Classical CD review: Music for Wood and Strings by Bryce Dessner

Music for Wood and Strings

Bryce Dessner

Sō Percussion

Bryce Dessner is best known as a guitarist for the indie rock band The National, but that may soon be eclipsed by his steady rise in the world of contemporary classical music. In May alone: Dessner's orchestral score, "Quilting," was premiered by conductor Gustavo Dudamel and the Los Angeles Philharmonic; he curated a festival of new American music in London; and he released an album of his piece "Music for Wood and Strings," performed by the ensemble Sō Percussion.

Not content simply to compose a new work for the adventuresome percussion quartet, Dessner came up with a new instrument, too. The “chordstick” is a cross between a hammered dulcimer and an electric guitar, according to Dessner, who collaborated on the design with Aron Sanchez, the instrument builder behind the experimental rock duo Buke and Gase.

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The Sō Percussion players use a combination of pencils, violin bows and mallets to achieve a surprisingly broad variety of sounds from the set of four chordsticks. Built in various sizes, one of the larger instruments features a fretted string for laying down rock-inflected bass lines.

“Music for Wood and Strings,” a suite of nine continuous sections commissioned by and premiered at Carnegie Hall, opens with the serenity of an Indian raga. The bowed chordsticks have an uncanny resemblance to a tamboura, the drone instrument of classical Indian music. But as soon as that sound evaporates, the chordsticks are energetically hammered in a way that makes a listener wish Steve Reich would write a piece for the Hungarian cimbalom.

Some sections act as tranquil interludes, foils to rowdier episodes thickened with ancillary drums. Then there’s Section Five, which pulls out all the chordstick stops. It’s the frenzied Scherzo of the piece where shimmering minimalist figurations commingle with a woodblock in extremis and a prog rock groove that would not sound out of place on a Yes album.

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At 35 minutes, it’s arguable the piece might be stretching its limits. Still, on repeated hearings it’s commendable how satisfying a quartet of chordsticks can sound. Chalk that up, in large part, to the imaginative musicality and can-do spirit of Sō Percussion.

Unlike some rockers who turn to classical, Dessner earned a master’s degree at the Yale School of Music and played flute and classical guitar before forming The National in 1999. With fellow indie rockers Richard Reed Parry from Arcade Fire and Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood, Dessner personifies what appears to be a generational shift in musicians, comfortably straddling the worlds of rock, jazz and classical music.

“Music for Wood and Strings” is proof that Dessner’s taste for experimentation outside indie rock is steadily becoming the more interesting side of his genre-blind personality.

Huizenga is a freelance writer.

Music for Wood and Strings, Bryce Dessner and Sō Percussion, Brassland

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