Cigar Smoke

by Esther Lamneck
Innova Recordings, St. Paul MN USA, 2007
CD, Innova 673, $15 US
Distributor’s website: http://www.innova.mu.

Reviewed by Michael R. (Mike) Mosher
Saginaw Valley State University, Michigan

mosher@svsu.edu



Not having heard the harmonious marriage of clarinet and electronics (computer and tape) before, this reviewer was pleasantly surprised by their sweetness. Some of the tracks demonstrating this union are played on the Hungarian tarogato clarinet, Lamneck's specialty.

Dr. Lamneck teaches in the New York University Steinhardt School of Education's Department of Music & Performing Art Professions. Her CD Cigar Smoke is a distinctly academic project, for the composers whose work she plays and teaches at the University of Maryland, the University of Maryland, State University of New York at Oneata, the University of Buffalo and her own NYU. The project was funded by the American Composers’ Forum’s Recording Assistance Program and issued on Innova, the label of the American Composers Forum, which bills her as purveyor of a "hard-driving clarinet."

On this disc, she both improvises and follows notated scores. The title track, Robert Rowe's "Cigar Smoke", alludes to the death of Anton Webern, who was shot by an American occupation soldier in 1945 as the composer stepped outside to enjoy a puff in the night air. As Lamneck plays her instrument along with a responsive computer, might the clarinet represent the smoke and the machne the soldier? The digital aspect is also essential to three-part "Trio for Clarinet and Two Computers", composed by Lammeck and Cort Lippe.

The remaining tracks in the hour-long CD include Dinu Ghezzo's "Abyss", Lawrence Fritts' "Musicometry", Orlando Legname's "Event Horizon III" and Zack Browning's "Crack Hammer", which were all composed for clarinet and tape. Beyond its contemporary gritty title, "Crack Hammer" makes use of Ptolemaic magic squares in its composition, those symmetrical mathematical devices Browning found in Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa Von Nettersheim's 1531 book De Occulta Philosophica. In our own century, with the addition of Esther Lamneck's subtle clarinet, they add up to satisfying electro-acoustic music.