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Alternative Facts for Organ has received the 2023 Global Music Awards Silver Medal: protest music

Tapping into the dystopian nightmare of present day American political dysfunction with the musical precision and analytical skills of Sigmund Freud, Emmy Award winner and Los Angeles-based American composer Bruce Babcock illustrates with two vastly exciting and entirely different approaches to the same work, that his Alternative Facts (2019) is chameleon-like; the message remains the same, but the presentation is shaped by the medium and it’s soundscape.

American pianist Gloria Cheng, who won a Grammy for her 2008 CD, Piano Music of Esa-Pekka Salonen, Steven Stucky, and Witold Lutosławski, has recorded a timely and brilliant performance of Alternative Facts on the Navona album, Through Glass, which also includes contemporary works for piano by Ovidiu Marinescu, L’lana Cotton, Alla Cohen, Curt Cacioppo, and L. Peter Deutsch.

Unremittingly edgy, Cheng’s interpretation captures the bipolar ups and downs of the Alternative Facts narrative through masterful use of virtuoso technique, clarity of balance, and torturous adherence to Babcock’s intentional rhythmic/metric seizures. Universal angst since Trump’s surprising ascension to the American presidency in 2016 has frayed the planet. Cheng’s steely pointillism, like walking on broken glass, captures the nerve-shredding yin and yang of a democracy on the edge.

Alternative Facts in its original piano version pitches hysteria and nervous agitation at a higher, brighter level of unease, something just shy of a shriek. Cheng employs her tremendous command of the piano to shape each incident with her own razor-sharp intellect.

Alternative Facts when performed on organ - the same notes with some shapeshifting in voicing - moves, out of technical necessity, at a slower and usually darker level of fractured consciousness. Composer Babcock suggested performing the piece on organ to James Walker, who recorded it for the Navona album, Sustain Vol. 3, which also features contemporary solo works for piano and organ by Jacob E. Goodman, John A. Carollo, Hayg Boyadjian, and Sydney Hodkinson.

Given free rein by the composer, Walker has constructed a sound and color scheme for the organ replication of Alternative Facts that is even more menacing than the original piano version, perhaps because the organ is such a cavernous instrument. Walker has found the deep gut of apprehension and disbelief that is the heartache and neuralgia of Babcock’s award-winning glimpse into nascent fascism.

The aural equivalent of the disturbing stream of consciousness paintings by Hiëronymus Bosch (1450-1516) which depict the infernal regions of the human psyche, composer Bruce Babcock doesn’t want hearty handclasps for Alternative Facts. Rather, sober consideration of current and future threats to American democracy.

Daniel Kepl | Performing Arts Review