Arditti Quartet, Aleck Karis, Paula Robison, Callithumpian Consort - Liang: Brush-Stroke (2009)

One of the most exciting voices in New Music, Lei Liang strips cultural identity of nationalistic, and even hemispheric, agenda. Born in China and now resident in San Diego, he follows the example of Chou Wen-chung and others in trying not so much to synthesize Western and Asian musics – which inevitably results in fusion food – as to recalibrate their languages and philosophies in a new common realm.

His recent music – only one piece is from the 90s, part of the piano suite My Windows – has developed the idea of ‘one-note polyphony’, an extension of his interest in the spectral harmonies of guqin music. The title piece, performed by Stephen Drury’s Callithumpian Consort, combines a very narrow pitch set, signature motifs on the dominant woodwinds, interspersed with wild percussion passages and moments of almost total stasis.

This approach is even more clearly evident in the instrumental pieces. The My Windows sequence ends on three full bars of rest, to allow the accumulated resonances to die away. Built around just six pitches, it’s virtuoso writing of the subtlest sort. Other pieces are more extreme, in the sense that they flirt with extremity. Serashi Fragments, for The Arditti Quartet, is fiercely technical but expressive. Memories of Xiaoxiang for alto saxophone and tape might almost be an alternative soundtrack for Woman of the Dunes, its wailing, ghostly cry played on a detached mouthpiece, its storyline delivered in a Chinese opera version of recitative. Lei Liang requires the harpsichordist on Some Empty Thoughts of a Person from Edo to pluck and palm strings in an approximation of lute or koto music. Some of the playing (the composer’s wife Takae Ohnishi) borders on violence, but there is also a delicate lullaby, interrupted by wild shouts.

Lei Liang is an important musical philosopher, coming into mature expression. The carefully won emptiness of his thought allows sound to flow and cohere in new directions and forms. East and West lose any slack associations.