Aaron CASSIDY

composer        //       conductor

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from "the green is either" (2003-4)

 

 

"...radical, convulsive, ... conceptual, and exceedingly complex."

Pierre Gervasoni in Le Monde, reviewing a performance of zero panorama (1999). Fondation Royaumont Voix Nouvelles Courses in Composition, September 1999.

   
 

"This work is, of course, very unusual. How good to encounter something completely different to anything I have encountered before! How rare!

The Ferneyhough connection looks of course the closest, but the dislocation is here far more extreme, stretching towards a challenge to what we mean by 'musical.' Ferneyhough, however complex the interwoven actions, however convoluted the negation of purposeful effort, always produces results that affirm a statement 'in' music, which is expressive and even gesturally theatrical.

Cassidy is far from this and seems nearer to the chance of Cage inasmuch as a field of action is carefully set up, and then unpredictable movements across that field are evoked ....

However one views the work, I think it deserves merit for its complete originality and striking successfulness in sound. The sonic result is not naive, as is sometimes the case when caused by notations of 'complexity.' It is interesting and rather inscrutable. Forms appear fleetingly and then are covered, buried under the discrepancy between the two hands. The sense that meaningful forms are present but buried is tantalizing."

Jonathan Harvey, in a review of String Quartet (2002).

"Aaron Cassidy, a young American composer from Buffalo, explored a plethora of unusual playing techniques as an integral compositional parameter. His virtuosic bass clarinet piece was intensely physical with a visual counterpoint arising from separation of fingers from breath, the outcome created by the interaction of the two decoupled layers. The result was exhilarating, and it was followed by deceptively listener-friendly monodic piano pieces (in the tradition of Alain & Evangelista).... I was astonished to find (as recently with the delightful piano music of Richard Emsley) that although pretty on the page, their complexity is absolutely daunting for ordinary mortals, which you’d never guess from hearing alone. "

Peter Grahame Woolf, in a review of a BMIC concert by Ian Pace and Carl Rosman, London, October 2002. ten monophonic miniatures for solo pianist and metallic dust for amplified bass clarinet.  MusicWeb Seen & Heard.

"Wolfgang Schurig, who curates the yearly Bludenzer Tage Zeitgemäßer Musik, called Aaron a composer 'whose works are so over-structured that all structure dissolves and can not be recognised any more'. Just to make sure: This was meant as a compliment to a composer whose oeuvre, despite being as far from the mainstream as could possibly be, has gained international esteem at a still young age. Cassidy, who was born in Illinois and now lives and works in Chicago, certainly has a uniquely personal approach to justify the attention. While to most of his colleagues it is all about the 'flow' and about finding your rhythm and then moving along with it as it carries you effortlessly from one chord to the next, he prefers to build road blocks and use them for inspiration - the task is not how to get round them but how to make them part of the journey. This process, which he is the first to admit is as 'esoteric' as his work, means that some of his pieces take ages to complete, waiting to be finished for more than a year. The finished result is subsequently no 'easy listening,' but calling it academic would also be wrong. Instead, many of his compositions actually have a distinct lightness to them and never weigh heavy on the soul. Aaron defined it best himself with a title from one of his most recent works: 'Dance me through the panic'. It may all be absurd, but that's no reason to not have fun. And if all structure does get lost, then maybe that's a good thing indeed."

Tobias FischerIntroduction to "15 Questions with Aaron Cassidy" on www.tokafi.com.  August 2006.

"It was good to hear again Aaron Cassidy's intricate ten monophonic miniatures, inspired by Ian Pace's research into 'key noise'.  This employs amplification to render audible 'a variety of muting techniques which create unpredictable results'; they had been more effectively demonstrated by Pace, and experienced by the composer and an all too small audience of devotees, at St. Cyprian's, London, together with Cassidy's metallic dust (Ian Pace & Carl Rosman, BMIC, October 2002).

Peter Grahame Woolf, reviewing a performance at the Gaudeamus Music Week, Amsterdam, September 2004. MusicWeb Seen & Heard.

"I think they are extraordinary pieces, and they have an 'expressive' (or even expressive without the scare quotes) quality which is not quite like anything else I've heard."

Jim Gardner, Director of New Zealand's 175 East, discussing a CD of recent works.

"Left to their own devices, the composers have taken upon themselves the enormous task of 'deconstructing' and rethinking every aspect of what music is, without too much analysis of what they are deconstructing and without a language to replace it. They expressly reject the idea of 'mimicking the methodologies found in the "hard" sciences', but lack of data and analysis of existing music has not stopped them from catching on to the self-important phraseology and special obscurantist terminology employed by professionals. Their forest of footnotes are nothing but self-references leading back to previous unverifiable assertions made by themselves in long-inaccessible publications.

"There is no space here to try to sort out for them or for everybody else what they mean with all this. Among other things it involves 'vectorial layers'. This apparently interesting term is, of course, not explained; however it seems to imply a lot of 'precomposition' -- which is, by definition, not concerned with what notes happen to turn up.

