The Space Between Us is the third studio release from Akropolis Reed Quintet, a group with a singular instrumentation, well on its way to redefining...

The Space Between Us is the third studio release from Akropolis Reed Quintet, a group with a singular instrumentation, well on its way to redefining how modern wind chamber music groups present classical music. It's an album about conflict and resolution, a story of how art and its reflection on life can bring people together. It opens with the first studio recording of Jacob TV's "Jesus Is Coming" for reed quintet, a composition that juxtaposes fragments of speech and babble against traditional chamber writing. It's followed by four Akropolis-commissioned works. A raucous amalgam of influences, David Biedenbender's "Refraction" by turns evokes heavy metal, the vocal music of Guillaume de Machaut, and dubstep. The delicate, often meditative "Gallimaufry" by Rob Deemer belies the chaos implied by the title, while title track "The Space Between Us" by Gregory Wanamaker explores changing relationships through language, texture, color and harmony. The album closes wtih John Steinmetz's "Sorrow and Celebration," which imitates a ceremony or ritual, calling people together to mourn and rejoice. Formed in 2009 at the University of Michigan and winner of the 2014 Fischoff Gold Medal, the Akropolis Reed Quintet takes listeners on extraordinary imaginative musical adventures. They have commissioned more than 25 new reed quintet works, published a catalog of original and arranged reed quintet sheet music, and have garnered more than 22,000 online views for the Web Premiere video series of new reed quintet repertoire. Akropolis injects its dynamic repertoire into communities and schools around the country, and in 2015 won the Fischoff Educator Award. The group was recently awarded two grants from Chamber Music America and the Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs for a January 2017 community residency in Detroit.