Jackson Greenberg: First Light
Ravello Records

At twenty-four minutes, First Light might be more CD single (or EP) than full-length, but its two works are nonetheless compelling. Born and raised in Philadelphia, the now Los Angeles-based Jackson Greenberg studied under Steve Mackey and Paul Lansky at Princeton University and has since established himself as a go-to composer for film and television projects. The pieces on First Light, however, are stand-alone works of markedly contrasting character. Whereas the title work is an incrementally intensifying drone performed by a symphony orchestra (unusual for material of that type), the second is a dignified, smaller-scale treatment of a Rilke poem, replete with a dramatic reading archived from a decades-old public domain recording.

First Light appears first, a sixteen-minute exercise in dynamic combustion realized by the Slovak National Symphony Orchestra under conductor Arturo Rodriguez's direction. The work's structure grew out of an infatuation Greenberg had developed with digitally elongating short recorded sections into soundscapes many times their original length. While some outcomes didn't sustain his interest for their duration, one that did became First Light, the impression created by it so emotionally resonant it felt to him as if the piece had birthed itself. He thereafter reconfigured it for an orchestral treatment such that the electronic dimension that's initially dominant is gradually overtaken by the orchestra, the calibrated build in its playing intended to evoke the experience of rising from dark depths to bask in the light awaiting at the surface.

It opens portentously with a thrumming single-pitched drone accented by sweeping figures and flirtations with dissonance in the string clusters. Exhalations of immense, elemental force emerge as the core expands, other instrument sounds gradually emerging and thickening the accumulating harmonic density. Don't be surprised if you find yourself visualizing Munch's 1911 painting The Sun when rays of light punctuate the swelling, at times pitch-shifting sound mass. As the piece progresses towards its conclusion, it induces disorientation in the listener when flutes, horns, strings, and percussion swirl at light-speed and the whole takes on the character of an unstoppable colossus. When decompression finally arrives, it comes as a relief.

While vastly unlike First Like in its intimate tone and sound design, The Panther shares with it certain thematic qualities, with Rilke's poem conveying the exhaustion experienced by an entrapped creature and the diminishment that comes with such imprisonment. Strings and electronics form a potent backdrop, but it's the controlled recitation of the text by the unidentified speaker in German that makes the piece truly arresting. Coupling the voice recording with an elegiac classical score proved to be a remarkably effective strategy by Greenberg, and the two pieces are so enticing they make one eager to hear more from their creator.

April 2020