Composer Osnat Netzer releases her debut recording, featuring performances by Ensemble Dal Niente in full ensemble and chamber settings, saxophonist Geoffrey Landman, Mivos Quartet, flutist Eric Lamb, violist Michael Hall, pianist Marianne Parker, and the ~Nois saxophone quartet. Netzer's music engages with various abstract concepts, including cognitive linguistics and the experience of physicality.

"Ebullient, pensive, whimsical, and mysterious by turns, Osnat Netzer’s new music presents a multifaceted and deeply riveting gestural world."
-- George Lewis

In the opening paragraph of her eloquent liner notes for Dot : Line : Sigh, Osnat Netzer explains the genesis of this creative title. Since 2014, her work has been influenced by an interest in cognitive linguistics, and those explorations manifest in her work as ways of employing musical vocabulary. “Dot : Line” then is a gesture involving a punctuated sustain; “sigh” manifests as a stylized, contoured line. Throughout the works on Dot : Line : Sigh, we hear this elemental dichotomy despite divergent aesthetic undercurrents in the music.

The opening track, They bury their dead with great ululations, references a tradition of hiring women to wail at funerals, as a way of giving permission to the mourners to release their own grief. Originally written for Winsor Music and performed here by Ensemble Dal Niente, the piece opens with plaintive unisons that divide and stretch against one another, catalyzing fervent passagework that rotates around the central pitch. Scurrying activity builds in the strings underneath slowly bent notes in the winds before diminishing to a breathy texture with eerie pointillistic passages. Growing insistence in the accompaniment supports lyrical material in the winds before we hear the characteristic unison gesture from the opening return. Netzer makes an analogy between the hired wailers and artists – indeed, art’s function is to give license to experience on a deeper level.

Pillars, for alto saxophone and piano, opens with a series of punctuated complex timbres – a version of the “dot : line” Netzer mentions in the notes. As we are drawn into this hybrid timbre, Netzer varies what happens within that sustained duration; the piano subdivides the duration with repeated notes or angular figures, the sung note in the saxophone glides up to a different pitch. The piece evolves through a kind of counterpoint of layered ideas; many of the fragments Netzer introduces early on are fleshed out and integrated with each other and built into a vigorous texture. During the second half of the piece, Netzer takes a playful approach to subverting the groove with accents that articulate odd groupings.

I won’t be outrun by a cavalry of snails for two sopranos and ensemble is theatrical in nature, living in a fantastical, feverish space of abstraction. The vocals are comprised of nonsense words and extended vocal techniques, and merge with the gestural, virtuosic quality of the instrumental playing. Doppler effect-esque passages enhance the work’s surreality, always living somewhere in between the real and unreal.

Schertch (scherzo sketch) is a short work for flute and string quartet, inhabiting a scherzo character and flaunting phrase expectations in Hayden-esque fashion. As in Pillars, Netzer’s affinity for rhythmic play takes a forward role, while angular lines are offset by sighing gestures. The piece contains the album’s most neoclassical music, and it is a treat to hear Netzer have fun toying with the historical template.

Balance is at the core of Contrapose, a work for viola and piano. Drawing inspiration from the Vijñāna school of yoga, Netzer embedded concepts of “rooting” and “connecting” into the work; the basis of this philosophy is that every impulse must be balanced out by its opposite. In Contrapose, this means the viola and piano are constantly equalizing the gestural, timbral, and motivic vocabulary of the piece.

Netzer writes that I AM FUCKING ZEN for saxophone quartet is “a process-based composition, wherein a short musical idea undergoes gradual transformations.” The pitch material moves seamlessly between triadic structures and microtonal inflections of the corresponding pitches, creating an intentional disorientation. Off-kilter rhythms percolate within a context of quick dynamic contrasts, creating a kind of linear counterpoint of associated material. Netzer ingeniously leads the quartet in and out of quasi-unison passages that break independently before linking up again. Later in the piece, the horns imitate each other’s contour, distorting it through augmentation, diminution, and pitch adjustment. Irregular unisons return to close out this unique and affecting piece.

The album closes with away dream all away for soprano, flute, and viola, a light hearted, neo-soul setting of a text by Samuel Beckett. The material is presented in modular fashion, interspersing fragments that each have their own character and profile. Jagged repetition with occasional variation plays a significant role in the piece, as familiar material is recontextualized and changes meaning as its surroundings shift. Amanda DeBoer Bartlett’s soprano alternates between taking a lyrical lead and functioning as a third instrument, punctuating the timbral texture of the flute and viola.

– Dan Lippel