Fabio Mittino & Bert Lams - Long Ago
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Fabio Mittino & Bert Lams - Long Ago
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Fabio Mittino & Bert Lams
In Long Ago Fabio Mittino and Bert Lams have taken George Gurdjieff and Thomas De Hartmann's piano arrangement of near eastern melodies and transcribed them for guitars. The results are charming and make for pleasant listening, which is about as far as they go. Some of the tracks, such as "Armenian Song" definitely benefit from the delicacy offered by the plucked strings, allowing the haunting melody and delicate ornamentation to gently sparkle. Others, like "Orthodox Hymn for a Midnight Service" lose the stately grandeur that homophonic writing gains from the piano to become noodling and dull.
Long Ago: Music by Gurdjieff/De Hartmann Artist release (www.mittinolams.com)
Many of the sources that Gurdjieff and De Hartmann used tended towards static writing: repeated figures hovering around a tonal center. With the strong, percussive nature of the piano, or the voice-like sound envelope of wind instruments (or of voices themselves), these figures gain strength, projecting a mass of sound that implies a sort of solidity. Think, for instance, of Mussorgsky's standing chords in Boris Godunov or of Scriabin's "Mystic Chords", which use quartal harmonies to break the functionality implied by traditional triadic harmonies. Instead of propelling the music forward by way of tensions between dissonance and consonance, these parallel blocks of notes describe structure instead. In order for this to work, the sound has to be big, which is something the piano is well-suited to deliver. When the same chords are moved to guitars, that sense of power is lost, and the result is far less moving, veering dangerously into the New Age category, as happens in too many tracks on Long Ago. The flaws in this album have nothing to do with the performers, who are exquisite musicians. They deftly coax lovely ornaments and more than enough subtlety from their instruments. The problem is in the transcriptions (transcriptions of arrangements of transcriptions, in fact) themselves. Gurdjieff (born to a Greek father and Armenian mother in what was then Russian Armenia sometime between 1866 and 1877), trekked through Armenia, Iran, Egypt, Central Asia, Tibet and Rome, taking notes of melodies (and collecting a variety of spiritual and philosophical ideas to be worked into his own spiritual system along the way). Later he worked with the Russian composer Thomas De Hartmann to build a body of piano work from these melodies, serving, like his countryman Komitas, as a pioneer ethnomusicologist. While Gurdjieff is better known for his colorful career as spiritual guru (and, at least in his early days, as an out and out con man, who dyed hedgerow birds yellow to be sold as canaries when he wasn't hypnotizing people to cure them of addictions or seducing his female followers), his work in collecting and preserving musical ideas of a wide variety of remote peoples remains exemplary. Transcribing the Gurdjieff/De Hartmann oeuvre away from the piano has worked well with the Gurdjieff Ensemble, when the music was being moved back to traditional instruments. In these, the force provided by the piano was made up for by the variety of timbres, the percussion, and the wind instruments. Those transcriptions also opened up a window into how those tunes sounded in their original settings. Unfortunately Long Ago lacks both of these advantages, and, on the contrary, moves the music more into the background. However, if well-performed, slightly exotic background music is what the listener wants, Long Ago might just be the perfect choice. - Erik Keilholtz
Further reading:
Levon Eskenian and the Gurdjieff Folk Instrument Ensemble
Anja Lechner and Vassilis Tsabropoulos
V. Rev. Yeznig Zegchanian
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