The absence of melodrama that characterizes Linda Catlin Smith’s music offers welcome respite from the incessant turbulence of today’s public arena. The Plains, the first volume in a projected series documenting her compositions for solo piano, stretches out through more than an hour, with an air of calm persistence. Before long, a distinctive sonic environment takes shape around the path marked out by Cheryl Duvall, who takes the soloist’s role. Sheer duration conveys a sense of scale, conjuring up a prairie-like expanse, the topography of flatlands, devoid of ostentatious features. Smith’s music is by no means mundane or routine, however. It is suffused by unpredictability, arising not from the artifice of calculated surprise, but from the absence of a perceptible goal. The Plains isn’t a composition oriented toward some culminating point, from which all that has preceded may be seen to fall into some tidy, predetermined pattern. It more closely resembles the journal of an inquisitive wanderer, not steered by some mission, but compelled by an urge to travel. There are moments of intensity, suggestive of fleeting fixations, which, along with plentiful small details and subtle shifts of focus, register acts of close perception and discernment. Implicit in this music is a figure within its landscape, attentive and judicious, a mobile yet noticing presence. Duvall, who is intimately attuned to Smith’s compositional approach and conceptual horizons, embodies that presence with expressive finesse and sensitivity. Her touch conjures up a refined and responsive sensibility as well as an enveloping space.
Julian Cowley studied in London at University College, the Institute of United States Studies and King’s College, where his doctoral thesis on postmodern fiction was supervised by Eric Mottram. Cowley has lectured and published extensively on literature and cultural studies, and is now a freelance writer on music. He has contributed to every issue of The Wire magazine since 1998, and in recent years has published a number of articles and reviews in Musicworks and other adventurous publications. He lives in Hertfordshire, England, a short distance north of London.