Linda Dusman: Flashpoint
Release Date: October 21, 2023
Label: Neuma Records
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With a tagline of “Music and sonic art from the personal to the political,” Linda Dusman walks her talk. While many composers make music about social and political topics, Dusman has a way of deftly intertwining significant societal issues with themes of identity, memory, and human experience, creating a deep connection between music, performer, and listener. The seven works on Flashpoint take challenging current events as creative stepping-stones, from the Syrian refugee crisis, climate change, the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond, as well as to personal themes of love and loss.
Press:
Jazz Weekly — George W. Harris, November 13, 2023
MusicWeb International — Richard Hanlon, January 14, 2024
Fanfare — Huntley Dent, Issue 47:4 (March-April 2024)
I was initially puzzled why Linda Dusman would begin this program of chamber works composed between 2015 and 2023 with Flashpoint, a piece for solo bass flute; she even named the album after it. Many contemporary composers write for unaccompanied instruments, and having heard a dozen or so, I don’t look forward to their general aimlessness. New Music can be abstruse enough with multiple instruments; it feels barren with only one. Dusman has provided a happy exception. Flashpoint is a study in an array of attention-getting techniques, some lyrical or whispering or vocalizing, others almost percussive. The low, hollow timbre of the instrument is used for haunting atmospheric effects—I kept thinking of moaning Japanese ghosts. Altogether I was engrossed from beginning to end, in no small part because of Lisa Cella’s superb performance.
Keeping this success in mind, I was still skeptical about and numberless quotidian happenings, scored for solo bass drum. I’ve heard a whole album devoted to solo snare drum, but the bass drum presents a limited range of sounds beyond boom. Dusman’s piece actually began life scored for snare drum, and I should say immediately that the soloist, Tom Goldstein, has devised sounds other than boom, while being assisted by two everyday objects, a threaded rod and comb—percussion instruments found around the house are a catchy New Music ploy—along with “various sticks and mallets, sighs, shakes, and mumbles.” To this should be added gnomic phrases uttered by the soloist, like “necessary journeys” and “pleasurable journeys.” With a percussion battery at hand, Goldstein rarely goes boom, and an arresting palette of sounds is created (although I don’t quite see how the piece grew out of a discussion between him and Dusman on the role of the bass drum in Le sacre du printemps). With two pieces under my belt, I could appreciate the program note’s declaration that Dusman composes in the terrain between concert music and sound art. As terrains go, this is a wide one without distinct boundaries.
More conventional is unaccompanied violin, of course, and in Dream Prayer Lullaby an ingenious mélange is created by interweaving virtuosic phrases from Paganini’s Caprice No. 6 with melodic snatches of Arabic, Nigerian, and Andean lullabies. It’s a very appealing idea, beautifully carried out by violinist Airi Yoshioka. A plaintive mood and a harsh dissonance or two suggest an indirect political agenda. The program notes make a point of bringing Dusman’s social and political concerns forward; Dream Prayer Lullaby in some way addresses the plight of immigrant children that became a humanitarian crisis at the border with Mexico in 2018. I feel sympathetic, but I can’t quite see how the listener is meant to connect abstract music to politics.
The same applies to Corona Bagatelles, a suite of five pieces for cello and piano that is “a musical cryptogram of the COVID-19 virus, offering solace during the pandemic through intricate musical structures derived from the spike protein’s 1,273 amino acids.” The pieces are in a conventional idiom compared with what has come before, and each bagatelle is ingenious, very musical, and continually engrossing. The performance by cellist Gita Ladd and pianist Daniel Pesca is all it could be, but my appreciation wasn’t aided by any of the information offered about the virus.
Refugees, climate change, and the Syrian crisis are mentioned in the booklet, convincing me that Dusman finds inspiration, and distress, from such urgent issues. I’ll leave it at that, speaking strictly as a listener. The contrast between how the Statue of Liberty once represented America’s open door to immigrants, in stark contrast with the turmoil we see today, is the backdrop for Mother of Exiles, a piece cast on a larger scale. It is written conservatively and melodically except for interjections of punctuated violence. The melodies are reminiscent of folk music with indeterminate origins. The performance by the Inscape Chamber Orchestra conducted by Richard Scerbo could hardly be bettered. We have reached the polarity in Dusman’s output that produces concert music, but there are art sounds as well, so to speak. The effect is quite striking and strong, holding a broad appeal for the general listener.
I’ll mention only in passing the duo for clarinet and trombone, Lake, Thunder, which is not as radical as the solo pieces in exploiting unusual sounds. This reflects its intent as a meditation drawn from the I Ching on energy at rest. Much of the piece is harmonious, in fact, and as I had discovered already, Dusman hasn’t the slightest trouble holding the listener’s interest—she has a gift in that regard considering the extremes she takes you to. The instrumentation for Dancing Universe is the traditional piano trio, so again we are in the realm of concert music rather than experimentalism. In tribute to the composer’s parents, fragments of their favorite hymn tunes flicker in and out (the connection to T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets escapes me). Trio des Alpes gives a lovely performance of a work that hews close to classic piano trios while fully being in Dusman’s personal language.
I feel that I’ve been coerced in a way to bring up extraneous social and political tangents when my dominant response to everything here is great admiration of a gifted composer. Dusman is Professor of Music at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, and many of the talented performers enlisted for this album come from there. The recorded sound is superb in every case. In the program notes I would have welcomed more description of the music.
The first impression one might have is that these seven pieces are all over the place, and the examples of sound art are certainly distant from the concert music. This doesn’t detract, however, from the result, which is one of the most impressive New Music collections I’ve encountered in quite some time.