Richard Cameron-Wolf - Passionate Geometries (2024) [Official Digital Download 24/88]

“I want to tell you what’s going on here. You don’t want to know… Is art just a substitute for what we’ve lost?” In his micro-opera Heretic, Richard Cameron-Wolfe’s enigmatic protagonist breaks the fourth wall, and in the process gives us a window into his artistic vision. Through exploration of dramatic and narrative subtlety in his micro-operas and text settings, expressive shadings of pitch in his use of microtonality, and finely etched treatment of timbre and gesture, Cameron-Wolfe reaches for the ineffable, something embedded in what we’ve “lost” or perhaps an essence of something that we can never possess. Throughout these chamber works, written over a thirty year period, we hear him calibrating his expression towards the mystery that lives between and beyond the sounds, obscuring the transparent surface in favor of the ambiguities of creative uncertainty.

Heretic introduces the listener to a format that has become a core component of Cameron Wolfe’s work, the dramatic micro-opera for one performer. Performed with precision by guitarist Marc Wolf, also the score’s diligent editor, the piece demands an embodied dramatic performance alongside, and often concurrent with, the intricate instrumental part. Cameron-Wolfe engages with the inherent tension between live performer and audience and the balance between inward and outward impulses in art making. The guitar part is woven into the wide ranging vocal part, including wordless vocal effects, spoken dramatic text, and sung passages.

Originally conceived as a piece to be choreographed and performed with dancers, the pacing and organization of Time Refracted for cello and piano reflects that initial intention. Cameron-Wolfe establishes a quietly enveloping pad from the opening, in alternating gestures between oscillating figures in the piano and poignant double stops in the cello. One can imagine dancers responding to the moment to moment dialogue of ideas as well as the overall searching quality that pervades the piece.

Opening with the same quartal harmony that begins Heretic, Mirage employs an alternate tuning of instruments with a standard fretting setup, achieving a scale of 48 equal divisions of the octave through the four guitars. His use of the microtonal tuning goes beyond local expressive color, becoming a structural pillar for the unfolding rhetoric of the piece, developing ideas through microtonal variations across the ensemble. A folkloric melody characterized by an upright dotted rhythm is distorted through an “out of tune” presentation and rhythmic diminution and wobbling bent notes are punctuated by pointillistic interjections.

O Minstrel appears on its own in this collection, but is also the opening movement of a chamber cantata for soprano and ensemble. The ritualistic song sets a text by 13th century Sufi poet Fakhruddin Iraqi entreating a minstrel to grace the protagonist with the inspiring gifts of art and love. The voice and guitar lines are in equal dialogue, with Cameron-Wolfe using the instrumental line to paint the text with fleet passagework, rich block chords, and haunting tambour gestures.

Telesthesia for cello quartet was written in memory of the composer’s friend Harold Geller who passed away in 2019, and captures the phenomenon of feeling the presence of one we have lost in our ongoing life. As with Mirage, gestural accumulation is achieved by subtle displacement of rhythmic simultaneity and extended vocal and percussive techniques broaden the sonic palette. Telesthesia uses contrasting characters and an episodic structure as its organizing principles.

Cameron-Wolfe’s Kyrie (Mantra) has gone through several iterations; the version heard on this recording was transcribed by Ukrainian guitarist Sergii Gorkusha and effectively integrates components of the prepared piano version. The work is divided by three extended flute solos, the first is an evocative introduction that features extended techniques (the original seed for the piece). The guitar enters with a sound vocabulary that evokes the sound world of the keyboard preparations – polyrhythmic tapping passages, bartok pizzicati, and left hand hammer-ons. The second and third flute cadenzas are separated by a passage of bell-like harmonics in the guitar, and migrate from virtuosic bursts to sustained multiphonics.

The second micro-opera on the recording, Lonesome Dove - a true story for “tenor saxophone, watcher, and portable darkness”, dramatizes an experience Cameron-Wolfe had in graduate school listening to a dove singing in the early morning. While he first thought two birds were singing responsively he eventually realized it was simply one dove relocating and answering itself, creating a spatialized performance of its own song. Cameron-Wolfe embeds this mysterious dialectic into the piece, building implied melodic and timbral counterpoint into the saxophone part, as well as planning a mobile staging wherein the performer, a dancer, and an eight foot tall black screen move to simulate the unseen movement of the dove.

In Passionate Geometries for soprano, flute, cello, and guitar, Cameron-Wolfe re-engages with the theme that underlies Heretic, the nature of and desire for the “poetic life.” Here, he sets his own text about a poet who is struggling with a crippling writer’s block under the weight of earthly disappointment. Cameron-Wolfe divides the work by using various instrumental combinations: a cello solo opens the piece, a short ensemble passage leads into a duo between soprano and flute, which sets up an instrumental trio phrase, and so on. The two middle strings of the guitar are tuned a quarter tone low to allow for shadings of pitches within that range. Cameron-Wolfe’s ensemble writing alternates between tightly coordinated rhythmic mechanisms and looser, more fluid dialogues with the voice. This dichotomy balances the piece between rigor and expression, an apt analogy for the forces shaping the struggle of our protagonist poet.

Tracklist:
01. Cameron-Wolfe- Heretic
02. Cameron-Wolfe- Time Refracted
03. Cameron-Wolfe- Mirage d’esprit
04. Cameron-Wolfe- O minstrel
05. Cameron-Wolfe- Telesthesia- 13 episodes-deliberations on multi-planar syzygy
06. Cameron-Wolfe- Kyrie(Mantra)IV
07. Cameron-Wolfe- Lonesome Dove- a True Story
08. Cameron-Wolfe- Passionate Geometries


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