Separation Songs (2013/2018)—a haunting, slowly-evolving set of 54 variations on four-voice hymn tunes—juxtaposes and weaves together an array of tunes from William Billings’ New England Psalm Singer (1770), gradually altering them as the piece unfolds. Although its architectural surface remains fairly consistent throughout, the 70-minute continuous work for two string quartets is at any given moment alluring and eloquent in its simplicity and beauty.

The composer writes, “Throughout the piece, hymn tunes appear and reappear in ever-expanding loops of music. . . . Each time they return, the tunes filter through a ‘separation process,’ whereby selected notes migrate from one quartet to the other . . . generating new rhythms and harmonies.”

On this recording, L.A.’s acclaimed Eclipse Quartet, a stalwart of the Southern California new music scene, accompanies and interacts with itself—playing both quartet parts.


Matt Sargent is a composer, guitarist, music technologist, and audio engineer based in upstate New York. His generally pensive and serene music is often based on natural resonances and repeating structures and frequently involves the sonic features of specific spaces, which has led him to create work in many unique locations, such as the grain elevators of Buffalo’s Silo City and Death Valley’s Rhyolite ghost town. His music has been heard in concerts and installations at the Reykjavik Art Museum, Constellation (Chicago), The Wulf (Los Angeles), the Darmstadt Ferienkurse für Neue Musik, the New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival, the Chesapeake Orchestra’s River Concert Series (DC), the Museum of Contemporary Art (Cleveland), the SEM Ensemble’s Emerging Composers series, and elsewhere. He is a visiting assistant professor of electronic music and sound at Bard College. His album Ghost Music, a work for solo percussionist, was released on the Weightier Recordings label in 2018, his Tide (for ten basses)was released on the Marginal Frequency label in 2019. (www.mattsargentmusic.com)

The Eclipse Quartet (Sarah Thornblade and Sara Parkins, violins; Alma Lisa Fernandez, viola; Maggie Parkins, cello.) is dedicated to performing contemporary music. It has toured throughout the U.S. and Europe, and its repertoire spans extends from works by John Cage and Morton Subotnick to collaborations with the singers Beck and Caetano Veloso and includes works music by Roger Reynolds, Roscoe Mitchell, Julia Wolfe, Peter Garland, Ben Johnston, Ruth Crawford Seeger, Annie Gosfield, John Zorn, Fred Frith, Philip Glass, Lois V. Vierk, John Adams, John Luther Adams, Jim Fox, and many others. The group has recorded music by Morton Feldman, Frederick Rzewski, James Tenney, Ben Johnston, and Zeena Parkins for the Tzadik, New World, Microfest, and Bridge labels.

REVIEWS:

“Ever wonder what two centuries colliding sounds like? Listen to ‘Separation Songs.’” (Robert Carl)

“Matt Sargent’s ‘Separation Songs’ upholds Cold Blue’s penchant for innovative compositional concepts while at the same time gracing its catalogue with an exceptionally beautiful piece of music. Imagine the stirring, plaintive cry of a Shaker hymn sustained for seventy-three swoon-inducing minutes and you’ll have some immediate idea of Sargent’s setting. Performed with sensitivity by the Los Angeles-based Eclipse Quartet, ‘Separation Songs’ is, in formal terms, rather simple in design yet no less exquisite for being so. Sargent, a composer, guitarist, music technologist, and audio engineer who calls upstate New York home and who’s created work in unusual locations such as the grain elevators of Buffalo’s Silo City and Death Valley’s Rhyolite ghost town, converted tunes from William Billings’ New England Psalm Singer into an eloquent set of variations. . . . With no breaks in the presentation and the material evolving slowly, ‘Separation Songs’ begins to take on the character of generative music created for a gallery installation, especially when it hews to a static dynamic pitch rather than a conventional narrative arc (though resolution is intimated, subtly and artfully, as it approaches its end); it’s easy to imagine the piece stretching out for hours on end, its programmed variations looping endlessly and holding mesmerized gallery visitors in thrall. The title, by the way, alludes to the fact that when the hymn tunes re-emerge in the presentation, they’re filtered through a ‘separation process’ that sees selected notes transposed from one quartet to the other, resulting in new rhythms and harmonies. While that formal design brands it a contemporary composition, no formal understanding of the work is required for one to be moved: this is a modern work that seduces the listener with the sensuality of its rustic sound, the serenity of its tone, and the sincerity of its tender phrases. Assuredly, the gentle, keening cry of Eclipse’s strings will stay with you long after this lovely recording ends.” (Ron Schepper, Textura)

“’Separation Songs’ . . . to my ears, is like listening to a Renaissance consort of viols through a layer of gauze, or filtered by the mists of time, much like when ghostly strains of Schubert’s ‘Death and the Maiden’ appear in George Crumb’s ‘Black Angels.’” (TheWholeNote)

