Dances and Canons was the first ECM recording for both composer Kate Moore and pianist Saskia Lankhoorn, and it remains the best single introduction to Moore's piano music. Eight pieces for one, two, four and multiple pianos build hypnotic, swarming pulse patterns and shifting planes of sound. Lankhoorn is the only pianist credited, so the album is also a portrait of an interpreter facing extreme technical demands.
Moore and Lankhoorn were both born in 1979 and met in 2003 at the Royal Conservatorium in The Hague, according to Textura. Moore was born in England, grew up in Australia and settled in the Netherlands, where she studied with Louis Andriessen. ECM links the teeming natural soundscapes of her Australian childhood to the layered textures of her writing. Lankhoorn, a Dutch pianist, has played Moore's music regularly since that first meeting. The album was recorded in April 2013 at the Auditorio Radiotelevisione svizzera in Lugano, with Markus Heiland as engineer and Manfred Eicher as producer. George Miller wrote the liner note.
Two versions of Spin Bird, a lilting solo piece, open and close the programme. The Body Is an Ear, for two pianos, takes its cue from the Sufi writer Hazrat Inayat Khan. Its patterns gather into larger clusters that arrive in waves, then fall back to a whisper. Canon, for four pianos, is the longest work at almost sixteen minutes, with figures chiming at different pitches until an abrupt ending. In Sensitive Spot Lankhoorn plays against recordings of herself, layering staccato patterns into a dense, reverberant mass. The solo pieces Stories for Ocean Shells and Joy show the range in between, from interlocking melancholy figures to aggressive passages that recall Andriessen.
Critics noted the closeness to minimalism and its limits. Textura heard echoes of Philip Glass but warned against the label, praising music of "architectural complexity, structural force, and multi-dimensionality" in its 2015 review. Tyran Grillo, writing on ECM Reviews the same year, observed that "Moore is more interested in the under-arching gesture" than in process for its own sake. Miller's liner note puts the performer at the centre. "It's impossible to listen to this music," he writes, "and not wonder about the enormous technical demands" it makes.
CD, ECM New Series 2344, first released on 10 October 2014, in a cardboard slipcase.
