It’s not even two full steps from this EP back to Charles Ives. One of Laurie Spiegel’s best-loved pieces is titled The Unquestioned Answer, a response of sorts to Ives’s 1908 chamber work, The Unanswered Question. Ives was preoccupied with the big-picture philosophizing of the Transcendentalists–hence Emerson, Thoreau, and the Alcotts popping up in his Concord Sonata.
While Ives contemplated what it all meant (and accepted that he couldn’t know), Spiegel’s cheeky response is more direct, yet with a healthy dose of irony. The cover of her 1980 album, The Expanding Universe, prints a Q&A session with the composer. It begins, “How would you describe your music?” She answers: “I wouldn’t.” One implication, I think, is that music–especially in her milieu in the 1970s and 1980s–carried with it a lot of misguided assumptions. Rigorous composition could be for electronic instruments. Modern music didn’t need to be atonal. Heck, a woman could be a serious composer.
Spiegel’s quips–that she wouldn’t describe her music, that it was written for record players, and more–offer an ethos that many ambient musicians have embraced. Certainly, The Expanding Universe is a key work in the ambient canon. She pioneered many computer-based techniques when Ableton was still generations away. Even if The Unquestioned Answer doesn’t sound like Ives, you can see why she might identify with America’s most famous outsider composer.
The Ahn Trio Ensemble Plays Laurie Spiegel continues that dialogue with an unexpected twist. Spiegel wrote most of her other signature works for electronic instruments. The Ahns are classical musicians with a traditional background. The Unquestioned Answer becomes a solo vehicle for (acoustic) piano. Still not exactly Ivesian, but a step back in that direction.
Scored for piano and cello (the Ahn Trio Ensemble is, on this EP, a sister-act duo), Spiegel becomes a bit less ambient. Given the limitations of humans and their instruments, there are fewer details for the composer to control. But the very physicality of performance–the contact with each piano key, the scrape of the bow–puts an accent on every note that prevents these versions of the music from fading into the background.
To some Spiegel devotees, that might be a drawback. For the composer herself, I suspect, it’s just different. One of the pieces here, Island Of Peace, was written for the Ahns. There is no sign that the performers are meant to minimize that vitality, or to play in any way “ambient-like.”
For the first time, then, Spiegel’s notes are front and center. Each piece is built from one or two, simple, tonal phrases. The Unquestioned Answer has a clear tonal center but no indication of major or minor. A Fall Afternoon, for solo cello, begins like a Bach suite but only grudgingly develops. There are resemblances to Philip Glass. Unlike Glass, though, Spiegel seems content to remain modest, whether in duration, instrumentation, or dynamics.
That modesty serves the music well, even if it has held back Spiegel’s popularity. Among a niche crowd of old-school ambient heads, her legacy is secure. The Ahns have taken a valuable step to put her vision in front of a wider audience.
