"Mundiglossia" is the album-length studio recording of Cole Blouin's concert piece Mundiglossia/Bloom (' patiently...'), written between October 2020-February 2021 for saxophonist Thomas Giles.

download comes with .pdf of a conversation between Cole Blouin and Thomas Giles on the material, conceptual, processual, and technical dimensions of the piece, as well as a document containing Blouin's original program notes.

Louis Goldford writes:

"Among the numerous gifts that Mundiglossia leaves for the listener is a deep connection, a trust, a friendship, and a collaboration between mutually rigorous artists. This music is firmly rooted in such a gradual process — gradual by comparison to the normal pace of the city in many senses. Arguably, Mundiglossia could not have been produced by any other means than through the care and diligence afforded by these two particular artists, who have taken the time to explore, charting the technical terrains and pathways of the soprano saxophone in depth and with their characteristically imaginative fervor for the instrument’s storied history, and for the consummate artists who have come along to master it, which of course, includes Thomas Giles’ supreme contribution.

Blouin and Giles have spoken quite eloquently about the many foundational themes of this piece, developed through the pandemic and engraved during the January 6th riot. Not surprisingly, among these, the theme of anxiety in relation to the state of the world stands out. How this is subtly communicated over the course of forty-two minutes depends on how one's ears are pulled in various directions, but for me, the concept behind the work’s overall formal design provides some valuable clues.

No composer has made more use of the spiral, or has been more articulate about so-called “spiral form” as utilized in music, than the American composer Fred Lerdahl. Thinking of the spiral as a set of “expanding variations” that seem to spin out from a central point, Lerdahl’s Auskomponierung of the spiral (i.e. “composing out,” in Schenkerian terms) aptly describes the course charted throughout Mundiglossia. Spiral form assumes the prolongation and elaboration of a piece’s fundamental materials as individual musical components radiate out from a central point, alternating with one another and, at the same time, elongating and expanding into phrases from mere motives, and then from phrases into whole sections, and so on. As centrifugal forces cast these components farther away from their origin, materials develop through a basic process of expansion, just as the spiral’s concentric rotations become larger, tracing a growing circumference around the same axis of rotation. For Lerdahl, as for Blouin and Giles, and for others who have made musical use of the spiral, the axis of rotation may often be the piece’s basic materials recurring in a consistent order, even as they undergo transformation each time they come back around.

Mundiglossia firmly establishes its basic materials up front in its initial moments: a high, altissimo glissando; then radio static with saxophone pitches veiled through colored air; then a tremolo combined with a trill; then two widely spaced and resonant soprano multiphonics; then a middle-register fluttered glissando; then close-dyad multiphonics that seem to flicker just perfectly; then a brisk, ordinario melody fluttered with occasional harmonics, and so on. Listening to how these elements mutate and evolve over the course of the piece bears much fruit, for example, in how one hears the initial altissimo gesture expand into a series of rich and dense multiphonics, constantly moving through meticulously notated “registral zones” around twenty-seven minutes in. Or, for example, how the initial ordinario melody “blooms” into an elaborate swirl of grace note gestures clustering around individually quantized durations. The separation between these “modules” of initial material seem to become blurry, maze-like, and the listener may no longer perceive the boundaries between them.

Interestingly, the spiral has also served as a constant metaphor for anxiety, which brings to mind the “anxiety spiral,” or how one “falls into a spiral,” or patterns of otherwise “catastrophic thinking” that characterizes modern existence. Some of these patterns are echoed in Capitalist Realism, a source of inspiration for this music cited by Blouin and Giles. Yet the spiral, in psychotherapeutic terms, has been used to describe at times both downward and upward directionalities, a basic feedback mechanism wherein similar kinds of thoughts are self-reinforced. In one trajectory, similar thoughts beget similar thoughts, but in some other trajectory, this same basic thought process still duplicates itself over and over again, be it negative or positive in nature.

Translated loosely as “the speaking of worlds,” Mundiglossia has much to do with how Blouin’s attention is pulled in various directions by the sounds one encounters in modern living, and how time passes as one traverses various activities throughout the day. “They all exist. The idea that [various musics are] somehow separate is just a reflection of conversation, or convention, around the sound,” says Blouin. Describing the change in his state of listening to Éliane Radigue versus Madonna, the treatment of materials in the music itself mimics the interplay of these quotidien sounds; alternating, unfolding, each vying for attention while hoping to avoid pastiche, all wrapped up in a sort of spiral. At any point, the listener might wonder whether the material is spinning off the rails or “blooming” in its development, and it is this kind of excitement, or perhaps anxiety, that keeps us on edge as we listen further.

But how do we escape the spiral? Where does the piece end? The questions of where and how to end this outward process of radiation is always an interesting one. Quite late in the piece, around thirty-eight minutes, the final module of radio static with veiled saxophone pitches is heard. Every time this section comes back, one might think of an actual radio with some tune poking through the static. What began and evolved through the piece as vaguely march-like, at first, has also been transformed through gradual repetition. Now, it seems, at its culminating moments, one hears something strangely and vaguely identifiable, or hopelessly familiar. Something that we might have heard yesterday in a corner deli, anywhere. Is this a pastiche? Should we take comfort in its familiarity? Is it possible to listen without reference after all, as Blouin asks?"

Louis Goldford
April 2023
New York City