Compared to Scelsi's Piccola suite for flute and clarinet, Ko-Lho seems to come from an entirely different imaginative world. In the 13 years that separate the two works, Scelsi went from a playful, comparatively immature mode in which the two instruments are essentially staged like characters to a virtual blending of the two into a single entity. Scelsi developed this new approach to ensemble writing from the late '50s onward. The style is perhaps best-heard in his string quartets from the third onward, but the modestly sized Ko-Lho compares well with those pieces, which are among the most important of the last century. Not a difficult piece for listeners to deal with, both movements of Ko-Lho together come to about seven minutes in performance. He tightly winds the parts together, usually keeping them within the range of a semi-tone or smaller, and both usually speak in monotone long-tones, actively punctuated with re-articulations and spatially modeled with color shifts. The instruments blend into a single, flowing, ecstatic ribbon of red noise. The articulations cause brief ripples in the surface illusion, but the perceived unity of the sounds is so strong that it's easier to believe that the sound is flowing from a single instrument than from a duo. It's those decorative, poetic nuancings of the sound that are the true life of the piece, the focus of the listener's interest, guided by Scelsi's intuitive inner rhythm. Quarter-tone glissandi, quarter-tones, stunning multiphonics on the clarinet, and detailed demands on the specifics of technique, such as the width of the vibrato and subtle, dynamic cross-hatchings, obsessively turn the timbres over and over in constant change as objects of contemplation. Scelsi was a composer keenly aware that a new work must be its own frame, that on a certain level even the most stylistically extreme art must contextualize and explicate itself. To that end, he occasionally completely severs the cohesion of the duo with melodic passages for either instrument. What's extraordinary is that even these radical digressions still come off as disturbances, diversions from the main flow. As Scelsi no doubt expected, they make that unity far more meaningful by putting it into the perspective of instrumental writing other than his own. Ko-Lho and its kin are important contributions to chamber wind writing for many reasons, none less than the simple fact that few good wind pieces on this scale have such aesthetically serious intent. The lack of any cartoonish play or quaint pastoralism in Ko-Lho is thirstily welcomed. But something about the softer effect of dissonance between wind instruments than between strings means that Ko-Lho also cannot produce quite the effect of heated intensity and spiritual clamor that the quartets do. This is welcomed also, because even with Scelsi's severely earnest attitude toward his musical aims, there is potential in his most advanced style for giving us a fairly straightforward kind of musical pleasure; Ko-Lho demonstrates that. ~ All Music Guide
