“When it comes to attempts at musical seduction, Lentz’s music is way out front.” (Kyle Gann, Village Voice)

“Lentz’s music inhabits…a musical ‘state of becoming,’ where both new and reappearing musical and textual fragments are fused through complex layering processes.” (John Schaefer, New Sounds, WNYC)

“Lentz’s work ‘chortles’ in ways both sensual and intellectual.” (Los Angeles Reader)


River of 1,000 Streams is a beautiful, bold, virtuosic, slowly evolving piano work in which a live/solo part is expanded by the addition of hundreds of “cascading echoes” (reappearing fragments of the music) that appear kaleidoscopically in up to 11 simultaneous layers, creating thick clouds of (primarily) tremolos that gradually gain in density and volume as rich, drifting harmonies climb, in a great arc, from the very bottom to the top of the keyboard. This piece, “conceived one early morning on the banks of the Yellowstone River” (Lentz), is more purely textural than most of Lentz’s recent work. Yet, like much of his work, its structure is that of a densely woven tapestry of new and recurring moments of music.

River is performed by one of Los Angeles’s most prominent pianists, Vicki Ray, a Grammy-nominated new-music champion and a founding member of the California EAR Unit and Piano Spheres. She has performed with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Los Angeles Master Chorale, the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players and many new music groups in LA and around the world.

REVIEWS:

“There is absolutely nothing novel about music for multiple pianos; it’s been done by everyone from Conlon Nancarrow to Sun Ra. Realtime processing is old news as well, but when the composer is Daniel Lentz and the performer is Vicki Ray, the combination is bound to be enlightening. The half-hour work’s title, River of 1,000 Streams, is a fine descriptor for the music on offer, but there is much more to this extraordinary listening experience.

“The piece is an ascent, or at least it ascends in large part, similarly to the way in which Xenakis’ La Legende D’eer descends. As Lentz’s music rises, wending its droning way forward as much as such staticity can, bits of the music are brought back in a web of non-periodic recurrence. Long strands interweave and are then separated, leading ultimately to a climax in the upper register and the most subtle big bang of a reverberant ending I’ve heard.

“However, for me, the real intrigue of the piece is in its syntax. Lentz has never been afraid of the triad, and it could be argued that he built a career on it. However, he uses it as does no one else, modulating from center to center with all of the consummate skill of a Romantic composer while sounding like none of them. His is a language of carefully constructed pantonal rhetoric to foster half-glimpsed allusion. In a youtube interview, Vicki Ray speaks of how she feeds her piano students at the California Institute of the Arts a diet of old and new music. It would make sense, given such a balanced approach, that she is so sympathetic to Lentz’s inclusive vision. As the piece progresses, she brings out melodic motives that conjure shades of Chopin, Liszt, Grieg and others of the bygone age software and its manipulation were supposed to replace. There is beauty, power and soul in this music, and I would challenge even those for whom the idea of modern music is anathema to sit back and relax into this complex but gorgeously pastoral universe. On speakers, the titular streams of sound are what capture the most attention as they flow past, eroding preconception as they wash the listening environment clean. On headphones, the piano’s myriad articulations and their resultant overtones grab the ear from moment to moment, thanks to Ray’s expert control of color and dynamics. Both experiences are rapturous, and, as always with Cold Blue Music, the recording is impeccable.” —Marc Medwin, Fanfare magazine

“Daniel Lentz is one of a number of composers who emerged in the wake of American minimalism and used some of the movement’s primary tenets to leverage a distinct, hard-to-pin-down voice. But the sweeping River of 1,000 Streams, a work for solo piano and cascading delays, is anything but minimal. It’s more like a slow-motion Romanticism—a flashy five-minute prelude exploded into a twenty-nine-minute aural galaxy. Lugubrious deluges of bass notes expand and crash gradually, while each crystalline fleck of luxuriant high-end shimmer seems to dance listlessly through space. It’s lush and lyrical, but there’s no coy phrasing or élan, just vigorously palpitating chords unfolding into majestic expanses. Occasionally, especially later in the piece, the torrents subside enough that a recognizable motif drifts into audibility, but it’s seldom long before any such is washed away into the fluttering tides of sound. . . . An emotive and versatile listen . . . its peculiar dialogue between romantic pastoralism and abstraction becomes increasingly intriguing with multiple listens.”— Musicworks magazine

“A new Cold Blue release by Daniel Lentz is always cause for excitement in these parts. For forty-plus years, the Southern California composer has been dazzling listeners with his highly personalized music, one that like Cold Blue deflects attempts at genre pigeon-holing. Minimalism’s present, true, but embedded so deeply within the complex DNA of a Lentz composition it dissolves, and without too much effort traces of jazz and popular music might be located, too; at the very least, his music is richly textured, rhythmically propulsive, and melodically enticing. Refreshingly free of lugubriousness, Lentz’s panoramic tapestries never fail to reward the listener with their vibrancy and evocative power.

