Erkki-Sven Tüür

Abstract

cussion from Beibei Wang. As water is constantly changing, so too is this music. Other than an ironic reference to Handel in the title, this is a rather enigmatic piece. The strongest moment is a triumphant fanfare accompanying the flushing of a toilet. This happens several times. Sweet Wishes has Paxton return to his trombone. This is even more enigmatic than the previous piece. It would seem that Tim Rutherford-Johnson would agree; his discussion of this piece in the liner notes doesn’t actually discuss it at all. The interesting edge-of-coherence explored elsewhere on this album I think has been missed here. In stark contrast, Bye is the most focused and restrained piece on the album and is a welcome gesture of settling down. Saxophone, clarinet and wah-wah trombone play a stately chorus, like the pilgrims’ chorus from Tannhäuser. The compositional task here is the effort to get out of this material, because, as beautiful as it is, it is like an endless loop of self-similarity. A very large-scale everybody-doing-everything climax tries mightily to achieve this. But once this train is in motion, Paxton seems unable to really alter its course – he can only add surface elements more or less in tension with a deeper momentum. There is so much to enjoy in this music, not least the extraordinarily vibrant and virtuosic playing from the Dreammusics Orchestra and Ensemble. From what I can tell, this group essentially is Alex Paxton and his friends, and this album is very much centred on him. He is credited for conducting, recording and mixing all six tracks, and the ensemble has no footprint unaffiliated with him. While listening, I found myself constantly evaluating how annoyed I was. I doubt this is a desired vector of listening. It went like this: somehow I had the impression that he was watching me, evaluating my response and throwing some shiny new thing as soon as my attention flagged. While it demonstrates an extraordinary musical situational awareness, it is also a rather exhausting dynamic. RutherfordJohnson writes that Paxton was a music teacher to young children while in graduate school. That experience has clearly informed his compositional approach. I really do think that there are wonderful elements to this music, though I also feel as though I have been treated like a child. But perhaps this is not such a bad thing.