ALBUM REVIEW: The Colorado

Posted on June 27, 2016 by maestrobeats

The Colorado River is a national treasure. download (31)

For the past 5 million years, the Colorado River has carved some of the most magnificent landscapes on Earth.

More than 33 million people across Arizona, California, Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, and Mexico depend on the Colorado River for their water supply. The river supports a quarter million jobs and produces $26 billion in economic output each year from recreational activities alone.

But if the numbers alone don’t convince you, maybe the stories behind the river will.

VisionIntoArt teamed up with New Amsterdam Records to create The Colorado: a multimedia, music-based documentary that explores the Colorado River Basin from social and ecological perspectives across history. The project is conceived as equal parts eco-documentary film, live performance, and an educational tool for classrooms.

And just wait until you meet the team behind the music. For this one-of-a-kind album, the Grammy Award-winning contemporary vocal ensemble Roomful of Teeth breathes life into compositions by Shara Nova, Paola Prestini, Glenn Kotche, William Brittelle, and John Luther Adams.

With color, charisma, tight harmonies, and striking shots of the river and its wildlife, the documentary presents the Colorado in all its majestic splendor—but it also tells a much bigger story.

Today, with a booming agricultural industry to support and nearly 40 million people dependent on its waters, the Colorado is overused, over-promised, and unable even to reach its delta. Add to that the impact of climate change on the region, and you begin to see why these are stories that truly need to be heard.

The Colorado explores vast terrain, both in terms of music and lyrical content. Lyrics by William Debuys navigate from the prehistoric settlements of the region to the current plight of the river’s delta, from the period of European exploration to the dam-building era and its legacy, from industrial agriculture and immigration to the inescapable impact of climate change.

As an additional educational component to the album and documentary, the team behind The Colorado is also in the midst of creating a full-length textbook, corresponding section by section to the film, which will allow students and audiences to explore these topics in greater depth. The goal is to create connections between art, ecology, and regional history while also educating audiences toward a better stewardship of resources.

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The album begins—well, at the “Beginnings.” Composed by rock drummer Glenn Kotche (of Wilco), “Beginnings” sets the sonic scene of the prehistoric Colorado River through sparse instrumentation, evocative rhythms, and layered, wordless vocals. Almost ritualistic in nature, Roomful of Teeth’s voices evoke a deep spiritual connection to the river and its surroundings.

It’s followed by cross-cultural composer Paola Prestini’s “A Padre, A Horse, A Telescope.” Prestini, who is one of the co-founders of VisionIntoArt, takes a more Baroque-inspired choral approach. Setting Jesuit sources as the text for the piece (including a Hail Mary in Cochimí, an extinct Native American language), Prestini creates haunting counterpoint through echoing, intricately layered voices which speak to the religious symbolism of the river—both for Europeans and indigenous peoples.

The river’s relentless pulse comes alive in “An Unknown Distance Yet to Run,” written by composer, singer-songwriter, and mezzo-soprano extraordinaire Shara Nova (of My Brightest Diamond). Through steady rhythms, restless strings, and chant-style vocals, she tells a gripping tale of exploration and adventure.

Composer William Brittelle folds elements of electro-pop into his two contributions on the album. “Shimmering Desert” features breathy, wordless vocals in a kaleidoscopic collage of electronics, radio clips, and strings, while “The Colossus” recalls the drama and dangerous working conditions of the Colorado River dams.

Pulitzer Prize-winning composer and environmentalist John Luther Adams’ contribution to the album requires a bit more patience. Unfolding slowly across layered, softly cascading vocal lines, he creates a vision of a vast, organic river landscape populated by nothing but the soft sounds of nature—in this case embodied ever so delicately by human voices.

Prestini’s narrative-driven “El Corrido de Joe R.” tells a more concrete story of love and sacrifice along the river. Roomful of Teeth sings above trickling water and birds chirping as they tell one family’s story—an anecdote of the interpersonal relationships between people and the land they live on.

It’s followed by another Nova piece, “Welcome to the Anthropocene,” a ghostly illustration of modern man’s massive (and dangerous) impact on the planet as we continue to abuse our resources and damage our world.

And yet, the album ends on a decidedly hopeful note: Kotche’s “Palette of a New Creation.” Roomful of Teeth paints an image of optimism through vividly colored harmonies and beautifully textured polyphony—a reminder of the meaningful change we can create when we lift our voices together.

