Propellers in Love

Arnold Dreyblatt is one of the most misunderstood contemporary composers on the scene. The complaint is that his music is amateurish, whatever that means. Funny thing is, he admits this freely, and that technique and advanced conceptions of harmonics are not for him. His explanation is that "the instruments themselves are my greatest teachers." Dreyblatt sees the means of making music as the stuff from which compositions are made: surfaces and materials such as wood, brass, pipe, air, reverberation, etc. As evidenced by the two works here, one can hear two things at work — besides strings and percussion — the influences of Terry Riley and Steve Reich from their early years and an ambition to "get to the big sound." Here, what is illustrated over two compositions, "Propellers in Love" and "High Life," is a willingness to incorporate the elemental "modes" for listening: rhythmic structure, overtonal structure, timbral richness, etc, and shift them into a bigger more inclusive way of both hearing and making music. Here, all strings are played as percussion instruments, repetitively, even hypnotically. They've all been altered in some way and need to be recorded very closely in order to capture both the acoustic resonances of the instruments that the combination of those resonances in a room or recording space. While this might sound very academic, it's anything but; in fact, given the strange sonorities and polytonalism of Dreyblatt's music, it's actually a lot of fun, and not in an egghead way. This is especially true of "High Life." The track is a duet between Dreyblatt playing an electric lap steel guitar and Paul Panhuysen on a prepared electric bass. It's a curiously lovely study of overtone structures and timbres. In just intonation, there are no half steps and everything has a drone-like quality. La Monte Young brought this to the States with him, and it's been used ever since. Here, two tonally different instruments, tuned three steps apart, are producing various timbres as they shift into and out of the playing space, as the players are exerting or relaxing tensions. Between them, a third timbre is produced creating another series of overtones. It's monotonous, but it's far from boring. Dreyblatt has taught us much abut the uses of instruments, and based on this work alone he is far from the amateur others make him to be. Truly beautiful, touching pieces.