Happy Christmas to you all!
To conclude my week-long sojourn into the start of winter, i’m returning to the Estonian trio Una Corda – comprising harp, harpsichord and kannel – for a performance of a piece that i think is perfect for the festive season and especially Christmas Day itself: Cantus angelorum by Lauri Jõeleht. The title, which translates as ‘song of the angels’, directly relates to the choice of these instruments, as Jõeleht explains in his brief programme note:
A group of theologians and philosophers have contemplated the nature of sound produced by various musical instruments and have concluded that the sound of plucked string instruments might be the closest to those that one hears in the heavenly spheres.
The music primarily consists of an interplay between melodic and chordal ideas – the former highly conversational, driving the piece on; the latter acting as gathering points when the dialogue pauses and the trio is more rhythmically united. However, a sense of unity actually persists throughout everything that happens; the nature of the contrapuntal sections is such that it’s as if the three players were finishing each other’s sentences, or passing a train of thought between themselves, conveying the impression that they’re all essentially communicating the same thing. Read more
For the penultimate work in my week-long journey into winter, i’m again turning away from festive music to a piece that continues my preoccupation with the season’s prevailing darkness. Not that the work in question, Éliane Radigue‘s Occam XVII for double bass, has darkness as its theme; her Occam series is primarily associated with water-related imagery (in part literally, the performers being asked to keep images of specific watercourses in mind while playing). But every time i listen to this piece i’m drawn into a soundworld that i think of as a myriad shades of black, having the same kind of inscrutability and, despite first appearances, endlessly shifting surface details (both real and imaginary) of the marvellous black paintings by 
While i can take or leave most Christmas music, i have a real soft spot for lullaby works setting texts that either allude to or directly address the sleeping infant Jesus. It’s a nice counterpoint to the shouty-shouty zeal that permeates a great deal of festive musical fare, but more importantly it invites composers to explore the most intimate, dare i say ‘snuggly’ side of their musical language. So the next piece in my week-long journey into winter is a lullaby composed last year by Japanese composer Karen Tanaka. Though not actually a Christmas carol at all, to my mind it fits perfectly in this context.
This morning (at 4:19am to be precise) saw the winter solstice, making this the northern hemisphere’s shortest day and the start of not only the season of winter but also a host of traditional festive periods. Being the day when we’re dominated most by night, it’s an ideal moment to spend time with the latest work by Maria Kõrvits, Darkness and Deeper Dark. To an extent, it continues a preoccupation from Kõrvits’ previous work Öö [Night], 
The pair of canticles used in a traditional Anglican choral evensong service effectively straddle the Christmas story, the 
It’s nice, sometimes, when a composition isn’t concerned with layers of complexity and subtext, but instead focuses on a single idea. So as the days grow increasingly cold (here in the UK, at least), it seems an ideal time to explore one of Age Veeroos‘ latest works, the title of which, Külmking, translates as “chills”. It was written for one of my favourite ensembles, 
During my week-long journey into winter, i’ll be veering back and forth between sacred and secular music. When i first heard Tõnis Kaumann‘s setting of the Marian hymn 
The solstice and the season of winter are fast approaching, so over the next week as we transition through i’m going to explore music that taps into some of the aspects of this remarkable time of year. By that i don’t just mean ‘Christmas music’ – which, let’s face it, is rarely something to get excited about these days – but also works that speak of cold, darkness and the ever more encroaching presence of the night.
Live in Lyon is an unedited 23-minute recording of one of Karkowski’s performances. The fact that it’s unedited is significant, as it highlights from time to time the way in which Karkowski wrangled with both the technology and the sound materials themselves, and the occasional dropouts and glitches that occur in no way sound like ‘mistakes’ but only add to the overall effect of the performance. Discussing Karkowski’s music to an extent necessitates looking broadly rather than at minutiae. It tends to unfold slowly, generally favouring evolution and transformation rather than abrupt cuts and shifts, and an important factor in engaging with it is the way one gradually becomes familiar with its discrete sound elements, a familiarity that Karkowski often makes crushingly intimate. 
Caesar’s art is beautiful and unsettling, and that’s not a bad description for Hidden Doors, a four-part journey through a soundscape that’s simultaneously stable – even, at times, borderline stagnant – yet with an omnipresent sense of threat. The first part sets up two layers of sound, one of which is positioned in the middleground, and consists of quiet, slightly glitchy burbling. The second layer involves various pitches being emphatically extruded in the foreground, sometimes piercing or juddering, other times acting in a more circumspect manner, lurking nearby. The relative strength of these two layers continually varies and wavers though extremely slowly, gently altering the depth and focus of the music. In the second and third parts there’s more of a sense of diverse elements being brought together. In the relatively brief Part II, there’s a sense of metamorphosis, of these elements combining to form something new. In less than three minutes it becomes a beautiful but strange, multi-faceted texture in which pitch and noise collide and jostle, as if it were reforming and breaking apart constantly. 
Another of the works at the BBC Symphony Orchestra’s Maida Vale concert of Estonian music on 4 July was Erkki-Sven Tüür‘s 2007 accordion concerto Prophecy, which received its first UK performance with Olari Elts conducting and Mika Väyrynen (for whom it was written) as soloist. Any composer who writes a concerto has to make a decision about the nature and significance of the relationship between soloist and orchestra, and in the case of Prophecy the entire structure of the piece was dictated by that relationship in this performance.
There’s so much i could write about in this series looking at free internet music, that i think it’ll be something i’ll have to return to regularly from now on. For the time being, though, i’m ending this series with an album that’s one of the most imaginative and effective reworkings of existing material that i’ve ever heard. It’s by Irish musician Dunk Murphy of whom, it must be said, i’ve seriously wondered over the last few years if he can do no wrong. He’s the creative force behind the project Sunken Foal, whose three Friday Syndrome volumes (released in 2012, 2013 and 2015) are all absolutely stunning demonstrations of his unique experimental approach to blending acoustic and electronic sounds into something that, stylistically speaking, is very hard to describe, but if we were to call it electronica then that wouldn’t be entirely untruthful.
