CD Review | En Route (Leaf Music, 2023)

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Leaf Music
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User Ratings (1 Votes)
4.6

En Route
Gillian Smith, violin
Leaf Music, November 2023

For better or worse, En Route is a unique example of how track lengths, titles, and human voices (or the lack thereof) affect a listener’s experience of an album.

The first set of tracks, Nebula Variations, was written by Derek Charke, whose compositions offer experimental analyses of the nature of music and instrumentation. These variations are no exception: the first plays around with range, using low and high notes to gauge their textural discrepancies; the third explores how strings sound when played simultaneously. Both convey ideas through short runtimes and loose melodies. Gillian Smith’s careful solo violin performance, however, fails to uphold novelty in Variations 2 and 5, which experiment with discordant crescendos and string plucks over their seven- and nine-minute durations, respectively.

Hsiu-Ping Wu’s titular work, despite being longer than both variations, presents a much more palatable experiment. The piece utilizes octave leaps, scratching sounds, shifts in tempo, and moments of silence to generate an uneasy tension. The listener comes to associate emotions with specific instrumental techniques. Amy Brandon’s Dualisms then uses descriptive titles like “Darkly Melting” and “Joyfully” to generate the same emotional clarity as Wu’s work, while using the concise length of Charke’s variations.

Tree Talk is an oddity. Contrary to Smith’s own words, which carry a conversation with her instrument, the violin’s “voice” doesn’t sound like one at all, but rather like a collection of whiny, unpleasant patterns with little lyrical flow. Smith tells the listeners how to feel rather than allowing them to feel for themselves. This creates tension with the album’s previously asserted stance that the melodies of the violin have the power to carry meanings of their own.