Reiko Füting's newest release brokenSong alternates choral settings of poetry by his long term collaborator Kathleen Furthmann with a solo piano performance of his introspective work, Five Meditations on Music from Luigi Rossi’s Collection, by pianist Jing Yang. Füting frequently uses quotation and references to early music as a jumping off point in his work. The choral works are sung by Vocalconsort labia vocalia, conducted by Füting himself.

Füting’s music establishes reverent spaces. There is a theme of quotation and reference to past repertoire that runs through his work; the canon serves as a point of departure that is grounded in a familiar approach to beauty. It is from this space that Füting explores, fragmenting and deconstructing materials to illuminate new corners in a rich sonic architecture. On Broken Song, we hear this approach through the lens of two contrasting, but equally intimate instrumentations, a capella choral music and solo piano works. The vocal works set texts by settings of poetry by his long term collaborator Kathleen Furthmann.

weht - umweht opens with three minutes of luminous contrapuntal music drawn from Hans Leo Hassler’s Ach weh des leiden. Füting then approaches the material with characteristic deconstruction, using register, extended vocal timbres, harmonic development, and repetition with variation to take fragments of the opening material into new, haunting terrain. As the piece closes, the phrases become increasingly truncated, eventually fading into an oscillating ascending major second and a closing minor chord that elides into a whisper.

The title track for solo piano is based on material from Canzon francese del Principe by Carlo Gesualdo. Füting establishes multiple layers of activity immediately with punctuated pizzicato and sustained harmonies. Brief shards of Gesualdo’s score emerge from the sparkling texture, interrupted by glitchy, angular bursts of texture. It is as if we are hearing repeated, gentle short-circuits of our musical memory. Other moments in the work are marked by repeated cells of material, like a skipping record player opening a brief wormhole in the fabric of time.

“...und wo Du bist” brings the listener immediately into Füting’s multi-layered compositional approach to voices. Non-pitched sounds expand the timbral boundaries of the texture and enhance and extend the text. The primary melodic lines rely heavily on large intervallic leaps, lending the piece a sense of verticality and expansiveness.

Five Meditations on Music from Luigi Rossi’s Collection borrows from the Italian Baroque composer as a basis for music that examines subtle transformations. In the first movement of the set, a cyclical harmonic progression is embellished with increasing density of contrasting textural materials. The second is set in minor, emphasizing ominous central pitches in harmonics and plucked notes on the strings of the piano. An insistent, repeated pitch that alternates between damped and naturally played anchors the third movement, eventually highlighting the overtone series contained within its fundamental. In the fourth movement, Füting manipulates figures from Rossi’s score, presenting them in rhythmic irregularity and unpredictable repetition. The final movement opens with two heroic chords followed by a resultant, sustained sonority that is carefully managed with the pedals and subtle removal of notes from the chord. The texture evolves in a similar fashion, with phrase iterations sounding progressively closer together.

“in allen landen” contains the album’s most jubilant material. Percolating rhythmic figures in extended vocal textures propel the music forward, with punctuated, high register proclamations sounding like train horns. The choir comes together with flowing counterpoint in a quotation from a chorale by Martin Behm, underscored by sustained pitches that remain in the choir, as if stuck in the air. The bright, horn-like punctuations return towards the end of the work, and it ends with an unsettling closely spaced interval in the middle register. It is a fitting close to the album, one in which Füting hears the present through the past, filtering its musical elements through a contemporary sensibility.

– Dan Lippel