Because together, through education, environmental activism, and effective stewardship of land and water, we can keep the Colorado flowing for generations to come. After all, there is 5 million years’ worth of music coursing through the Colorado River—for those who are willing to listen.

ALBUM REVIEW: David Kechley’s A Sea of Stones

Posted on June 20, 2016 by maestrobeats

by Brendan Howe

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David Kechley, indisputably the most technically challenging composer of music for guitar and saxophone, has released his latest three works for the unlikely combination – Points of Departure, Bounce, and the eponymous Sea of Stones. Granted, although Kechley was the first to specifically pair the guitar and saxophone together in 1992 with his album, In the Dragon’s Garden and has composed virtually all of the genre’s canon, Sea of Stones stands on its own as a magnificently complex, engaging, inventive work that also effortlessly achieves accessibility – no small feat in contemporary instrumental music.

It is important to note that Kechley’s compositions are heavily influenced by time spent in Kyoto, Japan, and that during his initial collaborations with saxophonist Frank Bongiorno and baroque guitarist Robert Nathanson for Dragon’s Garden they paid particular and meditative attention to the famed Zen garden at Ryoanji Temple – an experience that so inspired Bongiorno and Nathanson that they began calling themselves the Ryoanji Duo.

In both title and concept, Kechley derives Sea of Stones from the “controlled randomness” of the rock garden – fifteen boulders arranged in groups of two, three, and five, such that the maximum number of boulders visible from any angle is fourteen, the fifteenth revealed upon enlightenment. As Kechley asserts, his album is filled with motifs “that repeat, but don’t” – they maintain a familiar atmosphere while adding new perspectives for a sense of enriched understanding.

Points of Departure differs from other Kechley works for guitar and saxophone in that it consists of five discreet movements, as opposed to movements that flow directly into one another. Saxophonist Laurent Estoppey, who recorded Departure with Nathanson, opens the work in Prologue and Dramatic Exposition and closes the work in Epilogue and Lyric Recapitulation with two temple bells struck over Nathanson’s urgent, augmented, arpeggiated seventh and ninth chords, as the opening and closing of ceremonies.

Each movement of Points of Departure is titled to match its character. Kechley’s signature sharp contrasts are readily apparent in the tempo and dynamic shifts of Dramatic Exposition. Estoppey’s soprano sax at one moment frantically trills over Nathanson’s rapid attacks of nylon strings, and the next moment both release and slow to a pill-induced slumber.

The second movement, Quirky, makes heavy use of large and unusual staccato intervals intermixed with short, halting soprano sax phrases. It draws to mind images of ground squirrels doing what ground squirrels do – an impressively unique aesthetic that demonstrates Kechley’s versatility in writing for the two instruments.

Departure’s remaining movements – Chorale, Cadenza and Slow Dance, Relentless, and finally Epilogue and Lyric Recapitulation – each offer wonderfully varied shifts in tone and style, and create a brilliant narrative arc that returns to its starting point, but carrying a profoundly changed perspective.

The second of the three pieces included on Sea of Stones is Bounce: Inventions, Interludes, and Interjections, and was recorded by the Ryoanji Duo as a single 14-minute track. Kechley explains that the instruments build upon a single opening motif, inventing new forms as they go, with strategic interruptions that cause us to “stop and take a breath” at certain points throughout the piece. Lyric interludes also serve to build the structure of the piece. It becomes more continuous, intense, and organic as it evolves, before reaching the end of the cycle exactly where it began.

The latest of Kechley’s works, for which this album is named, brings in a unique orchestral element behind the Ryoanji Duo, here performed by the Polish Sudecka Filharmonia. The first movement, Awakening, opens with a steadily increasing, reverberant drumroll as a call to ceremony, similar to what would have been heard at Ryoanji Temple in the 15^th-19^th centuries. Diverse percussive instruments, evoking a theatricality akin to Kabuki, punctuate the melodic alto sax and guitar lines. This awakening is precise, crisp, and energized.

Kechley begins Dances and Reflections with the flute, then guitar, then horns, and finally oboe echoing the main sax motif, showing in brilliant resolution the stark perspective shifts that come from reflecting one event in different instrumental voices. The result is heartbreaking and mesmerizing. As the instruments join forces to flow into Arrival, they bring their divergent points of view into a single dramatic narrative.

