Music for Film, Sculpture, and Captions (Kairos, 2022) is the fifth portrait album of Anthony Cheung’s music and brings together three works for large ensemble. A line can go anywhere: Concerto for Piano and Ensemble (2019) was written with the wire sculptures of Ruth Asawa in mind, and for the forces of Ensemble Modern, with soloist Ueli Wiget and conductor Franck Ollu. The Natural Word (2019), written for Ensemble Dal Niente and conducted by Michael Lewanski, uses stock captions of sounds found in film and television as starting points for transcription, depiction, soundtrack, and Foley. Written in collaboration with video artist Tristan Cook and scholar Sean Zdenek, the piece is an extension of an interest in semiotics, expanded and in dialogue with disability studies and media studies. And null and void (2021) exists as both a musical accompaniment to Stump the Guesser – the irreverent silent film by Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson, and Galen Johnson – as well as an independent work on its own. The piece draws on the unique virtuosity of Ensemble Musikfabrik, conducted by Elena Schwarz.
Released on Kairos Music, October 5, 2022
Introductory essay by Tim Rutherford-Johnson
(album booklet and other info available on the label’s page)
A line can go anywhere (2019) for piano and ensemble
Ueli Wiget, piano
Franck Ollu, conductor
Ensemble Modern
The Natural Word (2019) for ensemble
Ensemble Dal Niente
Michael Lewanski, conductor
null and void: music for the film “Stump the Guesser” (2021) for ensemble
Ensemble Musikfabrik
Elena Schwarz, conductor
Selected Reviews
“…Cheung’s intensely colourful, exquisitely wrought ensemble-writing lets us imagine them. Rattles and scrapes on woodblocks segue into chiming triangle and into microtonal high winds: there is dazzling control across the instrumental gamut (with equally dazzling performances throughout the album). Restraint is key: Cheung rarely over-eggs the material, framing with silence the sound heard, be it the faint click-clacking of a clarinet’s keys or the buzzing decay of an overplucked harp. Eventually, the contrasting episodes morph into a more continuous texture of swelling, quasi-spectral rising and falling scales. The instrumental variety gives The Natural Word the character of a concerto for orchestra… Alluding to the wire-mesh sculptures of artist Ruth Asawa, Cheung’s piano concerto A line can go anywhere explores the piano as a wired mechanical box. Slow microtonal descents are a recurring motif, staggered across instruments, and a just-intonation Rhodes keyboard adds colour. The first movement presents an opening cell gradually becoming more complex, like wire unfurling, the opening staccato and pizzicato flourishes eventually leading to dense microtonal textures. In the quieter second movement, dense passages transition to and from bare ones imperceptibly. In the thrilling third movement, a high piano trill motif is like a high-wire routine setting off a chain reaction of tremolo pyrotechnics throughout the ensemble, from rattling triangle to glissando violin. An intriguing album fusing the traditional and the contemporary.”
Liam Cagney, Gramophone, March 2023
“Cheung responds to the material, and to [Daniil Kharms’] aesthetic, with nearly everything but the kitchen sink: Harry Partch’s instruments, thunderous, motoric percussion that references Russian futurism, swing-era jazz brass, with wah-wah mutes, glissandos, and altissimo stabs, and a pistol firing (there is a game of Russian roulette on screen). I would greatly like to see how it syncs up with the film, but null and void as an aural document has a beguiling sound world. Cheung’s partnership with Kairos continues to expand, encompassing a variety of techniques and inspirational material. Accompanying videos of these pieces would be welcome – dare we hope for a DVD release?”
Christian Carey, Sequenza21, February 2023
“San Francisco-born Anthony Cheung is one of America’s most imaginative young composers. Yet his work has been better appreciated across the Atlantic… From his idol Beethoven, Cheung inherited a sense of motivic coherence that helps to organize his kaleidoscopic sonorities…In the exquisite slow movement, “Weightless/Sustained,” Cheung exhibits a knack for synesthetic textures and colors. This is what a quartz might sound like if it could sing — the piano’s prismatic upper register supported by pizzicato strings and mallet percussion. Intricate metric layering and floating woodwind lines help to lend the impression that we’re astral-projecting through some crystal cosmos. The closing “Woven Wire” movement is an homage to the gyroscopic sculptures of Japanese American artist Ruth Asawa. Cheung captures the moiré patterns of her basket-like creations in a virtuosic perpetuum mobile for Wiget, who executes impossibly difficult cross rhythms with player-piano precision. For the pinwheeling grand finale, jackhammer repeated notes and funnel-shaped two-hand runs seem to suck us down into the accelerating vortex of Asawa’s crisscrossing wires.
Joe Cadigan, San Francisco Classical Voice, Jan. 2023
“Cheung’s concerto plays with the contrasts between occupied and empty spaces through the opposition between the piano and its orchestral accompaniment. The piano, as the sound surrogate for Asawa’s sculptures, throws out a filament of fragmentary, skittering lines whose interstices are filled by the surrounding strings, winds, and brass. In the first movement these latter tend toward independent, individual lines, while in the slow second movement they are grouped into fused masses. The agitated final movement suggests the experience of perceiving an object from shifting perspectives — an appropriate way to apprehend Asawa’s wire sculptures, whose elaborately traced shadows throw out dynamic patterns when seen from a mobile viewpoint.
Conceptually, the single movement The Natural Word, also from 2019, is the most intriguing work on the album…Many of the sounds described by the captions are natural—wind, birdsong, the sounds of frogs and seagulls, thunder—but others are more abstract and, presumably, challenging to put into music. This is where Cheung’s mastery of the timbral potentials of orchestral instruments comes fully into its own…The result is a cohesive soundtrack suggesting a narrative logic one can’t quite put one’s finger on—like experiencing a dream or watching a film with peripheral vision only–but which nevertheless makes perfect sense. At a more prosaic level, Cheung’s orchestrations of the sounds described—low strings for ships’ horns; glissandi on high strings for wind blowing; fused strings and winds for the EKG machine—mimic their models to an uncanny degree.”
Daniel Barbiero, Percosi Musicali, November 2022
“Listening to this spine-tingling collection of three pieces puts you in dialog with a lively mind as it responds to creativity encountered in sculpture, film, and, yes, captions. Cheung's absolute brilliance as an orchestrator and sonic synthesist are at the fore throughout, perhaps most impressively in The Natural Word (2019), composed for and performed by Ensemble dal Niente. Inspired by a selection of closed-captions describing sounds other than dialog, this gives Cheung the opportunity to blend together, in a witty and captivating 15 minutes, such cues as "orchestra playing tender melody" and "rain pattering." The assured architecture of the piece - another specialty of Cheung's - keeps it from being just a sequential series of sounds. That structural confidence is also well-represented in A Line Can Go Anywhere (2019), a piano concerto that pays homage to the spare, playful beauty of Ruth Asawa's sculpture. Pianist Ueli Wiget and Ensemble Modern give a dazzling, definitive performance of a work which could find a place in any orchestra's repertoire. Null And Void (2019), given a swaggering, pin-sharp performance by Ensemble Musikfabrik is not a film score but a "musical analogue" for Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson, and Galen Johnson's silent short, Stump The Guesser. Not having seen it, I can only say that if the film is as full of charm, elegance, and emotional variety as the music Cheung created, it must be a masterpiece.”
Jeremy Shatan, An Earful, November 2022