Christian Wolff & Antoine Beuger - Where Are We Going, Today (Erstwhile Records, 2018)

Christian Wolff & Antoine Beuger - Where Are We Going, Today (Erstwhile Records, 2018)

With a combined age of 147, Christian Wolff and Antoine Beuger make for the eldest duo to grace Erstwhile Records. Where Are We Going, Today perfectly showcases the duo's decades of separate experience, while also demonstrating a surprisingly contemporary creativity. The music is like little that has came before, although taking numerous references from each composer's prolific past.

Christian Wolff is an American avant-garde composer, best known for his mid-20^th century works where he worked closely with composers like John Cage, Earle Brown, and Morton Feldman. Among several cutting-edge pieces from this era, one of Wolff's most important, and likely the most infamous, was 1969's Stones: a three-sentence text score which told any number of musicians to make any type of sounds with any shape or size of stones, for any duration, and without any notes on progression or form. One of the most famous performance of this piece is the 1995 recording by the Wandelweiser Komponisten Ensemble, a collection of composers dedicated to contemporary experimental music who were best known for experimenting with extremely quiet and reductionist music. Performers included Burkhard Schlothauer, Jürg Frey, Michael Pisaro, and Antoine Beuger.

On Where Are We Going, Today, in addition to voice and whistles, Beuger is credited as playing "EWR recording (1995) of Christian Wolff's stones", referring to the recording I just mentioned. That might sound odd or confusing, but it's actually completely literal – throughout Where Are We Going, Today, the EWR recording of Stones can be heard near-silently playing in the background, unprocessed, uninterrupted and unamplified. It truthfully sounds like little more than gentle rainfall, which I'd probably assume it was given the occasional presence of other field recordings within the album. The fact that it wasn't simply a field recording, in my opinion, provides great interest. What a clever way to pay homage to the music of the past – a piece by one composer and performed by the over, a ground layer of influence.

This isn't the first time that Beuger has layered pre-recorded pieces like this before. It brings me back to 2009's brilliant two . too (for erwin-josef speckmann), which contained two hour-long pieces – two and too. two was a new piece, performed by soprano Irene Kurka and clarinetist Jürg Frey. too was, simply, that same recording of two with an earlier duo piece, three drops of rain / east wind / ocean (recorded for Hibari Music), placed over top of it. On too, the pieces worked together. Neither were in the foreground or the background, and they found wonderful ways to accidentally harmonize. In Where Are We Going, Today, Stones obviously exists exclusively in the background. It doesn't work alongside the new piece, it just gives it footing – it's the album's canvas. It's a little thing that many listeners, especially those listening on speakers, may not notice – but it plays a huge role in giving the piece life and personality.

That's probably enough about the background, let's talk about the foreground. The album primarily consists of two main sections: the patient spoken words of Antoine Beuger, and the spontaneous improvised instrumental interruptions of Christian Wolff. I'd like to talk about aesthetic purposes of Beuger's spoken voice before I go into what he's actually saying. Beuger says only 234 words during the album's 70-minute runtime, sequenced in about 25 independent stanzas. The stanzas themselves vary from being several lines to a single word and are broken up by multi-minute gaps. Even the sentences themselves are read with Beuger's voice slowed to a drawl. His voice is soft and calming, which lends greatly to the album's daydream atmosphere. On my second listen of the album, I attempted to transcribe Beuger's text. I sequenced words into sentences and stanzas, attempting to put them in the format closest to Beuger's intentions. This is an exercise I highly recommend to those interested in the album, or those having difficulty with it. I found that I kept losing track of time – was that last word seconds ago or minutes ago? The last word, or the last line, would ring in my head until the next would come, be it moments or minutes later. This is a common goal within music of this slow, quiet vein – leaving the listener to reminisce over the last note while they await the next. But, to my experience, never has it worked quite like this before and, in my opinion, never before has it worked quite this well.

The text is as mysterious as one might expect. There is no obvious format, order or logic to the lines, although there is a particular stanza which gives great insight into the general meaning of the text: "Lines / Strangely beautiful lines / Inexplicably converting." Strangely beautiful are the lines indeed, not just due to Beuger's relaxing tone, but due to the poetic prowess of the lines themselves (fans will likely remember Beuger's previous flirtations with poetry in music, such as on his previous Erstwhile duo with Michael Pisaro). Other lines seem to be discussing the music itself, almost taking the appearance of a text score: "Any duration / Any instrument / Any number / Any ways of making sounds." That stanza ends with the word "Any" repeated seven times.  We get even more repetition further into the piece, when stanzas built from reused phrases emerge – a greatest hits stanza, if you will. Beuger himself calls these lines, and especially their conversions, inexplicable, so I don't think there's much use in attempting to interpret this text literally or logically. Instead we have a series of vague thoughts about music, aesthetics and collaboration, sequenced together in a way which is equally poetic and meaningless. It's ambiguous, but it's beautiful.

And finally, we have the last piece of the puzzle: one of America's most important composers of avant-garde music, Christian Wolff, on piano, objects, charango and flute (although I could swear I heard a melodica in there). His contributions to the album are, or at least sound to be, completely improvised. He typically plays in brief interjections, melodies, and single notes and chords – rarely do they last over a half minute, and there are usually long gaps in between these instrumental passages. My guess is that Wolff recorded several brief improvisations on a variety of instruments, and the whole thing was edited together by Beuger. His playing is free and varied, but I'd still call the majority of his passages light and breezy – harsher and more distracted improvisations would take away from the piece's zen atmosphere. Beuger's text does actually provide a bit of insight into these passages as well: "Music / Just a few sounds / More than just a few sounds / But only if just a few sounds." The duo seems to find something pleasant within these just-a-few-sounds passages, where their briefness allows them to represent more than what was actually played – perhaps the idea is to allow the listeners mind to imagine further music from the few notes which were played. Either way, it seems to be some contemporary music reimagining of the well-known phrase of "less is more". I can't quite pin down what's so wonderful about these passages – the improvisations aren't so interesting or emotional in themselves. It must be how they match with Beuger's spoken voice. They rarely exist on top of each other, but never quite juxtapose one another – it's more like coexistence. Perhaps Beuger explains it best: "Understanding each other silently / Quite still and solitary / Wonder why."

Where Are We Going, Today is gorgeous, completely subverting and surpassing my expectations. The duo plays with many, many years of experience and they use that to create something simultaneously nostalgic and modern. The music feels moving, conceptual, and inspiring, but it always manages to pass right through me like a cool breeze. Works, and collaborations, like this are rare, so Where Are We Going, Today is not one to miss.

Where Are We Going, Today is available in both digital and CD copies from the label's bandcamp:
https://erstwhilerecords.bandcamp.com/album/where-are-we-going-today