Countless recording projects grew out of the unique conditions created by the COVID-19 pandemic. The interpersonal isolation, the creative methods of communication, and the technological solutions for sharing materials and collaboration all coalesced into a kind of sub-genre of its own, born out of necessity. The best of these projects found ingenious, organic ways of marrying form, process, and content such that the limitations of the context became integral to the essence of the work itself. Minutes by Guy Barash and Cornelius Dufallo is one such endeavor, an album length composition composed of 40 minute long miniatures, each the result of an invested dialogue between the two musicians and visual artist Vezna Andrews (whose evocative paintings are featured in the album artwork). Several parameters built into the artists’ process give Minutes its unique and compelling profile. Barash and Dufallo alternated initiating the material for different movements, ensuring that the burden (or privilege!) of locating the first spark of invention would be shared equally. Once they added Andrews, this impetus was divided by three, with each artist invested with the agency to lead a new miniature. Instead of mapping out the larger structural form of the album in advance, each new miniature was written in sequence, allowing the larger work to emerge naturally, shaped by the artists’ shifting curatorial instincts from within the process. The nature of how the piece came to be speaks to how memory can function organically from within the genesis of a work; moments in the latter minutes point back to earlier miniatures, as a cohesive structure emerges without the necessity of pre-meditation. The brevity of these miniatures itself references historic composers who took iconoclastic approaches to temporality. Whether we consider Webern’s extreme economy or Feldman’s expansive maximalist time stamp, engaging with time creatively as a parameter in the toolbox has been an important compositional strategy for several prominent composers. Temporality is not the only compositional component that establishes links with the historical repertoire. Dufallo plays with various iterations of the cross string arpeggio technique bariolage in several of the movements, referencing Baroque violin virtuosity. In “Minute 25” the arpeggio is interrupted persistently by jagged improvisatory gestures, while a mournful melody and electronic static provide an unsettling frame. In “Minute 28,” Dufallo’s moto perpetuo figure is interwoven with Barash’s percolating electronics, while in “Minute 39,” the technique is refracted, distorted into a kind of repeating music-box loop. The final minute uses bariolage as a constantly shifting textural foundation, underneath a series of melodic tentacles. Bariolage isn’t the only Baroque reference; we hear fragments of a phrases from Bach’s Sonatas and Partitas for Unaccompanied Violin amidst the dystopian house of mirrors of “Minute 26,” peaking out from the fever dream of motivic strands and hiccuping electronics. Much of the material is driven by the tactile sensations associated with textures themselves, like the quirky, mechanistic grooves established by mechanisms of pizzicati and harmonics in “Minute 5” and “Minute 13,” the latter featuring brusque violin outbursts and futuristic interjections in the electronics. In “Minute 7” we hear rarefied arpeggios on unstable harmonics reminiscent of Salvatore Sciarrino’s evocative violin caprices. “Minute 32” and “Minute 36” both revel in luminous halos of sustained tones, the former venturing through a complex harmonic progression, while the latter articulates one chord passing through voices in oscillating waves. Using a drone as a harmonic reference point is a common thread that appears in several of the miniatures. “Minute 1” establishes a pedal point in the violin tremolo from which blossoms of melody start to appear. “Minute 21” evokes a simple, modal musette, with the electronics providing contrasting stabbing commentary to the violin’s lilting melody and drone. Ritual and introspection characterize “Minute 30,” as the violin plays a somber three note figure that is echoed in an electronic timbre that echoes the Armenian duduk. The pedal point in the violin in “Minute 3” establishes one locus of a dense polytonality, as the electronics tug and tear at any establishment of harmonic stability. Barash’s electronics take a more dominant role as the primary timbral material in several of the miniatures, such as the churning machine texture in “Minute 17” or the carnival of animalistic sounds across several registers in “Minute 37.” “Minute 34” features a hypnotic angular repeating figure in layered violins that is looped and subsequently reversed, twisting its essence towards a brief hallucination. Barash and Dufallo establish an almost semantic dialogue in “Minute 29” between bursts of frenetic electronics reminiscent of vintage video game sounds and poignant, calming double stops. Minutes shares a salient quality with pointillist painting — one can listen up close to the details of each component movement or back up to absorb the entirety. The fact that its conception was continuously responsive throughout the process as opposed to pre-meditated reinforces the work as an outgrowth of its circumstances; it is a piece that grew quite literally from the impetus to communicate, collaborate, and create in a moment of imposed alienation. But the sensitivity of the artists throughout has resulted in a piece that finds a different kind of cohesion from a pre-planned work, one that is constantly responsive to itself as it unfolded. – Dan Lippel