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2010
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San
Francisco Chronicle
August
29, 2010
Review:
CD review of Venus Notorious by
Zack Browning
Author:
Joshua Kosman
The
seven chamber works by composer Zack
Browning on this disc are built around
some kind of constructive process involving
magic squares, feng shui and the movement
of the planets. The details hardly matter,
and in fact any halfway savvy listener
will be able to detect the presence
of a system just from the repetitions
and variations that infuse the music.
What counts, rather, is the surface
play of the music, which is charming,
ebullient, infectiously bright and also
somewhat limited in scope. Browning's
music is densely but unpredictably patterned,
built around tiny rhythmic and melodic
cells that repeat, join, scatter and
stutter according to whatever rules
are in place behind the scenes, and
because Browning's rhythmic palette
is so bouncy and exuberant - some of
the music sounds like dance tracks for
androids with varying numbers of feet
- it has a seductive sort of grace.
But there's also a digital feel to the
music that is underscored by the predominance
of piano and percussion; a little more
textural variety and even sensuality
would have been welcome.
The
New York Times
March
4, 2010
Review:
At Ease in T-Shirts or Suits, and With the Medieval or Modern (review of JACK
Quartet concert at Merkin Hall, NYC on 03/03/10)
Author:
Anthony Tommasini
Zack Browning’s 2008 String Quartet provided
just what was needed to end the program: a propulsive, giddy, rocking piece, a
rush of cyclic riffs and fractured meters. Was it just the context the JACK
Quartet provided, or did the strange, cchorale-like harmonies in the piece recall
Machaut?
The
Birmingham News
March
12, 2010
Review:
Karen Bentley Pollick: Virtuosity of the avant garde (review of concert
Alternating Currents by Karen Bentley Pollick, violin at the Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham,
AL on 03/11/10)
Author:
Michael Huebner
Zack
Browning used highly-charged sound masses in broad swashes to bring "Sole
Injection" to an intense conclusion.
2010
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Music of Our Time
August 29, 2007
Review: Esther Lamneck CD Review
Author: Dary John Mizelle
Zack Browning’s Crack Hammer for clarinet and computer-generated sounds provides a
welcome sense of fun and humor in an otherwise very serious CD. The composer
employs repetitive, additive rhythms with an unpredictable sense of humor. The
form and rhythm of this piece were based on a magic square. Ms. Lamneck’s
impeccable sense of timing makes the performance very exhilarating
All Music
July 2007
Review: Funktasia: Music by Zack Browning
and Sever Tipei
Author: James Manheim
The title of the CD “Funktasia” is more
applicable to the music of Zack Browning, which mixes select references to the
language of popular music with structures derived from abstruse formal devices
like magic squares. His zippy music is made up of short, punchy blasts that are
accented by sharp but subtle contrasts of texture between instruments, often
between an electronic and an acoustic sound. In the opening Pure Sweat, for example, a bass clarinet
veers off from buzzy electronic sounds. The use of the electric guitar in Coming Up Sevens (1987) is notable; it
is one of a fairly small group of modern compositions that uses instruments
from the popular world but divorces them from its stylistic references — and
plays with the results in interesting ways.
Georgia Straight
February 22, 2007
Review: Standing Wave Concert in Vancouver
Author: Alex Varty
The program featured attractive works
from Horn by Island guitarist Tony Wilson and English iconoclast Thomas Ades, but the
ensemble stared down bigger challenges in Zack Browning's Impact Addiction
and Carlos Sanchez-Gutierrez’s Luciernagas. The former is mathematical and exceedingly
complex. Browning also asks the musicians to perform at a hyperspeed
pace, which renders that complexity difficult to grasp on first hearing.
2010
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San Antonio Express-News
September 17, 2006
Review: Concerts highlight composers, innovations
Author: Mike Greenberg, EXPRESS-NEWS SENIOR CRITIC
Zack Browning's "Network Slammer," which uses the numerical magic square as a
compositional model, showed that process-oriented music, a frequently dour obsession
of the 1970s, can be great fun. The live flutist (Chih-hsien Chien) spun intricate melodic
lines against a banging computer part that alternated between a cockeyed robotic dance
and more rhythmically supple and energetic material. The four-channel electronic sounds
brought to mind the beloved Hammond B3, and they filled the space richly.
