Marti Epstein – For Jack
For Jack is a 50-minute-long piano solo written in 2024 for pianist Jack Yarbrough. Epstein was inspired by Jack’s many performances of her music; how he approaches her sound world with a beauty of touch and an attention to pacing. This piece is long and, with a few exceptions, it is extremely quiet and spacious, but is extremely tense and anticipatory with islands of intensity that relentlessly holds your attention.
JPA Falzone and Morgan Evans-Weiler – Ascending Music
The pieces brought together here were assembled as the fruit of collaboration undertaken by Falzone and Evans-Weiler. Instrumentation is the strongly unifying element. The reed organ, once ubiquitous in the private music setting of the home as well as a default practice instrument for organists, is now regarded as something of a relic of the past. The two pieces of Ascending Music are the most forthrightly collaborative. Careful attention was given in listening to favorable frequencies highlighted by the resonance of the space. Pauline Oliveros and the Deep Listening Band were an immediate inspiration. If an underground cistern invited deep listening, would not a stairwell suggest ascendent listening?
Lila Meretzky – Simultaneous Contrast
New York based Meretzky’s debut release is a portrait album of 5 works and plots a sprawling journey through New York City-based composer Lila Meretzky’s catalogue. Quartet for strings and percussion draws on exercises by Josef Albers to explore color relativity. On Chaconne, Ji Hye Jung gives a plaintive marimba performance. Don’t look for me where birds sing, for solo percussion and electronics, honors Bertha Kula, a young immigrant who died in the 1911 Triangle Factory Fire. For Linda Catlin Smith, performed by Unheard-of//Ensemble, pays tribute to a key influence. The program ends with To crave and to have, a study in luminous color for string orchestra. These works reflect the tension of opposing forces and evoke shifting perception over time.
Zeynep Toraman – a lifetime of annotations
Turkish composer Zeynep Toraman’s debut release is two pieces for intimate string ensembles featuring andPlay, Clara Levy, Biliana Voutsckova, and Judith Hamann. The two pieces – each over 20 minutes – are each a pensive, textured unfolding of stings. Poetic, dark, and rich, these two pieces demonstrate Toraman’s practice-based research that explores the ways in which texts (in the broadest sense of this word) can interact with one another within the larger framework of musical compositions, by way of thinking of her own library as an archive, and enfolding autobiography, poetry, fiction and history within her works.
Huw Morgan – Melos
“Melos” is an ongoing series of site-specific installation pieces for organ and electronics. “Melos” (from the Greek for “melody” or “arc”) passes sampled organ tones very slowly through static tones held on the organ, creating a rich, fluid architecture impossible to achieve through mechanical means alone. The organ’s expressive capabilities are extended to create an enveloping, dense texture that is constantly in motion, the ear constantly drawn from point to point much as the eye would be in a gothic cathedral or deep cave. Each iteration of the work is unique to an instrument and its environment: this recording presents five versions from four different buildings.
