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Christian Wolff et al.

high, grouped according to the highest pitch. The 78 two-note combinations come first, then the 286 three-note chords, and so on, until all the pitches of the octave in question are sounded simultaneously in the one possible thirteen-note chord as the last, 8,178th, sound of the piece. Vriezen’s approach as pianist results in a surface that exceeds, and almost renders irrelevant, the description of the work’s method. Over the course of years of living with the piece, he developed the ad hoc piano technique unveiled in this recording, which results in a traversal of the table of chords that lasts less than half an hour – less than half as long as the composer’s performances of his own work. The result is a virtuosic and sonorous exercise, not a combinatoric one. The opening sections, of twoand three-note chords, become mechanistic toccatas of ascending chromatic scales that gradually unfold in longer and longer segments; by the end, the constant hammering of hugely dense but registrally constrained sonorities is in another space entirely, a swirling cloud of pianistic resonance and elusive internal patterns of semitonal wandering. The rapidity with which Vriezen delivers the data at hand creates a music that is not at all about the chords themselves, but is rather a study in emergent properties: phantom chromatic counterpoints, blooming resonant artefacts, explorations of density. This performance proposes a thesis about Tom Johnson’s work: that what matters here is not pattern, not arithmetic, but sound – instrumental writing, the presence of the performer, and virtuosity. In Vriezen’s hands, the instructions are rendered irrelevant by the emergent results. We are listening not for mathematical pattern but for sensory impact, and the overt ‘objectivity’ of the material is only a productive neutrality that puts the more traditional raw materials of music on display. Vriezen’s compositional contribution to this disc, Within Fourths/Within Fifths (2006), is an explicit homage to Johnson’s quasi-mathematical practice and, as such, it is also an instructive reminder that the translation from arithmetic patterning to score is not as innocent or transparent a process as many descriptions of Johnson’s music make it seem. Like Johnson’s, Vriezen’s work is an exercise in the exhaustion of combinatoric possibilities within a restricted space, and the general structure is similar: an escalation from one to five voices in a catalogue of possible chords. The restriction, though, is an aesthetically and stylistically weighted one; the atoms of Vriezen’s intervallic universe are diatonic, and there are fewer combinations to explicate. That is enough to generate an entirely different result from what is, fundamentally, a conceptually identical premise. Instead of an athletic, gradually overwhelming accumulation of cloudy chromatic intensities, we have a series of gentle, lulling chorales broadly reminiscent of Federico Mompou or Howard Skempton. Here, as the number of voices and thus combinations gradually increases, the lengthening sections create not a sublime monolithicity but an everdeepening Satie-esque flatness. Together, despite their very different surfaces, these pieces are an alluring pair. They remind us that, in the music of Johnson or Vriezen, as in the visual art of Sol LeWitt, the material results will always exceed the restrictions of the idea, will in fact find their being in precisely that excess, if the idea is well conceived. That is harder than it sounds. Here, by that measure, are two very well-conceived ideas indeed.