Things we like: Moon Ha, Amorsima Trio

I'm an old school listener, which means I'm still geeked on The Romance of the Artifact. That said, in our post-Covid techno-world, I've learned to write record reviews from digital downloads and view concerts via livestreams. While I miss the immediacy of analog warmth and the intimacy of being in the room, I'll take my musical kicks where I find 'em. So I'm writing this piece based on listening to a download and viewing a livestream.

By his own admission (in the liner notes to the new album String Works), the New York-based composer-musical technologist Moon Ha is a frustrated violinist who remains fascinated by the sounds of strings. String Works, released last November on Stradivarius, contains pieces he composed between 2011 and 2023 for string octet, quartet, trio, duo, and solo (with electronics). Opener Illusive, the earliest work here, combines the forces of the JACK Quartet and Mivos Quartet. To these feedback scorched ears, it conjures images of raindrops falling, icicles forming, and descending shafts of light. It's followed by "Until That Time May Come...," played by the Momenta Quartet, which uses arcing and collapsing harmonics against an ascending pizzicato figure to evoke an awakening Earth. 

Now to the real reason I'm here: The last three tracks on String Works are performed by Amorsima Trio, in whole or in part. Violinist Mia Detwiler, cellist Kourtney Newton, and violist Mike Capone got together during graduate studies at the University of North Texas, performing in the new music-focused Nova Ensemble under Elizabeth McNutt's direction. They formed Amorsima in 2016 with an eye towards performing music by living composers, and expanding the string trio repertoire by commissioning new works. All three of them have performed at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth as part of the Sounds Modern series that McNutt directs, and Newton is a regular on the improvised music scene in Denton, including the feminist improv trio Bitches Set Traps (with McNutt and Sarah Ruth Alexander). 

On Moon Ha's Artless Beauty in Pursuit of Theory, Op. 2, they explore texture and timbre, then play a section of almost Romantic lyricism, albeit with some very modern sounding chromaticism and false harmonics. A repeating figure that burbles like a flowing stream is interrupted by some patches of dissonance. The piece ends with gentle harmonies. On Resonance is played solo by Detwiler, who uses samples and loops, echo and delay to overlay parts, making herself sound like a complete string section. I've seen her do this live with another piece and the effect is quite stunning. Finally, Moon Ha's elegiac Artless Beauty in Pursuit of Theory, Op. 3, is played by a duo of Detwiler and Capone. 

The Moon Ha album is, thus far, the only studio recording of Amorsima I've been able to find besides a single track on composer Adam Mirza's Bandcamp-available album Partial Knowledge. The trio does have a YouTube channel documenting many more performances. They recently performed a program of six challenging pieces composed by faculty members from the University of Miami's Frost School of Music. Sadly, a planned concert of the same program in Austin had to be cancelled due to weather, but the livestream of the Miami event is archived and viewable on the Frost School's YouTube.

Shawn Crouch's Krasner Canvases consists of three vignettes, each inspired by a painting of Abstract Expressionist icon and Jackson Pollock familiar Lee Krasner. The first two, White Squares, 1948 and Milkweed, 1955, are taut, tense constructions, replete with glisses, tremeloes, and aggressive snaps of the strings. The third, Self Portrait, 1924, trembles with poignant melody. Scott Stinson's Raised By Wolves III (Music in Time of Chaos) starts tentatively, with tension building via the juxtaposition of turbulent bowing with percussive pizzicatos, emblematic of a creeping sense of dread. 

Composer Lansing McCloskey introduced his No Sugar, which includes scordatura (retuning of the instruments) and audience participation in the form of playing back sound samples on their cellphones during the second movement when cued by Detwiler. First movement No artificial sweeteners added opens with harmonized long tones which allow the listener to luxuriate in the richness of the instruments' timbres, giving way to more rhythmically complex lines and rapidly ascending scales. My favorite piece of the evening. 

The second movement, It's fine, I'm fine, everything's fine (a title reminiscent of Fred Frith's "It's Fine" with Skeleton Crew) begins in similar fashion, with Detwiler playing false harmonics as a cacophony of voices from audients' phones begins to encroach. The strings play lush harmonies as the sampled sounds of bells and chimes create a kind of music of the spheres. The piece ends with Newton breaking sheets of glass with a hammer into an aluminum tub (wearing eye protection, with a mesh screen) -- a bit of business that recalls the theatrical aspects of her work with Bitches Set Traps. Because of her onstage position, seated between her trio mates, Newton becomes the visual fulcrum of Amorsima, seeming to direct the group at times with the tilt of her head or the raising of an eyebrow.

After a brief intermission, the program resumed with Dorothy Hindman's Untitled VIII. Capone introduced the piece as a kind of Extreme Close Up view of the sonorities in an oboe solo from Beethoven. (I've often thought of the entire doom metal genre as an ECU view of a fragment from a Black Sabbath song.) If the pieces in the first part of the concert were cinematic in scope, Hindman's piece was more microscopic in its examination of sound in fine detail, with the musicians exploring all the sonic possibilities of their instruments.

For Juraj Kojs' On 386 Bows J, the musicians moved their chairs so they were seated far apart on the stage, then commenced with a furious torrent of notes, lifting their bows theatrically above their instruments, and playing spectrally minimalist long tones that recalled the serene passages from Anthony Braxton's Composition 96. Newton's solo near the end of the piece, which alternated busy passages with "floating" bow, was particularly compelling, leading into a delicately placid finish.

The concert concluded with Charles Norman Mason's Aphelocoma (named after a genus of scrub jays, as every bird watcher knows). The piece opened with a pulsing bass note over which Detwiler and Capone played chromatically gliding dissonances that gradually morphed into vibrato-laden harmonies. An episode of darkly spirited bowing and a brief recapitulation brought the piece and the concert to a close. Would that there were more opportunities to hear music like this in DFW beyond Sounds Modern's now-semiannual performances. Amorsima Trio is my new favorite group that I have yet to hear in person.