"In the process they attempt to identify and dismantle the whole phenomenon of music: every constituent, every aspect of musical performance -- with the mindless obsessiveness of a precocious 12-year-old plucking off insect-wings or smashing a watch to look at the bits. Music, to them, consists of a great variety of components: many kinds of plucking, scraping, puffing ... all kinds of positions you can put your fingers, elbows, epiglottis ... and for the composer, thousands of signs and symbols: numbers, figures, wavy lines, dots etc. All of these are listed and classified as elements to be played off against one another without, however, there being even the remotest wish to see how all these elements can relate to one another as they do in real music as it is performed."

Julian Silverman.  Reprinted (without permission) from Tempo review of Polyphony & Complexity.  Vol. 59, no.232, April 2005, p.67-69

"... Cassidy’s String Quartet takes itself extraordinarily seriously. As an exercise into what a string quartet means as a string quartet, it succeeded. As for his further goal of deriving musical material from the players’ physical motions, it looked as if they were needlessly conducting with their bows as their comrades played, and had I not read that their movements were part of the score, I would have guessed that violinist Ari Streisfeld was having a seizure as he almost fell off his chair near the Quartet’s conclusion."

Marc Geelhoed, reviewing JACK Quartet concert.  Reprinted (without permission) from deceptivelysimple blog.  May 5, 2007.

"[175 East artistic director James] Gardner ferrets out recherché scores from across the globe and presents ear-tickling programmes, which can at once entrance and irritate, delight and bemuse…as they should. And the inner city ambience of Hopetoun Alpha fits the spirit perfectly. When a plaintive siren from the adjacent fire station accompanied the soprano sax’s primeval wailings in Aaron Cassidy’s hypertensive asphyxia it merely sharpened our attention to the silence inherent in the sparse writing of the ensuing Morton Feldman miniatures."

Eve de Castro-Robinson, reviewing 175 East concert in Auckland.  Metro{live} magazine, May 7, 2007.

"Richard Haynes opened 175 East's The Sleep of Reason concert with a fierce, virtuosic rendition of Aaron Cassidy's asphyxia, his soprano sax scrambling, diving and looping in waves of insinuating melody."

William Dart, reviewing 175 East concert in Auckland.  New Zealand Herald, May 11, 2007.

"I couldn’t believe the variety of sounds [Richard Haynes] was getting from his instrument [in Cassidy's asphyxia], and he was required by the composer to not necessarily play the notes but suggest two notes at once, to play the spaces in between, to kind of … suggest the notion that the music is written on two staves, inhabiting the space in between, and creating a whole world of conjecture in the process ....  The physical choreography of the movement and gesture in that musical realization was wonderful.

In terms of the sounds he was producing, it wasn’t just throwing himself randomly at the instrument and producing squawks and things.  It seemed like a completely under control performance, and absolutely in command of where he was going. The silences and the timing of his silences I thought were just as astonishing and just as gripping as with the actual sounds.

You get the feeling of what it must’ve been like at certain times of history, of musical history, when new music bursts upon the scene … I’m sure Beethoven’s music in its more rarefied or confrontational moments must’ve sounded to contemporary listeners just as jagged, just as uncompromising, and just as fascinating."

Peter Mechen in interview with Eva Radich, reviewing 175 East concert in Auckland.  Radio New Zealand, May 7, 2007

"Two knockout works were those in which Rosman exercised his vocal showmanship: Aaron Cassidy’s I, purples, spat blood, laugh of beautiful lips, another premiere, and Richard Barrett’s Interference. Cassidy’s piece, for unaccompanied high male voice, requires the performer to monitor a computer-generated random pitch line through an earphone and sing that line while pronouncing fragments of words derived from texts by Arthur Rimbaud and Christian Bök. Cassidy’s work addresses their translation and, in the absence of conventional verbal meaning, Rosman’s declamatory voice delivers a powerful emotional impact, extending the consideration of verbalisation and sound poetry since Kurt Schwitters and the Dadaists. The randomness of the pitch line ensures the work is never rendered the same way twice.

"...The new works from Karski, Lim, Dench and Cassidy are terrific, and contrasting them with the more established Ferneyhough and Carter works identifies some current directions in composition, Cassidy for example incorporating unconventional performative techniques and Karski devising elaborate formal structures."

Chris Reid, "Lessons in Hyper-Virtuosity," reviewing ELISION ensemble concerts at Australian National Academy of Music and ABC Iwaki Auditorium in Melbourne.  realtime 80, August 2007.

“I liked the witty and slightly narcissistic vocal miniature I, purples, spat blood, laugh of beautiful lips by Aaron Cassidy. The piece twisted itself, transformed, and slipped out of the composer’s control like a mannerist 'figura serpentinata.'  The work is full of Renaissance-like floridness, mannerist surfeit, multimedia poetics. Cassidy gave the proof of his aesthetic maturity.”

Sawomir Wojciechowski (trans., Dominik Karski), Ruch Muzyczny, issue 23, 11.11.07, reviewing ELISION ensemble at Warsaw Autumn Festival, 22 September 2007

page updated:  03 May 2008