Bandcamp's Best Contemporary Classical Music of 2024
The Best Contemporary Classical Music of 2024
"The taxonomy of contemporary classical music—new music, contemporary music, whatever you want to call it—is a thorny issue. That ambiguity makes rating the year’s best offerings difficult, if not impossible, but embracing the big picture of musical diversity that these 10 albums have delivered all year long has provided excitement, asked questions, and explored disparate sorts of beauty. These are the best contemporary classical albums of 2024 in alphabetical order." – Peter Margasak
PM: "British composer Leo Chadburn trawled through musical sketches he made more than 25 years ago to revise and develop the pieces found on his latest album, a stunning minimalist showcase where the most skeletal material feels gorgeously expansive. Pianist Ben Smith tackles three of the five works—with the composer adding subtle synth accents on two of them—beginning with “The Reflecting Pool,” a series of patiently and elegantly intoned arpeggios whose sustain is underlined by electronic halos. It’s one of several pieces here that seem to levitate almost motionless, quietly enveloping the listener with decaying overtones that seem to reveal more action than the rolling lines from which they emerged. “Camouflage” goes through endless shifts in phrasing and accents while retaining the same harmonic contour—as if watching the infinite sparkle on the surface of a a placid sea—while the closing piece “A Secret” is an ascending scalar line “Map of the World” is a knockout string quartet in which a single chord is sustained for 10 glorious minutes of sensuous harmony, with variation coming primarily from shifting bow pressure or arco speed, casting a mesmerizingly beautiful ambience that could sustain for eternity. While certain listeners might complain that nothing happens, I only wish the reverie didn’t end so soon. “De La Salle (Violins)” employs a similar tact with greater aggression and volume, with the bows in constant motion to produce an eerily still yet pregnant atmosphere, effectively charged by terse single line variants. Technically, not too much happens, but it’s among the most exciting things I’ve heard all year."
PM: "Over the last few years, Nick Dunston has rapidly blossomed from first-call double bassist for the likes of Tyshawn Sorey and Vijay Iyer into a multi-layered creative force creating music that lays waste to any specific discipline. As strong as his previous work has been, this new juggernaut, which he bills as an “Afro-Surrealist Anti-Opera,” achieves new heights. I’ve never heard anything like it. The Berlin-based Dunston used a commissioning opportunity with JACK Quartet, America’s most adventurous and technically advanced string ensemble, to forge a work built on dualities, colliding composed and improvised music; acoustic and electronic sounds; and instrumental and vocal elements. The sounds played by JACK are insanely visceral, with lacerating scratch notes, un-pitched scrapes, and just intonation harmony. But at times Dunston treats them like readymades, layering them with his own furious bass playing, or dissolving them within an attack laid down by a string, Berlin-based ensemble rooted in jazz. Working closely with producer Weston Olencki, Dunston operates like a master sculptor, using edits and electronic treatments to facilitate mind-melting blends further interwoven with a quartet of daring vocal improvisers from both sides of the Atlantic—Isabel Crespo Pardo, Sofia Jernberg, Cansu Tanrıkulu, and Friede Merz—who toggle between language and pure sound. Dunston is juggling a shit-ton of material here, and it could’ve easily collapsed under its own weight. But instead, he’s created a suite of dazzling extremes and electrifying confrontation that reveals a razor-sharp vision. There’s not nearly enough space in this column to dig into a textual analysis, but nothing about Colla Voce is simple. After a dozen listens I’m still coming to terms with it, but each spin has only made the process more enticing and rewarding."
PM: "Last year I wrote admiringly about the trio Les Certitudes performing the music of its keyboardist Léo Dupleix, and this phenomenal new album suggests that he’s in the midst of a genuine creative explosion, masterfully harnessing the harmonic splendor of just intonation within ravishing, slow-motion melodic forms. He plays stately harpsichord lines, conjuring a sound somewhere between Arnold Dreyblatt and C.C. Hennix. But once the rest of his ensemble begins to shape patient, beautifully pastel chords alongside him, the music opens up. “Resonant Tree I” features the clustered tones of violist Cyprien Busolini; traverso flutists Mara Winter and Johanna Bartz; and bass clarinetist Juliette Adam unfolding amidst Dupleix’s cycling patterns—subtly shaded with synth tones—which are further complemented by meticulously placed acoustic guitar and 12-string accents from Fredrik Rasten, which function a bit like a prism, brilliantly refracting the sounds. The flutes are absent on “Resonant Tree II,” which is guided by a related but different sequence of chords, elevating the viola into a more prominent role, interacting with the harpsichord sounds more explicitly, and pulling away from the muted bass clarinet tones. In a brief sleeve note the composer writes that he often dreams of a “sound that one could grasp in one’s hand.” It doesn’t feel like a dream as much as a beautiful reality."
Also one of my favorites of the year.
