review: doubles cd 2009

Peter Child (b. 1953) is a British composer who's lived most of his adult creative life in the U.S. He's currently based in Boston, teaching at MIT. Child's music department includes John Harbison, and it's meant as no disrespect to compare the two. Child is certainly neither an acolyte nor disciple of his elder colleague; he's very much his own artist. But as a reference for listeners who may not know Child's work, his music shares with Harbison's a respect for and mastery of traditional practice, a desire to blend modern with traditional techniques and expressive tropes, and a refined imagination and wit.

All of this music is scrupulous in its attention to telling detail. Child is obviously an extremely intelligent person who relishes any challenge, intellectual or aesthetic. The good news is that these smarts aren't used in service of hermetic or solipsistic games, but rather to make music that is both fresh and approachable. One feels the composer is having great fun, and the attendant joy is infectious. Child also has a gift for incorporating diverse musical languages and traditions without sounding cheap or facile. This is evident in the third and final movement, "Varia," of the 2002 piano piece for four hands. It begins with a delicately spiky texture, dissonant and pointillistic. Then it morphs into a blues. Then comes a little neo-Classical ditty, followed by a less "categorizable," more sparely transcendental coda. This sounds like a mish-mash, but in fact each section is done very stylishly and never pushed to cliché, so that one accepts the shifts of perspective, and actually revels in them, looking for connections (though don't try too hard).

Child has a taste and aptitude for aphoristic statement. Almost all the music on this collection is in fact made up of morceaux, perhaps nowhere better shown than in the 1998 Dickinson Songs. The composer seems to have an inexhaustible reserve of clearly defined, catchy ideas that create a satisfying form within a short span, often less than a minute. The same goes for the Variations for solo violin (1999), which seems like Paganini compressed into an Augenblick. Doubles (also 1999), despite listing two pianists in the headnote, is in fact three linked sets of short solo pieces, written for the two performers as successive sets. I find it most remarkable for several truly fleeting pieces, which demand not just speed and dexterity but a jeweled precision of touch. Both Chew and Deveau are up to the challenge.

This is music of exceptional quality, modest but not retiring, pushing envelopes without ever trading into grandiosity. I think you can tell how much I like it. Robert Carl