So as to not give too much away, suffice it to say that the remaining four movements of Stones will not disappoint listeners who are eager to hear the rest of this beautifully crafted experience. Dialogs and Meditations initially breaks cleanly from the perpetual motion of instruments sharing with one another, the sax diving deeply into its own thoughts while the guitar drifts from whimsy to action. Return and Last Light come full circle with familiar motifs and percussion. Though the album concludes almost subconsciously, it leaves the listener with a sense of awakening.

ALBUM REVIEW: Stories for Ocean Shells by Kate Moore with Ashley Bathgate

Posted on June 13, 2016 by maestrobeats

by Maggie Molloy

Picture yourself walking along a beach, listening to the soft crashing of the waves and collecting shells on the ocean shore. Each shell a beautifully delicate, one-of-a-kind work of art—each shell with its own story and its own unique song.

That’s the inspiration behind Cantaloupe Music’s latest release, Stories for Ocean Shells, which tells a wordless tale of two friends and musical collaborators living oceans apart: Australian composer Kate Moore and New York-based cellist Ashley Bathgate.

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The two first met in 2009 when Moore came to New York to rehearse one of her pieces with Bang on a Can, of which Bathgate is a member.

“I knew from that moment that we would work with each other again,” Moore said. “Sharing similar experiences, aesthetic interests, and being at a similar place in our lives meant that we could immediately see where the other was coming from. We were both rebels from a background playing the cello, and we both wanted to break out, with the aim to create something new that we could call our own, tapping into that vast energy around us.”

Moore has written a number of solo cello works which Bathgate has premiered over the past seven years—and Stories for Ocean Shells is a culmination of their close musical collaboration thus far.

The album begins with an invitation. “Whoever you are come forth” is an introspective prelude of sorts—a slow and gradual immersion into the intimacy and strength of a solo, unaccompanied instrument. The piece was written as a wordless interpretation of Walt Whitman’s poem “Song of the Open Road,” about the long and winding journey of a lonely traveler. Bathgate paints a tender image of the lone traveler through her rich tone, bittersweet lyricism, and warm phrasing.

mg_8491c2a9johan-nieuwenhuizec2a92013-foto-johan-nieuwenhuize-2 It’s followed by the album’s title track, which Moore wrote as a present for a little girl from Thailand who had shown her gorgeous silks with elaborate handwoven patterns. The young girl’s name translates to “ocean shells.”

“The cyclical patterns were intricate and beautifully ornate,” Moore said, “Reminiscent of those traced on the surface of a seashell, spiraling in ever-expanding and contracting formations.”

It became the inspiration behind “Stories for Ocean Shells,” a piece comprised of intricately layered cello motives which circle and expand around one another in beautiful waves of sound. If this piece is a silk cloth, then Bathgate is the silk weaver, crafting each wave by hand with beautiful color and detail.

Another cloth-inspired piece follows—this one “Velvet.” Musically, the piece combines the relentless repetition and exaggerated pulse of minimalism with the drama and dynamic color of Romantic era. Bathgate sounds equally at home in the soft elegance of the velvet’s surface as she is in the rich, dark shadows of its folds.

The darkness is palpable in the album’s next track, “Dolorosa.” Moore wrote the piece after the words of the Stabat Mater, 13th-century Catholic hymn to Mary which portrays her suffering during Jesus’s death. Deeply spiritual, the piece features Bathgate’s whispering vocals drifting above long-breathed cello phrases, textured with subtle interjections from Lawson White on pedal steel guitar and vibraphone.

But if “Dolorosa,” is about loss, then “Homage to My Boots” is about liberation. The piece was inspired by Moore’s old Doc Martens’—a symbol of freedom and joyous possibility she purchased for herself when she first left home. Bathgate steps into Moore’s shoes for this piece, dancing through both the exhilaration and the vulnerability of young independence.

The album closes with “Broken Rosary,” a tribute to Moore’s grandmother who died the same year that Moore was born. Her grandmother left her an old rosary, which Moore accidentally broke as a child. She pieces it back together in this emotional work, the beads ever so softly audible behind the intimate cello melody and soft electronic ambiance.