PM: "Only one of three pieces that comprise this stunning album of work by Canadian composer Paolo Griffin features more than one musician, but they all present sound in some kind of dialogue. On the opening composition “The Purpose of an Empty Room,” alto saxophonist David Zucchi unfurls largely static long tones subsumed in electronics that alternately expand his blown notes into an upper register choir or smother them in rippling feedback. I don’t know how much agency the performer has, but it’s telling that the composer quotes another great Canadian composer, Martin Arnold, in the album note: “When music is slack it does not thoroughly enforce completion. It stays open to be explored, co-created by the listener.” Indeed, all of the music here seems to breathe, with Zucchi locating exquisite variety and richness in the hidden crevices, echoes, and mutations of his deceptively simple lines, with just intonation further enhancing the kaleidoscopic harmonies. “Alone, Together,” performed by violinist Aysel Taghi-Zada and percussionist Michael Murphy, is more precisely notated, but here the slackness between the jagged, tart string instrument and the clangorous resonance of the percussion proves crucial in opening up small chasms and responses that feel innately interactive despite them both following a score. The album closes with countertenor David Hackston singing inside a refractory electronic landscape on the knockout “Madrigal,” his stunningly precise delivery radiating into eerie, endlessly mutating clusters at once heavenly and hellish. All three pieces meander luxuriously, their inherent patience opening up gorgeous new sonic vistas."
PM: "Sarah Hennies reaches a new creative peak with this striking 2-CD collection of three new works that simultaneously reinforce her well-defined aesthetic while forging new ground. All three works deal with incremental shifts embedded within repeating phrases; but the scale, timbre, and sweep have never been grander. The 10-minute “Zeitgebers,” German for “timer,” retains the composer’s ardor for percussion music, melding vibrant field recordings by Marc Namblard with the sort of deliberately janky, homemade rhythms Hennies has made a bread-and-butter feature. But it’s the other two works where things really open up, expanding the ways cyclical time can impact music. The composer usually uses a stopwatch to mark her scores, but for “Clock Dies,” New York’s Talea Ensemble wanted to use a conductor; so Hennies decided to write something closer to what she calls “normal music.” In this case, the slowly morphing themes initially suggest a Morton Feldman vibe, although Hennies soon shifts gears while vividly bringing out different sections of the ensemble in different parts of the work—whether it’s stuttering damped piano patterns or terse string-and-wind machinations. Time is evoked through a halting rhythm that suggests a broken clock, or several unreliable timekeepers colliding. “Motor Tapes,” performed by Dedalus Ensemble, draws on similar ideas; but the use of electric guitar passages to convey the bland, isolated memories that take hold of us across our lives act as a translation of neuroscientist Rodolfo Llinás’s idea that certain experiences play over and over in our heads—like a tape loop. Few contemporary composers can bring such heady ideas to life within music that’s so utterly captivating on its own."
PM: "Ernst Karel and Bhob Rainey are two of experimental music’s most intrepid thinkers and explorers. Both are horn players who started out playing free improvisation and have taken wider but nonetheless circuitous paths in sound over the decades. Few artists can match Karel’s work with field recordings—especially his more recent work in cinema, while Rainey was half of the influential lowercase sound duo Nmperign with trumpeter Greg Kelley. They spent nine years making this epic, pouring a mix of live instrumentation and meticulous field recordings within a chord progression tuned to a 96-note octave—it should be remembered that Rainey studied with microtonal pioneer Joe Maneri years ago. Pooling their resources, the pair have created something special—a loose series of narrative dramas that resonate with rich harmonic depth. They’re both credited with electronics and recordings, but Rainey occasionally adds slowly decaying piano chords that provide grounding and almost function like a Greek chorus. Two of the pieces deftly add an abstracted string quartet and clarinets, further enhancing the dramaturgy while helping to underline the potency of the recorded material, which is sometimes spiked with unexpected elements, like the strident blast of Indonesian pop music that suddenly pierces “Sparks an empty pool.” The album has puzzled and delighted me in equal measure, leaving questions that keep pulling me back in for another listen."
PM: "As a child growing up in Hawaii, composer Leilehua Lanzilotti spent time around the sculptures of Toshiko Takaezu. So when she was enlisted to co-curate an exhibition of the artist’s work, specifically exploring the sonic element of Takaezu’s ceramic objects—resonant bodies she called “closed forms”—Lanzilotti was able to draw upon first-hand experience. The second half of this album is the 46-minute title work, which is included in the show as a video installation. The composer played a variety of the artist’s bronze bells and closed forms—some of which contained small objects that were dropped inside of them before they were fired in a kiln, creating variable rattle-like qualities. The result is a patient exploration of those peculiar resonances; frictive, clattery accents punctuating longer swells of decaying tones and muffled, extended rumbling that sounds as if recorded underwater. The album opens with the New York trio Longleash performing “for Toshiko,” a concise four-movement based on recordings of Takaezu’s bronze bells transcribed and arranged for piano, violin, and cello. The individual movements were titled after a quote from the artist that conveyed how her work connected the visual, the tactile, and the sonic. The enveloping resonances are harnessed and parsed, with shifting lines that thrum and drone, mixing percussive stabs and arching long tones. Sō Percussion tackle “sending messages” using clay pots on the first movement and bells and rattles on the second, sharpening Takaezu’s generous sound world in ebb-and-flow pulsations and abrasions."
