When I take this CD in my hand, reading the text of the cover, I find that the set is bursting with ultimate talent; that of The Orchestra of the S.E.M. Ensemble, conducted by the awesome composer and former Cage collaborator Petr Kotik and pianists like Hildegard Kleeb and Joseph Kubera.
Maybe there aren’t any real coincidences, i.e. the Karma of one and all makes things happen and occur in seemingly fantastic strands of events, but I sure got surprised anyhow when indulging myself in this CD from Maria de Alvear, finally getting down to reviewing it after it’s been stacked by the computer for a few months in a pile of other releases from de Alvear’s label World Edition while troublesome, worldly events put obstacles in my way…
First it was Petr Kotik! I didn’t expect him to stare me in the face from this de Alvear CD, i.e. spiritually; there are no pictures on the cover. I had been working, not so long ago, on Kotik’s part of the Sonoloco site, and published a review of his enormous Many Many Women, where he composes structures for a text by Gertrude Stein; an overwhelming work of auditory bliss! All the other issues, by the way, from Paula Cooper Gallery’s label Dog W/A Bone are also piled by the computer for coming reviews… and just the day before yesterday, as I came back home late at night after a solid first performance of Folke Rabe’s work for Brass Quintet and Orchestra – L’assiuolo caprese – in the Berwald Hall in Stockholm, I found, on the floor inside my door, three CDRs with new works by Petr Kotik, not even committed to commercial phonograms as yet, sent to me by the composer for evaluation – so Petr Kotik sure was on my mind… and now here on de Alvear’s World! Coincidences? I doubt it. As I said, I don’t believe in coincidences, as my studies of Tibetan Buddhism would have me doubt. Coincidences are just a brand name for the connections we cannot yet distinguish, right? We may not, perhaps, see the pattern yet, but we feel the underlying web of existence supporting our assumptions.

As for Hildegard Kleeb, I first encountered her on a CD from Hat Art with Morton Feldman’s For Bunita Marcus – the first CD with Feldman music that I purchased, as I remember it. Pugliese, Nappi and Kubera are household names for the Cageian connoisseurs on the Silence list!

All in all, this is a very strong issue, a tight and powerful crew steering a mighty work towards completion.

Extracting information from the CD cover I find that this work aims at making possible the crossing of the attentive listener into another world beyond emotional associations. Even this line of thought is in accordance with what I’m just reading in Sogyal Rinpoche’s The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, which I came across after soaring through The Tibetan Book of The Dead (Bardo Thödol), which was recommended to me by none other than Karlheinz Stockhausen, who urged me to read it. “It’s all there”, he said, and nowadays I do understand what he meant, and it is truly wonderful that a passage towards enlightenment is opened to us, little by little, life after life.

Maria de Alvear has dedicated this major work to the Native American Nations. The reader might get bored by all these so-called coincidences which I don’t believe in, but I just have to let on that I recently – a few weeks ago - bought the mighty collection of photographs of the North American Indian that were painstakingly gathered by Edward Sheriff Curtis (1868 – 1952), now collected in one thick volume of reproductions in a book published by Benedikt Taschen Verlag in Cologne, and Cologne, you may be aware of, is the home of Maria de Alvear, and Stockhausen lives around the corner, a few miles into the Bergisches Land!

The cover text also explains that the collaboration with pianist Kleeb has been a strong and lasting one, with important implications for de Alvear and Hildegard Kleeb. De Alvear especially extends her gratitude to the Indian nations of Cherokee and Tuscarora and all the nations of Turtle Island, with whom she has lived for some periods.

Then Maria de Alvear says something important, which lights a flame of love for her in my heart:

The music begins on a mystical, shrouded, mythological note, in sparse metal and bells, the pianos thundering out of the jungles like moist clouds of sound welling forth in mighty successions across the topography of humanity. I sense human offerings to cruel gods of old, and the intense gaze of a medicine man through the smoke piercing my head, two spots of glowing coal spearheading my amnesia of bardos.

The density of this music almost over-powers my senses, until I let go and let myself be carried on this roaring wave of deep timbres; an ocean of pianos and orchestra in a slowly revolving motion of lives, life after life, a myriad of flickering consciousnesses through the space-time continuum.

Suddenly a minimalist rhythm, as out of some Steve Reich railroad repetition (Different Trains) offers a bead of steadfast audio; a procession of swaggering steel gates in a gallant tour de force down the history of Man, and I get reminded of Philip Glass’ Hopi visions in Koyaansiqatsi.

As the repetitious game ends, slower, more thoughtful sounds appear, in a soft, sentimental reminiscence of emotions out of the romantic era, or perhaps… and perhaps out of a jazzy, club-smoky atmosphere… but it is drawn out into a stream of relentlessness, a wide flood of strings, out of which Bartok pianos hammer away, directing the core of the music towards George Antheil reverences and Charles Ives or Aaron Copland bows, diligent musical gestures, hand-outs of mercy…

This all tells that the music is varied, but there is an inner sense that flavors the atmosphere through-out, a kind of diligence or thoughtfulness that mischievously plays on, touches upon, some traditions of our culture, of our virtuous self-centeredness, holding a curved mirror in front of us, a wretched musical mirror to make us see – hear! – beyond the obvious, which is almost always just a habitual misunderstanding, a compulsory behavior of fearful laziness – until the emergence of DEATH forces us to look upon our total emptiness…

And yet again there are passages in World that come across like beautiful meta-music; music about music, a piano concert about piano concerts… like something that might have risen out of some work by Jan W. Morthenson or Sven-David Sandström or Johan Hammerth… and I rest in these passages like a sailor downwind of an island in a storm, and I watch the light glittering on my consciousness out of fresh moments of unfathomable realms of age… and like a fool I get swayed by these caresses, these fondling fingers across my forehead, making me feel a laid-back love between the stars, and I realize, finally, that this music has won me over, lured me over, carried me over into a state of mind reminiscent of, maybe akin to, the vibrating forces of transparent mind across the Tibetan plains…

I bow, Miss de Alvear, and smile inwardly…