Gloria Coates: Indian Sounds (Symphony No. 8)

Editorial Reviews
Album Description
Gloria Coates (b. 1938) is of a modernist generation for whom music is a vehicle for dark, disturbing emotions, for whom the range of musical sounds must be greatly expanded to blast through audience complacency and address the special horrors of our time. At the same time, she is capable, as few members of her generation are, of limiting her materials and welding a work into a single gesture. She realizes, as most serialist and expressionist composers have not realized, how much more intense a piece of music can become when it is narrowly focused, when it does not flutter around to every possible technique, but hammers away within well-defined limits. These thoughts are inspired particularly by these vocal works of Coates’s, which are so much darker than her usual instrumental music. Coates is best known, after all, not for vocal music, but for her symphonies. And, diverse as her work is, its common denominator, the technique she has been most associated with, is the glissando, the gradual upward and downward pitch shift, like a siren. In their emphasis on text and emotion, the pieces here sometimes push the glissando out of the limelight, but glissandos still inform the background of every piece at some point. When Coates turns to the human voice, she is typically atypical. None of these works fits neatly into a genre of vocal music. Even the earliest and most conventional piece here, The Force for Peace in War, is a kind of mini-cantata of heterogeneous text elements. The voice is sometimes absent from most of the work, and appears almost as a distancing element, like a lone human figure on a panoramic landscape. Moreover, Coates says, "the texts for Cette Blanche Agonie, Fonte di Rimini, and Indian Sounds should not be understood. The music is the text really . . . [the structure is] derived from elements of the text . . . so the text itself is used as part of the music abstractly." It all gives us a different view of Coates, with her love for canons, symmetries, geometric patterns pushed slightly to the background to make room for the more human concerns of the texts. And it further illuminates one of the most original composers of the late twentieth century, a woman who evolved her own compelling aesthetic by applying minimalist intensity to an expressionist vocabulary.

Tracks:

String Quartet No. 7 'Angels' (2000)
Grave
On Wings Of Sound
In Falling Timbers Buried
Prayer
Molto Sostenuto Espressivo
Adagio Molto Con Espressione
Allegretto Scherzando
Marcato
Mirror Canon
Agitato

Customer Reviews:

intense, dreamy intellectualism.......2004-08-22

Coates is fond of using Baroque analogies to cast her work in technical terms, and in interviews openly confesses her love for Vivaldi and Bach. While there's little doubt of her meticulous attention to formal structures, make no mistake--Coates would be burned as a witch had she produced works like these in the 18th century. Not to be flip, but the discerning eye will note in most portraits of Julian Bream a subtle protest: fingers forming the "devil's 9th" chord, the playing of which was punishable by death during the Inquisition and afterward. This somewhat dissonant chord is clearly visible on the cover of his arrangements of Bach's partitas.

Coates incorporates a vast vocabulary of dissonances into her rarified soundworld--one at odds with much of modernist orthodoxy (which the moderns have long since morphed into) for its sheer emotional heft and technical complexity. She sounds nothing like Vivaldi; for that matter, she sounds nothing like any composer. If one is pressed for comparisons, her music bears passing resemblance to Feldman, and then only in the vaguest terms. The simplistic view would be to call her quartets and symphonies scores for approaching flight paths--what airports sound like on the outside from fixed positions, a soupcon of colliding Doppler fades and crescendos. More directly, though, the listener finds a smoldering core of mournful, ambivalent glissandi that cascade over one in a torrent.

Like most 20th-century iconoclasts, she favors strings over horns, woodwinds and percussion, and the utilization of large banks of violins, violas and cellos in her orchestral work gives it unprecedented scale. This characteristic follows with her chamber music as well, and it must be noted that any ensemble playing Coates must do so with a sense of this multiplicity. This offering is clearly among the best.

Gloria Coates: Indian Sounds (Symphony No. 8)

Average customer rating:

Gloria Coates: Indian Sounds (Symphony No. 8)
Coates , Wirrmann , and Kuntzsch
Manufacturer: New World Records
ProductGroup: Music
Binding: Audio CD

General | Symphonies | Classical | Styles | Music

General | Classical | Styles | Music

Classical | Indie Music | Stores | Music
ASIN: B00006RYCY
Release Date: 2002-10-29

Tracks:

Cette Blanche Agonie
Indian Sounds (Symphony No. 8)
The Force for Peace in War
Wir T Allein
Fragments from Leonardo's Notebooks, Fonte di Rimini

Album Description

Gloria Coates (b. 1938) is of a modernist generation for whom music is a vehicle for dark, disturbing emotions, for whom the range of musical sounds must be greatly expanded to blast through audience complacency and address the special horrors of our time. At the same time, she is capable, as few members of her generation are, of limiting her materials and welding a work into a single gesture. She realizes, as most serialist and expressionist composers have not realized, how much more intense a piece of music can become when it is narrowly focused, when it does not flutter around to every possible technique, but hammers away within well-defined limits. These thoughts are inspired particularly by these vocal works of Coates's, which are so much darker than her usual instrumental music. Coates is best known, after all, not for vocal music, but for her symphonies. And, diverse as her work is, its common denominator, the technique she has been most associated with, is the glissando, the gradual upward and downward pitch shift, like a siren. In their emphasis on text and emotion, the pieces here sometimes push the glissando out of the limelight, but glissandos still inform the background of every piece at some point. When Coates turns to the human voice, she is typically atypical. None of these works fits neatly into a genre of vocal music. Even the earliest and most conventional piece here, The Force for Peace in War, is a kind of mini-cantata of heterogeneous text elements. The voice is sometimes absent from most of the work, and appears almost as a distancing element, like a lone human figure on a panoramic landscape. Moreover, Coates says, "the texts for Cette Blanche Agonie, Fonte di Rimini, and Indian Sounds should not be understood. The music is the text really . . . [the structure is] derived from elements of the text . . . so the text itself is used as part of the music abstractly." It all gives us a different view of Coates, with her love for canons, symmetries, geometric patterns pushed slightly to the background to make room for the more human concerns of the texts. And it further illuminates one of the most original composers of the late twentieth century, a woman who evolved her own compelling aesthetic by applying minimalist intensity to an expressionist vocabulary.

Track Listings:

Track Listings

track listings

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