PM: "French violinist Clara Levy (Ictus Ensemble, Onceim) designed this gorgeous album as a concert program, framed with a clear sense of movement, with the sound of her instrument growing more and more focused as the collection proceeds. She opens the album with a bracing meditation she wrote to set the tone, the raw grain of the violin submerged in ambient noise. Our ears acclimated, she moves on to Giacinto Scelsi’s three-movement “Xnoybis,” a rigorous, occasionally strident exploration of a single pitch from countless microtonal perspectives, swerving, wobbling, and vibrating with glorious, richly textured detail. Following another Levy piece, where the violin exerts only a ghostly presence, as striated harmonics tangle with ambient noise, she tackles Kaija Saariaho’s “Nocturne,” a study for what became her monumental violin concerto Graal théâtre, that’s marked by a wide range of timbral investigations; lurching, curving, and tangling. “Allégorie,” by the young Mexican composer Erika Vega, delves rigorously into delicate overtones emanating from pin-drop bowing distinguished by sparkling vibrato, punctuated by pizz plucks. The piece feels lighter than air, but hits hard with its spectral harmonic action. The album concludes with “Listening Into Silence,” a lengthy piece by the phenomenal German composer Eva-Maria Houben—a leading member of the Wandelweiser Collective—that’s filled with rests whose lengths are determined by the performer in an effort to bring the listener into the piece itself, occupying those theoretical silences as an act of calibration for more detailed engagement. The last piece is a kind of a guide to the whole experience, which can erase time as we inhabit these rarefied spaces."
PM: "Violinist Sarah Saviet and pianist Joe Houston formed their duo back in 2019, and while there are loads of compositions written for such instrumentation, they’re devoted primarily to those that are unabashedly experimental, with a repertoire including pieces by Catherine Lamb, John Cage, George Lewis, Chiyoko Szlavnics, and Morton Feldman. But on their first recording together they followed their instincts and presented a set of original works they developed back in 2022. As with Microtub, these pieces are tailored to specific sonic worlds in which the two musicians thrive—an area no outside composer could understand as well. The album opens with the minimalistic “lines, spaces,” a halting yet conversational dialogue conducted with terse note splatters—sometimes coming together in dazzling unison, but more often articulated in contrasting patterns and sudden passages of sustained sound. The result is a kind of virtuosity of reduction upended by the gorgeous violin long tones and needling piano in the composition’s final minutes. The middle of the album is occupied by three shorter pieces that deploy different iterations of breathless, high-velocity interplay—with phrases that seem modeled on speech patterns—in which the duo’s technical precision and telepathic connection elevates the zig-zagging unison and contrapuntal writing into an athletic experience. But my favorite work on the album is the lengthy closer “unfoldings,” a gorgeously sustained meditation in which Saviet bows extended, richly striated, shape-shifting lines over lushly ringing drones produced by Houston using e-bows on the piano’s strings—the sounds aligning and departing, and generating electrifying harmonies."
PM: "As much as I’ve enjoyed previous recordings from Splinter Reeds, the extraordinary winds quintet led by bassoonist Dana Jessen on Dark Currents feels like a high-water mark—a recording that finally reveals the fullest diapason of its dazzling versatility and curiosity. I wouldn’t necessarily have expected a piece by Bang on A Can co-founder Michael Gordon to so powerfully reveal the ensemble’s mettle, but his idea-packed marvel “Tall Grass” does just that. Even as the composition sets off with familiar post-Philip Glass-adjacent minimalism, the way the composer utilizes each of the virtuosic voices—joining Dessen is oboist Kyle Bruckmann, saxophonist Nicki Roman, clarinetist Bill Kalinkos, and bass clarinetist Jeff Anderle—breaking them into fast-moving sections and injecting a steady array of harmonic effects that seem to transform the timbre into something almost electronic. The kaleidoscopic action morphs with astonishing fluidity, bringing psychoacoustic fuckery within a dizzyingly peripatetic excursion. Paula Matthusen’s “Antenna Studies” veers more toward abstraction, delving further into more elusive sound worlds into which are woven aerated traces of radio broadcasts. The composer has claimed that the work is designed so that it “may be tuned into by performers and audience members at different points, either by radio or phone.” I’m not sure how it works with radio or phone, but listening to the meticulously placed sonic strata produced by Splinter Reeds on my speakers I’ve been tuned in and turned on."