Virtuoso flutist Claire Chase continues her laudable documentation of her multi-year commissioning project, Density 2036, with digital release of newly premiered works from 2021. Featuring pathbreaking music for flute, in solo, electro-acoustic, and chamber settings, by composers Ann Cleare, Wang Lu, and Matana Roberts (including two versions of a work incorporating improvisation by Roberts), Density 2021 highlights new flute repertoire that embraces current aesthetic considerations in new music with invention and creative enthusiasm.

In her 2021 iteration of her ambitious commissioning project, Density 2036, Claire Chase invited three composers with unique voices to write new works, Matana Roberts, Wang Lu, and Ann Cleare. The three electro-acoustic works are varied in impact and aesthetic, but share a transportive quality, bringing the listener inside sonic spaces the composers have created specifically for these pieces.

In Auricular Hearsay, composer and multi-media artist Matana Roberts turned their attention to the mind states of performers. An interest in neurodivergent brain and thought patterns led Roberts to create a multimedia score that allowed visual and auditory information to interact with each other and guide performers through their own unique realizations of the piece (every performance is by design different). In particular, Roberts was interested in facilitating non-linear thinking, framing an open improvisation experience. Chase’s performance, with collaborators Susie Ibarra on percussion and Senem Perler on live electronics, is searching and patient, mining a range of timbral and expressive areas for hidden gems and allowing the momentum of the work to ebb and flow to energetic peaks and contemplative valleys.

Wang Lu’s Aftertouch takes its name from a MIDI keyboard parameter that senses the amount of pressure being applied to a key. The analogy extends to Wang Lu’s percolating electronics part, referencing techno with an incremental palette of percussion sounds, from airy to dense. Chase’s flute takes wild virtuosic flights that are manipulated as if in a hall of mirrors, plays breathy material into reverberant delays, and mimics sounds from the animal kingdom with growls, gurgles, and menacing purrs. The piece closes with the electronics echoing microtonal descending glissandi in the flute, as a watery drone emerges.

Ann Cleare’s anfa conjures the desolate Boglands in the center of Ireland. “Anfa” translates as “disturbance in the elements” in Irish, and Cleare was captivated by the troubled industrial and geological history of the bog region. This piece is a sort of paean to that region, an attempt to symbolically animate and revitalize it. The music takes the eerie landscape on its own terms; Cleare chooses to write for contrabass flute to explore the lowest registers, and the electronics allow those frequencies to establish a sustained presence even as Chase moves to contrasting material. Chase’s flute participates in a kind of divination, pulling life out of the deep recesses of the sonic bog, willing it into renewal by seeking out the vibrations that will free it from stultification. The piece has several prominent stopping points, structural markers where we retreat to silence, only to resume the mystical process once again.

– Dan Lippel