What Happens Has Become Now is the fifth solo viola album of American, New York-based experimental violist-composer Jessica Pavone (it is her fourth solo album for the Relative Pitch label. Her first one was released ten years ago, Knuckle Under, Taiga, 2014), recorded at GSI Studios in Manhattan in January 2024.
Pavone’s solo viola music stems from years of concentrated long-tone practice and an interest in repetition, song form, and sympathetic vibration, is Influenced by the ‘folk song’, which lives largely through oral transmission. Each piece’s performance may be unique, reflecting the indeterminacy of Pavone’s output for solo viola. Over the past twenty years, Pavone has been developing solo music based on the pitches of the open strings intended to accentuate the natural sympathetic resonances of her particularly loud viola. Over the years, she has incorporated and experimented with extended bowing techniques and electronic effects to give herself a «partner» to play with and more texture to her compositions.
What Happens Has Become Now offers only four distinct pieces, with no information on the techniques Pavone used, but all demand careful listening to begin figuring out what Pavone does with the viola. The title piece employs sustained and highly resonant lines that make the viola sound like a twisted and experimental version of the traditional Norwegian Hardanger fiddle, often including disorienting folk-like overtones. Pavone experiments on «Wrong Worked That Way, and It Worked Good» with luthier-artist Ken Butler’s hand-crafted hybrid instrument, the Sword Viola, an otherworldly transformation of common and uncommon objects, altered images, and diverse sounds as function and form that collide in the intersection of art and music (Butler’s description). The Sword Viola allows Pavone to play with feedback, distortion and noise and create an industrial-like texture. Pavone pushes the viola on «Below the Threshold of Sensation» to its most physical, extreme sonic palette, including a stubborn mutation and scratching of the viola strings while the last piece, «Unrequited Renouncement», drowns the viola in a stormy-vibrating oceanic drone.
Eyal Hareuveni
Jessica Pavone (viola)
