Canadian composer Robert Humber is prolific, releasing two albums in 2025. Into Air, his first offering for 2026, is an ambitious collection of pieces written from 2020-2022 for overdubbed solo instruments. Humber’s work involves repetition as a grounding principle, with a fascination for playing with texture serving as a refreshing element.
The title track is played by violinist Adrian Levine. Cast in three movements, it features overlapping ostinatos that first undulate, then gallop through a triadic harmonic palette. In the middle of the piece, there is a fetching passage for hocketing glissandos that softens its edges. The presence of reverb, here as elsewhere, gives the acoustic instruments an outsized character, as if projecting into a large space, instead of the small studio in Toronto in which Into Air was recorded.
Classical guitarist Ben Diamond plays the three parts in mothmouth, which begins with coruscating harmonics that create a polyrhythmic underpinning for a loping melody. Gradually, the harmonics are replaced with interlaced quicksilver lines, occasionally interrupted by taps on the guitar body. There is a buildup to animated tremolando passages and heartily strummed sonorities which is succeeded by slow arpeggiations and another round of harmonics. Supple lines wend their way into the foreground, ricocheting between the overdubbed instruments. The final section plays with the percussion of string and body noise. A tightly woven melodic thread that is accompanied by tapped chords moves through a quick fugal section, only to stop short and return to the harmonics of the work’s outset.
Repeated notes shimmer from six grand pianos on Murmuration, played by Stephen Eckert. As the piece builds, these accelerate and are joined by quick arpeggios, thrumming octaves and thick chords, saturating the soundspace in richly textured music. Using six pianos could easily lead to too much of a good thing, swamping the proceedings, but Humber’s deft writing never tips over into excess.
The cellos in Singing in Circles, played by Heather Tuach, grow from tentative single notes to multi-string verticals and boisterous scalar passages, with crescendos and decrescendos delineating a fluid framework. A long-range buildup ends in the noise imparted by extreme bow pressure, which is then countered by a soft, lyrical melodic passage that slowly leads to a layered finale, concluding with resounding major chords, followed by a brief denouement.
Each of these pieces requires commanding technical skill and is performed with precision. If musicians were assembled to play them live, it would be quite a thing to hear.
