"In creating this distinctive program of music and titling it Unison Polyphony, the multifaceted Swiss reedmen Markus Eichenberger and Christoph Gallio have implied a seemingly contradictory nature at the heart of their collaboration - two instrumental voices that relate to each other, illogically, by following a shared path (unison) and different paths (polyphony) at the same time. But if we are willing to accept the premise of our initial equation, where the consequence of their pairing is a single, self-contained, indivisible entity, we may decide (as the 19th century British historian/philosopher Thomas Carlyle imagined, in another context) that in so doing they have "penetrated into the inmost heart of a thing, detected the inmost mystery of it, namely, the melody that lies hidden in it; the inward harmony of coherence which is its soul, whereby it exists, and has a right to be, here in the world."

The singular "thing" that Eichenberger and Gallio have constructed through their separate, spontaneous actions is the conceptually unified "harmony of coherence" which reveals its identity through pure melody. We typically tend to think of duos as either supportive - that is, one voice offering a foundation upon which the other voice may elaborate - or conversational - where the complementary or contrapuntal voices interact in a chosen field of convergence, while maintaining their individuality. But, to my mind, this duo could be regarded as cohabitational while neither generally supportive nor conversational, that is, agreeing to exist in a common space, contributing ideas that fit together without apparent compositional development or specific points of reference. Often, their participation seems to avoid the conditioned impulse of corresponding reaction. The melody that results, in those moments, is an unexpected, unpredictable complication of parts, no longer two distinct voices, but one integrated event. One plus one now equals one.

Melody is a direction, a flow of details, sound in motion towards a perceived endpoint, an elongation of experienced time into space. Its movement creates shape, contour, outline. Melody may describe, or dictate, and thus determine or suggest a point of view, as metaphor - observable in Shakespeare or Schoenberg. Or it may qualify as its own form and function. Consider this isolated line from Gertrude Stein's piece In (1913): "Leak in a leak in earn in urn eucalyptus new rights new rights pole light lime." Meaning, and/or motivation, becomes secondary to the visual and melodic experience. In some of her writings, Stein has been categorized as a "cubist" author, as the repeated and recontextualized words may suggest an abstracted illusion of multiple perspectives. Here, however, her words become an object, the thing itself, the mystery contained in the music.

Similarly, albeit in their rather more extreme manner, Eichenberger and Gallio act to agitate sound into existence as the thing itself, outside of referential or abstracted patterns, melody improvised and constructed in its own concreteness.

Though speaking about visual constructs, the Swiss artist/designer/theoretician Max Bill characterized the distinction between concreteness and abstraction in 1947 when he wrote, "To concretize means 'to transform into an object' something that was not previously visible or palpable. To make abstract ideas, relationships and thoughts visible: that is concretization, objectification. The goal of concretization is to present abstract thoughts in reality in a way that is perceptible to the senses."

As if confronting the challenge to "make abstract ideas, relationships and thoughts perceptible" in an improvisational context, Eichenberger and Gallio insinuate the shape and texture of sound as object through acute instrumental means - adjustments of pitch, manipulations of timbre, blending of tones, each adding color to the compounded sense of line - and phrasing that emphasizes the angle, arc, and edge of their measure. Lyrical content is established as the acceptance of accident and intuition. Their synthesis of melody as object defines its own reality... "whereby it exists, and has a right to be, here in the world." "-Art Lange, Chicago, October 2021

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The Squid's Ear!