Reviews

TEMPO, Ave Maria, January 2025.
“This is extraordinarily well-crafted and well-composed music - without a doubt the best music I’ve yet reviewed for TEMPO. . . the music presents a shockingly powerful image in the epilogue: the struggle of doubt and penitence. It is a deeply human feeling of powerlessness over the fates and fortunes of one’s life, and a desperate pleading for mercy.”

Percorsi Musicali, Ave Maria, January 2024.
“The dynamic power and the very slow pulsation are the pillars of Variation III while in Variation IV we witness the return of the voice surrounded by a harmonic rhythmic gait that recalls the song. The Interlude follows where the protagonism of the noise flows onto the tonic pedal of Variation IV (cont'd). The album ends with Epilogue marked by the single repeated note in perfect resonance with Scelsi's poetics.”

Boring Like a Drill, Ave Maria, December 2023:
“The pianist is required to repeat the theme, but to press the keys silently. Background becomes foreground in a breathless negative space, substance made of incidental noise. . . In Power’s version, penitence and apprehension is shared by performer and audience.”

Boring Like a Drill, Maintenance Hums, August 2022:
“There’s a sly humor in the three pieces here that, depending on your musical taste, either teeters on the edge of grating on your nerves or just shoves you over that edge immediately and keeps on plowing ahead.”

TEMPO, Diligence & Maintenance Hums, April 2021:

“For me, though, it is for *current* resonance and mahrem bir eser that, different as they are one from the other, are some of the most memorable music I have heard in the last decade.”

The Squid's Ear, Diligence, June 2021:
“Sometimes frustrating, sometimes ingratiating, always repaying repeated listens with new facets. Eager to hear more from Power.”

BMore Art, Maintenance Hums, March 2021:
“As the final track continues, all those warm, granular sounds overlap and meld into one another, filling your ears like the thrum of cicadas.”

Percorsi Musicali, Maintenance Hums, September 2020:

“with an intelligent reinterpretation of the rhetoric of music in our times, Power has placed himself halfway between John Cage’s performance practices and Giacinto [Scelsi]’s attention to sound… in Buoy (after Laurence Crane) then, you get a masterpiece… a combined flow of materials that seems to reproduce the harmonic beauty of an orchestra.”

Dusted Magazine, Diligence, 2020: 

“[Power] is now a force guiding the rapid-fire development of instrumental syntax and its expressive components…

“Each moment, each overtone and microtonal shift away from the fundamental, the emergent and immersive wonders contained in a single pitch, the possibilities within possibilities revealed as a pitch changes and the ultimate return all speak to a journey for the individual listener to which theory needs to catch up!

"Here, again, we have an absolute mastery of technique in the service of a language that assumes it and demands something beyond.

”[Power’s music is] a boundary-breaker, constituting one of the best things coming from the label in some time.“

The New York Times, Untitled, June 2013:

“in “Untitled,” a slow, blurry string duo… the violist Erin Wight and the cellist Alex Waterman gave a rich account of the work’s resolute ooze and elemental graininess.”

Interviews

“Ian Power: Maintenance Hums”

Percorsi Musicali, Ettore Garzia, 6 September 2020.

Before I talked about music of utter clarity, and in addition I try to write music that does not really employ textural hierarchy: everything is foreground, and as a result the listener can both give themself over to the momentum, and have time to rest and sit in a particularly comforting part of the piece. This is where titles like swathe and BUOY come from.

“Pianist Ian Power wants you to slow down and reconsider classical music traditions.” 

Baltimore City Paper, Brandon Soderberg, 1 December, 2014.

The classical music I love the most is the stuff that washes over me or just hits me straight in the face. That’s what I’m trying to cultivate.

Other

Cantata Profana Program Notes, 2019:

The intimacy and profundity of Ian Power’s music is initially subdued during its performance, but overwhelming post factum. Typically, coming off as aural monoliths, his works extract intense drama from a single situation. This allows the audience to really focus on the importance of the fragile relationships that are presented to them. In “Water dripping…” the world on the stage is a still life, while barely holding on. It is like being afraid of the dark while being awake in total silence.