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Continuo |  |
Continuo's debut recording, Meditations on Pachelbel's Canon, is a
product of the fertile imagination of Victor Friedberg. Taking one of
the greatest hits in Western music history, Friedberg weaves an
intricate web of ambient textures, Western and Indian percussion,
transcendental voices, and piano.
Though classically trained at Julliard and Oberlin, Friedberg found his
artistic grounding in electronics and spent his formative years doing
ground-breaking work with his teacher and mentor, John Cage. "Cage",
says Friedberg, "opened up a new path for me, one that immersed me in
electronic experimentation and also in non-western music and
philosophy. "The path from Cage", he notes, "led to Eno, and from Eno
to Peter Gabriel. Last Temptation was a seminal record".
In
doing Meditations, however, Friedberg has fused his classical
upbringing with his love for ambient, electronic, pop and ethnic music,
especially the music of India and Pakistan, Bali and West Africa. The
result is a 50-minute work in the classical theme-and-variations form,
in which the theme of Pachebel's canon leads to variations that inhabit
different musical worlds.
"You can go into each of the
meditation sections and feel like you're in a new musical tradition,"
he explains; "but even if you don't know anything about Balinese
gamelan or Indian ragas, there's something familiar about it. I was
interested in ethnic music, ritual trance music, and deep grooves. It's
the mother of all Pachelbel".
The term continuo refers to a
rhythmic accompanying part that filled out the ensemble in Baroque
times. In the original Canon by German Baroque composer Johann
Pachelbel, a series of string parts cascades over a repeating bass
line, or continuo. Meditations on Pachelbel's Canon uses a vast
landscape of synthesizers, sampled strings, operatic and non-Western
voices, piano filigrees, and percussion to turn this classical work
into an enormous pop song.
"I used just the bass line
in the 'verse' sections," he explains, "and bring the various textures
over it. The 'chorus' section is the full groove kit with the strings
playing the whole Canon. And the operatic and vocal sections are like
the bridge." A continuo is supposed to repeat, but in order to keep the
Meditations from becoming too repetitive, Friedberg subtly varies the
electronic texture each time the Canon returns. "Also, as the CD goes
on, the meditations become deeper and more intense. By the finale, the
Canon is quite transcendental."
The original Canon in D Major is a modest work. But it is also an
emotional, slightly melancholy one. And in the past twenty years it has
been used in countless film scores, TV ads, and has been arranged by
musicians as diverse as Brian Eno and George Winston. In fact, it's
become so popular and so ubiquitous that many people instantly
recognize it without having any clue as to what it is or where it comes
from. The trick with arranging such a well-known piece is to try to do
something with it that hasn't been done before. From the beginning,
Continuo's Meditations on Pachelbel's Canon lets you know you're in for
something completely different. It begins with an exotic, Asian-tinged
prologue. The actual Canon comes in, and is quickly synched up to a
steady dance groove. As the Canon fades away, the bass line continues
while flute, Indian tabla drums, piano, and wisps of electronic
traceries float overhead. Samples of operatic voices soar briefly but
majestically above the instrumental textures. From these building
blocks, Friedberg constructs an arresting, sometimes enigmatic
soundscape that takes the listener through the worlds of Indian raga,
Balinese Gamelan, chill-out electronics, and modern dance music. All of
this built on a nearly 300-year-old classical music work by a composer
who is otherwise totally obscure.
Friedberg set out to use
real singers and instruments wherever possible; there is very little
sampling on the Continuo disc. The operatic vocals, for example, are
done by British singer Jennifer Rhys Davies. "That was one of the most
interesting musical experience I had making the record," Friedberg
recalls. "I had this Buddhist text translated into Italian, and I wrote
what I thought was an authentic but condensed operatic aria. I sent the
music ahead to her in Wales, but I had no idea until we started
recording and she began singing that it actually would work. It*s a
quite beautiful moment." Indian vocals, African percussion, and ethnic
flutes are also played rather than sampled.
This
combination of ancient and modern is central for Continuo. In addition
to its musical meaning, Continuo is a name that alludes, Friedberg
says, to the space-time continuum. Meditations on Pachelbel's Canon
seamlessly blends the retrospective and futuristic, and while Friedberg
doesn't plan for the project to continue focusing on Baroque music
forever, he admits that the next project will probably also have at
least one eye on the music of the past: the next Continuo recording, he
says, will be based on either the Bach Mass in B Minor, or Barber's
Adagio for Strings.
For the moment, though, there is the
matter of this impressive debut. Continuo's wild and inventive set of
meditations has an almost dreamlike quality to it, as if following the
musical thoughts of someone who's drifting off to sleep... The music
wanders; fragments of previously heard material are barely glimpsed
through a veil of electronics; new sounds and voices sneak into the
picture; but the train of thought leads back, inevitably and
continually, to the familiar strains of the Pachelbel Canon.
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