Virtuoso flutist Claire Chase continues her laudable documentation of her multi-year commissioning project, Density 2036, with digital release of the works from 2019. Featuring pathbreaking music for flute, in solo, electro-acoustic, and chamber settings, by Olga Neuwirth, Sarah Hennies, Phyllis Chen, and Pamela Z, Density 2019 represents a landmark addition to the contemporary flute repertoire.

Claire Chase’s twenty four year commissioning project, Density 2036, builds a radical new repertoire for flute in various contexts — solo, with electronics, and as a lead ensemble instrument. The 2019 iteration of the project, released here in digital only format (and in collaboration with the 2020 and 2021 programs on a 3 CD set), focuses on the latter two contexts, featuring a electro-acoustic work, two duos (one of which is a duet with Chase’s own heartbeat), and one with choir.

Olga Neuwirth’s Magic Flu-idity pairs Chase’s flute with the percolating rhythms of a typewriter, played here by Nathan Davis. The work is a reworking of Neuwirth’s flute concerto, Aello—ballet mécanomorphe, written for Chase and Thomas Dausgaard with the Swedish Chamber Orchestra. Originally intended to be paired with Bach’s fourth Brandenburg Concerto, the concerto shares the three movement form of a Baroque concerto, and this duo reimagining retains the lightness and grace as well as the typical fast-slow-fast structure. The dialogue between the typewriter and flute soloist mirrors that of the ripieno and concertino, as the accompaniment articulates rhythmic arrivals while the flute swoops in and around the clicks and occasional bell rings of the machine’s carriage return lever. The middle section features sustained material on both instruments, broken up by colorfully embellished figures on flute.

Pamela Z’s Louder Warmer Denser uses an audio interview with Chase as the source material for a collage style electronic part that fragments her voice. Mining disconnected words, laughs, and utterances, the electronics highlight the registral contrasts embedded in Chase’s speaking style, Pamela Z creates an engaging portrait of Chase that serves as the sparring partner for the live flute part. Sometimes the instrumentalist is in rhythmic unison with the electronic part (reminiscent of the increasingly popular YouTube stylized videos where an instrumentalist transcribes a speech and plays along, i.e. Henry Hey’s infamous rendition of a George W. Bush speech), and other times in counterpoint with it. An accumulating wash of long, reverb saturated tones provides a pad for repeated utterances of “36” that close the work, a reference to Chase’s ambitious multi-year project that culminates in 2036.

In Roots of Interior, Phyllis Chen composed a different kind of portrait of Claire Chase, investigating the rhythms of the performer’s own heart during and after a virtuosic performance. Inspired by her own experience carrying her daughter during her pregnancy after hearing two heartbeats in counterpoint with each other, Chen extrapolates beyond Chase’s impressive physicality on her instrument to the simultaneous internal response happening within her body. The result is both a compelling musical work on its own and an invitation to consider the impact of performance on a performer’s inhabited corporeal experience.

Sarah Hennies’ Reservoir 2 for flute and voices explores the boundaries between conscious and unconscious thought. The work opens with waves of inhalation and exhalation, a repeated tone on the flute, and an enveloping harmony in the voices. It has the quality of a collective meditation. Hennies paces the evolution of the texture patiently, adding new entrances and pitch material to encompass an increasingly rich expressive range. At the piece’s climax, we hear an undulating mass of vocal swells on wordless syllables, flutter tongued tones in the flute, and brief grunting outbursts from the choir, as if releasing suppressed tension. The effect is cathartic and expansive, a guided seventeen minute journey that unfolds at the speed of emotion.

Each chapter of Claire Chase’s Density 2036 project has its own unique profile. There are many angles from which to contemplate the works on Density 2019. In a certain light, each piece is a reworking of pre-existing material — Neuwirth’s original concerto, Pamela Z’s reorganization of material from an interview with Chase, Chen’s highlighting of Chase’s heartbeat, and Hennies’ processing of subconscious emotion. Three of the works look inward in creative and individual ways, at the unique features of a personality expressed in speech patterns, at biochemical feedback as a manifestation of lived experience, and at the journey of working through stored emotional memory. It is a credit to Chase and her collaborators that amidst such an ambitious and visible commissioning project, they are able to retain and amplify such personal depth in each piece, leaving behind not just volume of repertoire to future interpreters, but works that carry their own indelible imprint.

– Dan Lippel