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It's easy to be dismissed as trivial when your music is attractive, and with David Gunn's music, that would mean missing out on its real attraction. Long before it was fashionable, Gunn used clear-cut rhythms, evident melodies, and explicit harmonies—all while moving music forward into new territory, not backward into some neo-romantic haze.
This doesn't mean his music is easy. Yes, you can stroll out of a concert whistling his tunes. And Somewhere East of Topeka acts like a musical virus that you can't recover from.
But the true nature of Gunn's creations is veiled by its charm. With humor (or at least good-naturedness), they cajole their way into your ears, where they then can do their evil work of drilling into the soft matter of your brain, sowing seeds of hybrid rhythms and harmonic incongruities into your subconscious.
In listening to Gunn's compositions, your softened brain will change. Mine did. Years ago, as part of his cabaret Big Sister, the guitar played an apparently familiar flamenco riff—but one just a sixteenth-note short. Since then, the traditional riff always sounds, well, just a little dull.
And so it is with this recording. About Cowbellies, Gunn writes, “Metrically marked Andante with a full udder, this bovine blues follows the multiple-stomached digestive process of man's best friend.” It's also a spare counterpoint, and an example—like so many of his tunes—of elegant composition, full of stretto, call-and-response development, and imaginative orchestration that works without calling attention to itself.
Gunn's fascination with klezmer is private, twisted, and full of free reinterpretation of its sense in a Milhaud-does-jazz kind of way. Katmandon't carries itself with a dancelike feel, about which he writes, “A baritone sax leads the band on a klezmered journey to northern Nepal.” Katmandon't is a short set of rondo-like variations that also includes harpsichord, and better travelogue music was never written. Bon voyage!
Speaking of voyages, faux-travel is itself a kind of rondo in Gunn's music. Going Like Sixty, written for the 60th birthday of a dear friend, moves through melodic fragments from a delicate pianistic introduction through to driving rhythms. Gunn says, “once this piece gets up to speed, it shows no sign of slowing down.” Or revealing where it's going until it gets there.
Variations are alive and well in the 21st century, so after an evocative klezmer sound arises from mysterious percussion, The Help Me Rondo gently pillages and recasts the Beach Boys' Help Me Rhonda like Diabelli on speed. Like many of Gunn's compositions, The Help Me Rondo is also a theatrical piece—midway through the fugal section, the percussionist drops his music and calls for help. The preoccupied musicians ignore him, but he recovers in time to rejoin them at the piano for a glissando and full-stride romp.
Oddest among the creations on this recording is A Song, a Dance, and a Spizder, three compositions grouped for, it seems, convenience rather than coherency. But what these extended internally coherent pieces reveal is Gunn's future direction that in succeeding years will produce the Mass of Mercury for chorus and orchestra and Urban Renewaltz for orchestra.
Composed for the New Music Across America series, A Song, a Dance, and a Spizder includes Dance of the Hasidic Chigger Hecklers, a full-blown klezmer dance in (mostly) 9/8 time for clarinet, alto sax, violin, cello, piano and finger cymbal. It's in Dance that Gunn's interest in rethinking—and reinvigorating—new music with traditional forms comes through. No one would mistake Dance for true klezmer; but the classical gestures, including this one, are about mutating the familiar into the strikingly new.
Not the Right Balloon—the set's Spizder, which, according to the composer is “a nearsighted duck in a cactus factory, from the German verb spizden, to back hurriedly away from prickly vegetable matter in webbed appendages with degenerative myopia”—is a story-song that uses a Gunn trademark: post-psychedelic verbal imagery replete with puns and distorted sequiturs that demand careful attention, all while you're laughing out loud. The accompanying music is, by contrast, childlike and elegant—part of the gossamer story-song music Gunn has been writing for three decades. Gunn reports that although “the story's rationale has been lost in an apocryphal past, his therapist says it's plainly a composite of five stream-of-consciousness dream sequences that were triggered by a short-term hurdy-gurdy dependency.”
The composer also wrote the lyrics* to Do Aliens Wear Sombreros, another story-song (yes, this is the Song of A Song, a Dance, and a Spizder) with delectably thick harmonies and jagged rhythms, not to mention an `alien activity' section which employs several Whining Cicada With Blinking Eyes Keyrings, erstwhile products of Archie McPhee Company. “It's a dead ringer for what aliens really sound like,” Gunn says with the fleeting conviction that defies Aliens' substance.
The centerpiece and title song of this recording is Somewhere East of Topeka. Again klezmeresque, it is so Bach-like in shape and harmonic direction that it stands as a miniature monument to composing music with modernism cast far behind. It's a virus-music that, like a catchy commercial, simply cannot be exorcised from the mind, but unlike music-for-hire, makes itself inevitable without lyrics hawking face cream or muffler service. (Coincidentally, the title refers to the place where, in 1982, a muffler fell off of Gunn's car.)
And what is this about David Gunn's titles? No one could guess that Out of Cahoots—a lopsided barroom waltz in 5/8 time that uses another Gunn trademark, the whole-tone scale—might actually refer to something in the composer's life (he's not saying), but Hunting Tuna is another matter. Composed for the bicentennial celebration of Stowe, Vermont, Hunting Tuna is a bluesy variation on Justin Morgan's Huntington. With changing time signatures, the music has what Gunn calls “a pleasantly out-of-kilter feeling,” and like most of his compositions, presents both a counting challenge and a musical reward for playing it. In Hunting Tuna, it's as if Holst tripped over Copland on the way toward a New Orleans funeral.
