Tibetan singer Yungchen Lhamo and Russian pianist Anton Batagov first met through their mutual friendship with famed choreographer Bill T. Jones, so it's only natural that their first musical collaboration is based on movement and improvisation. Tayatha traces a journey of spiritual transformation, invoking the universal themes of love, family, faith and renewal.

[Ziporyn's] whole career has been about making US see and hear that music is one world. - the Boston Globe Following the critically acclaimed Frog's Eye (CA21040, 2006) Big Grenadilla/Mumbai marks the second Cantaloupe Music collaboration between composer/clarinetist Evan Ziporyn and Gil Rose's Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP). It is also the second time that Evan has teamed up with world-renowned tabla player Sandeep Das - a member of the Silk Road Ensemble - thus forging together a non-western master musician with a premiere western orchestra. Commissioned and premiered by the American Composers Orchestra in 2006, Big Grenadilla features Evan Ziporyn on bass clarinet and is named for the wood from which clarinets are made and the "big" orchestra, magnifying and framing. Wanting to highlight and amplify what he likes to do best on his instrument, Evan calls the piece "an attempt at ancestor worship, on two levels: The instrument dreams of it's living, rooted reality, with the orchestra playing the role of it's environs." Mumbai is a memorial to and meditation on the terrorist bombings in that city in 2008. Mumbai was commissioned by the Boston Modern Orchestra Project and premiered alongside with Grammy nominated soloist Sandeep Das on May 27, 2011.

Classical Music

The practice of hocketing is defined by splitting a single melody across multiple parts, often in surprising ways. While the form dates back as far as the Middle Ages, it is still found in musical traditions all over the world. Meara O'Reilly has written and recorded a series of hockets based on principles of perception, drawing both from cognitive research as well as historical practice. Each piece in the series explores a variety of conditions under which the listener might involuntarily fuse sequences of notes into melodic patterns, despite differing sound sources. In the entire work, there are never more than two notes occurring at one time, although it may often seem like there are many more. In the field of music cognition, this is also referred to as pseudo-polyphony, or melodic fission - a concept that first came to O'Reilly's attention through researcher Albert Bregman's work on Auditory Scene Analysis, and O'Reilly's own experiments with auditory perception while in residence at the Exploratorium in San Francisco. O'Reilly initially wrote the pieces on a computer in an attempt to push specific boundaries of what it was possible for the human voice to sing. She then taught herself to sing both parts, creating an uncanny valley in the resulting recording. The music currently exists solely as a recorded work, but it's also intended to be sung live by two performers, or by a solo performer with electronics.

Conceived and realized in partnership with Q2 Music's Peabody award-winning podcast Meet the Composer, Splitting Adams is Alarm Will Sound's tribute to American composer John Adams, and in particular to his works Chamber Symphony (1992) and Son of Chamber Symphony (2007). Presented with commentary tracks from MTC's host Nadia Sirota, Alarm Will Sound's artistic director Alan Pierson, and the composer himself, the podcast-plus-performance conveys a rare sense of interaction for the listener; not only does the music, performed in all its lush detail by the 17 musicians in AWS, capture and connect the long trajectory between the two works, but the commentary also shines a revealing light on the story behind the music.

Classical Music

"• Commissioned by the New Music Bassoon Fund. • Seven-piece Rushes Ensemble features the top bassoonists in the U.S., including Dana Jessen. • Performances booked for March 2014 in Boston (3/26), Philadelphia (3/28) and Montclair, NJ (3/29), with more TBD. • Extensive three-month marketing, press and social media campaign. • Promotional videos currently posted on YouTube (youtube.com/watch?v=umhQdxwn26M) and Vimeo (vimeo.com/51771906). "

Ken Thomson's Restless features vituoso cellist Ashley Bathgate and the emerging Brooklyn-based pianist Karl Larson. This release is the follow-up to Thomson's Thaw, which was released on Cataloupe Music in 2013. Restless, in four movements for cello and piano, and Me Vs., in three movements for solo piano, are two of Thomson's most substantial chamber works. While their form and instrumentation are a clear nod to traditional idioms, Thomson's signature blend of jazz, punk and modern art music still simmers at the surface. Avant-garde influences peek through the opening strains of "Forge" and the long, tense silences of "Turn of Phrase", while the dark, almost brooding tone of "Remain Untold" suggests the sonic cataclysm to come. Throughout Restless, these sometimes sudden shifts in mood and emotion suggest a world in turmoil. Thomson's music is notoriously difficult and consistently demands the height of virtuosity and technical precision from each performer. Bathgate and Larson deftly navigate Thomson's lengthy passages while steadily building the tension and density - in the end pushing the large-scale form to dramatic climaxes.