And so Stories for Ocean Shells ends as softly as it begins: a single, lone traveler—though never truly alone.

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“When I was a little girl my grandmother gave me a huge conch shell that she found on the beach,” Bathgate said. “She told me that if I held it up to my ear, I would hear the ocean she visited. That idea stayed with me; that you could share an experience without necessarily being in the same place at the same time.”

Stories for Ocean Shells is proof of that possibility; it is a beautiful and heartfelt reminder that friendship will always conquer distance—and so will music.

“At any given moment, at any given location, somewhere in the universe, two people like us are picking up shells on a beach, listening into them for answers, for ideas, for a connection, for peace, for hope,” Bathgate said. “They’re listening, like we are, with wild imaginations and dreams of what’s to come. The possibilities are endless.”

ALBUM REVIEW: Danish String Quartet: Thomas Adès, Per Norgård, Hans Abrahamsen

Posted on June 6, 2016 by maestrobeats

by Seth Tompkins

Even if you know nothing about the Danish String Quartet, after listening to their latest album, it is clear that their capital strengths are versatility, sensitivity, and humility. Throughout this release, their inexhaustible flexibility, as well as their clearly attentive and humble collaborative spirit, show that this group of Scandinavians represents the acme of musical professionalism.

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photo credit: Caroline Brittencourt

The repertoire selected for this release is tightly related in certain ways. All three pieces, by Thomas Adès, Per Norgård, and Hans Abramhamsen, are the composers’ first published attempts at writing for string quartet. Additionally, all three pieces come from the composers’ early twenties: both the Norgård and Abrahamsen were written when the composers were twenty years old, and the Adès arrived when its composer was twenty-three. These common threads provide the listener with interesting food for thought, setting up a satisfying journey through this music.

The title of the first piece, Arcadiana, is a theme of sorts for this entire collection of music, referring to the ancient Greek legend of the mythical utopian land of Arcadia. “Arcadia,” in the context of this release, refers to two aspects present in all of the included pieces. First, it is connected to the frequent use of traditional tonality in this otherwise “modern” music as a means of harkening back to the “utopia” of earlier music. It is also connected to the utopia of youth, when the future appears bright and promising; this refers to the youthful ages of the composers at the times of composition of all three pieces.

The disc is laid out with the two longer pieces as bookends. It begins with Arcadiana, Op.12 by Thomas Adès. This piece is a series of short vignettes referring to geographic places (both real and mythical) and/or the music of other composers, including Mozart, Schubert, Debussy, and Elgar. The skill and versatility with which the quartet executes the contrasting textures here is striking. This piece is an enjoyable listen at the surface level, with beautiful moments couched in fascinating complexity and, and also provides an engaging intellectual journey, if the listener is so inclined.

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The second piece, the shortest on this disc, is the Quartetto Breve by Per Norgård. It is indeed breve, but it still packs a punch. Its two movements are of contrasting character, with the first being deliberate and rhapsodic, and the second having a punchier contrapuntal texture. As in the first piece, in both movements, the great delicacy with which the quartet approaches these contrasting pieces shines.

The second movement, in particular, showcases the quartet’s egalitarianism, which is required in order for this music to work. The pointillistic music in this movement demands the same kind of ensemble-wide sensitivity that is called for in Bach’s contrapuncti, and that ethic is equally at home here, yielding excellent results. The opening cello notes in this movement are also notable; they showcase the warm yet balanced acoustic environment found throughout this superbly-mastered disc. The listener gets a complementary balance of proximal sounds (bow hair scratching, etc.) and warm resonance; this results in a beautiful but non-distracting sound environment that serves primarily to showcase the supreme delicacy and deep preparation of the quartet.

Hans Abrahamsen’s String Quartet No.1 rounds out this release. It is a series of 10 miniatures, called “short stories” by the composer. These diminutive pieces all have distinct characters, stemming from combinations of American minimalism, European serialism, contemporary techniques, and folk song. This piece is perhaps where the versatility of the Danish String Quartet is most obvious. The ease and dexterity with which they execute these dramatically different characters is impressive and delightful.

ALBUM REVIEW: You Us We All by Shara Nova & Andrew Ondrejcak

Posted on May 16, 2016 by maestrobeats

by Maggie Molloy

“Dear Beyoncé,” Shara Nova sings dotingly above the excited clattering of an antique typewriter. “Do you ever think that you’re like everybody else? Just another human, fartin’ around this damned earth?”

