Track 2. Etwas lebhaft (1983) [14:37]
Instrumentation: 3 woodwind, 3 brass, piano, violin, viola

Coming home after this November day’s bike exercise, having made the usual 30 kilometer racing round across narrow asphalt roads through coniferous forests dripping with the heavy moisture of fall, I celebrate reaching and passing 5000 kilometers since May, pouring a mug of strong, black coffee – and sliding one of the three CDs that just arrived with the compositions of Christopher Fox into the laser box.

Whammo! I’m immediately drawn into the experience, no time to wait, nowhere to hide. I dry myself feverishly with my bath towel and sit transfixed in the armchair in front of the stereo. I happen to hear Etwas lebhaft first, though it is the second piece on this CD, so I place it first also in this text about the CD.

Though I do not generally read scores, I see this score in a sensual sense, inside my head, projected on the inside of my eyelids as I listen: a harmonious, yet slightly out-of-joint progression down the predicaments of space and time: a semi-transparent motion across dark topographies, the coat of destiny and fate dragging across the expanses of the Bardo of this life.

The fluency of the music feels like language rising out of the readiness of a child’s lingual development; un-hurried, natural, following its due course – yes, like photosynthesis: an exchange of energies; a fluctuation of guises: all dreamscapes of energy displaying the mirages of imagination.

Hearing Etwas lebhaft is like dipping into a flow, like dipping your foot into a mountain stream, like lowering your compositional perception into a Lapland brook with fresh glacier water, + 4° Centigrade and ten thousand years old, yet new as NOW.

Christopher Fox about Etwas lebhaft:

Aha! So that was what I felt when I sensed something slightly out-of-joint in the harmonies! And how applicable on all sorts of human relationships!

Superficially, I hear analogies to Morton Feldman’s For Samuel Beckett in here, especially to one rendition I taped off of the radio (in Sweden) in 1988, performed by The Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra under Jonas Dominique.

There is a layering going on, at least in my mind, when I hear Etwas lebhaft: thin layers of mist in the wind section – and inside the soundscape, inside the atmosphere that it creates: a piano that keeps dripping drops of precipitation into a bucket placed at the corner of a shed, with the assembled stillness of November to amplify it.

Even though this music – overheard in its entirety, as I sort of eavesdrop on it – amounts to a magnificent meditation, it still has this steady progression, this welling-forth, mighty and relentless like a lahar… but in a gentle fashion; gentle and stubborn – a music that works like that famous drop that hollows the rock…

Etwas lebhaft starts out with a sudden, cacophonic fanfare that reminds me of some Stockhausen statements, but the steady dripping piano inside the web has nothing to do with Stockhausen, and even though you may think of Terry Riley and the pulse of In C, it’s nothing like that either, because the In C pulse is excited, up-beat and somehow worried, while the piano of Etwas lebhaft is forest-like meditative. Furthermore, Etwas lebhaft calms down as it passes along, from the fanfare-like beginnings to a turned-away forest-mist atmosphere with the hardly discernable presence of golden-crested wrens up the branches.

The steadiness of the overall motion of Etwas lebhaft reminds me – if analogies serve any purpose at all – of Luciano Berio’s Eindrücke as I’ve heard it with Orchestre National de France under Pierre Boulez in a recording from 1981 – but all the references I make here are layman references, simply based on the impression the music – superficially – makes on me. There is probably no scientific – musicological – substance in those observations – and furthermore, an even more prevalent characteristic of Etwas lebhaft is this dreamy feeling, worthy a Debussy.

However, there is one aspect of Etwas lebhaft that definitely has a poignant substance to it: the sensation of serenity and peace that it renders; the lowering of blood pressure that it induces, and its beneficial effect on metabolism and the diffusion of nutrients.

Track 1. Straight lines in broken times² (1992) [12:44]
Instrumentation: clarinet, violin, piano

Opening in a twin-tempi swiftness, this music falls into a minimalistic mirror-dance of recurrences and disappearances: a hasty motion round the floor: shadowy figures out of someone’s Christmas dusk imagination swirling about at the periphery of human perception, in and out of paintings on the wall, like inklings, like images of shooting stars through the cerebral cortex.

Yes, tiptoeing lightness in a gravity-defying lightness of mind and a saliva-spurting jocularity.

However, the speed at which Straight lines in broken times² enters doesn’t keep up, at least not in the first room, in the immediate view – although on an unheard plane it continues, as a prerequisite - …because the slower tempi that are swung about later on retain all the amassed force of the former speed, in an inertia of audibility that moves with the heavy determination of wet rubber boots through the leaf layers of November in Westonbirt Arboretum.

This is a small ensemble rock ‘n roll tune. I can envision the three musicians standing about, swaggering and stomping – even the pianist, Jerry Lee Lewis-like!

Fox describes the piece:

This is the trio setting. The other settings are for organ / solo cello / bass clarinets and tape.

Tracks 3 – 6. Themes and Variations: memento / à bout de souffle – tangled – intersections / triasse – string quartet (1992 – 1996) [38:46]

Christopher Fox elaborates some on his Themes and Variations:

Track 3. memento / à bout de souffle [12:29]
Instrumentation: violin, viola, cello, piano / bass flute, bassoon, percussion

Christopher Fox:

A full measure of thickly layered music, like thick paint applied to the canvas, thickness upon thickness in colors brown, dark gray, ochre, in sweeping gestures, moving autumn-like – melody swaggering like withheld thoughts of a spruce forest damp with mist and the inward thoughts of silent birds… The piano follows an imagined Hänsel und Gretel path of rocks and pebbles left behind by the ice that retreated ten thousand years ago, and your jacket is wet from the touch of needled branches.