Conceived as a reimagining of director D.W. Griffith’s infamously racist 1915 silent film The Birth of a Nation, Rebirth of a Nation, recorded with the Kronos Quartet, is a controversial and culturally significant project examining how “…exploitation and political corruption still haunt the world to this day, but in radically different forms.” + Originally commissioned in 2004 by the Lincoln Center Festival, Spoleto Festival USA, Weiner Festwochen and the Festival d’Automne a Paris, the project was Paul D. Miller’s first large-scale multimedia performance piece, and has been performed around the world, from the Sydney Festival to the Herod Atticus Amphitheater, more than fifty times. + Paul D. Miller is probably most well-known as DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid. + He has recorded a huge volume of music and collaborated with a wide variety of musicians and composers, Iannis Xenakis, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Kronos Quartet, Pierre Boulez, Steve Reich, Yoko Ono and Thurston Moore among them. + He also composed and recorded the score for the Cannes and Sundance Award-winning film Slam, starring acclaimed poet Saul Williams, and produced material on Yoko Ono’s recent album Yes, I’m a Witch.

In his original program notes for Sonatra, composer Michael Gordon writes that he conceived of the piece for solo piano as a sideways tribute to Frank Sinatra, but with the sonata form as an equal and opposite force that tugs at the music from within. “I grew up playing, or mis-playing, the piano,” he notes. “When I started writing Sonatra, I decided that since I would probably only ever write one piano piece in my entire life, I wanted to use all the keys on the piano, and use them often. I constructed long chains or links of major and minor thirds that ceaselessly wind their way up and down the piano. Eventually they start cascading and intersperse with glissandos half the length of the keyboard, sounding to me like the performer has at least four hands." Sonatra is slightly more than 15 minutes in length, but when performed in both equal temperament and just intonation, as Bang on a Can All-Stars pianist Vicky Chow has done for her singular recording of the piece, it takes on the aura and personality of a two-part epic.

Bearthoven is small ensemble that has its roots in the Bang on a Can organization's Summer Music Festival at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art—known worldwide as a mecca for emerging composers of adventurous contemporary music. Comprised of Karl Larson (piano), Pat Swoboda (upright & electric bass) and Matt Evans (percussion & drumkit), the group started in name only as a cheeky tribute to Beethoven, and quickly took on the mission of making art music more accessible to a wider range of listeners than the traditional "classical music" crowd. Trios features the work of six young composers and serves as a living blueprint of Bearthoven's community. "Each of their individual voices is reflected in our identity as a trio," Larson explains. "When Bearthoven began, we were determined to build a new repertoire for our instrumentation; piano-bass-percussion trios are common in jazz, for example, but pieces for this format in the modern canon were virtually non-existent. So our goal in building this repertoire wasn't to cultivate a particular sound or style, but to act as a blank page for composers and give them the chance to project their distinct voices onto our ensemble."

Classical Music

Aleksandra Vrebalov's The Sea Ranch Songs was commissioned for the Kronos Quartet by the community of The Sea Ranch in celebration of the California retreat's fiftieth birthday. The music does a magnificent job of connecting with the nature, spirit, and architecture of this magical landscape. This music is more like a multimedia work. The music features rarely documented sounds from the Northern California coastal community and it's nature. The work is paired with a cinematic exploration on a bonus DVD directed by videographer Andrew Lyndon. "The Sea Ranch idea on a global scale might be utopian, but through music, we praise it's beauty and affirm it's urgent relevance in our wounded world, so much in need of healing." (Aleksandra Vrebalov) Kronos Quartet consists of violinists David Harrington and John Sherba, violist Hank Dutt, and cellist Sunny Yang. The group has a west coast performance schedule to be announced following this release.

Classical Music

"• Composer/percussionist Glenn Kotche’s fourth studio album features the Kronos Quartet and eighth blackbird. • Release timed to coincide with a series of new work premieres and performances, including Carnegie/Zankel Hall in NYC (2/22), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in SF (3/21-22) and French Legation Museum in Austin, TX (4/16). • Extensive three-month marketing, press and social media campaign, with planned video EPK. "