“On first listen, one wonders, what is this instrument? A glass harmonica? A pair of harmoniums? Perhaps a medieval string consort. One hears hymn-like chords and cadences. Yet dissonances intrude briefly, and Ivesian multi-key-centers blossom. . . . The instrument is actually the Eclipse Quartet, overdubbing itself. . . . “It’s gorgeous, and reminds one of John Hollway’s 2014 ECM release, Pavans and Fantasies from the Age of Dowland, and Kronos Quartet’s 1997 release, Early Music.” (Only Strings)

“Mournful passages drip with an ache that’s almost physically palpable; when some sense of hope is glimpsed, it is quickly…drenched in a poignancy that is nigh on devastating. Sargent’s deft production emphasizes the quartet’s weaving of numerous wraith-like filaments that bring a disarming ethereality to the recording, yet it’s the work’s fundamental emotionalism that makes it such a passionate experience. Powerful, wrenching stuff.” (Darren Bergstein, Downtown Music Gallery Newsletter)

“Like a kaleidoscope, the music is always changing and yet always staying the same: its fundamental elements move constantly but consistently within predetermined boundaries. Its strange blend of uplift and melancholy made me think of some of Gavin Bryar’s best work. Strongly recommended.” (CD Hotlist)

“I think this is a beautiful piece of music and I am not sure why. I like the slowness of the development, the melodic touch and the general minimalism. If anything, I am reminded of the work of Gavin Bryars, his Obscure Records…. Forty years ago, Brian Eno could have picked this record as well for inclusion on the great Obscure Records series. A long and excellent piece of music that brought some much needed calm to my place.” (Frans de Waard, Vital Weekly)

“You may think you’ve heard everything there is to hear but there cannot be an end truly.… Luckily out of the absolute everything of possibility there are good things still to be heard, very good things. Such a good thing is Matt Sargent’s 70-minute chamber opus Separation Songs, as played with proper and considerable spirit by the Eclipse Quartet. It is scored for two string quartets and consists of 54 variations on hymns by William Billings. There is ‘separation’ in the way tones from one hymn migrate into another one at every turn in the cycle.

“Given the Cold Blue label designation you’d be right in assuming a Radical Tonality category for it. It belongs there…yet one notes also that it evokes, in fact what it is [is] on one level a string arrangement of old SATB hymns such as (in more conventional form) might have been played on deck in the last hours of the Titanic’s ill-fated voyage. The gradually timeless suspension the separations give rise to makes it as all in a dream, something ultimately without temporal provenance in the way it seems—and so it derives its radical quality in that way.

“It is in the oscillation of is and is not to the above that the music takes its power and charges it. It is the secret push to it all. Secret before it hits you that is. Then it is the IS that gets you in repeated hearings, how the music is radicalized in its sequencing as in some dreamtime realm we only know when we recognize its kithing kin-twin-ness so to say. It is as like-with-like without patently perceived repetition so much as continuity that this music derives its pull and charm from.

“It grows on you after a matter-of-fact first hearing, like someone’s words that seem simple but then in recall they take on deeper impact, so also this music in second, third, and etc., hearings. That is the crux of this one. Hear it, contemplate it, then get it into your ear zone for good? Do. Process is product, and a very good thing it is! .” (Gapplegate Classical-Modern Music Review)

“There’s repetition, and then, there’s repetition on such a cosmically vast plane as to stress audibility. Matt Sargent’s haunting and beautiful Separation Songs pushes the art of repetition to its limits in a frame that offers the calm waters of meditative listening while gently disturbing them.

“Composed between 2013 and 2018, this nearly hour-and-a-quarter work for two string quartets sounds larger than it is. The likelihood is that its excellent engineering is responsible for the illusions of largess. Sargent begins with hymn tunes collected in 1770 by William Billings, but they serve a more inclusive musical purpose as they loop and bump up against each other in the overdubbed hands of the excellent Eclipse Quartet. While tones clash, pulse and vibrate in a kind of post-Alvin Lucierian sympathy, those points of friction are not what softly but insistently rattles the eardrum, or not completely. The piece moves from modal territory reminiscent of Beethoven’s Heiliger Dankgesang toward something much closer in its restlessness to Faure’s requiem, ripples just beneath the surface disturbing but never completely shattering its calm. The tunes themselves float in and out of focus with the short-term simplicity but underlying multivalence of a Messiaen adagio.

“The recording allows for a beautiful view, so to speak, of the two string quartets as they traverse and retraverse the tunes’ cartographies in loose parallel, but nothing is presented in too stark of a relief. If simple immersion in the soundworld is the order of the day, it is easily attained. There is little more to say about the long but fruitful journey itself, save that, as with so many Cold Blue releases, it involves a gradual unfolding, and anyone without the patience to undertake it might do better elsewhere. Conversely, for those desiring an hour of bliss for adults, of something beyond so much of the mindless music afloat these days supposedly made to foster a meditative state but really an excuse for vapid self-indulgence and self-congratulation, there are moments when nothing else will do. There is a depth to this excursion into early North-American spirituality that will keep it relevant long after pieces whose music falls flat under the weight of their titles have vanished.” (Marc Medwin, Fanfare magazine [Five Stars])