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The Journal of Music

The America-born violist Nathan Sherman is a regular fixture at new music concerts in Dublin and beyond. Resident in the capital since 1999, he is a founding member of Ficino Ensemble, as well as a member of Stone Drawn Circles, who have both performed at New Music Dublin this year and last. Recent album releases have seen him closer to the spotlight, including on his duo album with Alex Petcu, Totemic, from 2022. His latest release, The Gentle Erasure of Time, is his first solo album, featuring six viola-and-electronics tracks. There are three Irish composers included – Jonathan Nangle, Sam Perkin, and Linda Buckley – alongside Karin Rehnqvist, Nicole Lizée and Benjamin Broening.

In building an album of solo instrumental works with electronics – particularly for a single-line instrument like viola in this case – a question that must inform the composition is: Why? What does the natural instrument bring that the electronic component cannot, and vice versa? Do the shades and acoustic qualities blend or act in opposition to one another? In commissioning these works, Sherman was surely seeking ways of approaching and exploring these questions.

Case in point: a spray of electronic colour opens the album, forming into a pair of chords – major, then minor – and a viola melody enters over the top of it. This is Jonathan Nangle’s The Gentle Erasure of Time, the shortest work on the album, unfolding over the following six minutes, with the viola often seeming fragile amongst the more intense, almost pointillistic fixed part. Notes form and morph into harmonics, or rapid arpeggios answer the pulsing accompaniment. By contrast, Swedish composer Karin Rehnqvist’s I Thought the Sea Would Sing to Me casts the viola as solid and earthy. Exploring plaintive material through an almost improvisatory journey through the viola’s varied timbres, it draws on a wealth of techniques – quarter tones, glissandi, battuta strikes – in increasing intensity. The solo viola work continues for long enough that, even on a third or fourth listen, the entry of the electronics (designed by Rehnqvist’s former student Gustav Lindsten) like a flash of light catches me off guard. The Canadian composer Nicole Lizée has a distinctive sonic vocabulary. Her Tuurntazm is made in homage to turntablism, gliding between episodes, sometimes serene, sometimes propulsive. The viola is more subsumed into the overall texture here, often treated as a sonic ingredient rather than a solo instrument – but not always, as it comes to the fore at times imitating record scratches or spiralling through arpeggios. At the end, Sherman plays two separate duelling parts while an electronic crowd cheers them on.

Extramusical
Like his recent hybrid-symphony Children in the Universe, Sam Perkin looks to the American public figure Charles Eisenstein for a title, in this case More Beautiful Than it Has to Be. Typically for Perkin, it’s optimistic, open-hearted, and vividly colourful. But I can’t deny that my response is coloured by its influence; I find Eisenstein frustrating at best, concealing cowardly moral positions behind lyrical prose. Yes, this is an extramusical problem, but Perkin leans hard into the connection, and the tighter he binds his music to Eisenstein’s writing, the less patience I have for it, beautiful or not.

The American composer Benjamin Broening describes his work Memory Shifts as being based on how memories change over time and repeated retellings. It’s based on the same material, played three times with fairly substantial changes each time – changes in emphasis, technique, melodic direction. Broening built the electronics from the sound of the viola and full credit is due here to producer Garrett Sholdice and engineer Edu Prado, who make the wise choice to allow the viola and electronics to blend in a way they couldn’t in a live performance. This gives the music a dreamlike quality, the viola sometimes duetting with itself, other times asserting its presence when you thought it was already there.

The closing work for the album is Linda Buckley’s The thin veil. This opens with the solo instrument playing drifting pairs of notes, holding off on the introduction of electronics for the first minute of the piece. When they do enter, they seem to answer, ethereally, the viola’s notes. Buckley’s description refers to the belief in the thin veil between reality and the spirit world at Samhain, and there’s a sense of the natural and electronic sounds being on opposite sides of that veil, but dancing together. This work’s sublime ending reaches a rousing height, bassy electronics bouncing under soaring viola, but before it can land, the veil closes, a single earthly note all we have left to hold onto.

There’s a factual through-line to this album – that is, these are new works for viola and electronics – perhaps even an autobiographical one, drawing on artistic partnerships Sherman has nurtured over the decades. But it’s not a conceptual or musical through-line, so the process of listening to the music can feel disjunct. There is certainly thought put into the ordering – keeping the structurally-similar Rehnqvist and Buckley works separate, for instance. For me, this disc works well, but in two mutually exclusive ways. As a whole, it’s a showcase for Sherman’s formidable skill; his beautiful tone colour and acrobatic virtuosity, as well as providing a wealth of answers to the question I posed at the start of this review. But each track so distinctly creates and explores its own soundworld that it rewards listening in isolation.