Composer Maya Verlaak challenges musicians

The Hague-based Ensemble Klang’s new CD Vanishing Point is entirely dedicated to three pieces by Flemish composer Maya Verlaak (Ghent, 1990). She likes to challenge herself, the audience and her musicians. Instead of ready-made scores, she sometimes presents performers with ‘puzzle scores’, in which they compete with an unpredictable computer that forces them to find the ‘right notes’. Or they enter into a dialogue with self-recorded music that they can turn on or off by playing certain pitches. Verlaak’s ingenuity seems inexhaustible.

The album, named after the eponymous piece, centres on musical puzzles that the musicians have to solve while playing. In Roulette for piano, guitar and electronics, pianist Saskia Lankhoorn and guitarist Pete Harden are guided through the score using a rotating screen. Two arrows indicate what the guitar, and what the piano should play, but as soon as one of them starts, the other’s arrow stops and vice versa. Only by working together and interrupting each other at exactly the right moment can they bring the piece to a successful conclusion. An intriguing idea, but what is the resounding result?

Spatial soundscape

Roulette opens with a slow, irregular pulse of what resembles the sounds of a Javanese gamelan. Against this heartbeat, we hear sparse chords and arpeggios from both piano and guitar, accompanied by a hefty dose of reverb. This creates a decidedly spatial soundscape with many silences, in which the heartbeat also occasionally stops. The piece ends as abruptly as it began, as if we experience just a snapshot from an endless whole.

In Vanishing Point for percussion and electronics, Verlaak addresses the idea of sounds dying away. Joey Marijs enters into a dialogue with self-recorded material. Once the resonance of a cymbal has died out, the computer generates an electronic beep. The harder Marijs hits his cymbals, the longer their extinction time. His task is to anticipate these different vanishing points and thus synchronise them with each other.

What we hear is a seemingly completely random tissue of faster and shorter, higher and lower beeps against stray beats on cymbals and gongs in varying dynamics. It is as if, while floating through the universe, we pick up signals from aliens, to which Marijs tries to formulate a response.

Musicians form ‘walls’

Conditions, the last and longest piece, lasts over half an hour. Verlaak created this ‘puzzle’ for Ensemble Klang’s six-member line-up (two saxophonists, trombonist, percussionist, pianist/keyboardist and electric guitar) and electronics. In this, too, the performers respond to material previously played and recorded by themselves.

This time, the composer does not consider the place in which music sounds as fixed, but as space between the musicians, each acting as the ‘wall’ of a hexagon. Verlaak analysed how sounds change as they move away from or towards each other. This resulted in a complex mathematical score through which the performers – again – can only find their way by working closely together.

It is the album’s most melodic and harmonic piece. Conditions opens with low, sustained piano and trombone tones and short marimba motifs. Gradually, the other instruments also blend into the discourse, with each instrument seeming to go its own way, so that more and more layers start to slide over each other. The progressively increasingly dissonant sound fabric nevertheless remains transparent.

Challenge for the performers

At intervals, the hushed atmosphere is broken by a strongly distorted electronic sound, like a jammer. This seems to protest against the mutual harmony and gradually becomes more prominent – until it briefly disappears from earshot, only to unexpectedly return all the more aggressively. Towards the end, the musicians also start playing distorted sounds on their acoustic instruments, but who ultimately ‘wins’ the battle remains uncertain. 

All the pieces breathe a meditative atmosphere. This is certainly not unpleasant, but I fear that all these ideas, so well thought-out on paper, are mainly a challenge for the performers; nowhere does it get really exciting. Moreover, the listener is left guessing whether the ‘right notes’ have actually been hit and whether the piece would be the same in a different performance.

In the past, Verlaak has managed to surprise me with contrary, often witty compositions, but the music on Vanishing Point is ultimately a bit too uniform to remain captivating.

This review was written for the Dutch music monthly De Nieuwe Muze

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