Gradually, the music thins out into an open gaze across a widening meadow, retaining the whining stillness of deer petrified in motionless awareness. Soaring vulnerability.
The bassoon lets loose a wooden garland of Pinocchio gestures; the fairytale figure a song-and-dance man in a sudden liveliness inside this turned-away absentmindedness; a shot of vitamins administered; the score coming to life! The percussion brings new aspects, while the bassoon and the bass flute stand back to caress each other gently, in a peculiar, otherworldly presence. Bassoon courts, bass flute is courted.

Track 4. tangled [6:27]
Instrumentation: clarinet, trumpet, violin, piano, percussion

Fox:

Shrill percussive whiplashes, cutting duration in birthday cake sections, piercing your hearing, yes, you’re hearing the piercing! Beating thin time like a clock! The piano trickles just like water inside the music, while the trumpet – stubborn, longitudal – blows down the walls of Jericho! (or it ties ribbons around the head of the guest of honor, the heroine of the occasion, while encouragers and prompters toss her around into dizziness and undirections!)
The metallic sound of percussion and trumpet resounds like strong sunlight on bronze surfaces, calling all the ghosts of minerals out of their atomic jitter, to stand contoured…

Track 5. intersections / triasse [12:28]
Instrumentation: alto flute, bassoon, trumpet, double bass / clarinet, piano and percussion

Fox:

This really bounces, dances, marches! I hear Igor here: Stravinskij, L'Historie du Soldat! The music munches and chews, walks proudly, stops! Walks proudly! Stops! Starts! Halts! Walks proudly! Marches along in a cartoon manner, so rhythmic, so proud! So swift and so energized!
The music showing off, impressing – pleading… in brilliance and playfulness and in full recognition of its worth! We’re still in the section with alto flute, bassoon, trumpet, double bass. Walk, stop, walk, stop! LISTEN! And GO! And STOP!!! quiet… and… LISTEN! GO! and… STOP! Yes, and I can’t sit still! Yessiree!

But then… aha! - the piano moves in ever so lightly, not drawing undue attention to itself at all, just presenting itself as a matter of fact in the sound picture, as if it’d been there all the while… but I know it arrived on the moment like the fragrance of butterfly orchids with the cool evening air… so the triasse section is here! Percussion talks to itself like an old man on a bench, hat down the face, collar up – old stories rising in shreds up his mind, like bubbles of methane out of swamps…

The music is careful, cautious now, in an ensemble configuration that gradually, all but imperceptibly, rounds up the lightness of the moment, the transparence of absentminded lustfulness, a see-through tenderness that means no ill: a musical benevolence that could cool off even the most angered war lord, it seems… if it were only so…

Track 6. string quartet [7:22]
Instrumentation: violin, viola, cello, double bass

Fox:

String quartet always means two violins, one viola and a cello, doesn’t it? Yes, commonly, that’s the way you always think of it – without thinking! - when you hear the term, of course – but all the term indicates, for sure, is that there are four stringed instruments at play, nicht Wahr? Yes – and here one of the violins is exchanged for a contrabass; a double bass. Praise be! I like being surprised, and this simple exchange surprised me and liberated me some too!

I leave this short string quartet – seven and a half minute – on repeat, and sit back and relax, let it do its work within my place and time right now, accurately, as is, here, NOW. I love it! I seldom hear music with this much gentle consideration for the duration of its existence, as it slowly, silently moves ahead, careful not to disturb the slightest grain of sand or the driest, oldest leaf of grass from yesteryear: a music that tries to observe without affecting that which is observed; an impossible but noble approach, like loving without needing – just letting be, letting exist, in a kind of intercession: a music that, in its purest form, is… SILENCE! Wonderful, touching, inspiring! A Dalai lama kind of music; a Meister Eckhart kind of music; a Saint Augustine kind of music – so gentle and therefore so reverberant, so revealing, like my mother’s wrinkled hand touching my cheek on the verge of her present existence at 95 years of age… and I get up to light some Tibetan incense and listen a few more times to this completely honest piece of music by Christopher Fox. I feel gratitude. The only earlier musical experiences that come close are some blessed moments with The Great Learning Orchestra performing some of the A4 pieces written especially for them.

Track 7. Reeling (1983) [5:19]
Instrumentation: clarinet, percussion

After string quartet – the concluding section of Themes and Variations – Reeling comes shock-wise, like an alarm-clock bursting into a sudden awakening, in a music that leaps and bounces and jumps for joy and the sheer excitement of being fully alive! Jeez!

This is a tap dance that stirs the dust into rising clouds, making you cough! It’s the most unforeseen clarinet/percussion trick you could ever not foresee! In its exuberance it opens personal remembrances of musical moments of similar total instrumental and spiritual devotion down in Kuerten, in some of Stockhausen’s wildest ensemble or soloist compositions, performed by eager attendants at the Stockhausen Courses. I can actually see this musical creature of Reeling - like in a Disney cartoon - in a cloud of dust, arms and legs shooting out in all directions, the energy spurting out like saliva and drops of sweat in the heat of the spotlight! Wow!

Fox says:

Listening and writing through this CD with works by Christopher Fox – the first Fox CD I hear - has been overwhelming, as I am utterly surprised at the sheer quality of the compositions; the liberating thinking behind them and the free-fall experimentation that has harvested such an amazing crop! I hear such quality in here, such marvelous texture and flowing progression - such piercing presence! I haven't heard such quality in a long old time – and the musicians of the Ives Ensemble, one by one and in various combinations, are the crème de la crème of contemporary instrumentalists!