Christopher Butterfield: Souvenir
Redshift Records

How to characterize the music of Victoria, British Columbia-based composer Christopher Butterfield (b. 1952)? Imagine Carla Bley and John Cage conflated with Anton Webern—the whimsical mischievousness of the former mixed with the chromatic micro-universes of the latter. Of course Butterfield's no card-carrying member of the Second Viennese School; it's more that his music, like everyone else's that came after it, benefited from the opening up of harmonic possibilities ushered in by Schoenberg, Webern, and Berg.

That Butterfield would create such unusual and original music makes sense given his background. As a one-time chorister in the UK, he was exposed to the English choral tradition; his return to Canada in the mid-'60s, on the other hand, brought with it exposure to pop and the avant-garde. Composition studies at the University of Victoria and Stony Brook University followed, as did stints in Toronto playing in a rock band, performing sound poetry, and contributing vocally to John Oswald's ariature. Butterfield's the kind of maverick who'd naturally augment his own chamber compositions on his 1993 debut recording with a performance of Kurt Schwitters' Ursonate (recorded in an anechoic chamber, no less). He's also written an opera, Zurich 1916, sung Erik Satie's Socrate at Toronto's Gallery 345, and co-ordinated and curated the Victoria-based Cage 100 Festival, which, of course, celebrated the composer's centenary. Butterfield's seen his work recorded by others—Quatuor Bozzini issuing Trip, featuring five pieces for strings, in 2017, for example—and released his own treatments of others' works, including his renderings of Greta Monach's sound poems Fonerga in early 2022.

Performed by Aventa Ensemble with Bill Linwood conducting, Souvenir presents four long-form works created between 1995 and 2012 on what's ostensibly the composer's second portrait disc. The cute cover photo and hand-lettering promises some degree of irreverence, yet while there is that—in liner notes, the composer writes that the titular work is based on improvisations “made with undependable electronics” and states of parc that it “tries hard to maintain some kind of organizational order, but keeps falling off the rails”—the material was crafted with fastidious attention to detail and merits serious consideration. Interestingly, each piece was commissioned by a different Canadian ensemble, parc the only one created for Aventa Ensemble.

That see-sawing whistling sound chirping in the background of Souvenir? Tree frogs recorded in Barbados, naturally. The twenty-one-minute piece has a whole lot going for it otherwise, however, first and foremost the constantly mutating dialogue between strings, percussion, and woodwinds that holds the attention unwaveringly. Bass clarinet, flutes, and piano carve intricate pathways through Butterfield's action-packed design, each slippery instrument resisting easy harmonic capture as the patterns wind back upon themselves like an ouroboros. Butterfield wrote parc as a somewhat wonky vibraphone concerto for Rick Sacks, a bandmate of the composer's in the early '80s Toronto band Klo. Like in Souvenir, the patterns essayed by the soloist unfold in a rather snakes'n'ladders-like formation with lines ascending and descending unpredictably. Also like the titular work, parc shape-shifts through multiple episodes, with that initial part followed by explorative others featuring wood blocks, organ, Fender Rhodes, woodwinds, and mallet percussion.

Written for Arraymusic, Frame was created with Cage's “Ryoanji” technique in mind whereby, in Butterfield's estimation, “vertical attacks are never quite together.” Slower than the first two pieces, the material advances in a leisurely stroll of stutters and hiccups, with lengthy pauses at times separating the instruments' utterances and loud percussion strikes keeping things lively. While generally reserved and often subdued, Frame jerks to attention ten minutes in when a fusillade of drums and cymbals joins the ensemble's bleating. Butterfield crafted the album's final piece, Port Bou, for Montreal's Nouvel Ensemble Moderne and structured it using both serial and chance procedures and found material. It's understandable, then, that of the four works it'd the one to evoke early twentieth-century writing most. The knotty melodic trajectories intertwined by the chamber instruments vaguely suggest some association, however tangential, with the main progenitors of that aforementioned Second Viennese School, even if there's also a playfulness present that's very much emblematic of Butterfield's sensibility.

May 2023