from "the green is either" (2003-4)
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"...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. |
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"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."
"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. "
"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."
"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).
"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."
"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.
"... 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."
"[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."
"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."
"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.
"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."
“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.”
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