Queen Bey makes no reply.
600x600 Regal, royal, and ridiculously talented, Beyoncé is just one of several modern pop gods called upon in Nova’s contemporary Baroque chamber opera, You Us We All. The album-length opera is a mixed-up, mashed-up court masque about five allegorical characters searching for meaning in the modern age, filled with corny fan letters and cornetto solos, broken hearts and Baroque instruments.

It’s a work of 21st-century musical theater written for 17th-century instruments—an ornate, Baroque-style pageant of life and death with music by Nova, libretto by Andrew Ondrejcak, costumes by Zane Pihlstrom, and choreography by Seth Stewart Williams.

Shara Nova (previously known as Shara Worden) is one of those musicians who is notoriously impossible to pin down. She’s an artist in every sense of the word—a composer, a singer-songwriter, a mezzo-soprano extraordinaire, and a musical chameleon.

Perhaps best known as the frontwoman her own avant-garde rock band, My Brightest Diamond, she has also collaborated with composers and artists as diverse as the Decemberists, Sarah Kirkland Snider, Sufjan Stevens, Colin Stetson, David Byrne, and many more. For Nova, writing and starring in her own Baroque chamber opera was simply the next logical step in a career of beautifully unusual musical endeavors.

You Us We All began with a commission from the Belgian ensemble Baroque Orchestration X (B.O.X.), a collective that is committed to creating new music on old instruments. Inspired by their wide range of rare period instruments, Nova began working with writer, director, and production designer Andrew Ondrejcak to craft a new theatrical work that would combine the lavish nobility and grace of the Baroque era with the boldness and artistic experimentation of the 21^st century.

The opera premiered last year with performances in Belgium, Germany, Amsterdam, and New York. And though no performances made it over to the West Coast (yet!), we can still live vicariously through the original cast recording, starring Nova herself with her hand-picked skeleton cast of curious characters.

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The opera takes its structural form from the Baroque masque—a form of festive courtly entertainment which flourished in 16^th and 17^th-century Europe and involved extravagant music, costumes, sets, and dances. Masques typically featured a series of tableaus in lieu of a standard plot, and opted for allegorical characters to represent abstract virtues such as Beauty, Strength, or Justice.

At its core, You Us We All adheres to this basic structure of pomp and circumstance—but what begins as lighthearted courtly entertainment quickly turns into something much darker: a radical look inward at how we define our culture and, perhaps more importantly, ourselves.

Nova’s warm, lustrous vocals sparkle in the role of Hope, along with acclaimed New York-vocalist Helga Davis as Virtue, baritone Martin Gerke as Love, performance artist Carlos Soto as Time, and countertenor Bernhard Landauer as Death. The 10-piece B.O.X. collective provides a backdrop of clean, courtly, polite, and precise accompaniment reminiscent of a Baroque dance suite—but with some more contemporary percussion thrown in for a 21^st-century edge.

The opera tells a tale of Love, Virtue, Hope, and Death—four dreadfully superficial characters who define themselves solely through their fabulous costumes, ornamented melodies, and material possessions. Surrounded by the glitter and glamour of riches and wealth, they begin to reflect on the meaning of their lives in the modern world only as Time strips away their carefully-crafted layers of pomp and artifice.

The opera unfolds through a number of modern-day arias and recitatives: Death falls for Love, Virtue and Hope head out to a strip club, Time drinks away his sorrows—you know, the usual operatic drama.

But it’s all tied together will introspective little letters Hope writes to the pop divinities, almost like philosophical prayers to the gods above. In her own little 21st-century way, Hope’s fan letters harken back to the Baroque tradition, when philosophers sought to reconcile the existence of life and God through their writings.

It just serves as a reminder that although we’re three centuries past Baroque music and philosophical musings, we are still just as lost as ever. But at least we’re not alone—the opera reminds us that you, us, we all still have each other. And Nova’s prominent role reminds us that above all, we still have Hope.

“Dear Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen, is it true that you’re split from one single chromosome?” she sings sweetly above the antique typewriter. “Are we not us each all split from one single chromosome, and spend our lives trying to put the pieces back together?”