Second Inversion hosts share a favorite selection from their weekly playlist. Tune in on Friday, September 28 to hear these pieces and plenty of other new and unusual music from all corners of the classical genre!

Richard Reed Parry: For Heart, Breath and Orchestra (Deutsche Grammophon)
Christopher Cerrone: How to Breathe Underwater

I have to admit: this Staff Pick was a tough choice for me. It was a toss-up between Richard Reed Parry’s For Heart, Breath and Orchestra, and Christopher Cerrone’s How to Breathe Underwater. In one corner, a piece by a guy from one of my favorite bands, wherein he had musicians and the conductor listen to their own heartbeats through stethoscopes and asked them to play along as closely as possible to their own heartbeats—a beautiful existential notion and a beautiful thing to listen to.

In the other corner, a piece that’s kind of about depression, which is based on a Jonathan Franzen character from the book Freedom, of whom Franzen said, “[she] was all depth and no breadth. When she was coloring, she got lost in saturating one or two areas with a felt-tip pen.” If you are not weeping by the end of that sentence and by the end of this heartbreakingly hopeful piece, check your pulse, man. Ultimately, I loved them both so much that I had to just close my eyes and pick one. But…oops! I wrote about both of them. Now you’ll never know which one I picked! – Dacia Clay

Tune in to Second Inversion in the 11am hour today to hear these pieces.

Michael Gordon: Beijing Harmony (Cantaloupe Music)
Seattle Symphony; Pablo Rus Broseta, conductor

“Every city produces its own set of harmonies,” Michael Gordon writes in his program note for this piece. In Beijing Harmony, those chords are dazzling and majestic, shimmering magnificently across the orchestra. The piece was inspired in part by Echo Wall, a part of the Temple of Heaven in Beijing where sounds echo from one side of the structure to the other. In performance, the wind and brass players are spread out across the stage—and when you listen with headphones, the music echoes from left to right and back again, all around and through you. – Maggie Molloy

Tune in to Second Inversion in the 5pm hour today to hear this piece.

Pauline Oliveros: Lear (New Albion)
Deep Listening Band

Way out on the northeastern tip of the Olympic Peninsula, nestled amid the sprawling and historic Fort Worden State Park, is a massive cistern, nearly 200 feet in diameter and over 14 feet deep. There’s nothing that quite compares to the immersive 45-second reverberation that echoes across this cistern—which is what made it the perfect location for Pauline Oliveros and her Deep Listening Band to record their self-titled album. Accordion, trombone, didjeridu, keyboards, and electronics somehow merge into one cohesive, meditative soundscape that lulls you straight into sonic hypnosis.
– Maggie Molloy

Tune in to Second Inversion in the 7pm hour today to hear this piece.