If your heartbeat were a conductor's baton, it would be an exasperating master—lagging a millisecond here, quickening two paces there. Think of your own as heard through a doctor's stethoscope: mine always speeds up, as if the doctor and I have caught it dawdling. Richard Reed Parry, the multi-instrumentalist for Arcade Fire and a composer as well, keys into this most basic of all rhythms for Music for Heart and Breath, his first full album of classical compositions. The performers, who range from yMusic (with help from the National's Aaron and Bryce Dessner and Nico Muhly) to the venerable Kronos Quartet, wear stethoscopes over their chests to keep time. Their pulse is also the piece's. In some cases, one performer's breath dictates the ensemble's movements; in others, the ensembles work together, playing in and out of sync with each other in heterogeneous clouds.
It's a remarkable concept, and it seems impossible that no composer has thought of it before. Composers have previously consulted the I Ching, rolled dice, tossed coins; Olivier Messiaen searched all the way back to 17th-century plainchant to free himself from the tyranny of the organized beat. How no one thought to look at their own chest, rising and falling, and make this primal connection, beggars belief. Parry himself seems incredulous: "For awhile I thought, for goodness sake, has somebody really not done this?" he told Sinfini Music.
The conceit animates the music, figuratively and literally. There is a palpable aliveness to the performance that makes the makes the six pieces, written for different configurations, feel like a guided meditation. This is body music, unquestionably, and by the end of the album the music's subtle internal rhythms have reconfigured your own.
Parry's touch as a composer is pensive and delicate. There are a few startling outbursts here and there, but they recede gracefully, and the overall impression is of groups of notes judiciously dotting vast white space rather than swarming the canvas. The mood is still, serene, similar to Western mystics Lou Harrison and Terry Riley. In the "Heart and Breath Sextet", violins slide down some minor thirds, bent back like bamboo branches. Pianos push gently in the opposite direction with rising figures. It's the sound of sighs and chatter, a foyer filling up with arriving dinner guests—but just as soon, these voices back away into silence again. The effect is mournful, muted; if Parry's method is skewed toward the sounds of humanity, his ear leads him away again into silence and emptiness.
Each piece traces simple, profound gestures and then tapers away, leaving a troubling impression. Interruptions comprises seven miniatures, only one longer than four minutes: the plucked strings, guitars, and gracefully staggered woodwinds of "Sticks/Tension" hit the ear like a handful of pebbles splashed into a pond. "Duet for Heart and Breath" pairs Parry with yMusic's violist Nadia Sirota, who draws breath audibly before bowing some feather-soft harmonics. "Freeform Winds/String Drones" is just that, overlapping washes of sound that move in unpredictable surges.
Parry's writing is shimmering, jewel-like. His firm grasp of mood and color recalls Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time, but his music doesn't end time so much as atomize it and spread it out—things happen in Music for Heart and Breath at roughly the same pace as they do in real life. There are no fixed points, just motion along a spectrum, and we never know exactly where we are. But the uncertainty, familiar as it is, is oddly soothing.
