Eleanor Cory: Of Mere Being

Eleanor Cory (Composer), St. Luke's Chamber Ensemble (Orchestra), New York New Music Ensemble (Orchestra), Susan Rotholz (Performer), William Blount (Performer), William Purvis (Performer), Eriko Sato (Performer), Louise Schulman (Performer), Daire FitzGerald (Performer) | Format: Audio CD

Product Details

• Performer: Susan Rotholz, William Blount, William Purvis, Eriko Sato, Louise Schulman, et al.
• Orchestra: St. Luke's Chamber Ensemble, New York New Music Ensemble
• Composer: Eleanor Cory
• Audio CD (November 1, 2001)
• Number of Discs: 1
• Label: Composers Recordings (CRI)
• ASIN: B00005T6HI
• Also Available in: MP3 Download
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #650,165 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)

Editorial Reviews

This is an era of pluralism, with many different musical languages vying for the attention of both creators and listeners. A composer today has no single “common language” bequeathed to her or him, but must choose between competing idioms, even if that choice simply means sticking with the style of one’s predecessors. The plethora of information, and the power of media to disperse it, makes it impossible to ignore the enlarged aesthetic field on which music plays today.

For some composers, the response is to hunker down, to choose a single expressive mode and hang tough. For others, eclecticism rules, in a cornucopia of quasi-random, postmodern profusion. And then there is a middle way (not middle-of-the-road), the way of synthesis. Composers of this ilk draw on multiple sources, but their aim is to meld them, to create a seamless blend of elements, where the music can glide continuously over an expressive/stylistic spectrum.

Eleanor Cory is such a synthesist. Her music is the result of intensive investigation of her options and the concomitant amassing of real technique to accomplish any expressive goal she sets. From work to work, despite their distinct personalities, certain common concerns and interests assert themselves. They include:

A love of counterpoint. Cory creates music from setting lines in motion. A musical idea is a thread for her, which weaves and braids with other such ideas to create the tapestry of a piece. At times the lines can be angularly expressive, at others arpeggiated, and often, they coalesce into pulsating 16th-note textures of repeated notes.

A grasp on a wide range of harmonic stances. Cory’s roots are in the modernist classical tradition (a master of which, Charles Wuorinen, was one of her teachers), but these works show a natural feel for harmonic languages that range from the highly chromatic (often the starting point of these works), to the modal (both octatonic and church modes, as one hears in the solo piano work), to the diatonic, and to jazz harmony (for example, Bouquet). The composer also studied with a true American maverick, Meyer Kupferman, whose music blends jazz with serialist elements, so she is reinventing a worthy tradition here. An impulse to blend languages and aesthetics.

This is the element of synthesis mentioned above. Even when a music arises with strong associations, like certain jazzy moments in these pieces, it may be a surprise, but it is a welcome one, well prepared. This music never feels like a pastiche of elements. One senses the connections between different languages, as they often share some element—motivic or harmonic—that links them beneath the surface.

Looking at the specific works on this disc, the title of the composer’s 1996 Play Within a Play refers to the piece’s motivating idea, which in turn guides its structure. The music consists of one style that introduces and concludes the piece (more “abstract,” as Cory describes it), and “frames” a more spacious and consonant music, in theme and variations form. That enclosed section is analogous to the play which occurs within Hamlet, highly stylized, yet which by its conclusion has set the action in the drama in a new light. Similarly, the return of the framing musical materials feels different because of what has preceded them in the variations. Yet equally striking to the listener is how the music “within” the piece alludes so effortlessly and fluently to American jazz. The lyrical chorale of the theme and its pensive offshoots suggest Bill Evans, and the spiky runs Bud Powell.

The 1997 Of Mere Being is notable for the sound of its forces, chorus with brass quintet. Cory treats the two as equal partners in dialogue, presenting a joint interpretation of the text by Wallace Stevens. The composer found certain aspects of the poem ripe for musical treatment and extension, such as in the section which creates an entire accompaniment out of the alternation of “happy/unhappy.” Its great cou