2010
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The Atlanta
Journal-Constitution
February
17, 2005
Review: New music rises from 'Red Clay'
Author: Pierre Ruhe - Staff
With a growing national reputation,
Browning was heard locally a year ago, when New York's Bang on
a Can ensemble, on tour, played some of his speed-demon music. Tuesday's
nine-minute premiere, "Secret Pulse," starts with taped sounds of
blurry, stroboscopic electronica, augmented by live flute, cello and violin.
It's way-cool in attitude, racing at top velocity, pausing only occasionally
for a lyrical cello melody or pointillistic violin fragment. There's anxiety in
its fast-faster-faster sensory overload, which stirred feelings of
helplessness. It felt like a bleak commentary on our depersonalized,
electro-computer society, where an individual's ideas are swept aside by the
information-age tsunami. And it was kinda fun.
The Computer Music Journal
Volume 29 Issue 4
Review: 14th Florida Electroacoustic Music
Festival 2005
Secret
Pulse by Zack Browning had the drive I’ve always
loved from parts of the Béla Bartók quartets. They make music that crests like
a wave. Then, clarinetist Esther Lamneck returned to perform Zack Browning's Crack Hammer, a crackerjack combo of
computer and clarinetist: it was a fight to the finish, both contestants making
me cheer!
St. Petersburg Times
April
2, 2005
Review: Bonk Festival opens with
mild-mannered note
Author: John Fleming, Times Peforming art
Critic
And give Zack Browning's propulsive
Flaming Walls the prize for best inspiration, with the "Magic Square of
Mars"
providing its framework, according to a program note. Holt laid down expert
support for the exciting, jagged rhythms.
Fanfare
June/July 2004
Review:
Review of CD “Inner Visions” Sherban Lupu, violin
Author: Robert Carl
Zack
Browning's Double Shot (2000) is an engaging moto perpetuo
based, according to the composer, on material derived from magic squares.
There's no way of knowing how this source relates specifically to the music,
but it's just as well, because the energy and momentum of the piece are
infectious on their own and, if nothing else, it's obvious the source gives a
level of cohesion to the product.
2010
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The Berkshire Eagle
July
20, 2004. Copyright
Review: Bang On A Can All-Stars
Author: Seth Rogovoy
The concert kicked off with composer Zack
Browning’s “Back Speed Double Circuit,” which according to the program notes is
a mathematics-based piece that has something to do with magic squares and the
planet Mars. Indeed, at times it sounded like an extraterrestrial “Rhapsody in
Blue,” its proportions bent or altered as if by a powerful gravitational or
magnetic force. The musicians played in response to computer-generated sounds
that at times evoked a harpsichord, and mostly in stop-start fashion. With a
clear, rhythmic pulse emerging, the overall piece began to take shape and an
overriding architecture emerged wherein the seemingly jagged, unrelated bursts
of clarinet, drums, bass, piano and guitar revealed a greater, almost
harmonious relationship.
Gaudeaumus week
September 2004
Review: Musical Pointers
Authors: Peter Grahame Woolf andf Alexa Woolf
……….. - that in contrast to Zack Browning's absorbingly entertaining Network
Slammer for flute (Susan Doyle) and tape. Zack's piece is direct and clear
on first acquaintance, but one to hear again and again for the sheer pleasure
of familiarity; based on The Magic Square of Venus (Agrippa), but
nothing like Maxwell Davies - an electroacoustic work to wake up and delight
the audience for any type of concert.
2010
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Arts Ireland
October 2003, Issue No. 68
Review: The Crash Ensemble
Author: Miriam Stewart
Although some of Dennehy's own pieces written for the Ensemble were
interesting, the
real highlights of this show were the American pieces, composed by Philip Glass
and Zack Browning among others; pieces whose sparse technical tricks were given
full, controlled rein. A feast for the ears and mind. More performances please!
