I was impressed by my first encounter with Gloria Coates’s highly individual music (CPO, 3/97) and I remain so, though a slight, perhaps illusory reservation has arisen. The first two movements of Time Frozen will give you a good idea of what she is about. In the first, over a sepulchral drum roll, a solo violin plays a simple, tonal, hummable tune. It is then treated as a canon, but with the additional voices so placed and pitched that the result is grindingly, milk-souringly dissonant. Much of her music uses strict canon to produce extraordinarily dense webs of sound. In the second movement, again over a drum roll, all the other instruments play very slow glissandos, firstly predominantly downwards, then upwards. Again the textures are densely matted.
Those two movements last about 13 minutes in all. A far more severe test of Coates’s imagination is Homage to Van Gogh, here recorded at its first performance in front of the painting that inspired it, Van Gogh’s Still Life with Quinces. This lasts 23 minutes and consists very largely of complex textures woven from glissandos, with simple melodies or ostinatos occasionally emerging from or thrusting through the mesh. It is curiously gripping, certainly not boring, partly because it seems to be in constant motion, partly because of the clear analogy this music has with painting (Coates is herself a painter, and one of her pictures is reproduced on the booklet). Indeed, listening to her music is rather like looking intensely at a painting, the eye moving from a dense impasto to a more delicate cross-hatching to a passage of vivid brightness.
Light, in fact, is one of her preoccupations, and it is the subject-matter of her Second Symphony: clarity emerging from opacity, one independent plane of music glimpsed through another. Anima della terra, an earlyish piece but part of an ongoing work-in-progress, is atypical: very intense but singable vocal lines with, until the end, much less complex instrumental counterpoint: often no more than three parts. My reservation is that none of these pieces seems of predestined length: I would not have felt a lack or gap if a movement of the symphony or five minutes or so of Homage to Van Gogh had been inadvertently omitted. But nor would I have felt restive if they had gone on longer. Decent performances and recordings, save Anima della terra, where the voices are well back and the string sound harsh.'