Composer Jeff Lederer Puts Out His Two Most Out-of-the-Box Recordings to Date

Schoenberg On The Beach and Balls of Simplicity, the two fall releases from Jeff Lederer's Little (i) Music, offer us a portal into an expansive sonic world. They're not companion pieces, and yet they're related by more than just their shared creator. 

Schoenberg On The Beach is a jazz song cycle based on works by composers Arnold Schoenberg and his student Anton Webern.

The album includes texts the composers associated with those pieces by poets Rainer Maria Rilke and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and others. Joining Lederer's clarinet and flute are vocalist Mary LaRose; cellist Hank Roberts; Patricia Brennan on vibraphone and electronics; bassist Michael Formanek; and drummer Matt Wilson.

Marty Ehrlich plays bass clarinet on one track; and turntablist Arktureye creates fascinating interstitial sound collages by remixing archival audio from Coney Island.

The album, at least in part, takes inspiration from the ocean. Lederer grew up a quarter mile from the beach in Pacific Palisades, California. His high school math teacher was Larry Schoenberg and no, that's not a coincidence – Arnold was Larry's father. 

"Arnold Schoenberg suffered from asthma," said Lederer, "and often sought relief from his respiratory illness by spending time at the beaches of the Mediterranean, as you can see in photos of him in his bathing trunks at the shore vacationing with his students Webern and Berg. While I think he struggled with the cultural environment of his last city of residence, Los Angeles, he no doubt enjoyed his proximity to the ocean."

After growing up on the West Coast, Lederer has lived for many years in Brooklyn, itself a coastal place and the home of Lederer's beloved Coney Island, and also the Luna Park theme park. 

"Luna Park opened in 1912, the same year as the premiere of Schoenberg's 'Pierrot lunaire (Pierrot In The Moonlight),' said Lederer. Two of the pieces on Schoenberg On The Beach come from "Pierrot."

Schoenberg On The Beach covers a breathtaking amount of musical and emotional ground, from tender beauty to swirling chaos. "On The Beach" opens the album with a soundscape of birds and electronics. Wilson is a jack-of-all-sounds throughout, whether on drum set or various percussion instruments, such as the soundscape he creates on Webern's "Blummengruss."

Brennan's sensitive vibraphone playing knits the album together. Ehrlich's muscular bass clarinet is the perfect foil for LaRose's voice on "The Pale Flowers of Moonlight," while Arktureye creates a haunting opening to "Heiter." Formanek's arco playing on "Heiter" is resonant and beautiful, especially in combination with Lederer's clarinet. The album's closing track, "Summer Weariness," ends with a fading electronic soundscape that leaves us contemplating the silence, wondering at what we've just heard.

Balls of Simplicity, meanwhile, gathers Lederer's notated chamber works, composed between 1979 and 2021, as performed by the Morningside Tone Collective and guest pianist Jamie Saft. (The title comes from a Shaker saying, but please remember this is an album by a guy with a band called Swing n' Dix.)

The album includes Lederer's first notated work, "Piano Piece," written during his senior year in high school and performed here by Saft. It's a reworking of an existing English folksong.

"I can see the seeds of my interests in an incipient form here," said Lederer, "namely my impulse to arrange and adapt pre-existing music."

Like Schoenberg On The Beach, this album also takes inspiration from water. The opening piece, "Bodies of Water for flute, cello and piano," arose from Lederer's walks near a series of waterways in Guilford, Vermont, where he and his wife often spend summers.

Additional sources of inspiration include the aforementioned Shaker religious sect ("Vision Songs Quartet for flute, clarinet, violin and cello"); the end of creation ("Song for the Kaliyuga for piano, clarinet, violin and cello"); and the effects of Alzheimer's on Lederer's father ("Persistence of Memory for two clarinets").

Little (i) Music's fall releases are a compelling pair, reminding us that music can be exciting and mysterious and epic and intimate, sometimes all at once. 

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