Here is a liner note I wrote to accom­pany the album An Economy of Means by fellow Sleeping Giant Robert Honstein.

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Robert Honstein has always found hidden pathos in clean, well-lighted places. 

In Honstein’s music, as in much of 21^st-century life, those “places” are often virtual: an online dating site, an inbox full of missed connec­tions and mistaken iden­ti­ties, even the internal commu­ni­ca­tion channels between comput­ers them­selves. His pieces have titles like Alone Together, Talking In Circles, Why are you not answer­ing?—prosaic language stripped of context, hinting at unseen depths of alienation. 

But isola­tion can also be an end in itself, spare­ness an aesthetic impetus. This is the terri­tory of An Economy of Means: a piece for solo vibra­phone, an album, but also perhaps a kind of mission state­ment. Inspi­ra­tion through limi­ta­tion (self-imposed and other­wise)  is the subject at hand. There are prac­ti­cal consid­er­a­tions to this: it’s easier to haul your vibra­phone to a gig than an armada of timpani. But even more so, these two works fit into a long tradi­tion of grand compo­si­tional state­ments built from humble musical mate­ri­als, stretch­ing from Bach’s epigram­matic fugue subjects to Stravinsky’s stylized banal­i­ties and on through Philip Glass’s method­i­cal, cyclic forms. These pieces wear their ambition lightly, as if to say: more econom­i­cal means to greater ends. 

Writing music for a single performer is another form of limi­ta­tion. No matter how many char­ac­ters the soloist strives to embody, every­thing remains, in a sense, mono­logue. This can be turned to an advan­tage, though, and a major topic of An Economy of Means is the inherent drama of a lone performer tackling a large-scale work. Prolonged encoun­ters between soloist and instru­ment tempt us to imagine a first-person narra­tive, even auto­bi­og­ra­phy, the performer sitting in for the composer. It’s also a matter of sheer physical endurance. If virtu­os­ity is the art of making the diffi­cult appear easy, then a form of empathy rises from watching a performer really sweat (In Liszt’s Années de Pèleri­nage, for instance, the epitome of the Romantic trav­el­ogue, the pianist must dispatch feats of strength and simul­ta­ne­ously embody the sensi­tive Byronic hero. Simi­larly, a pianist must maintain an Olympic grace to navigate the leaps and dives of Strada Nuova.) This struggle can be hard to convey on a record­ing, of course—but it’s not an accident that one of the more athletic move­ments here is titled Cross Fit.

That quality of emphatic alone-ness also contributes to the first-person, diaris­tic feeling of Honstein’s forms. Grand Tour is not a piece about sight­see­ing but rather about a specific traveler’s expe­ri­ence of travel—music written from a point-of-view, about a point-of-view. Many move­ments explore only a single musical gesture. Others progress in a gradual, exploratory fashion, intro­duc­ing new sounds and ideas with extra­or­di­nary care. But despite this method­i­cal approach, the music remains surpris­ing and unex­pected. One reason for this is that one is never quite sure at the outset of a movement just how far Honstein will take an idea. Some remain intimate and obser­va­tional (Passeg­giata); others unfurl extended essays leading to dramatic conclu­sions (Fast Notes, Long Tones).

Much of the music is initi­ated from small focus points of activity: the suspended isorhyth­mic bookends of Grand Tour, the shim­mer­ing, shifting white-key patterns opening An Economy. But in keeping with the scale of the two pieces, these fixed points are often pushed to extremes. Inter­est­ingly, the way Honstein develops his mate­ri­als here does not take the form of Baroque fort­spin­nung or 19^th-century devel­op­ing vari­a­tion, but some­thing more linear, organic, almost stream-of-conscious­ness. Though these forms some­times sound like the product of “process music” (a tech­nique by which a composer prede­ter­mines the course of a piece by subject­ing the music to trans­for­ma­tional rules), Honstein writes that there are no large-scale processes at work here. The dramatic cruxes of the album confirm this: no calcu­lated process could lead the placid swells of Broken Chords to such breath­tak­ingly chro­matic terri­tory in just a few minutes, or govern the wayward harmonies of Per. It is more the affect of process that one hears, the sound of a human mind turning some­thing over and over, trace­able but in the end illogical.

That’s not to say the album is a closed system, free from outward intru­sions. Grand Tour, espe­cially, is highly refer­en­tial; in fact, the music is liter­ally set in motion by images and expe­ri­ences of Venice, a city long asso­ci­ated with exotic “other­ness” and, as such, a desti­na­tion for gener­a­tions of young northern-European aris­to­crats. Each movement of Grand Tour gives a sense of a limited world­view being disrupted and altered by a foreign element. Aimless foot­falls become a break­neck dash through swarms of tourists; outra­geous Baroque orna­men­ta­tion, Neoclas­si­cal purity, and moder­nity corrupt and swallow each other; enormous cruise ships, vulgar yet beau­ti­ful, advance and recede inex­orably; a rumi­na­tive evening on the lagoons turns dramatic; finally, night falls, and we retrace these wander­ing steps, exhausted. In the end, the grandios­ity of this tour is revealed to be a bit of irony, a folly; the city is as unknow­able as ever, the piece only a series of private, discon­nected impres­sions by a single traveler.

If Grand Tour is a cata­logue of expe­ri­ences, then An Economy of Means is a compendium of a differ­ent sort. “Percus­sion” is, of course, not an instru­ment, but a huge category of miscel­la­neous instru­ments that fit into no other section of the orches­tra. In this sense, composers can be forced into limi­ta­tions the minute they decide to write percus­sion music. Setups contain­ing multiple instru­ments can create either coloris­tic contrast or a single ur-instru­ment; here, Honstein stretches the bound­aries of just a single instru­ment (and the tech­ni­cal capa­bil­i­ties of its player), augmented by a large battery of mallets and strate­gi­cally-placed props. The result is a vibra­phone piece that doesn’t always sound like vibra­phone. The six move­ments of An Economy reveal secret voices hidden within a familiar instru­ment, combin­ing and over­lap­ping them like the manuals of an organ. It turns out to be a piece with multiple “setups” after all; they’re just contained within the purview of a single instrument—admirable economy, indeed.