First, this is Gloria Coates (b. 1938) not Eric. Second, we have a welcome addition to a stilltoo-small discography of one of the most original living American composers. I will confess this is my first encounter (far too late) with her music, but I have been primed by word of mouth, above all by fonner Fanfare critic Kyle Gann, who praises her lavishly in his American Music in the Twentieth Century. And the advance word has been confirmed by the music I've finally heard.
Coates is definitely a composer in the mold of the American "ultramodernists" of the early 20th century. The listener will immediately sense an adventurous, uncompromising, cantankerous spirit in her work that is a descendant of such as Ives, Ruggles, Cowell, and Crawford. Her most distinguishing technique is that of the string glissando, which in lesser hands can be a cheap symbol of modernist instability, and a passport to aural seasickness. Not here. Coates is careful to place her sliding tones at the service of larger processes: canons in particular, or "additive/subtractive" lines that expand and contract the range of the glissando over time and in perceptible patterns. She's a wonderfully paradoxical composer because, on the one hand, the music is highly experimental in its surface technique, but on the other hand, classical in its attention to form and development within the symphonic argument. She's a very conceptual composer, as both the titles of movements (Symphony No. 7's movements are "The Whirligig of Time," "The Glass of Time," and "Corridors of Time") and her attachment to strict processes, nowadays called algorithms, may suggest. But no matter how idealistic the music, it always carries a visceral impact, or in good old American terms, a real wallop.
The three works on this program nicely cover the composer's entire symphonic cycle (up to this point), dipping into the start, the middle, and end. Symphony No. I (1972-73) is her best-known work, also referred to as "Music on Open Strings." The work begins with an alternate pentatonic tuning of the instruments, and in the third movement incorporates the scordatura (retuning) of the strings back to the conventional tuning into the real-time performance fabric. Not all the sounds are just the five pitches, though, as Coates inserts all sorts of glissandos that enrich the texture, even if they don't establish other finn pitch centers. It's a highly original work, and a bracing combination of both minimalist and modernist practices.
The Symphony No.7 (1990; a tribute to "Those who brought down the Wall in PEACE," though there is little I hear that's programmatic in the actual music) is the most European sounding of the three works: not a surprise, as the composer has lived her mature artistic life in Germany, another marker of her "outsider" status. It's highly abstract in its materials, and verges on being the work whose glissandos wear out their welcome. But just
