Aaron Cassidy: The Crutch of Memory

Works by Aaron Cassidy

The works on this CD consistently trace the progressive story of a simple but fundamental reconception of instrumental playing in order to uncover a new strange world of sound material. The concept is based on the idea of ​​an instrumental ›decoupling‹: the separate treatment of physical performance components, e.g. B. Beginning and fingering technique on a wind instrument or the two hands of a string player. A simple idea, albeit counter-intuitive. But driven by Cassidy's conscientiousness and self-awareness, the consequences immediately multiply: the dismantling of the player's acquired physical, musical, and technical relationships with his instrument; a shift in emphasis from the sounds produced to the means that produce them; the displacement of sound from its inherited position at the center of musical discourse; the need for new hierarchies and a new perceptual vocabulary.

This is not a pipe dream or a rush into an arms race of complexity or difficulty. The axiom of Cassidy's work is simple but radical: the sounds heard are uncontrollable traces that mark the collision points of forces that are on a journey from somewhere to somewhere. There is no solid ground, only transitions, trajectories and speeds throughout the track.

The music presented here follows this basic idea in order to create a strange, incomprehensible, irritatingly 'physical' music with ever purer and more truthful means. The earliest works for solo woodwind, metallic dust (1999) and asphyxia (2000), are contrapuntal dances between pitches and the forces that distort them. Even before they leave the instrument, melodic forms and canti firmi damaged by differently manipulated approach and breathing.

In The Crutch of Memory (2004), the playing instructions only specify transitions between hand positions and finger arrangements of the string player's left hand. As the bow races independently across the strings, an even clearer work concept is presented, in which sound becomes an almost accidental by-product of the musical universe of independently moving muscle groups. Here, for the first time, the wriggling, shuddering tones are just a trace of a silhouette of something else.

The 2008–2009 pieces for woodwind and brass include the Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion. They sacrifice pitch accuracy, since the work of the instrumentalist's hands is employed with complete disregard for their traditional function. In these works, which are elaborate ›finger dances‹, the relevant question is not how long the tubing that can be achieved by a particular grip, but what mechanical gestures the fingers move and how uncomfortable and unnatural they are for the user performers are. The music does not manifest itself, however vaguely, in the tonal space - yes, not even in the sound, but in the elasticity of the fingers and hands of the performer.

As in Francis Bacon's paintings that gave these works their titles, meaning lies in the distortion – the gulf between the ordinary and the distorted that can only be bridged at the cost of effort and contingency. In Cassidy, as in Bacon, the force enforcing this divide is represented. The sounds are a misleading trace - we ignore them.

The only work whose sonic material is not a by-product of clashing physical movements is the vocal solo I, purples, but here too the tonal range is marginalized. The pitch language is just a computer generated, randomly changing glissando, audible only to the performer. This hidden source, whose context remains hidden from us, is the starting point for a variety of essential muscular maneuvers of the throat that produce explosions of sound, while actions of the mouth and tongue produce a tangled thread of phonemes - derived from three different readings edited together and Translations from Arthur Rimbaud's poem Voyelles. Pitches here are fleeting excerpts of a randomly generated, inaudible ›text‹.

But where is the listener in all of this? Maybe there is a ›Cassidy sound‹. As a result of his idiosyncratic approach to instrumental composition, all we hear at first is wild knife thrusts on a solid structure, fleeting afterimages exploding from trajectories and plunging from one point to another, unhierarchical atoms framing lines of force, not quite graspable, swiftly upon us thrown with the unrelenting power of the performers under extreme pressure. In the more recent works, traditional gestural forms are almost entirely discarded or rendered inaudible. Everything that is stable does not arise from the sounds, but from the muscular actions that they trace and from the constellations formed by the actions: trills fade to tremolos and more subtle timbre oscillations, throat and lips contract until the sound chokes is, or they relax until they lose their ground. Finally, there is another level - a trail leading to Deleuze, who, along with Bacon, is one of Cassidy's most important non-musical interlocutors. The ruthlessly fragmentary surface of these works creates a permanent ambiguity of detail and context, in which audible groupings and syntax emerge without our being sure of them, or without being revealed to us by the next unexpected silence or a sudden tense stillness carry assets. It's exhausting but exhilarating.

Finally the songs only as sad as their listener – a unique work in Cassidy's dense oeuvre, the appropriate postscript. Relentless fragmentation, crushing energy and irritatingly insistent slipperiness give way to a simple, mysterious, seemingly endless succession of soft wails in the highest register of a muted trombone. Here, too, instrumental conventions are dismantled, but only to the extent that the throat and embouchure remain in a state of perpetual tension, while the slider and trigger sway gently in place. When one listens to this work and puts it in context with the other works, it appears as a quivering, touchingly vulnerable shadow - and one realizes that the instability of Cassidy's entire oeuvre can be defined not only as an issue of strength and power, but also as a fragile shudder.

Evan-Johnson
English translation: Susan Oswell