Malcolm Goldstein once described his philosophy towards life thus: "I just want it to be continually open, so that in death I'll just disappear. Leave no footsteps behind, no memorial. Just like a cloud, passing." And yet, even in the world of this forever free spirit, there were constants. One of the most essential of these, his life-long friendship with Philip Corner, is documented on Pieces of the Past, an album documenting an artistic relationship of mutual respect and inspiration in which the roles of composer and performer were as regularly questioned as they were clearly defined.

Certainly Goldstein, as he is happy to point out himself in the liner notes to this release, fed from performances of Corner's music as an impetus for his own compositional and improvisational work. The challenges they presented took his approach to the violin to a whole new level, leading him to the development of a variety of personal techniques. Many of them are on display here, most instantly appealing perhaps on hypnotic one-note meditation "Gamelan Maya", on which the violin lends color, rhythmical accents and texture to Corner's perpetually shifting and expanding piano pulses. And yet, the most impressive parts occur on the opening "Piece for Malcolm Goldstein by Elizabeth Munro", a composition which, with its microtonal oscillations, challenging glissandi and piercingly high pitches may not only exceed the limits of many listeners' tolerance, but also force them to reconsider traditional concepts of minimalism and richness.

On paper, this is nothing but a twenty-minute long almost uninterrupted line of sonic ink. And yet, in the moment of experience, it is all expression. Every note, every gesture, every melodic contour and curvature, the pressure of the bow on the strings, of the hand holding the bow and hitting the wood, the dynamic arches, the variations in pulse and vibrato, the endless gradations in tone from sweet cantabile to bestial grinding contains emotion, wisdom and meaning, there is not a single note here which Goldstein doesn't make his own, not a single decision which he leaves up to chance, not one instant where he falters or strays from his path. He is as perfectly in the moment as he is faithfully following the score and as a listener, the process of hearing him bring it to life is as breathtaking as watching Felix Baumgartner taking his parachute jump from space.

As displeasing as it may be to some people, this is music which leaves an indelible impression, which  stays with you. Goldstein may want to disappear completely in death. But with music like this, it's just not going to happen. - Tobias Fischer, Tokafi

Philip Corner’s 1962 Piece for Malcolm Goldstein by Elizabeth Munro is undeniably an extraordinarily difficult way to open a recording; it’s hard to imagine it luring people to listen through the entire track and beyond to whatever else follows it unless they are already hardcore devotees of uncompromising experimentalism. Yet that’s precisely what Pogus Productions has done on Pieces from the Past by Philip Corner for the Violin of Malcolm Goldstein, a CD retrospective which features a rare, long out of print track and four previously unreleased tracks from live performances. Positioning this stark music at the very beginning, however, provides an ideal grounding to help listeners understand the unusual nature of this extraordinary composer-performer relationship.

Corner and Goldstein both boast serious Uptown compositional credentials—both studied with Otto Luening at Columbia University in the late 1950s. But they were subsequently drawn into the equally rigorous world of the Downtown avant-garde just as the multidisciplinary Fluxus movement was starting to evolve John Cage’s indeterminacy into the realms of conceptualism and minimalism. A watershed opus that has gone down in history as the pivotal moment for this phenomenon in music is La Monte Young’s Composition 1960 # 10, whose score is simply the sentence: “Draw a straight line and follow it.” Just as Cage had opened the door for music to go literally anywhere in Imaginary Landscape No. 4, 4’33", and subsequent compositions, Young opened another door for music to go absolutely nowhere. And the way we create, perform, and experience music has never been the same since, even though most music still occurs in an arena that remains somewhere between anywhere and nowhere.

But what kind of music results if you follow a line that is not straight? Such is the gambit realized in Corner’s 1962 Piece for Malcolm Goldstein by Elizabeth Munro. As with Young’s seemingly unassuming work from just two years earlier, the music for Corner’s Piece is not notated in a conventional sense; rather it is simply one very long, unbroken line drawn on an adding machine roll that rises and falls, twists and turns. To further add to the indeterminate nature of the undertaking, Corner did not even draw this line himself but rather enlisted the help of visual artist Elizabeth Munro to execute one seemingly endless, continuous horizontal form. Transforming this image into music, as Goldstein has done on this nearly 21-minute live recording from a 1984 concert at Experimental Intermedia, is also almost an act of co-composition. And since he is also a composer of extended-duration works employing structured improvisation, as well as conceptual and indeterminate elements, he is an ideal collaborator. In addition, the violin, with its possibility for an infinite gradation of pitches, is the perfect instrument on which to convey an extremely meticulous sonic translation of every jagged contour and loop rendered by Munro’s hand.

While none of the other works by Corner on the present disc offer as fluid a continuity between conception, visual instruction, and sonic realization as Piece, the extremely wide range of violin sounds they each exploit reside in similar aesthetic terrain. The two Pieces for String Instrument, Nos. 3 and 5, both from 1958, already reveal Corner’s extreme tendencies; exaggerated portamenti and distorted bowings abound. But unlike his later continuous arcs of sound, the music here is very much a byproduct of the then contemporaneous zeitgeist of musical pointillism; each utterance feels like a self-contained sonic atom. The performance of No. 3 is here blended with Corner’s much later Gamelan Antipode/s (1983), which though notated on a standard G-clef using familiar-looking noteheads and dynamic markings, yields music that is in no way conventional. Admittedly, verbal instructions burst from the margins of the score to explicate the desired sounds that traditional music notation cannot transmit to a performer. The Gold Stone (1975), which is literally named for Goldstein (Stein = Stone), is another graphic score that leaves lots of room for improvisatory interpretation and takes full advantage of the violin’s limitless pitch spectrum creating a melody of infinite microtonal gradations. For the performance featured herein of Gamelan Maya (1980)—a live recording from Belgium in 1981—Goldstein is joined by Corner at the piano for what is arguably one of the most austere violin and piano duos ever attempted. Though Goldstein uses all kinds of extended techniques (an extraordinary wide range of bow pressure ranging from barely touching the string to digging into it full force, and he even sings along with his playing), he is basically playing the same note over and over again for about 17 minutes as Corner accompanies him doing the same.

While Pieces from the Past by Philip Corner for the Violin of Malcolm Goldstein is hardly a disc you’re likely to spin to create the right ambiance at your next dinner party, spinning it in such a setting might generate hours of provocative conversation. - Frank J. Oteri, New Music Box