Eight recent pieces by the endlessly-prolific Carson Cooman, all part of a larger cycle of works inspired by the Nantucket region of Massachusetts, where the composer spends portions of his summers.

Any review of Carson Cooman must inevitably begin with his extraordinary prolificity. He’s at the moment of this review 28 years old, the most recent work on this CD dates from 2009 and is op. 811, and one must assume a number of works have already issued from the pipeline since. Add to that his work as a performer (organist), arts consultant, and critic for this publication, and you get an idea of just what a phenomenon he is. [Regarding the last category, I found myself catching up on Fanfares from the last few cycles, reading a review of Maxwell Davies’ opera Taverner in 33:4, and thinking, “Gosh, this review is long but it’s incredibly informative and well written; I’m actually learning something.” And behold, when I got to the end I saw it was by CC.]

So OK, the by-now-usual introduction can be dispensed with. Because the composer is what I’d call a “good acquaintance,” I approached this review with a little trepidation, because I always fear that with so much music it’s going to sound like boilerplate, and I may be put in an embarrassing situation. But the near-miraculous thing is that Cooman continues to write music that’s this good, even with his breathless pace of production. All of these pieces have some connection to Nantucket, a place dear to the composer’s heart, either through impressionistic evocation of landscape, or association with a memorable personal experience. They range from orchestra to solo trumpet, and cover various chamber ensembles in between.

Cooman is a composer whose deepest roots seem to be in the American mid 20th-century tradition of nationalist/pantonalist composers. So his music always has strong melodic and motivic hooks, clearly pronounced and developed. But he’s hardly unaware of the rest of the century’s legacy. The bassoon quintet, for one example, has coloristic touches (such as the “mobile” of string harmonics that concludes the work’s accompaniment) that reflect the changes in the color/timbre palette we’ve seen over the past few decades. And though a lyrical essay very much in the old style (as its title indicates), the trio for trumpet, cello, and piano transcends the possible pitfalls of its instrumentation to sound so natural that one wonders why it hasn’t been used extensively by others before.

The strongest argument for this music comes from its obvious commitment to its materials, the composer’s deep hearing of what he’s writing, and a refusal to settle for easy solutions. To my taste the best two pieces are the orchestral ones framing the program, Miacomet Dreaming, with its utterly obsessive dotted rhythm motive, and Flying Machine, which is wonderfully extravagant in its ideas and orchestration.

The downside is that there’s just so much of it, and it seems like fabric cut from an endless roll (albeit of exceptional workmanship and quality). I only know a fraction of the composer’s output from a few CDs, but it domore....

Review By Film Music: The Neglected Art,September 2010

For a twenty eight year man Carson has certainly kept himself busy considering his opus numbers which exceed over 800 as of 2009. This is in addition to writer, reviewer, and musical consultant. Apparently he has learned how to survive without sleep! This new recording which consists of eight different works all inspired by beautiful Nantucket Island, is yet another example of new material to explore on the American Classics series. Having lived in the Boston area for a small part of my life I must confess the title of the work was what got my attention to explore the material further.

American composer Carson Cooman has had a phenomenally productive career, with opus numbers into the 800s by his 27th year, and he has maintained an active performance schedule as an organist, as well as being a music journalist and entrepreneur. The works on this CD, written between 2002 and 2007, are scored for a variety of forces ranging from solo to full orchestra, and all were inspired by the landscapes of Nantucket Island, off the coast of Massachusetts. Cooman’s music is lyrical and tonally centered, but he usually avoids falling into easy neo-Romantic clichés. His is particularly gifted as an orchestrator, and his works are full of delightful colors and inventive effects that he integrates with complete naturalness. In spite of the fact that each of these pieces, many of which have in their titles locations on the island, is linked to a particular landscape or experience, sometimes with programmatic specificity, they are fully successful as abstract music. Particularly effective are Miacomet Dreaming for orchestra and Shawkemo Dreaming for strings, brief tone poems with a bittersweet, evocative character, a specialty of Cooman’s. The Quintet for bassoon and strings is especially attractive, with a striking opening, in which the strings create a dense, harmonic fog out of which the bassoon solo emerges with the clarity of a lighthouse beacon. Madaket Dreaming is a lovely, wistful nocturne for solo piano. The strongest piece may be the Lyric Trio, a compelling, disciplined six-movement work for trumpet, cello, and piano that the composer describes as an “American Travelogue.” The performances by a variety of European orchestras and ensembles and American soloists are uniformly top-notch: polished, sensitive, and energetic. The recordings were made in various venues so the sound somewhat varies from piece to piece, but it is never less than excellent in its clarity and presence.