Payton MacDonald - Explorations 54
Payton MacDonald - Explorations 54 (ALN commissions)
MacDonald presents convincing and musically-intelligible recordings, a difficult feat for pieces which hinge on interpretation of graphic scores.
Payton MacDonald is an innovative percussionist and composer who performs and records an awful lot of music. His bandcamp project, Explorations, explores the realm of contemporary improvisation and expression on solo marimba with and without electronics. Explorations 54, titled accordingly, is the 54th installment in MacDonald's series of full-length albums, and showcases four new works by MacDonald and three other composers. MacDonald commissioned these new pieces when students at the 2021 Arts Letters & Numbers virtual summer workshop offered to compose new works for solo marimba. All four works are focused around the implementation of graphic and other non-standard notational techniques (listen to the bandcamp album here).
Oswald Huỳnh's Ngũ Hành opens the album with an aleatoric piece in five sections for marimba prepared with bamboo. The music depicts the Vietnamese word for the five elements, with each element as an individual mobile. Huỳnh's piece allows MacDonald to explore traditional and new sounds on the marimba, with the woody clanks and buzzes reflective of non-Western instruments.
While timbrally engaging, Hon Ning Cheung's The Snowman is Melting is the least musically-compelling work on the album. Melodic fragments skewer the piece with a mixture of atonal and jazz-inspired licks, which distract from the overarching metallic texture. Despite this, the piece effectively achieves what Cheung wants, as one can literally hear the icy skeleton melt into a puddle of emptiness.
Philip Ellis Foster's Cosmos 2 is an interpretation of an earlier graphic score using Japanese ink spray drawings, and allows MacDonald to do what he does best, freely improvise with vague text instructions. MacDonald's interpretation is rhythmically undulating and a reflective musical meditation.
The closing track is MacDonald's own Arts, Letters, and Numbers. MacDonald is both a master of his instrument and composing for it, as the piece is wildly virtuosic while incredibly idiomatic-sounding. Arts, Letters, and Numbers alternates between spacey noises and intensely rhythmic grooves throughout the fourteen-minute work. The performance is so tight when it needs to be that it sounds as though there is a separate player on drum set backing up the marimba. In all these works, MacDonald presents convincing and musically-intelligible recordings, a difficult feat for pieces which hinge on interpretation of graphic scores.
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