Michael Gordon: Sonatra

Album review

Alright, let’s not kid around: this album is really, really weird. Sonatra, by American composer Michael Gordon (*1956), founder of the musical collective Bang on a Can, is played twice in a row… Sonatra appears to be a play on word between “Sonata” – though this piece has nothing to do with a sonata – and “Sinatra” – though the crooner is in no way, shape or form mentioned throughout the album… The work’s specificity is its use of all 88 keys of the piano, in an almost continuous firework of rising and descending arpeggios, broken or not, and a few glissandos on the white keys. Nothing more, nothing less for a strong fifteen minutes. But why, you may ask, is the work performed twice? Simple answer: the first time on a piano tuned to “well-tempered” balance and the second on an instrument tuned to “natural scale”, a scale in which all intervals between successive notes are strictly the same (while in a tempered scale, some adjustments are made to please the human ear in conjunction with the most usual tones of a keyboard in western classical music). In this second interpretation, the listener is duly shaken up, as they’re unable to cling on any, even elusive or microscopic, tonal or harmonic pole – which is still possible, even in the most dodecaphonic serial music –; but after a few minutes, a new musical world opens up, in which these arpeggios seem to find their own logic. Listening to Sonatra requires a high degree of attention, but the resulting impression is rather striking! © SM/Qobuz