John Zorn - Astronome
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Music CD Cover
Artist: John ZornEdition: Music CD
CD Release Date: 2006-10-17
Music Label: Tzadik
Soundtracks:
- Act One, Scene 1: A Secluded Clearing in the Woods/Scene 2: A ...
- Act Two, Scene 1: A Mediaeval Laboratory/Scene 2: In the Magick Circle
- Act Three, Scene 1: A Barren Plain at Midnight/Scene 2: An Unnamed ...
Free Music Notes for Astronome
Free Music Review: An important addition to Zorn's oeuvre
Hit: 5 Stars
"Astronome" begins with a fascinating premise - a completely non-verbal "opera". The result is actually more of a operetta, but lets not argue semantics. The style is hardcore similar to the "Moonchild" song cycle with the same instrumentation (Patton, Dunn, and Baron), but don't let that scare you. The aural palette is surprisingly diverse.
Lets deal with the vocal aspects of the work. Richard Foreman supposedly composed a libretto in "vocalese". First of all, I think the term 'vocalese' is malapropos. Vocalese has strong connections to a very distinct style of jazz vocalization (e.g. Lamber, Hendrics, and Ross or the Swingle Singers) and Patton's vocals have nothing to do with this. It's a much more primal, pre-linguistic style of utterances. Where vocalese imposes syllables borrowed from verbal language, Patton's style seems to be somehow before language. Whatever it is, it's certainly unique and effective.
The important thing to note is that Patton's vocals are not just a lot of screaming. It may sound like screaming if you skim through the work, but there are many times when he adopts strange and menacing tones. He can do a lot of odd things with his voice. Rest assured, it doesn't get old.
The music is much more varied than one would expect. For those Naked City fans, this is nothing like "Leng T'che". It's not a huge wall of grinding, painful, death music, but an episodic journey through an ancient mystical world. Formally, I can't comment too much at this point. I've listened to "Astronome" in its entirety around ten times and I don't detect a lot of large-scale development. There are small themes and motives that return in different configurations, but nothing like the thematic development in "Six Litanies for Heliogabulous". I'm not expecting a strict sonata form or anything so mundane, but the whole thing sounds rather through-composed to my ears.
Overall, this is a wonderful new work that explores new sonic realms, even for Zorn. Every Zorn fan should pick this up and give it some serious time. The material is challenging, but no where near as challenging as his game pieces are to me. It WILL take some time before you start to enjoy it fully, but isn't that really true of most Zorn projects?
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