Andrew McPherson: Kinematics and Secrets of Antikythera

There’s an antique clockwork device recovered from a Roman shipwreck off a Greek island — the Antikythera mechanism — bronze gears fused by two thousand years of seawater, its purpose a mystery to the scholars who first x-rayed it. Andrew McPherson borrows the name, and something of the spirit, for the longest and strangest piece on this disc, a nearly forty-minute exploration of an instrument he built himself. That the metaphor holds up as well as it does tells you something about how seriously this composer thinks about the relationship between engineering and expression. He is not a tinkerer who happens to write notes. He is a composer whose imagination seems to have been unlocked by solder and circuitry.

Start instead where the disc starts, with the violin. Kinematics asks a single violinist to sound, for long stretches, like two, and Martin Schulz delivers that illusion with a bow arm that never seems to tire of double-stops, tenths flung off with a rasp and snap that recalls the Paganini caprices filtered through a modernist sensibility, minus the salon flash. There’s real cadential logic here, phrases that arrive somewhere rather than simply accumulate, and Schulz plays it as though it were standard repertory rather than a novelty. Eight minutes fly by. This is the sort of piece a violinist could use as an encore to silence a chattering hall.

Then things get genuinely peculiar.

The magnetic resonator piano — MRP for short, though nobody in this booklet abbreviates it that way — is McPherson’s own invention, built during his years at the Centre for Digital Music in London. Electromagnetic actuators reach directly into the piano’s innards and vibrate the strings without a hammer ever striking them. Notes swell up out of nothing. Sustain seems to have no clock on it. Harmonics shimmer and hang in the air like breath on cold glass. I’ve heard pianists chase similar effects with an EBow, that little handheld gadget guitarists use, and I’ve heard sound designers try to fake it in post-production, chopping the attack off a sampled tone in a DAW. None of that prepares you for the real thing, live, with a lid open and a pianist’s fingers doing things fingers don’t normally do to a Steinway.

Ryan MacEvoy McCullogh plays this machine as though he’d been born to it, given how closely McPherson’s notation seems tailored to a very particular set of gestures: pressure, release, the ghostly in-between called pre-touch. In dAmore, paired with Nadia Strota’s viola, the instrument at first behaves almost bashfully, its resonance suggesting nothing so much as the sympathetic strings of a viola d’amore — hence, presumably, the title’s small joke. But the balance tips early and stays tipped. Strota’s viola is virtually never silent, arching and swooping through a vocally inflected line that borrows more from operatic recitative than from the string-quartet tradition, while the MRP murmurs and glows underneath like a held pedal tone with opinions of its own. It’s an exquisite sound world. It is not, quite, a duo of equals. More a soliloquy with exceptionally sensitive lighting.

Secrets of Antikythera reverses that hierarchy and, in doing so, solves a problem I didn’t know the earlier piece had. Here the MRP finally gets to lead, unaccompanied, for the better part of forty minutes, and McCullogh navigates its long arcs, sound emerging from silence, cresting, receding again into something like tape hiss, with the patience of a player who trusts the material completely. Some listeners will find thirty-eight minutes of this a lot to sit with. I confess a section or two tested me, particularly a long central stretch where the harmonic motion slows nearly to stasis. But returning afterward to dAmore, I heard it differently: the viola’s constant activity now sounded less like imbalance and more like a kind of anxious counterpoint to an instrument still finding its voice. Context, as usual, changes everything.

There is no discography to speak of here for comparison. This is new-instrument music, and McPherson is more or less the only game in town, which makes the performances by definition the reference recordings, for better and worse. Schulz, Strota, and McCullogh play with evident conviction and, more importantly, with the kind of comfort in this idiom that suggests real rehearsal time inside the machinery itself, not just on top of it. The sound engineering captures the MRP’s oddities with unusual clarity: you can hear the room breathing around those long decays.

Worth hearing, and more than once. McPherson is an engineer and poet who has actually built something new rather than merely simulated one, and if not every minute here justifies its duration, the venture as a whole earns its strangeness.