Completed in 2009, Dystopia is a half-hour “film symphony”, a portrait of Los Angeles with visuals by Bill Morrison and a score by Michael Gordon. As with their earlier 2002 collaboration on Decasia, Morrison’s virtuoso collage of images from decaying nitrate film stock, Gordon’s score may be performed independently of the images, and the recording comes from the concert premiere at the city’s Disney Hall in 2008.
It’s music that goes on a frantic, often exhilarating, journey, setting off at top speed and only occasionally pausing for breath in moments of sliding, swooping instability. Gordon describes it all as “a ride down the freeway at 90 mph with few detours” and though his musical style is fundamentally minimalist and hard-edged, a whole range of earlier musics, from Renaissance counterpoint to drum’n’bass, are part of the mix, too, though the quotations are rarely recognisable. There are moments when its busyness calls to mind another musical portrait of a city, An American in Paris, though Gordon’s cityscape is much more clear-eyed and ambiguous than Gershwin’s. This objectivity doesn’t undermine the moments of striking beauty, though, nor the startlingly imaginative textures and scouring dissonances that are strewn through the score: its power is undeniable.
As its title suggests, the other work, recorded for the first time, takes earlier music as its starting point, too. Rewriting Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, first performed in the Beethovenhalle in Bonn, Germany, in 2006 (this is a recording of that performance) does what it says on the label – takes a musical idea from each of the four movements of Symphony No 7 as the starting points for the four parts of Gordon’s piece. So his first movement takes the massive chords with which the symphony opens, and deforms them with huge glissandos, like an ice sculpture melting before our eyes, while his second uses the main theme of the allegretto layered into closely packed dissonances, and so on. It’s more about the musical process more than the product, perhaps. It’s certainly striking, though unlike Dystopia, you might not want to hear it all that often.
