Sub Rosa
Footsteps a car door opens and closes a key turns in an ignition. Then a voice begins to sing a poem from Finnegan’s Wake set by John Cage. Those are the first sounds on Belgian singer Marianne Pousseur’s latest album an exploration of contemporary composers (including Cage Scelsi Kurtag and her father Henri Pousseur) in unusual settings — an elementary school a train station a spectacularly reverberant church. Pousseur writes “I like to listen to music in places that haven’t been designed for it. I like when music mixes in with noise.” And you can almost feel her delight as a serendipitous bird-call or school bell enters the mix. Most of these composers welcomed chance sounds — most famously in Cage’s “4’33”” which consists of nothing but. Nothing here is quite so spare and many of these songs are even hauntingly gorgeous: a setting of Rzewski’s “Hungry Child” with xylophone and random sounds of children playing gave me goosebumps. Percussionist Maxime Echardour’s contributions are luminous and Pousseur is committed and compelling throughout though her English diction adds an extra layer of abstraction at times. She covers an enormous range both in register and styles and surveys some formidable composers at their most primal and timeless while inviting a closer listen to the music that surrounds us.
