Beyond Words Musique Contemporaine Pour Saxophone Vatulya - Qtz2137 - Contemporary - by Quartz

Familiar to most listeners as a voice from the world of jazz or easy listening, the saxophone performs in a ’classical’ field with astounding ease, richness, and virtually devilish capacity for reinvention. Classical here is put in quotes, because the music you find on this record belongs to a large, exciting and only loosely charted stylistic area, where it is especially difficult to draw a line between ’classical’ and ‘non-classical’. Difficult – and pointless: how ‘classical’ is Steve Reich’s Counterpoint, which calls for a soloist who performs alongside his own recording, digitally multiplied? Can we readily designate Jacob ter Veldhuis’s works, where the saxophone’s voice is mingled with recited poems and electronic mishmash of pre-recorded speech samples, to ‘classical’ music? Can we – or, better, do we need to – classify Will Gregory of Goldfrapp, a renowned electronic music duo whose work spans from trip-hop to pop, as a composer of Beethovenian kind? Complex, multi-faceted musical languages emerge in these border zones. They gravitate towards a number of styles at a time, and it is here that the saxophone shines at its brightest. Its boundless palette of tone colour, a plethora of extended playing techniques, a refreshing sound, not too heavy with 19-century associations, a superb gift for sound imitation, – everything makes it the medium for compositional experiment. The saxophone grants a composer virtually unparalleled freedom – especially when combined with electronics.