Constellation Men's Ensemble - "Man Up / Man Down" album review
Constellation Men's Ensemble - Man Up / Man Down
Constellation's impeccable blend and intonation brings out a resonant beauty for the duration of the album.
After ten years, Constellation Men's Ensemble has released their debut album, Man Up / Man Down on the Sono Luminus label. The album's longer and intense titular work is bookended by two shorter bursts of peaceful reflection, Home and manifesto. Constellation's impeccable blend and intonation brings out a resonant beauty for the duration of the album, and are becoming a prominent force within the new music vocal community.
Jeffrey Derus' Home, setting text by Carl Sandburg, opens the album with beauty and tonal simplicity. Derus' music is drawn from his personal experience with choirs, resulting in Constellation creating a beautiful resonance with stellar intonation. Home is in a traditional three-part form, with the middle section in a pulsating quintuple meter. Derus' repetitive text setting defines the emotional impact in the last three lines of the short poem and is brief enough to not become tedious.
The titular work, Robert Maggio's Man Up / Man Down, is a large-scale, 30-minute exploration of the various perspectives of contemporary American masculinity. The declarative prosody is reminiscent of modern musical theatre, allowing the listener to understand Maggio's often uncomfortable sourced text. Presented in eleven movements, with several being extremely short, the musical success of Man Up / Man Down derives from Maggio's masterful command over the voicing within his vocal ensemble writing and implementation of cyclical motives, relating emotional themes across movements. He alludes to a wide variety of classical and popular musical idioms, using rapid style changes to emphasize shifts in demeanor. Constellation navigates these styles with ease, perfectly adapting on a whim.
There are multiple narratives told throughout Man Up / Man Down, starting with the tragic descent into neo-Nazism of Skate Park Guy: a loner who by the end of the work is completely immersed into a white supremacy group. Maggio, with text for these sections by sociologist Michael Kimmel, uncannily presents an all too often truthful tale of learned bigotry and how these groups prey on isolated individuals. Maggio connects each of the four "Skate Park Guy" movements with an ominous introduction and trudging, monotonous vocal lines.
Fittingly, the final movement, "West Point", collects previous musical material and swells to an emotional apex. The movement intersperses more of Kimmel's text with the traditional West Point Alma Mater. Maggio's use of postmodern collage comes to full fruition, expertly alternating from dense, four-part chorale harmony to contemporary pandiatonicism and post-minimalist overlapping of text. The culminating line of text, relaying from whom the cadets have learned toxic definitions of masculinity, amplifies in intensity and impact as Maggio adds layer after layer, ending with an almost screaming statement of "I should be..."
David Lang's manifesto finishes off the album. While an engaging piece on its own, it feels starkly anticlimactic immediately following Maggio's emotional build-up. Focused around love, manifesto presents an introspective look into Lang's universal qualities of a loving relationship, assisted by Google auto-completions. Standard of Lang's vocal writing, manifesto utilizes an abundance of space. Lang's writing is separated and syllabic, with dense harmonies changing on almost every single syllable. While becoming mentally tedious after awhile, Constellation takes great care to create motion within each set of harmonies. The ensemble's sense of groove, even within the space, helps to continually propel forward the music. With their debut album, Constellation Men's Ensemble continues to demonstrate the impact of contemporary vocal music.
listen to Man Up / Man Down on all major streaming services or order here
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