“In Fanfare magazine, Robert Carl contrasted the ‘fogs and mists’ of Ingram Marshall’s work with the “’right, edgy, poppy sounds and rhythms’ of Lentz’s. The characterizations aren’t inaccurate, but in the case of 2016’s River of 1,000 Streams the lines blur: in presenting a much more textural style, the twenty-eight-minute piece is both a quintessential Lentz work, as exemplified by the clear melodic figures that intermittently extricate themselves from the whole, and one reminiscent of a Marshall piece like Fog Tropes in the way the layers collapse into misty wholes. That latter effect is a product of the work’s design: as performed by renowned pianist Vicki Ray, River of 1,000 Streamsshadows the performer’s playing with up to eleven layers of ‘cascading echoes,’ echoes that, generally one to a few bars in length, reappear anywhere from a half-second to twenty-five minutes after the originating material is played.

“If anyone is up to the challenges of Lentz’s piece, it’s Ray. A longtime new music champion, the current head of the piano department at CalArts has worked with Steve Reich, Oliver Knussen, Louis Andriessen, David Lang, and Julia Wolfe, among others, and has appeared on labels such as Tzadik, Nonesuch, Innova, Cold Blue, and New World. In terms of overall effect, the piece, ‘conceived one early morning on the banks of the Yellowstone River’ according to Lentz, rolls forth with the unstoppable force of a huge mass, its bass tremolos initially rumbling like some below-ground geological awakening before ascending gradually in pitch like a slow-motion wave. As the parts accumulate into dense, rolling clusters, Ray’s rendering invites comparison to similarly layered presentations by Charlemagne Palestine and Lubomyr Melnyk, but Lentz’s individuating voice asserts itself loudly when those bright melodic figures chime, much like radiant shafts of light breaking through heavy cloud cover. Think of River of 1,000 Streams as a distinctive addition to a remarkable, still-growing discography.” —Ron Schepper, Textura

“Cold Blue Music released an album that brings out the best of what one can do in combining a grand piano with real-time digital processing. The title of the album is River of 1,000 Streams, which is also the title of the only track of a single composition by Daniel Lentz. . . . The result was a composition for solo piano performing with a computer running MAX software. The software is designed to ‘echo’ sounds from the piano. The echoes themselves are relatively short; and they may reappear at different temporal distances from the source, between half a second and 25 minutes. As the piece progresses, the textures of the samples that get echoed will gradually become thicker. The effect is thus one of ‘cascading echoes;’ and, there are eleven of them that accumulate before the piece runs its course. To return to the inspiration for the music, the result amounts to a torrent of sonic activity. (Think of how Bedřich Smetana used a full orchestra to depict the Moldau building in strength as it flows, and now imagine that effect being achieved through piano and electronics with 21st-century rhetoric.)

“On this recent recording the pianist is Vicky Ray, and the duration is a little bit short of half an hour. That provides sufficient time for the attentive listener to appreciate not only the overall textural effect but also the individual threads that intertwine. The effect is lush without devolving into any of those clichéd efforts to depict grandeur. This is an impression of a very moving visual experience; but Lentz has just the right discipline to focus on the visual details, rather than on ‘the artist having the experience.’ Nevertheless, there is so much abundance of detail that one is likely to encounter new listening approaches each time this recording is played.” —Stephen Smoliar, The Rehearsal Studio

“River of 1,000 Streams has a logical horizontal flow that has to do with an experiential “aha” moment Daniel Lentz had while standing on the banks of the Colorado River one early morning. What he felt inspired him to conceive of this work for solo piano and ‘cascading echoes,’ the latter of which appear very subtly and organically in the course of the work. Vicki Ray brings life to the part with sureness and sensitivity.

“Just as you cannot step in the same river twice, you cannot hear this work each time without feeling a new aspect of what you hear.… There is the constant of the dramatic arc of the music, beginning quietly and gradually building in developmental sequences of sostenuto shimmers of radically tonal rolls of chordal clusters that flow along river-like, adding embellishments and thematic directional cues that turn it all after all into musical syntax and not just atmospherics, though even if Lentz kept it entirely primal we would be transfixed. But no, he wants us to embrace its long sprawling arc of cosmic event unfolding as a very long whole.
“This is an excellent example of the Cold Blue school of mesmeric tonality. It speaks with a sprawling yet disciplined eloquence and takes us on a trip as would a river’s endless flow. Beauty is there for us. We only have to stand (or sit) and hear the music go by. Excellent!” —Gapplegate Classical-Modern Music Review