In March of 1996, Gunn and Dennis Báthory-Kitsz, co-hosts of the weekly nonpop radio show Kalvos & Damian's New Music Bazaar, were scheduled to interview composers in Europe. Both wrote pieces to be performed in their absence.Neither was played, and The Missing Inn March makes its debut on this recording. Gunn convolutes, “the tune really commemorates a local B&B that went missing after being sucked into a time-altering vortex on an otherwise fine day in March,” which may be close to the truth as this nearly unmarchable march suggests.
Billions Of Brazilians—though short of the number of Brazilians required for exact performance specifications “by rather a lot,” according to the composer—had its debut in an extended version with a hall full of musicians during American Music Week in 1991. Calling once more on faux-travel, Gunn incorporates an intimation of legitimate South-of-the-Equator sensibility with totally unlikely (but Gunn hallmark) whole-tone melodies spun together with street-organ tunesmithing, Latin percussion, and a certain familiar tune not his own.
Originally written as the “carousel spinning demoniacally backwards” motif for Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes in a theatrical production, Out of the Dark radiates the darkest color of all of the pieces on the recording, a fractured conversation between parts in whole tones, elusive harmonies, and the mere fleeting shadows of a klezmeresque future. “Think Hallowe'en in East Hades,” says the composer.
Fossick is a kind of perpetual motion for violin and clarinet, presented as the short-attention-span version of pulse minimalism. Themes are swapped, a little counterpoint occurs, then, poof—it's over. Like Out of the Dark, its fractured themes slip into and out of the composition with hardly a footprint, save for its recipe with a dash of whole-tone taste and a pinch of rhythmic itch.
Six different time signatures keep Running Lights' driving rhythms honest, and it's the closest Gunn comes to writing a bed of Reichian minimalism. Lights is a showpiece, but in Gunn's characteristically democratic orchestration, he encourages each player to rise out of that bed and reveal a unique sound. Demurring from seriousness, the composers opines, “The Highway Patrol has warned that any performance of this piece outside of a legitimate music hall venue will be cited for speeding. A more demure version that takes half again as long to play called Parking Lights, however, has formally been sanctioned for performance anywhere.”
Khartoumaraca is a gentle trio for clarinet, marimba and cello that has a strong relationship to the opening Cowbellies and the centerpiece Topeka, bringing the cycle of works on this recording to a close. Notwithstanding its sometimes jagged melodic lines, Khartoumaraca, if anything, makes manifest a new compositional substance whose elegance reveals in its accomplished shapeliness the scarred nakedness of the modernist era's jagged melodic lines, and a composer whose works are ready for their place in the contemporary repertoire.
Gunn offers one final riddle about his time signatures: “While Aliens, Topeka, Brazilians and Fossick are in good ol' 4/4 time only, all of the other tunes feature multiple time signatures, including 3/4, 5/4, 6/4, 7/4, 3/8, 4/8, 5/8, 6/8, 7/8, 8/8, 9/8, 10/8, 11/8, 12/8, 7/16, 8/16, 9/16, 11/16, 12/16, 13/16, 14/16, and 15/16. Can you find them all?”
— Dennis Báthory-Kitsz
* Do Aliens Wear Sombreros?
We are not alone, there are aliens all around
From planets far away and Mexicani towns
They dress in Teflon suits and cool serape shawls
They utter boops and beeps and hablan español
Across the sky they zoom in saucers fast and sleek
To cross the Tex-Mex border, though,
can often take a week
The grown-ups have big heads and six or seven arms
With which they keep the peace
and pick fruit on migrant farms
Their backs are green and wet,
propagation's done with tongue
And just like politicians, they often eat their young
[alien activity]
They travel late at night, both singly and en masse
Disguised as mariachis and vapory swamp gas
Do aliens wear sombreros?
David Gunn, composer
David Ross Gunn began his musical training at Settlement Music School in Philadelphia, studying piano and percussion. He later graduated from The Ohio State University with a degree in music composition. His collegiate tunes - such as “A Suite of Piano Pieces for Unruly Children” and “Sonaga (sic) for 2nd French Horn, Piano & Page Turner” - mirrored those of Peter Schickele's P.D.Q. Bach, and sight gags and cream pies prevailed (much to the chagrin of the university). Subsequent works often maintained a sense of humor, but added rhythmic complexity, melodic quirks, and a more gnarly compositional structure. Since 1992, Gunn has received numerous commissions from the Vermont Contemporary Music Ensemble, seven of which appear on “Somewhere East of Topeka.” He has also been commissioned by the Montpelier Chamber Orchestra, the Vermont Youth Orchestra and the Vermont Symphony Orchestra. His vocal music has been performed by the Onion River Chorus and Bayley-Hazen Singers, among other adventurous ensembles. File his music in the melodic, rhythmic and ebullient section of your record collection, with a cross-reference to humorous.
Besides being a composer, Gunn is also a writer, humorist, new music radio show co-host, and was, until this very moment, covert emissary from the planet Zombocartumia in the Crab Nebula. He currently lives in the middle of Vermont and in hope of, in order, peace on earth, good will towards men, and a pile of cash in the bank.
The Vermont Contemporary Music Ensemble
The “voice of the new music renaissance,” The Vermont Contemporary Music Ensemble is dedicated to performing rarely heard 20th and 21st century chamber music and works by living composers. The ensemble also regularly commissions new music. VCME has encouraged significant musical creativity in Vermont since its founding in 1987 by clarinetist Steven Klimowski. It is rare to find an ensemble outside of a major metropolitan area that performs solely contemporary music, yet VCME has done, and continues to do, just that. Further information about the ensemble is available at www.vcme.org.
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