Caleb Burhans: Evensong

This album is surreal and surprising at the same time.

It’s funny that, often times, the most revelatory music is the music that most obviously looks backward. While David Lang has been writing for early music savants Anonymous Four, Caleb Burhans has been writing his own early-music-inspired pieces–-those which draw on the simple, monophonic textures of Gregorian Chant, while still achieving incredible emotional depth. I spent much of this album remembering Faure’s powerful and poetic Requiem mixed with Easter graduals, Perotin, and Bang on a Can. A pretty awesome list if you ask me. Burhans’s album evensong, released this year on Cantaloupe, values retrospection. The opening track, a setting of the Magnificat, could be lifted from a number of different centuries, but, in a strange way, is distinctly 21st: a straight-ahead, monophonic setting that begins to bend and swoop as voices fall from the grace of melody. They’re simple gestures, and that’s why they’re so powerful–a theme for this album. The same openness that defines Magnificat flows through much of the record, save for Iceman Stole the Sun: a raucous, rock-inspired jam session that swells from early organ lines, builds through the steady beating of a drum, and explodes into a glorious blast of energy that ultimately tapers into resolution. The high point of the album for me is Oh Ye of Little Faith… a beautiful, nostalgic track driven by the delicate plucking of a harpsichord and a glockenspiel (strangely reminiscent of You Will Return from David Lang’s newest album). Strings float on top of the music box texture, with pangs of dissonance scattered throughout. Through the entirety of evensong, the intimacy of Burhans’s textures and simple melodic sense is powerful beyond what many might expect from such spare resources; it is, however, this spareness that creates these open–-almost reverential–-works of art.

It's good. Varied, clean. To listen to, not for background music.

Fantastic! New, refreshing choral music is hard to come by these days! There's some great, non-traditional instrumentation in there, too! There's a great mix of vocal and instrumental music on this CD.

Interesting, droney, addictive...

I never really listened to classical music, but I tried listening to some today and got this album. It's just amazing. This has got me hooked on classical.

Some things I like, some things I don't. There's a lot of drone/bandsemble-ish things going on, but the performances are tops. Futher listenings may reap better rewards. -Bz

Evensong is streaming live at WQXR this week, but tracks 8 and 9 here -- "In Time of Desperation" and "As Desperation Sets In" -- look to be iTunes exclusives. An auspicious debut, to say the least...