Composed in 2019, Lucier’s Monteverdi Shapero is barely two years old, and yet this still-young work becomes young once again on this extraordinary 2021 recording, refashioned by the hands, mouths, and minds of Claire Chase and Joshua Rubin. Their sound — silken orbs of eight flutes and eight clarinets — weaves Lucier’s cascading canons into a blue/white/grey mid-register tapestry whose progress flows like age itself. Making music during the pandemic, Chase and Rubin’s version of the work was recorded remotely: Chase in her apartment in Brooklyn, Rubin in his own place in Los Angeles. Their interpretation was built up via shared soundfiles — groups of instrumental layers being sent and resent across the continent, flowing at the speed of light.

Lucier’s title can be parsed, but only to a point (and illuminating a work’s title does not necessarily mean illuminating its soundworld). The first word of the title stems from the work’s canonic manipulation of four phraselets derived from two intertwining vocal lines from Claudio Monteverdi’s 1632 ciacconia “Zefiro torna e di soavi accenti,” SV 251. Lucier subjects these borrowed lines to processes of retrograde, inversion, and retrograde inversion. Alongside such tessellations, the piece presents a canon at the (relative) quarter note, with each subsequent iteration flowing twice as slowly as the previous. But not so fast: the link to Monteverdi isn’t quite so direct: Lucier relates that his inspiration came via George Russell and Gunther Schuller’s “On Green Mountain (Chaccone after Monteverdi)” from their 1958 record Modern Jazz Concert. The latter half of the title refers to Harold Shapero, who taught alongside Lucier at Brandeis in the 1960s. As a Ph.D. student there some forty years later, I can attest to the continuing influence of both composers. References embed references, canons embed canons, waves embed waves.

The drama of Monteverdi Shapero is gradual, understated: Lucier’s time-axis manipulation encourages the initially buoyant lines to elongate, ultimately reaching sixteen times their original duration. But technique does not explain the listening experience, which in Chase and Rubin’s recording becomes more about the empathy and difficulty and strength and inevitability and distraction and fragility and attentiveness and weakness and mystery of the passing of time. While both virtuosos, Chase and Rubin are still tested by the extremes of duration across these thirty-seven minutes. It takes effort to play wind instruments, unceasingly, across such a span, and we hear — gloriously and humanely — the sound of their efforts through their breath. Every sound they make is a form of exhaling, and each is made possible by a corresponding inhale. With a combination of elegance and realness, both musicians bear the physical toll of Lucier’s ever-expanding lines, and it’s all exquisitely audible. Breathing should not be suppressed, whether it be on recordings or in the world.

The ending of Monteverdi Shapero winnows, unweaves itself, but as it does my mind is already adding contrapuntal voices of its own. In this way, when the piece finishes, it continues. There is a psychological handoff: the sounds of Lucier/Chase/Rubin give way to an interior singing in me, which persists into the future. Occurring at the end of Monteverdi Shapero, such a translation of air vibrations into mind vibrations acts as an apt metaphor for Lucier and his visionary work.

The arrival of this recording coincides precisely with the composer’s 90th birthday. There is something fitting about the extremes of speed involved: months of work in the making, the digital EP of this deeply introspective piece is released with a single key-stroke. The text from the borrowed Monteverdi phrases translates as “Zephyr returns, and with sweet accents enchants the air and ruffles the waves.” Chase and Rubin’s version of Monteverdi Shapero brings us all more fully into the present, and reminds is that Alvin has been enchanting, exploring, and ruffling (feathers and air alike) in each of his ninety astonishing years on this planet.

© 2021 Richard Beaudoin