Search - Dana Cunningham :: Dancing at the Gate

Dancing at the Gate is a refreshing restorative -- an hour's retreat from the sharp edges of life. It's solo piano, and "contemplative" fits it like a glove. It is gentle, and Cunningham works in small melodic fragments, frequently repeated and developed in small changes of key and dynamic, but aimless it is most definitely not. We don't really have a word for this kind of music... The pieces feel loose and improvisational, but they are hung on a framework that is remarkably firm. This, I suspect is why they remind me so much of Debussy's Images. However, despite the fact that there is a structure here -- and even momentum, of a sort -- impatient listeners will find these songs as frustrating as trying to pick up mercury with a spoon. They shimmer like light reflected off water onto a wall. They stop, blink out, resume without moving and then trail off when the light -- I mean Ms. Cunningham's muse -- moves on. Keith Jarrett's massive improvisations do come to mind here, but there's a somewhat eastern feel to Ms. Cunningham's compositions -- their circular progression and intense artlessness... I find contemplation of these pieces an almost guaranteed doorway to an inner peace. That may not be your idea of what music is all about, and if it is not, I suppose the fault is mine, for I am surely describing clumsily something that is, in fact, quite graceful and, yes, quite lovely. And, while it neither plumbs the passions of a Beethoven sonata nor storms the heights of a late Schubert piano piece, Dancing at the Gate succeeds on its own terms. It is quiet music that encourages quiet contemplation. And that, these days, is priceless.