Mark Applebaum – Asylum
December 29th, 2009
Mark Applebaum (born 1967) is a composer of solo, chamber, choral, orchestral, operatic and electro-acoustic music, and a jazz pianist who also builds sound sculptures. He earned a Ph.D. in composition from the University of California, San Diego and is now the Associate Professor of Composition and Theory at Stanford University. Asylum is a collection of nine tracks that translate mental illness into music. Clocking in at 22 minutes, the opener, “The Blue Cloak,” is a composed sprawler that sounds for all the world like a lengthy acoustic free improv workout, what with its never-ending layers of outbursts from clarinet, electronics, flute, mouseketier (one of Mark’s electro-acoustic sound sculptures), percussion, piano and violin. But, rest assured that it’s completely notated, as it offers up a detailed sonic tour of a wimmelbild painting (in which masses of small figures create one large scene) called the Netherlandish Proverbs (1559).
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