A DUST IN TIME | GAPPLEGATE CLASSICAL-MODERN MUSIC REVIE

“In this sometimes grifting, drifting, blistering world we are in today, there perhaps is nothing quite so honest and direct than an album of New Music presented with care, with nothing but the music in general and, one ever hopes, something we will respond to, will like, something to want to hear again and again. New Music is a true element of our freedom from undue coercion, a thing to consider with never a hard sell.. In a world where people compose freely, listen freely, and ideally all are rewarded in kind, not in riches so much as to find a place in what the present-day may be self-remembered for, one hopes.

That hits me as I listen to the Del Sol Quartet performing A Dust in Time (Passacaglia for Strings) by Huang Ruo (Bright Shiny Things BSTC-0158). This is a full-length work divided into 13 sections, each of which flows to the next with a supercharged lyrical set of quietly reminiscent and sad but transcendent slow suspensions and unfoldings .Altogether the work makes for a beautiful, never ending mood that avoids the sort of rote repetition of orthodox Minimalism, but lingers on something that builds on a crawlingly slow ostinato, puts us onto very widely spanning in ways perhaps more vaguely familiar more as chant structured than overtly hypnotic recalls. In time the music moves in melodic motion beyond the already stated and follows a wide arc in a kind of hour-long quasi a-b-a axis..”