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Randy Hoestetler
Happily Ever After
Frog Peak Music, FP008

Reviewed by Mike Mosher, Assistant Professor, Art/Communication Multimedia, Saginaw Valley State University, University Center Michigan 48710 U.S.A.
E-mail: mosher@svsu.edu


Frog Peak Music (A Composers' Collective) is an artist-run organization in New England U.S.A. publishing and distributing experimental works of its composers. Its Web page is www.frogpeak.org . These two CDs, produced in 2000, offer two very different sensibilities and resultant works, from the most severely abstracted to the most lushly narrative.

The work of Carter Scholtz reminds us that Frog Peak's home, Lebanon, New Hampshire is only a few miles from Hanover's Dartmouth College, where Jon Appelton has taught electronic music composition for a quarter century. While the composer Scholtz's mathematically-determined methodologies are recounted on the CD sleeve, this reviewer will also tell you how it sounds, for the CD accompanied a long, rainy freeway drive and promoted contemplation. The opening cut "Lattice" is a characteristic piece of electroacoustic music, where tones assemble slowly and pleasantly. Its pitches diverge then return in intervals based on prime numbers 7 and 2. This reviewer found it reminiscent of the late-1970s radio show in California "Music from the Hearts of Space". It is enjoyable but undistinguished. The dilemma of such mathematically-structured, possibly overdetermined music of this nature is the philosophical question whether the listener can hear the relationships within the music, or must turn to the composer's descriptive "key" afterwards to understand what has been heard.

"Rhythmicon" is a phase-shifted canon using 17 members of a harmonic series whose tones accelerate or decelerate along a curve. Its five minutes of distinctly serial music sound simple as a children's song, synocpated and seemingly played upon kalimba or balafon. "Kaleidophon (strict)" is equally determinate but sounds more sensual, like wind chimes, celeste and bells, tinkling slightly discordantly: the part of the movie evoking the murderer's troubled childhood. It is followed by "Epimores", making use of Ptolemaic intervals in its construction. "Hamilton Circuit", based upon graph theory by mathematician William Rown Hamilton, is a rich 14 minutes and 09 seconds of evocative sound. a single tone sounds, is modulated then with another added. What we hear are series of insectoid sounds, clattering, chirping, squiggling and clacking, then echoes rising and falling, vulpine whoops out in the hills (not uncharacteristic of some parts of woodsy New Hampshire).

"Jet" incorporates both aircraft and the sounds of earth, air, fire and water, but seems primarily liquid with its running water. What sounds like a record player needle in an endless groove may be fire, and perhaps that's an air current slowly rising and falling, as if in a state of mourning and whispered prayer. The piece has abrupt changes like a radio channel-switching, from bell-like tones to its water source. The seventh piece "Luminous Voide" is also collage-like, with sounds like bells, voices, finger cymbals, fanfares like arpeggios from Doug Hollis' Wind Organ in Berkeley, California. The final "Kaleidophon (stochastic)" was performed by the Berkeley Gamelan and uses analog filters tuned to 16 members of a harmonic series and rung by a random source.

Turning to another Frog Peak CD, on the forty-five minute work "Happily Ever After " Randy Hostetler assembles the voices of people telling a favorite story. Sometimes people saying the same phrase (i.e., "Once upon a time") are layered into a chorus. Other times a story will build, and then the voice telling it will stop where you expect a climax, or else another story will enter and compete for your attention. Stories recorded from sixty-six individuals become in Hostetler's hands an orchestra, which he then assembles in the studio. The inherent intimacy of listening to a teller's tale is alarmingly violated when other voices are shoved in and over the experience.

There is a sense of urban multivocality at play here, the city talking to itself, its citizens and denizens recounting stories to each other. One is somewhat reminded of Edgar Lee Masters' play "Spoon River Anthology", though its voices are presented sequentially. The artistic process appears comparable to cutting up a magazine for a collage. A page, column or phrase of text can be pasted in for the impact of what it's saying-or else only for the pattern of its letters. A magazine photograph might be included in the collage for what it depicts-or else as a painterly passage of color. In his layerings and manipulations Hostetler forces us to acknowlege the storytelling voice as both content and form.

Randy Hostetler was born in 1963 and died in 1996. "Happily Ever After" was curated for this CD publication by his former instructor at California Institute of the Arts, Paul Lansky. The myriad voices were recorded by Hostetler between May and December of 1986 and assembled in Cal Arts electroacoustic music studios. The work took him about two years to complete A posthumous website www.livingroom.org contains more information on the composer's life and work.

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