By Sammy Stein
Aaron Wyanski is a man on a mission. He is a pianist, composer, and musicologist. Wyanski has been a featured composer at festivals and major events and has held a deep fascination with the atonality and compositional style of Arnold Schoenberg since he was young. This recording Schoenberg: Pierrot Lunaire, OP.21, sees Wyanski continue his ongoing exploration and homage to Schoenberg via the medium of jazz, Schoenberg in Hi-Fi. You have to be free-thinking to understand what Wyanski is intending with his Schoenberg in Hi-Fi series, of which this recording is another step. Wyanski coined the title “speculative musicologist” to describe the project, which is a series of albums and performances that explore a speculative reality in which Schoenberg’s music was intentionally marketed as lounge/exotica as part of the late 1950s LP boom in mid-century America. Wyanski takes Schoenberg and rearranges it, dropping in a large portion of jazz and enhancing the atonal concepts – hiding sweet inventions to be found and making Schoenberg accessible to an even wider listening audience. It might not seem to fit a free jazz take – until you hear it. Then, it makes sense. I was lucky enough to see Wyanski’s work performed in one of London’s major free jazz venues – Café Oto, and the audience there loved it.
On this recording, Wyanski radically rearranges Arnold Schoenberg’s atonal masterpiece, Pierrot Lunaire OP.21 with vocals performed with glorious decadence by soprano Anna Elder. In the alternate reality where Schoenberg is marketed to mass Mid-century audiences, it would coincide with the rise of high-fidelity audio. Many albums were being sold by boasting “you’ve never heard sounds like this before.” In Wyanski’s universe, that means freedom, and the sounds might come from a real or imagined faraway place. Or the sounds of outer space. Or an eclectic orchestration. Or an experimental approach to the new possibilities afforded by stereo sound. Or all of these.
An interesting feature of Schoenberg in Hi-Fi as a whole is that, aside from percussion, nothing is added or removed from Schoenberg’s work. As a result, while the transformations can sound radical, Schoenberg in Hi-Fi becomes a new lens to experience what is already in Schoenberg’s scores. Wyanski calls this practice speculative musicology.
On how he and Elder came to collaborate, Wyanski comments, “Anna and I met while both participating in the summer festival New Music on the Point and got to know each other better while we were both living in Pittsburgh a few years later. After my first Schoenberg in Hi-Fi release, she wrote me a very kind email and said that it reminded her of Yma Sumac, whom she used to make and perform transcriptions of, so she really got the whole exotica angle. She also mentioned that she was getting ready to perform Pierrot later that season. Seeing this opening as the once-in-a-lifetime possibility that it was, my response was, "Hey, want to make a Pierrotalbum with me?" and I consider myself extremely lucky that she agreed. I couldn't have asked for a better collaborator. There is a wide range of performance practices for the vocals in Pierrot, but the fierce accuracy of her approach I find especially well-suited for Schoenberg in Hi-Fi."
Wyanski has struck gold with Elder. Her vocals are rangy, and she also has an ability to not only be note-perfect but also to infuse a laid-back sense of decadence and humour into her singing.
There are twenty-one tracks on this recording, and they seem to fly past, as Schoenberg is given the interpretation he possibly deserved. Elder introduces elements such as a wonderful swinging sassiness on ‘Madonna’ while the essence of Schonenberg looms large on ‘Mondestrunken’ and Der Kranke Mond,’ albeit with a slight touch of Austin Powers sixties tones in the latter. The ears occasionally find themselves most definitely pricked as Schoenberg’s delectation for atonality and dissonance is explored.
A delightful confluence of classical music, jazz and, well, something completely different, this music is an exploration not just of Schoenberg’s style and workings but also a development of several areas where dissonance becomes almost harmonic. In every chord, it can be argued, all the notes are present, and dissonance is created when you rearrange and reorganize them, something that Schoenberg and his ilk took delight in and then unleashed on unsuspecting audiences – sometimes to their liking.
It is similar here, and the listener is drawn in if they are curious enough, or brave enough, to venture beyond the expectations of expected resolutions to sequences, progressions, or musical cadences, whether perfect, interrupted, or imperfect. What is most intriguing about the music is not its sixties tones, or slightly irksome embellishments, but its hidden notes, the sudden drops and changes, or the beautiful, crazy vocal lines.
When I reviewed Wyanski before, I said that free jazz appreciators will understand. This music makes complete sense. It still does, and Schoenberg still has a lot to show us.
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