Bunita Marcus – Lecture For Jo Kondo

99Chants

Another day, another re-issue of an overlooked female composer. That might seem glib, but there’s a lot of it doing the rounds at the moment. And let’s be fair, composition is still too frequently male-heavy.

Bunita Marcus is (unfortunately) known as one of those adjacent figures — a New York figure known by people in various scenes, with a raft of compositions under her belt and a pretty formidable back catalogue – but a real dearth of recordings. Unlike a few avant-garde figures (say, Pauline Oliveros or Ellen Fullman), Marcus isn’t prohibitively un-performable, or un-recordable. On the evidence of this record, while there’s certainly difficulty in the playing, it isn’t spectacularly prohibitive to record label or listener.

Marcus’s name was associated for me with Morton Feldman (who named a piece for her) — and she studied with big Morty, and it’s fairly evident. This in itself is pretty remarkable — Feldman is pretty notoriously a solitary voice, and while this has his glacial ache, there’s somehow more patience, a harmonic sense less brooding, more querulous. It’s definitely reminiscent of ’80s Feldman (plus lector), but there’s a sparing smattering of effects — light string glissando — that you wouldn’t associate with him. Which is to say, Marcus is clearly eminently capable of deploying texture and colour, and shares Feldman’s talent for parity, but she’s more Feldmanite than Feldman-esque, if that makes sense.

The term “tantalising” hovers over this release. There’s two pieces — a Marcus composition and a remix. And the Marcus piece has the impression of being functional: “Lecture For Jo Kondo”, the lector’s poem (by Nico Vassilikas) intimating something elliptical, incidental. Perhaps not in the sense of being unsubstantial, but rather akin to walking past a room with astonishing music that’s just on the borders of perceptual grasp. The remix by David August does a good job of accentuating the original but, perhaps, embeds the piece within more secure foundations — or at least moors it to drones and sustained tones.

Tantalisingly again, there’s a dearth of recorded music to follow this up with, leaving my impression of Marcus thus far being this and the few CDs that I’m going to try and track down once I’ve finished writing this. Definitely a composer who deserves more attention and releases on the scant evidence here.

-Kev Nickells-