven inward.

– Dan Lippel

American violinist Jennifer Koh’s new recording, Alone Together is based on her online performance series of the same name, created in response to the coronavirus pandemic and the financial hardship it has placed on so many in the arts community. The New York Times called Alone Together “a marvel for a time of crisis” and the lineup of composers “more inclusive than anything in mainstream classical music.”

Koh has been highly visible during the pandemic as a result of Alone Together, which features short new works donated by established composers and commissioned from talented young composers who may be struggling financially because of the COVID-19 crisis. Koh performs 39 world premiere recordings of works by established composers such as Du Yun, Vijay Iyer, Tania Léon, George Lewis, Missy Mazzoli, Ellen Reid, and Wang Lu and the emerging composers they recommended including Katherine Balch, Nina Shekhar, Lester St. Louis, Rajna Swaminathan, Darian Donovan Thomas, and Sugar Vendil.

Koh is a forward-thinking artist dedicated to exploring a broad and eclectic repertoire, while promoting equity and inclusivity in classical music. She has expanded the contemporary violin repertoire through a wide range of commissioning projects and has premiered more than 100 works written especially for her.

Alone Together was commissioned and produced by ARCO Collaborative with the support of commissioning partners National Young Arts Foundation and generous individual donors of ARCO Collaborative.