Notions of continuity are often complicated in Kenneth Kirschner‘s music. That’s just as true for the connections between material in his compositions as it is between the compositions themselves, as Kirschner has been exploring various parallel and interconnected trains of thought throughout his career, regularly returning to ideas that he first touched on, in some cases, decades earlier. That can make contextualisation a tricky business when considering his newer work.
As far back as Kirschner’s September 10, 1994 (NB. the titles derive from the date on which composition was begun, not completed), he pared back the music to just a single timbre, ethnic bells, isolated phrases of which play out, separated by short pauses, for around 30 minutes. We become aware that every phrase is both unique yet fundamentally similar to all the others, leading to a tentative, albeit questionable, sense of continuity. The same idea is explored, using electronic timbres, in two works from the same period, March 6, 1995 and September 11, 1996.
Fast forward a few years and we come to a series of pieces Kirschner began in the early 2000s (the first being April 3, 2001), when his output took a turn for the abstract. In these works, using the sound of a muted piano, he presents extended sequences of chords, each chord now seemingly unconnected to any of the others, a perception reinforced due to their being again separated by pauses, but here just long enough to undermine further the possibility of connection. Significantly, at the time when Kirschner composed these pieces, he was moving in a direction that increasingly incorporated chance procedures, leading to a period of indeterminate works in the mid-2000s.
A lot has happened in the intervening 20 years, but it’s been interesting to hear this fascination with continuity – its definition, function and even its (non-)existence – resurfacing anew in several of Kirschner’s latest works.
The piece that particularly grabbed my attention is April 27, 2023 which, as well as being one of Kirschner’s most recent compositions, is also one of his longest, clocking in at 2 hours, 48 minutes and 55 seconds. Yet one of the most remarkable things about the piece is that its ostensibly formidable running time becomes completely irrelevant while listening. It’s one of Kirschner’s possibly-real-probably-unreal chamber works, in which a string quartet articulates a seemingly never-ending progression of chords, all of different lengths, harmonies, characters and qualities, with brief pauses between them. As such, they immediately skirt the line between each chord being either its own unequivocal statement or just the latest utterance in an indeterminately-long ongoing narrative.
This effect is in no small part due to the neutrality of the music; there are subtle indications of vibrato here and there, but not consistently, and each chord is presented according to a flat dynamic and articulative contour, never wavering, never altering. As such, like the vast majority of Kirschner’s output, its emotional potential lies entirely in the ear of the beholder. Whether its abstract demeanour comes across as blank, poignant, mathematical, random, moving, or just downright boring arguably says a great deal more about each individual listener than it does about the actual chords and what they may or may not add up to. Music like this could – and in lesser hands, which one encounters way too often, invariably does – end up as a monotonous slog, but the wonder of April 27, 2023 is that it doesn’t; quite the opposite.
The liminal continuity is such that the chords don’t simply hint at connections one to the next to the next, but, beyond this, continually create the impression of being an elaboration, as if they’re a distillation or (better) prolongation of more detailed music that we’re not hearing. Along the way this is reinforced by distinct but possibly imaginary allusions to harmonic progressions; certain notes seem to act as accented passing notes, and elsewhere (such as at the close of the ninth movement) there are even plausible cadences. Kirschner’s decision to divide the work into 12 movements actively distances April 27, 2023 further from a world of pure abstraction. Each movement, he says, “explores a different set of harmonic and tuning relationships between the four instruments”, but behaviourally the quartet remains the same, continuing just as before.
The resultant continuity is therefore extremely problematic to define or describe; from different perspectives it could be thought of as circular, or static, or linear, or arbitrary. Though much seems to be militating against this, i can’t fail to hear it as linear, charting a steady, unstoppable path forward. From where, and to where, i have no idea whatsoever, yet that’s surely beside the point: this is music about the journey, about progression and progressions. And of course, going back to what i said earlier, it’s just as much about nothing at all, just a canvas of random chords providing a neutral space for my own, entirely personal, interpretation.
Similarly convoluted continuities can be heard in several other of Kirschner’s recently-released works. In November 20, 2022 it can be heard in the way the guitar’s melodic noodling manages to convey a linear direction, with a kind of “must continue at all costs” attitude. Here, too, curious pseudo-cadences appear at the close of the first and last movements. March 9, 2023 spends a little over five minutes of steady progress from vibraphone and glock-like material, at a pace that just about gives the impression of a loose but ongoing narrative. Broadly tonal, the appearance of microtonal notes here and there lend it a rather charming uncanny quality.
August 6, 2023 – one of Kirschner’s most dazzling compositions – starts in medias res, within a growing morass of sound, like multiple chords and elements all ‘frozen’ on top of each other. Over the course of the next 13 minutes, it brings to mind the work of Zbigniew Karkowski, where we engage more with perceptions of movement and change within a saturated space (perceptions that are similarly hard to parse, more like clues than something concrete or tangible) rather than specifics of material. Without any pauses at all, the continuity derives from the steady evolution of this central, shifting clusterobject, with frequency beats speeding up and slowing down within, sometimes suggesting there might be some slower-speed harmonic progression passing through the texture, or perhaps that it’s an agglomeration of elements moving at multiple different speeds, such that they’re impossible to resolve.
And then there’s October 29, 2023, Kirschner’s longest composition to date, clocking in at a bladder-defying 4 hours, 29 minutes and 45 seconds. In all important respects, this is a true sequel to April 27, 2023, except that it uses the ‘frozen’ chord idea from August 6, 2023 instead of string quartet chords, presented one after the other without pauses, jump-cutting from one to the next. From one perspective, there’s less sense of continuity as the piece doesn’t have the same clarity of harmonic / melodic connotations (though they are there), and there are also timbral fluctuations that act to distance the chords from each other. Yet the longer-term implications of listening – and this piece really needs, and earns, its extended duration – bring about a very different perception: not necessarily a ‘rightness’ but at least a strong plausibility as to why one chord comes after another. Maybe it’s just an acceptance of something unresolvable, yet over time the jump-cuts become less jarring. Kirschner’s earlier large-scale compositions – such as July 17, 2010, which i explored back in 2011 – were structured episodically, and October 29, 2023 almost unfolds like a sped-up series of episodes, engrossing us in each of its short-lived but mesmerisingly intricate, never static, clusterchords, before moving on to the next, like jumping between parallel soundworlds.
More recent is December 17, 2023, a 13-minute texture of vocal fragments, giving the impression of a voice refracted, and also filtered (there’s some clear pitch-shifting). The continuity is somewhat different here, having not just a melodic but also a verbal / communicative aspect, as there’s the occasional sense of a word or two being almost perceptible, emerging from the flurries of fragments. Furthermore, the quasi-continuity, derived from behavioural and timbral similarity, could be said to have more of a static flavour than a linear one, though that’s just as debatable as it is in all of these remarkable, fascinating pieces.
Released in November last year, April 27, 2023 is available as a download from Kirschner’s Bandcamp site. The other works mentioned are all available as free downloads from kennethkirschner.com.
