River Town Duo’s debut album, For Claire & Philip, features newly commissioned works written by six compelling 21st century American composers. Performed by double bassist Philip Alejo and harpist Claire Happel Ashe, this captivating recording shares the beguiling sounds of a unique chamber music pairing. For Claire & Philip is the culmination of River Town Duo’s collaborations with composers Caroline Shaw, Whitney Ashe, Derick Evans, Hannah Lash, Evan Premo, and Stephen Andrew Taylor. Since its formation in 2012, River Town Duo has presented dozens of concerts at venues including the University of Arizona, University of Illinois, Avaloch Farm Music Institute, Mackinac Island Music Festival, University of Notre Dame, and the University of Wisconsin, among others. River Town Duo has also performed as invited artists at the International Society of Bassists Convention and the American Harp Society Summer Institute.

On "Beauty Crying Forth," flutist Sarah Frisof presents repertoire spanning one and half centuries for flute by female composers. Including music by Clara Schumann, Lili Boulanger, Kaija Saariaho, Tania León, Shulamit Ran, and Amy Williams, Frisof, with guests cellist Hannah Collins and pianist Daniel Pesca, charts two parallel lineages, the evolution of flute repertoire from the Romantic era to the current day, and the overlooked role of female composers in shaping that repertoire. Daniel Pesca writes: “The most frequently performed works in the duo repertoire for flute and piano, as in all classical music, are by male composers. This record is intended to help correct this imbalance. In designing it, Sarah and I made the decision to include composers of a variety of eras, nationalities, and musical styles. The pieces included date from 1853 to 2014, and are written by composers born in Israel, Cuba, Finland, and elsewhere. This survey encompasses works of forthright lyricism and meditative, fragile sonic landscapes; both aphoristic works and those with broad dramatic sweep.”

Guitarist/composer William Kentner Anderson, "the alert guitarist" (Paul Griffiths, NY Times), has been a champion of new American music for 35 years. He founded the Cygnus Ensemble, and is Artistic Director of Marsyas Productions and the Roger Shapiro Fund for New Music. Anderson's music is not like anything else, often engaging with simple musical materials-pop songs, folksongs and folk lyrics. He breaks barriers-asking his guitarists to sing backup vocals, incorporating Tibetan overtone singing in his setting of Djuna Barnes' "Paradise", integrating an uillean piper into the Cygnus Ensemble. Anderson began performing chamber music at Tanglewood at age 19, gigged with the NY Philharmonic, the Metropolitan Opera Chamber Players, under James Levine, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, and the Theater Chamber Players in Washington, DC.

This is a composer-focused release of works by David Loeb, emphasizing his guitar music, but also including pieces for viols, and for Japanese mouth organ, clarinet quartet, and violin with string orchestra. The composer writes: “My formal studies (1959-1964) coincided with the midpoint of that thankfully brief time when twelve-tone and serial techniques seemed to dominate the world of composition. Authoritative persons and colleagues frequently admonished the few of us who stubbornly rejected the true faith, predicting marginalization and total obscurity as our fates. Many young composers studied Webern and Schoenberg scores with scriptural reverence, absorbing techniques and procedures which they unswervingly followed. In art, unlike politics, one achieves nothing only by opposition; one must find objectives to work for or toward: quaint old-fashioned ideas such as beauty, emotion, recognizable craft, purity, and even spirituality (not necessarily religious), precisely those qualities which continually draw us back to the great masters of the past. Modernity or originality seem far more ephemeral. Sometimes I remind colleagues or students that if our music survives into the distant future, historical performance musicians, not contemporary ensembles will perform it. In 1964 I began composing for early instruments and Japanese instruments. Integrating these aspects into my musical language did not present problems. When I first used secular Sephardic melodies in 1978, they also fit in effortlessly. Those early hybrid melodies simply added new ingredients to my extant multicultural stew. The limited number of pitches in diverse Asian scales or early Western modes never constrains me, rather it enhances purity. In those contexts, dissonances provide useful contrasts rather than a gray uniformity. Such music succeeds in its own way, much as great monochrome art (drawings, etchings, sculptures, black-and-white photography) never leaves us yearning for color."