16-2-60-N-5

“I write what is inside me,” says Sidney Bailin. “To me, revealing the psyche’s vulnerable parts is the essence of serious art. With each piece I write, I am trying to tell my secrets.”

On his first Ravello release, 16-2-60-N-5: WORKS FOR ELECTRONICS & PIANO, composer Sidney Bailin shows how musical technique exists solely to help him tell his secrets. A combination of piano and electroacoustic works, 16-2-60-N-5 transforms patterns and structures into a viscerally and emotionally gripping sound experience.

In Cascade, the piano speaks in flowing, waterfall-like gestures, contrasted with short, rhythmic jabs – the two modes expanding, merging and evolving over the course of the work.

Wedges is all about instrumental color – widening the instrument’s sound palette by placing screws of specific sizes between the strings of selected notes.

Dilation shows how the essence of tonality – the push and pull of pitch combinations – can exist in an atonal work.

The first electronic work, Reeds by the Shore, places an underlying track of regular plinking sounds under contrapuntal sax-like riffs, slowly building to a climax that almost forces the listener to move with the music.

The culmination of 16-2-60-N-5 is Speak, Child, in which sound samples of an infant’s babble are electronically manipulated and sequenced into a deep, dark, and finally redemptive exploration of a child’s mind. Speak, Child recalls Luciano Berio’s electronic voice manipulations in Visage, and Steve Reich’s groundbreaking minimalist Come Out; but it is, finally, like neither of these, and represents a genuine step forward in contemporary classical music.