Ornaments by Allison Cameron

https://allisoncameron.com/
http://www.spoolmusic.com/

Liner Notes from the Ornaments CD written by Martin Arnold:

Allison Cameron calls the collection of pieces recorded here Ornaments.
And indeed this music has the radical openness, the lack of boundary, the myopic detail (eschewing grand, overarching gesture), the (perhaps subtle) intricacy (and it’s apropos that this word that is so often paired with “detail” has the Latin root of being in (into) tricae – which carries such coherence-thwarting and understanding-defying translated meanings as “perplexities,” “subterfuge,” “quirks,” and “wiles”), and the particularity that I’ve ascribed here to the idea of the ornament. But this gives rise to a question: what is being ornamented? And something has to be ornamented for an ornament to be an ornament: a braid taken as a discrete entity is as complete and whole a thing as a vest; a braid on a vest is an ornament. Cameron’s music is not, for the most part, florid/copious/opulent/overtly complex. Its subversive mysteries would seem to more likely stem from distillation or reduction or a weird, radical and essential simplicity/clarity that defies the expectation of drama and progressive change. I’ve certainly thought of Cameron’s music in these terms in the past, but they always seemed to miss the mark somehow. Now, I think the title of her CD offers a more rewarding metaphor to provoke thinking about her work. I think Cameron’s pieces are ornaments, ornamenting a music that is inaudible, that Cameron doesn’t need to write. For me, Cameron’s work suggests a denser construction flowing somewhere beyond/beside/ before/behind the sounds that she has activated. It’s a fluid, amorphous construction that we can’t apprehend or represent but its spectral density allows the sounds that adorn it to have a richness – labyrinthine braids of valencies – that belies their seeming simplicity. We can’t apprehend or represent this construction (it isn’t really there; it’s a potential flowing out from the openness of this music); but we don’t need to. Cameron isn’t holding anything back; we aren’t being cheated of something more important, more essential, more to the point. We’re celebrating the ornament, we’ve got all we need, we’ve swerved from the trench.

Allison is a professional composer, performer and improvising musician in Toronto. Her reputation for writing compelling compositions for contemporary music ensembles is international. She's been celebrated in Musicworks Magazine, The Wire Magazine, I Care if You Listen, Exclaim and a variety of other publications. Her CD A Gossamer Bit was among The Wire Magazine's top 50 releases of 2015.

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The Allison Cameron Band
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