Continuo

Continuo's debut recording, Meditations on Pachelbel's Canon, is a product of the fertile imagination of Victor Friedberg. Taking one of the greatest hits in Western music history, Friedberg weaves an intricate web of ambient textures, Western and Indian percussion, transcendental voices, and piano. Though classically trained at Julliard and Oberlin, Friedberg found his artistic grounding in electronics and spent his formative years doing ground-breaking work with his teacher and mentor, John Cage. "Cage", says Friedberg, "opened up a new path for me, one that immersed me in electronic experimentation and also in non-western music and philosophy. "The path from Cage", he notes, "led to Eno, and from Eno to Peter Gabriel. Last Temptation was a seminal record". In doing Meditations, however, Friedberg has fused his classical upbringing with his love for ambient, electronic, pop and ethnic music, especially the music of India and Pakistan, Bali and West Africa. The result is a 50-minute work in the classical theme-and-variations form, in which the theme of Pachebel's canon leads to variations that inhabit different musical worlds. "You can go into each of the meditation sections and feel like you're in a new musical tradition," he explains; "but even if you don't know anything about Balinese gamelan or Indian ragas, there's something familiar about it. I was interested in ethnic music, ritual trance music, and deep grooves. It's the mother of all Pachelbel". The term continuo refers to a rhythmic accompanying part that filled out the ensemble in Baroque times. In the original Canon by German Baroque composer Johann Pachelbel, a series of string parts cascades over a repeating bass line, or continuo. Meditations on Pachelbel's Canon uses a vast landscape of synthesizers, sampled strings, operatic and non-Western voices, piano filigrees, and percussion to turn this classical work into an enormous pop song. "I used just the bass line in the 'verse' sections," he explains, "and bring the various textures over it. The 'chorus' section is the full groove kit with the strings playing the whole Canon. And the operatic and vocal sections are like the bridge." A continuo is supposed to repeat, but in order to keep the Meditations from becoming too repetitive, Friedberg subtly varies the electronic texture each time the Canon returns. "Also, as the CD goes on, the meditations become deeper and more intense. By the finale, the Canon is quite transcendental." The original Canon in D Major is a modest work. But it is also an emotional, slightly melancholy one. And in the past twenty years it has been used in countless film scores, TV ads, and has been arranged by musicians as diverse as Brian Eno and George Winston. In fact, it's become so popular and so ubiquitous that many people instantly recognize it without having any clue as to what it is or where it comes from. The trick with arranging such a well-known piece is to try to do something with it that hasn't been done before. From the beginning, Continuo's Meditations on Pachelbel's Canon lets you know you're in for something completely different. It begins with an exotic, Asian-tinged prologue. The actual Canon comes in, and is quickly synched up to a steady dance groove. As the Canon fades away, the bass line continues while flute, Indian tabla drums, piano, and wisps of electronic traceries float overhead. Samples of operatic voices soar briefly but majestically above the instrumental textures. From these building blocks, Friedberg constructs an arresting, sometimes enigmatic soundscape that takes the listener through the worlds of Indian raga, Balinese Gamelan, chill-out electronics, and modern dance music. All of this built on a nearly 300-year-old classical music work by a composer who is otherwise totally obscure. Friedberg set out to use real singers and instruments wherever possible; there is very little sampling on the Continuo disc. The operatic vocals, for example, are done by British singer Jennifer Rhys Davies. "That was one of the most interesting musical experience I had making the record," Friedberg recalls. "I had this Buddhist text translated into Italian, and I wrote what I thought was an authentic but condensed operatic aria. I sent the music ahead to her in Wales, but I had no idea until we started recording and she began singing that it actually would work. It*s a quite beautiful moment." Indian vocals, African percussion, and ethnic flutes are also played rather than sampled. This combination of ancient and modern is central for Continuo. In addition to its musical meaning, Continuo is a name that alludes, Friedberg says, to the space-time continuum. Meditations on Pachelbel's Canon seamlessly blends the retrospective and futuristic, and while Friedberg doesn't plan for the project to continue focusing on Baroque music forever, he admits that the next project will probably also have at least one eye on the music of the past: the next Continuo recording, he says, will be based on either the Bach Mass in B Minor, or Barber's Adagio for Strings. For the moment, though, there is the matter of this impressive debut. Continuo's wild and inventive set of meditations has an almost dreamlike quality to it, as if following the musical thoughts of someone who's drifting off to sleep... The music wanders; fragments of previously heard material are barely glimpsed through a veil of electronics; new sounds and voices sneak into the picture; but the train of thought leads back, inevitably and continually, to the familiar strains of the Pachelbel Canon.
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