reviewed by: Frank Kouwenhoven

This is an album of short (two- to eight-minute) contemporary works for chamber instruments, including one piece for electronics. Some of the pieces (which were all written in the period 2010-2022) are movements extracted from longer works, but on this album they have been given a new order to create deliberate contrasts between different sonorities. Basically they all operate in a new context, since the composer looks upon the entirety of the album as a new composition, a compound work very much in its own right.
Thus, we move from the first piece, an electronically amplified evocation of brooding sounds for erhu, accordion and piano, to a nimble and swift study for guitar which consists almost solely of rapidly played harmonics, soon to be followed by an exploration of rich sonorities on tam-tam. And so the album continues, with short solos for lever harp, an ensemble piece for flute, violin, cello and piano, and more. One element that connects many of these ‘bagatelles’ is that the instruments used are often employed in unconventional ways, sometimes even making it hard to guess what instrument one is listening to.
Listeners will look in vain for melodies or for any specifically ‘Chinese’ sounds (although the guitar as heard at the beginning of track 7 may briefly suggest the world of guqin), and they may at first be bewildered by the rapid succession of different sonic landscapes, or the strict focus on timbres and noise. This is a composer not much interested in form or organic development of themes or motives. I was reminded of the ‘spectral’world of composers like Gérard Grisey, although these bagatelles still seem to operate on a very different plane. So what does it all mean? To be sure, the name ‘bagatelles’ appears to understate the actual stature of these pieces. Upon repeated listening, many of them work like Japanese haikus, each piece unfolding a different realm of unexpected beauty and lyricism.
The composer was born in Taiwan in 1977, where she had her first musical training (piano, and composition at National Taiwan Normal University), before moving to Paris in her early twenties, and continuing her studies with Yoshihisa Taïra, Allain Gaussin and Philippe Leroux. In Europe, she embarked on a fairly successful career as an independent composer, writing contemporary music exclusively on commission. In this album on the label NEOS (which specializes in new music) she provides the listener with mere hints of the sources of her inspiration: her pieces primarily appear to evoke nature - in its organic, material sense, but also in its more mystifying aspects, resonating as sensations of light, space, movement and breathing in man’s body; ‘respiration’ being the key-word here. And then there are the poems of Emily Dickinson, an artist whose work evidently means a lot to this composer. Every piece in the album is coupled with a text from a specific poem by Dickinson, though mostly in mingled form, which makes it hard or impossible to arrive at full sense of every separate text. But according to the composer herself these lyrics serve at best as mere vignettes, as ‘extended titles’ for each piece, in which perhaps one or two isolated phrases may provide some hint at meaning, but one can also do without them, as, indeed, one can do without the actual titles of the works, often no more than abbreviations, such as ‘TTy’ or ‘p.53’. They surely mean something (TTy, for tam-tam, stands for the name of a specific percusssionist, Tsai Tsui-ying). But it is the music that should speak for itself, and it is best enjoyed as sounds, and as a direct interaction between composer, listener, and the natural and metaphysical world surrounding and pervading us. There are plenty of different moods in these pieces, ranging from menacing (track one) to jocular and playful (track 13) and beyond. The presence of a respiring, silent earth looms large in many of the pieces, while the composer (as a ‘personality’) is attempting to make herself invisible, or at least as small as possible. A rewarding experience, this album, a sort of radical redefinition of what music can essentially be about - but of genuine interest only for the truly adventurous, people with big ears and open-minded attitudes!
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