Saskia Lankhoorn KATE MORE Dances and Canons

The music of composer Kate Moore is a hybrid of hybrids. It channels the inner fire of things that must someday turn to ash, and coaxes from this realization one intensely melodic conflagration after another. Born in England but raised in Australia, Moore cites the latter’s open landscapes as having permanently hued her artistic paintbrush. Moore’s longtime interpreter is pianist Saskia Lankhoorn, who debuts both herself and the composer to ECM’s hallowed New Series family.

Even though Moore professes no allegiance to minimalism—and rightly so, for her politics could hardly be more different—fans of the genre’s stalwarts are sure to take distinct pleasure in this program. Furthermore, taking the opening solo piano piece Spin Bird as an example, we find a natural wonderment present in, say, the seminal Philip Glass. Yet where Glass might attend to the overarching philosophical questions of a Koyaanisqatsi or a Satyagraha, Moore is more interested in the under-arching gesture, a cupping of water in all its microscopic glory. In this respect, Stories For Ocean Shells, also for solo piano, is like two hands interlocking: despite being of the same organism, each has characteristics that distinguish it from the other, with whom it only partners occasionally in a world designed to separate them through material engagement. Only through immaterial actions do they come together in a temporarily unbroken circuit of meditation and profound thinking. Every microtonal harmony is a puff of spore, every melodic spiral singing as if sung in the manner of a falling leaf. The result is a music that gazes on its own reflection and sees insight into the self as insight into all selves. And so, what might seem a mere chain of arpeggios in theory is in practice a downright sacred unfolding of time signatures, which can only be notated through the act of speech and bodily interpretation. Lankhoorn is fully adapted to bringing all of this out, and more.

But if The Body Is An Ear takes its inspiration from the writings of Sufi mystic Hazrat Inayat Khan (as it does), then it also takes inspiration from that which cannot be written (as it should). The rhizomatic pulse of its two pianos is so translucent that the instruments bleed through one another until there is but one between them. The transitions are resolutely beautiful—from smoothness to pointillism, from connectivity to individuality, from river to ocean—but hearing them as we do from the level of the molecule, we recognize that even beauty needs emptiness to survive. In this light, Canon is the intermediary between coalescence and dissolution. Magnified now to four pianos, Moore’s forces begin with a rounded dance of solitude and finish in a thought spiral. As the newest piece of the program, brought to the studio as it was in still-raw form, its gradualness begs a contemplative spirit and rewards the patient listener with presence of mind.

From the above descriptions, it would seem as if Moore’s is an ephemeral realm. This it might very well be, though no more than anything in this world already is. It’s also physical. The spine of Zomer (for solo piano) is glass-boned, its nerves of light sending their messages in occasional, quiet bursts, while Joy (also solo) grows heavier with every iterative cycle of its unfolding. Like the emotion itself, it is sometimes messy, at other times supremely ordered, and prone to exhaustion. The ultimate (for being fundamental) distillation of all this is Sensitive Spot for “multiple pianos,” meaning the musician must play against recordings of herself, trying to match them as closely as possible. Quick and almost nervous, it reinforces itself like a flower becoming lost in its own fragrance.

The closing reprise of Spin Bird, then, feels less like such. Rather, it is a leap farther inward to a place where only you, dear listener, and I may travel, untethered and free to roam. (ECM Records)

Saskia Lankhoorn KATE MOORE Dances and Canons

Dances and Canons is the debut ECM recording of both composer Kate Moore and pianist Saskia Lankhoorn. Moore was born in England in 1979 and lives now in the Netherlands (where she studied with Louis Andriessen, among others). However, it is Australia, where she grew up, which has left the strongest impression on her creative imagination, its teeming natural soundscapes transmuted in her music of swirling pulse patterns and shifting, layered planes of sound. In Dutch pianist Lankhoorn (also born 1979), Moore has a dedicated and resourceful interpreter. “It’s impossible to listen to this music,” writes George Miller in the liner note, “and not wonder about the enormous technical demands it makes of the performer.” Lankhoorn, no stranger to demanding music, made her first broadcast performance on Dutch radio at the age of 16, playing Schoenberg; she met Moore in 2003 when both were at the Royal Conservatorium in The Hague. When Lankhoorn co-founded the new music group Ensemble Klang, Moore was one of the first composers the ensemble programmed. Since then they have worked together on numerous occasions and in contexts including concerts, dance, theatre, film and installations. The pieces on this album, produced by Manfred Eicher, span over a decade of Moore’s development as a composer, from "Stories for Ocean Shells", written in 2000 (in response to a commission from the Australian Society for the Contemporary Arts) to the 16-minute Canon, for four pianos, which was completed shortly before the recording session in Lugano’s Auditorio Radiotelevisione svizzera. Moore describes "Canon" as an exploration of the character of cadences: “Different progressions of chords have different emotional impacts … It’s about the question of tempo and perceiving time and the way a performer translates and interprets the structuring of time over the piece.” Four pieces here, “Stories for Ocean Shells”, “Spin Bird” (2008), “Zomer” (2006) and “Joy” (2003) are for solo piano, with “Spin Bird” (2008) appearing in two variations, to open and close the programme. “The Body Is An Ear” (2010), for two pianos, is inspired by the writings of Sufi philosopher (and singer and vina player) Hazrat Inyat Khan. “Sensitive Spot” (2006), for multiple pianos, was written for Dutch new music group Ensemble Modelo 62. In the present version, Lankhoorn has recorded the piece over and over, and the recordings have been layered to produce “a rippling pointillist sound world” as George Miller notes. The aim is to “create ‘a human sense of delays’ in contrast to mathematically precise electronic reverb … Human tempo is always changing and the resultant layered recording produces shimmering sheets of sound that vibrates with the iridescence of hummingbird wings.”