The focus of Wiek Hijmans’ new disc is contemporary composition for guitar, though it also includes what is surely the only medley of Thelonious Monk and Jan Pieterzoon Sweelinck (1562-1621) ever attempted. The word “classic” in the title is a bit misleading, since most of the pieces are brand-new commissions. Maarten Altena (of whose Ensemble Hijmans is a member) contributes “Album III” (2002), a piece which suggests that the famously warped Dutch sense of humour is alive and well: it consists of a dead-of-winter elegy flanked by acres of teeth-gritting three-chord rock guitar. Theo Loevendie’s “Scan” (2003) makes use of electronics to create a set of theme-and-variations that ignites unpredictably into billowing electronic loops. Christian Wolff’s “Another Possibility” (2004) is named after Morton Feldman’s “The Possibility of a New Work for Electric Guitar,” a now-lost 1966 piece written for Wolff (it was in the case when his guitar was stolen). As usual with Wolff, there are many different ways to realize the score: in this version, an austere series of fragments gradually joins up into passages of two-part counterpoint and call-and-response; the quiet, hesitant mood is interrupted only once, by an angry burst of notes occurring just before the internal track division.

Steve Reich’s Electric Counterpoint (1987), originally written for and recorded by Pat Metheny, is the best-known work here: a suite of three hypnotic, burbling canons constructed by overdubbing a grand total of thirteen guitar lines and two electric bass lines. Hijmans does an impressive job, giving it a pace and texture strikingly different from Metheny’s version. But the heart of Classic Electric is the late Paul Termos’s “ E Dominio ” (2001), a 17-minute piece built around a drone on E – a formal pavane, crisscrossed with agonized blues guitar, that slowly gathers to a piercing intensity. Listening to it, it’s hard not to think of Termos’s early death from cancer in 2003, even though it was written and recorded before he knew of his condition. Hijmans’ placement of the Monk piece immediately following “ E Dominio ” underlines the rawly elegaic mood: after hearing countless rote “Round Midnight”s it’s a shock to encounter a reading this angry. It’s answered by Sweelinck’s “Volte,” a piece full of the stately melancholy which was a period specialty of Renaissance composers. Hijmans concludes the program with his own “From Here to There and No Return,” which unfolds continuously through disparate moods and style-shifts without breaking the musical thread, eventually disappearing in a headlong rush of pop-music chording. He remarks: “The changing specific gravity of the different sections of material actually makes it impossible to retrace one’s steps. That is why for me From Here to There and No Return actually is about Life and Death. An irreversible transformation. Infinitely tough on the survivors. But in the process something of the power of nature becomes tangible.” Perhaps Hijmans has Termos in mind here; in any case, it’s a powerful way to end a consistently fascinating, thought-provoking album.

Nate Dorward

Cadence, October 2005