American Record Guide
November/December 2002
Review: The Newest Music (Review of CD
Banjaxed)
Author: Payton MacDonald
When not composing music Zack Browning
teaches at the University of Illinois. Several of the cuts on Banjaxed use the magic square as a
structural device. The magic square is a
grid of numbers that all add up to the same sum, whether one adds the rows, the
columns, or the diagonal lines. You
can’t hear this, of course, but I suppose it helped Browning organize his
musical thoughts. All of the tracks are
electro-acoustic. The acoustic
instruments include trumpet, violin, alto saxophone, flute, and mixed
ensemble. Browning combines pop and
classical ideas. I complained in the
last issue that this rarely works, but Browning seems to have pulled it off. Each piece has the thematic consistency of a
pop tune. They are all instantly
identifiable, with the same production polish and narrow dynamic range as most
pop records. Browning blends all of this with the creative and structural
sophistication of classical music. One
of the best pieces is the first one, Breakpoint
Screamer. It is an apt title for this
edgy, but cool work. The musicians
breathe fire like a dragon, singeing but never burning. I also enjoyed the title track, which might
be the aural equivalent of the pinball machine.
Imagine sassy, brilliant bumpers with each slam of the ball sending a
glitter of lights and mechanical twitters through your chest. Electro-acoustic aficionados should
definitely check this out.
American
Music Center
NewMusicBox
Review: Banjaxed CD, Capstone Records 8697
Browning's hyperactive, mathematical
compositions unite live performance with edgy electronics (primarily tape
parts), incorporating truncated, punchy rhythms that do not allow rest. Abrupt
changes in sonority often break down into dialogues between the live musicians
and the tape parts and often dissolve into a very ordered cacophony.
Occasionally, Browning teases us with a traditional melody line but no sooner
do you get used to it and he's off and running with a new idea.
2010
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The Computer Music Journal
Volume 24 No. 4, Composition and
Performance – Winter 2000
Review: Zack Browning and Eun-Bae Kim:
Diversity in Music
Author: Nico Schuler
Breakpoint Screamer by the University of Illinois professor of composition and music theory, Zack Browning, was
commissioned by the International Trumpet Guild (ITG) for performance at the
1994 ITG conference at the University of Illinois. Several layers of pulse-oriented patterns bring trumpets and tape
together in a unique and fresh way, creating an energy-carrying dramaturgy that
culminates towards the end of the 7-minute piece. Each pattern, with a distinct
rhythmic and melodic appearance, may change its global position so that not
only different patterns get together at different times in the composition, but
also with a different local position to each other. Thus, different polyrhythms
are constantly created. As the listener learns from the CD cover, the tape used
in this piece was produced with GACSS (Genetic Algorithms in Composition and
Sound Synthesis), a software package developed by the Illinois composer,
artist, and multi-media specialist Benjamin Grosser. With GACSS, sound
synthesis and compositional parameters are controlled by genetic algorithms.
The timbres generated by the program are classified with regard to their
waveform, called breakpoints. Breakpoints specifically represent the number of
peaks and the distance between those peaks. The composition Breakpoint
Screamer represents an excellent result of this concept, especially
considering the combination of instrumental timbres with computer-generated ones
and the "dialogue" between trumpets and tape. But most of all, the
large-scale concept works: the piece is fascinating up to the last second. That
the performance requires five trumpet players instead of two (or three) for
such a light texture is another question, but the final, audible result is what
counts.
2010
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The Irish Times
September
16, 1998
Review: The Crash Ensemble Project @ The
Mint
Author: Michael Dervan
Crash’s advocacy of the racy energy of
Illinois-based Zack Browning continued with a repeat of Impact Addiction for violin, keyboard, drum kit and tape, and the
premiere of Network Slammer for flute
and tape. Unlike most composers working within the electroacoustic field,
Browning uses computer synthesis to mimic a super-charged mechanical or gan
with an almost old-fashioned artificiality of timbre, and he produces music
which conveys a heady, almost giggly exhilaration.
The Irish Times
March
17, 1998
Review: Looking after the new, the second
UCC Festival of Contemporary Music
Author: Michael Dervan
The festival featured three visiting
composers, 45 year-old Zack Browning was represented by Impact Addiction and Sole
Injection, two works for live performers and tape, both highly energized
pieces which represent the musicians, guided by click tracks, almost as
pseudo-electronic puppets, and bringing together the procedures of high musical
art with the taste of popular culture.
These were the most impressive performances in the Crash Ensemble’s full
evening concert.
2010
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The New York Times
June
4, 1996
Review: Impish Noisemakers Revel In Sounds
of the Century
Author: Anthony Tommasini
There were many engaging and fresh sounds.
Zack Browning's "Breakpoint Screamer" for five trumpets and
computer-generated tape made a lot of wonderfully shimmering noise, but nothing
really happened.
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