Stephen Whittington: Final Fragments - Piano Music of David Kotlowy (DE LA CATESSEN RECORDS )
From our very own, Zane Morris:
“Softly drifting into the atmosphere comes Australian composer David Kotlowy and pianist Stephen Whittington’s Final Fragments (De La Catessen Records), a collection of often sparse solo piano pieces presented by the city of Adelaide and released in cooperation with UNESCO.
As a whole, the album evokes an image of Morton Feldman cradling a fledgling, girthy mitts handling fragile matters with emotive vigilance. Reminds me of a related anecdote I encountered years ago that tells of John Cage and Feldman sparring on the subject of a bird spotted overhead. While Cage revered its soaring freedom, Feldman insisted that the desperate search for sustenance motivates and defines its movement. The zen dread in Feldman’s observation is manifested and mostly maintained within Kotlowy and Whittington’s work on this LP.
Jon Dale’s accompanying text notes Kotlowy’s embracing the honkyoku shakuhachi Buddhist aerophone practice, where the human breath acts as a melodic perimeter. One blast of air lays out a melody. With pianist Whittington releasing phrases at the pace of ice melting under the force of human breath, many moments decay in unresolved horror, choked out by the anechoic-like negative space. Can’t help but wonder about the compositional origins for this sense of mourning, but listening while saturated in the recent delirious heat, much of Final Fragments feels like a grim gesturing towards the extreme dilemmas that every organic being could face stripped of our invented conveniences.
The saccharine George Winston-like respite of the “Well Fed Preludes” furthers evidence of the album's concept fully revealed. The trio of pieces' momentary contrast superimposes and amplifies the trip to the bottom of the ocean throughout the rest of the album. With less evocative titles, the remainder of the work leaves the listener without a compass as to the feeling one could derive, left on our own in the sonic darkness.
When looking deeper into Kotlowy’s work, he seems keen to epic fallacies and cruel consequence, as his work Mitithi (2014) is described as “a devastating vocal meditation on the desolation of indigenous people.” And while Final Fragments is self-aware of its 20th Century and traditional influences, the work poses the potential that Kotlowy has turned a shrewd about face from history, or alternatively is star gazing, pondering a futurist eco holocaust using inherited compositional methods. The looming nuclear existentialism central to Feldman’s generation feels comparatively targeted in scale to the environmental precariousness that humanity currently faces, a fragility beyond words.
There are certainly global and contemporary allies to the beckoning, determined despair rendered in modern composition: Evan Caminiti* and Kali Malone’s recent releases come to mind. What sets Final Fragments apart is that in listening, the careful piano work itself provides an oblique sliver of light carved into pitch black, the piano’s resilient hammers countering silence.
*Full disclosure: I contributed artwork to Evan’s 2020 LP Varispeed Hydra.”