CLASSICAL

If you've been sniffing around the gamier and more extreme edges of the recorded classical music release lists lately, you'll know that the cross-fertilisation that has always gone on between classical music and different popular styles has been generating some stunning new works recently. I've written about two of them in this column: Ed Bennett's Dzama Stories, which draws heavily on Expressionist jazz, and Mario Diaz de Leon's Enter Houses Of, where extreme rock styles are melded with ideas from the classical avant-garde. Both pieces hijack the ear on first hearing, and some listeners may find, as I have, that the more they listen to them, the more deeply they are drawn into this hyper-dynamic, powerfully emotional music.

AWAKE: Includes JUDD GREENSTEIN: Change; SEAN FRIAR: Velvet Hammer; MIZZY MAZZOLI: Magic with Everyday Objects; MARK DANCIGER: Burst; DAVID CROWELL: Waiting in the Rain for Snow; PATRICK BURKE: Awake. The NOW Ensemble. New Amsterdam Records, CD or download

One this new release the NOW Ensemble do something similar but in a very different way. Most of the six pieces on the programme owe some of their immediate and very strong appeal to their composers' very creative and personal response to ideas from pop and to earlier composers who have become iconic figures to many pop artists.

The opening piece, Change, by Judd Greenstein, starts off with a jaunty flute theme that is taken up and developed by the other instruments in the ensemble (clarinet, electric guitar, double bass, and piano) in a way that recalls the Moondog of pieces like Good for Goodie, or maybe the beginning of Terry Riley of In C. It's happy music that sounds great in the morning.

Nothing too surprising in the fact that Sean Friar's Velvet Hammer is based on repeated notes and chords, but there is much to marvel at in the variety of timbres and moods he gets from them, from woodpeckerish tappings to ringing peals to pounding attacks, all in six or so kaleidoscopic minutes. According to the anonymous online notes to the disc, one of the ideas behind Velvet Hammer was to find out what might happen "if the entire group were given access to the electric guitarist's effects pedals" and changes each instrument to find a way to amplify its sound and make use of the new sonorities produced. Listen to Velvet Hammer, and you'll know.

Mizzy Mazzoli's Magic With Everyday Objects has at its core a long, emotionally banal and nagging piano part that sometimes yields to or joins forces with wind melodies that pace insistently over a narrow span of notes. These are gradually overwhelmed by a nightmarish melange of sound. "Blocks of music are turned upside down, chords slide relentlessly out of tune, repetitive melodies become hopelessly entangled, and a schmaltzy piano melody perseveres throughout a frenzy of sound," the disc's annotator quotes the composer. Maybe some listeners will be more insightful than I am at linking the emotional tone of the piece with its title, but whatever that me be, it's a compelling earful.

The rest of the programme takes a lighter tone. After the black sonic blur of the latter part of the Mazzoli piece, Danciger's Burst scintillates with bright colours and rhythms. Listen to the nimble interplay between the electric guitar, piano and flute after about 3:00, and again at the end of the piece. There is an openness and optimism in the music, you also hear it in the Greenstein and Burke works on this disc, that is very far from the hyper-intense anxiety, hysteria, and despair that are almost to be expected in much new concert music (there is plenty of it in the Diaz de Leon and Bennett works mentioned above).

Sheer beauty of sound is also out in front in David Crowell's Waiting in the Rain for Snow, which start out what an arrestingly lovely episode that sounds like Balinese gamelan music repainted in the colours of the Terry Riley of A Rainbow in Curved Air. Sustained pitches eventually put the brakes on its constant flow of movement to make way for music "shrill winds of repeated chords with interesting harmonic shifts" that points up the minimalist style that was implicit earlier on.

Awake by Patrick Burke, really does seem to emerge from a dream state as the quiet, firefly-like flashes of piano and electric guitar sound that open it are energised by repeated notes and entrances by other instruments. The activity increases to create a sonic jamboree that is brought to a halt with an astonishing gesture, a long, slow glissando at the very bottom of the ensemble's bass range. Listen after that to the power Burke gives to way the double bass and piano, in its lowest register, support a sonic fabric fluorescently coloured by the electric guitar.

I came across this release as one of the new classical offerings on iTunes. The "digital booklet" that comes with the download, or at least the one I got, consists only of the cover art, with no text or documentation of any kind. And alas, because even though I was able to find some scraps of information online, more would certainly be welcome. Even so, the music speaks very eloquently for itself and I recommend it strongly even to people who usually keep their distance from contemporary classical music.