Carrie Frey is a composer and violist based in Brooklyn. Seaglass is Frey’s first album dedicated to her own music. There was Seagrass: Works for Solo Viola in 2023, on which she played one of her pieces, but all the others were by other composers. In her music, Frey achieves a remarkable feat, that of integrating avant-garde expressive elements into an accessible and dramatically appealing framework. There is no purely conceptual cerebrality in her writing, only the desire to tell a story in an original and unique way. The lady also uses literary sources as inspiration for all of her scores. Once all these pieces are taken into account, the final puzzle offers a very rich artistic experience.
A chorus like distant screaming creates an astonishing alchemical substrate between arrhythmic minimalism, Ligetian vocalisations, and a textural buzz-like hum that sometimes recalls the ‘’electric insects’’ in George Crumb’s quartet Black Angels. Intense, fascinating, and captivating. This is inspired by A Desolation Called Peace written by Arkady Martine, a science fiction novel published in 2021 and honoured with a Hugo and a Locus Awards.
LATHE cleverly evokes the swirling energy of the tool in question. Frey uses techniques such as canons, trills, and appropriate ornamentation to shape an interesting philosophical-feminist discourse: in Anne Carson’s book The Gender of Sound, it is demonstrated that every sound we make (especially with our voices) is autobiographical. In Greek Antiquity, women’s voices were considered “destabilising,” a factor of chaos and disturbance. The music, fed towards its last third by the voices of the musicians who sing the phrase When I love you, then you leave me and the time comes to be far away from you, constantly ascending to increasingly impossible high notes, does indeed seem to turn in on itself and be gradually stripped of its substance. It’s very effective, and damn clever.
Gone/Back is of a more abrasive nature than the previous two pieces, but still retains a powerful expressive and narrative nature. This time, the concept of non-linearity is explored through references to Italo Calvino’s short story Mr Palomar, Chopin’s Prelude op. 28 no 20, and the jazzman Ray Nance’s piece Wild Child. Frey oscillates between rough sonic tension and almost festive moments that are adorned with folk and strangely alien sound fabrics.
Seaglass/Pebble visits again the universe of science fiction author Arkady Martine by exploring the concepts, present in her writings, of multiple minds coexisting in a single body, or, conversely, a single mind inhabiting multiple bodies. The superposition or fragmentation of viewpoints are evoked through a writing where divergent voices overlap to gradually reduce to a single one, frayed and brought to silence.
The quartet The Rhythm Method (that’s the name) fully commits to this music, especially since Frey is the acting violist.
This program allows us to hear a musical discourse from contemporary American music that is both original and exciting. Let’s follow it closely.
