Isaiah Ceccarelli
Bow

1. ‘Sainte-Ursule 11’ (2014)
    Katelyn Clark (organetto) & Isaiah Ceccarelli (percussion)

2. ‘Falsobordone’     (2015)      
    Mira Benjamin & Galya Bisengalieva (violins),
    Robert Ames (viola) & Gregor Riddell (cello)

3. ‘Oslo Harmonies Part 1’ (2014)      
    Mira Benjamin (violin) & Isaiah Ceccarelli (percussion)

4. ‘Bow’                   (2015)      
    Mira Benjamin & Galya Bisengalieva (violins),
    Robert Ames (viola) & Gregor Riddell (cello)

5. ‘Oslo Harmonies Part 2’  (2014)     
    Mira Benjamin (violin) & Isaiah Ceccarelli (percussion)

6. ‘Dunstable’          (2015)        
    Mira Benjamin (violin), Robert Ames (viola) & Gregor Riddell (cello)  

7. ‘Sainte-Ursule 2’  (2014)        
    Katelyn Clark (organetto) & Isaiah Ceccarelli (percussion)

Interview with Isaiah Ceccarelli

'Bow' was part of the Canadian Composers Series CDs. The following interview is a brief extract from a much longer interview with Isaiah in the Canadian Composers Series booklet. You can read the introductory essay by Nick Storring here and if you want a copy of the booklet, please email us at info(at)anothertimbre(dot)com

In this extract from his interview, Isaiah talks about the two sides of his compositional work, and what unifies their apparently different surfaces:

Two very different soundworlds co-exist on your CD. Does this represent a schizophrenic music personality, or do they actually connect more closely than is apparent?

It’s probably that I’m a little bit schizophrenic in music because I’ve always liked so many very different things. But specifically I’d say that the way that I play on the tracks with Katelyn Clark and Mira Benjamin is only outwardly different from the music I compose on the string pieces. When I’m making that kind of timbral music I much prefer to be involved playing as part of the sound. I think if I just composed it and handed it over to musicians – even fantastic musicians – then it probably wouldn’t come through in the same way and I wouldn’t be happy with the outcome. It’s not that they wouldn’t do it well, but if I wasn’t involved I just wouldn’t quite get the timbral sounds quality that I wanted (mostly through my own faults as a composer!), so in the end it would feel that composing like that was like banging my head against a brick wall.

But working alongside Katelyn or Mira, we don’t have to worry too much about what’s written on the page, but we can talk about it and try things out and the page is just to remind us about where we’re going with the next step. With Mira, I feel that it’s more comfortable to have even just two notes written on a page than to be freely improvising – even if those two notes have got to last an hour, she’ll make them sound great. With Katelyn on the Sainte-Ursule pieces we talked about it and found sounds that we liked and then did many takes of the same thing – or it was always a bit different, but it sounded generally the same. I think when we play it’ll probably always sound a bit like that – kind of clanky metallic percussion with drones.But back to the album, for me the more improvised pieces – Oslo Harmonies and the Sainte-Ursule tracks – are really like the same music as the string pieces but behind a veil. It’s as if you’re further away, are listening from a distance, or it’s just more opaque. Especially with the reed organ on Oslo Harmonies Part 1. The reed organ is like the strings in the string pieces but has such a peculiar sound. But the timbral quality of the reed organ doesn’t hide the fact that the harmonies are kind of the same as in those string pieces. The string music is more in your face; it’s 95% clear and is directly there in front of you.

But the underlying sound is basically the same across all the album. It’s just that when we’re playing the more open stuff we’re adding layers of veils on top of the harmonies. But none of the music is melodic; it’s all harmonic, it’s just the string pieces are more clear and directly harmonic than the others.

How did you come to study with Laurence Crane, given that he’s in London and you live in Montréal?

I booked half a dozen lessons with him and came to stay in London for four weeks. Laurence told me to bring pretty much everything I’d ever written, so I collected everything I had together and burned lots of CDs, and we essentially just went through it. We talked about how to make ideas clear, and he told me how not to waste time and space in composition, and how not to have seventeen ideas packed in where two would work. And he also told me about various practical aspects, like how the score looks, how the parts look, how many measures or bars to have on a line – just practical things that all help to clarify the work. It was a mixture of creativity and just nuts and bolts, which is something I really like.”

Reviews

“Really, all of the extraordinary Canadian Composers series on Another Timbre deserves to be included in this best of year list, but forcing myself to pick a single disc I come down to Isaiah Ceccarelli's 'Bow'. Ceccarelli is the composer I knew least about in advance of listening these discs, but his was the one that really knocked me sideways when I put it on, for its startling transparency. And although I couldn’t attend that night, I understand his portative organ and percussion duo with Katelyn Clark at Café Oto as part of the series’ launch weekend was another highlight. One to watch.”
Tim Rutherford-Johnson, Best Sounds of 2017

"Ceccarelli’s music evokes images of vast landscapes; it is glacial, harsh, and beautiful. His pervasive use of dissonance, and inventive scoring have helped develop a musical style that captures what Emily Carr did in paintings, and David Adams Richards does with words. This style is largely developed through Ceccarelli’s harmonic language, and is most obviously present in Sainte-Ursule #11, Sainte-Ursule #2, Oslo Harmonies Parts 1 and 2, and Dunstable. For all intents and purposes, these pieces are tone poems—although they feature drastically reduced instrumentation compared to their romantic predecessors—that depict a geographical place.

"Bow is the pièce de resistance of this album, with the complex harmonies explored in the tone poems, as well as including more familiar harmonies like the resolutions of fourths and flattened thirteenths, and clear meter.  Ceccarelli's compositional style envokes images of an unromanticized and powerful Canadian landscape, placing it in dialogue with visual and literary works that had already begun to develop this style in Canadian art."     
Nolan Sprangers