The Free-Reed Review
Critiques of Compact Discs, Books and Music Scores
CD Review: Various Artists including Kô Ishikawa (shô) and Wang Zheng Ting (shêng)
Whose Forest?
Performers:

Program:

Review by Henry Doktorski:

This is a wild and wonderful activist CD produced by Toronto composer, Sarah Peebles, (see our recent review of her recording Suspended In Amber), intended to generate opposition to the Ontario Government's Lands for Life initiative, which is a major redefinition of the long-term plans for use of Ontario forests.

This CD is a compilation by many musicians, in many styles, yet all have a surreal avant-garde quality. Much of the music inspires calmness, introspection, contemplativeness. A lot of the works feature magnetic tape and computer music, beautiful, fascinating and eerie. You will hear bird calls with reverberating ambiance, a spoken poem to improvised modern jazz, the angry electric guitars of Hanslang's trio, medieval-sounding vocal music. You will hear samples, guitar and Korean komungo. Far out.

Some tracks are for solo instruments. Laurie Freedman plays the bass clarinet; George Gao plays an erhu, a Chinese fiddle; Kô Ishikawa performs his Japanese shô; and Wang Zheng Ting (a familiar name to readers of this web site) performs his Chinese shêng. (Both the shô and the shêng are free-reed Oriental mouth organs). Since this site is devoted exclusively to the free-reed instruments, I will focus on Kô's and Wang's contributions to the album.

Kô Ishikawa studied shô under Miyata Mayumi and Bunno Hideaki, and gagaku ensemble from Shiba Sukeyasu. He is one of Japan's premier performers of both classical Japanese and new works for shô, and performed Takemitsu's Ceremonial with the London Symphony Orchestra in 1995. In this CD, he performs a piece by Sarah Peebles, Blue Moon Spirit (1987). The motion and flavor were inspired by a gagaku "tuning piece" in the hyôjô mode. Listening to this music is like watching the clouds. There is no melody, and the chords move deliberately, impressionistically, without sudden change in harmony or tempo.

Wang Zheng Ting graduated from the Shanghai Music Conservatory and completed his degree in ethnomusicology at Monash University in Australia. He has appeared in numerous festivals (including one in New York City where I met him in March 1999) and recorded for the Australian Broadcast Corporation and for Shanghai radio and television. On this CD Wang performs a traditional piece which captures the warmth and joy of the Water Festival, a festival celebrated by the ethnic minority peoples in the mountainous regions of Southwestern China. He plays a medium-size shêng (20 pipes) in his own arrangement, which includes various shêng techniques such as portamento (it amazes me how he can make the pitch of a reed bend a minor third), rapidly repeated breath shakes (similar to the accordion's bellow shakes) and chords.

Considering the relative dearth of recordings of Oriental free-reed music, I would imagine that any classical shêng and shô aficionado would love this recording. Factually, I liked all the music on the album, but I believe the CD is worth its price just for the shêng and shô pieces.

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