Review from the New Music Recital at the University of Maryland, College Park (April 27, 2010)
Wind Quartet (2009) by Tomek Regulski
by Sasha Beresovsky

I was immediately struck by the drones emanating from the lower woodwinds against which the higher-pitched melodies were interposed. The technique appeared very similar to classical Indian music from the South, known as the Carnatic style, in which a special instrument called the tambura produces a buzzing sound on the first and fifth scale degrees. However, as Regulski's piece continued, the lower woodwinds too assumed foremost importance in the music's polyphonic structure. The overall impression of the piece was beginning to assert itself in my mind. At first I imagined a scene from a horror movie, but quickly abandoned the idea for something more serious and realistic. A deserted battlefield, in which the chaos of war had dissolved into the quiet agony of death and pain, forced itself into my mind's eye. In particular, the pitch-less blowing and the rasping, nasty tone produced by the instruments reminded me of dying soldiers wheezing, coughing, and breathing their last. Inconclusive melodic fragments, often in the form of abrupt chromatic slivers, completed the image - an apparition, perhaps the Angel of Death, slowly making his way among the wretched men, wrapped in the foul haze of fog and smoke. Here was certainly a worthy atonal successor to Prokofiev's lamentation scene from Alexander Nevsky.

28.4.10
Review of last night's "New Music" Recital at the University of Maryland, College Park
by Samuel Barham

Dissonance without the larger context of harmony loses its meaning - is in fact the very absence of meaning. Just as a string of tonic chords arranged arhythmically are bereft of expression, so are strings of tritones and minor seconds, randomly arranged; which stir the human soul only when they lead to consonance, or color it, or swallow it up. Then they become evil, as opposed to good. And this sort of opposition is at the heart of art, which is the act of pitting some great imaginary good against some great imaginary evil, with all the emotions of humanity in turmoil between. Through this sort of opposition our understanding of humanity begins to take shape. As it is, listening to last night's music (Polasky's Two Movements for Piano, Regulski's Wind Quintet, and Eric Slegowski's Resonance) caused me to wonder, in a poem I wrote,

...Where do men dwell these days?

What shadows--
What anguished shadows--
What dim thoughts and dreary days do dance
And mince their meanly-meted minds?
What measures do they carry to fit in their back pockets?
If I ask what is it worth?
They will tell me in grams and metres.

Nothing is possible with these
Unless it can be dreams in subway shaft.
Every mirage more muckle, meted out
In thimbles ever larger.

What word--
What word can say it--
What word can they say without a grin
And that hasn't been sent but they will deny it exists in the very act?
And what measures do they carry to fit their souls?
If I ask them whence or whither?
They will tell me no place in particular.

And in their eyes,
And in their tired eyes,
And in their sleepless eyes
I find a thousand nights of ash,
Apple-cores and aniseed
Strewn by the way, unburied,
Lest they should grow into something horrid or lovely
In the silence of the dead earth
But fermented in the heat of their hollow sun,
By which they are become the liquor of the lost.

For them there are no stakes,
without which, every crash
Signifies the end
And never the beginning.

Where do they keep the world these days?
Under what paperweight?
Under what pretence or mound of constructs, divesting it of colour
And opposing day to night as if one were black and the other white?
What tender moments are wrought by even
And left by morn to squalor
Until they fall under the weight of them and
Never hit the ground.

And do they wonder?
And do they wonder at the children?
And do they wonder when the children of their loins
Do not mourn at their dirges?
Nor dance when they pipe?

So I learned from their dissonance
The worth of beauty.