VOICES
Jürg Frey

EXAUDI Vocal Ensemble

James Weeks

NEU RECORDS

Recorded in 3D format (Dolby Atmos 7.1.4), surround sound (5.1) and stereo (2.0)

Voices in the borderland

Sound. Silence. A quiet chord. A fragment of melody. Silence.

Listening to Jürg Frey’s music, a calm settles on us. Calm, but not a daze; rather, a heightened attentiveness, an expanded awareness of the world which lies around us and permeates us. The threshold of sound illuminates the threshold of the self.

The special qualities of Frey’s music have been recognised and celebrated for many years, but until recently the voice was a rare presence in his work. In 2016 EXAUDI commissioned its first piece from him, Shadow and Echo and Jade; immediately it revealed a unique emotional climate, the voices fragile against the backdrop of silence, then radiant and transfigured in the final, shimmering coda. Inspired by this, more pieces followed, the collaboration drawing both composer and ensemble deeper into this focused, intimate vocal world.

Each piece takes a distinct approach. Whereas Shadow and Echo and Jade inhabits an expansive, open terrain at the extreme edge of sound, Out of Chorales is a more compact suite of four short movements, each exploring a single texture, harmonic material or process. Landscape of Echoes is a mesmerically cycling structure of regular, seven-bar phrases, into which voices are added or subtracted with each repetition, conjuring the resonating spaces of its title.

Both of these pieces use texts from Frey’s personal word-hoard, each line as evocative as its music:

Late lost colors
Traces in the borderland
Slight wind and summer light

Winterwhite
Winterwhite

By contrast, Polyphonie der Wörter – the earliest piece and the only one not to have its genesis in the collaboration with EXAUDI – takes a more ambivalent approach to text, seeking to dissolve meaning into phonetic sound by superimposing words on top of each other, until the music seems suddenly to coalesce into a single, sustained sound: pure voice, free of semantic association.

The final two works set Emily Dickinson, whose spiritual transcendentalism accords closely with Frey’s own temperament. Blue Bird’s Tune, written as an open-score work for amateur performers, overlays tonal harmony with a cloud of indeterminate pitch, gradually clarifying towards the centre before obscuring again in ‘cordial mystery’. More substantial is the most recent work, Because I could not stop for death, a slow-turning processional over a repeating ground. Both elements are articulated by different texts – the processional by Dickinson’s dreamlike cortège, the ground by a poem of Bai Juyi (772 – 846), concerning the repeated regrowth of grass. Here, Frey’s extraordinary ability to create unexpected, revelatory harmonic progressions from the most familiar materials is channelled into a deeply moving journey, freighted with the premonition of mortality yet – like Dickinson’s poem – suspended in lightness.

These pieces make exceptional demands on their interpreters, who must place themselves on a threshold, just as the music does: not only navigating the border between the softest possible sound and silence, but in so doing, also navigating the border of their individual technical and expressive vocal identities. With the voice, more than with instruments, one cannot remain invulnerable on that border: it is a place of risk, fragility, and self-exposure. But to take that risk, as Frey invites us in these remarkable works, is to encounter the world through new eyes and ears, a world in which these quiet voices, immanent and embodied, reveal our inextricable human indwelling – our Dasein, our being-there – within it.

JAMES WEEKS

CREDITS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS