One of the most celebrated Korean-born composers, Isang Yun (1917-1995) lived through the turmoil of WWII and the Cold War. After being kidnapped and imprisoned as an alleged Communist by the South Korean government, he was released following international protests and moved to West Berlin in 1969. Isang Yun’s music explores Korean sensibilities and the compositional techniques of European avant-garde music. The composer established his unique musical language based on the traditional Korean music ingrained in him, the Taoism that prevails in Korean culture, and European Modernism. To celebrate the centennial of Isang Yun’s birth in 2017, composers from far afield wrote solo pieces for pianist Eunmi Ko to perform as a tribute to him – eight musical worlds that come together in one: Unus Mundus. Participating composers each had their own approach to his legacy. Ingrid Stölzel and John Liberatore reinterpreted Isang Yun’s “main tone” technique in their compositions. Fabio Massimo Capogrosso, Alejandro Román, and Stölzel used a motive or fragment from Yun’s piano work or symphony as main musical material in their pieces. Eduardo Costa Roldán was inspired by Isang Yun’s life and the Korean history that Yun lived through. Girolamo Deraco and Seunghee Lee make more indirect allusions: Deraco explored the theatrical effect that a performer’s body creates during the course of the performance, while Lee’s inspiration came directly from the Korean kite flying tradition. Most nostalgic among all the works on the album, Christos Samaras expressed sentiments from his personal memory of Isang Yun throughout his work Euphoria. This homage album looks back as well as forward. Isang Yun established himself as one of the most prominent composers in the twentieth-century classical music through embracing his cultural roots and embedding it into his music. It is hard to imagine the cultural diversity and richness of the twenty-first century music without the legacy of composers like Yun.

Cellist Maya Beiser's latest, Uncovered, is an album of classic rock tunes re-imagined and re-contextualized in stunning and multi-layered performances. Consisting almost entirely of Beiser's multi-tracked cello with drums and bass added by collaborators Glenn Kotche (Wilco) and Jherek Bischoff, these uncovers - in new arrangements by Evan Ziporyn - breathe new life into works by Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix, Pink Floyd, Nirvana, Janis Joplin, Howlin' Wolf, King Crimson, Muddy Waters and AC/DC.

Shakuhachi players of old followed the path of ichion-jobutsu, or "enlightenment in a single tone." the spiritual element of the simple bamboo flute with its notched mouthpiece and five fingerholes is essential to its existence, and part of what led Henry Cowell to refer to it as "the universal flute." Ralph Samuelson's album shares that name and presents remarkably evocative works for the shakuhachi by American composers. The shakuhachi first came to prominence in Japan in the 17th and 18th centuries, when it was taken up by a sect of Zen Buddhist monks who used shakuhachi blowing as a core spiritual practice. Ralph Samuelson, who is among the first generation of non-Japanese musicians, was trained in the classical tradition of the Kinko School. He has played an important role in bringing the shakuhachi to the Western world.

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.

In an interview with the Hong Kong website Interlude, Ilari Kaila said, “I hope to never write music that doesn’t feel personal.” The Finnish-born composer was talking, on that occasion, specifically about The Bells Bow Down (Kellojen kumarrus), a single-movement work for piano quintet composed in memory of his friend, pianist Hanna Sarvala. But as each of the works here shows, Kaila’s vision is intensely personal, as is his musical language and style. Much of his work is shaped by extra-musical stimulus: his grief for a lost friend; visual and aural images celebrating the natural world; a love of the (sometimes multilingual) punning title. He has a strong awareness of music from outside the Western classical canon; he creates striking harmonic effects from within the diatonic system, and he has a keen ear for subtle gradations of sound, especially those made possible by the string family.—Gordon Kerry, excerpted from the liner notes. Ilari Kaila (b. 1978) is a Finnish-American composer who has written chamber, orchestral, vocal, and stage music. His music has been described as “haunting”, “intriguing”, “engaging ... soulful” (The New York Times), “powerfully resonating” (Helsingin Sanomat), and “melodically euphoric” (Rondo Classic). Kaila received his PhD in Music Composition in 2011 from Stony Brook University, New York, having previously studied at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki. Between 2011 and 2014, he taught at Columbia University and as a teaching artist with the New York Philharmonic, before moving to Hong Kong where he currently works as Composer-in-Residence on the faculty of the School of Humanities at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

“This album is about places, real and imagined. The trajectory of a melody lost among church towers. The cardinal points that orient human activity. The multiple dimensions of superstring theory and a melody from a nearby universe. The idea of a place – the afterlife – and a piece of music written as a gesture to help my old dog Lloyd navigate the bardo. And then our internal place, our world within our own mind, which if you learn to control yourself, you become irresistible.” Thusly, composer & electric guitarist D. J. Sparr describes his new album, Hard Metal Cantüs, adding that it also features “a nod to Frank Zappa and Henry Cowell.” Featuring performances by The Lee Trio, Third Coast Percussion, Del Sol String Quartet, Lubbock Chamber Symphony (with rising-star tenor Corbin DeSpain), and D. J. Sparr himself, Hard Metal Cantüs takes listeners on a sonorous journey of ringing bells, metal percussion, searing strings, abstract haiku vocals, and finally funk-rock metal guitars. Baton Rouge-based composer & electric guitarist D. J. Sparr has been described as a “A Texas guitar whiz with the chops to bang his sounds out to all fields across the entire music spectrum.” Who are we to resist?

Recently hailed as one of the most memorable live performers of 2015 by the San Francisco Examiner, the award-winning Aeon Flutes is an ensemble dedicated to the presentation of new music in a unique way. Now in their twelfth year, the core trio of Jill Heinke, Kassey Plaha and Sasha Launer make use of the entire flute family (including the “regular” C flute, piccolo, alto flute, bass flute, ocarina, slide whistle, and beyond), providing a fusion of sounds that can be at times soothing, melancholy, joyfully vibrant, or when used in a less traditional manner overtly dissonant, puzzling, fractured and otherworldly. Their Innova debut, Thrive, features living composers Elainie Lillios, Cornelius Boots, and Mike Sempert. Lillios was Areon’s 2014 International Composition Competition winner, and her “Summer Sketches” depicts the sonic landscape of the world of insects through extended techniques on the flute family. “Cthonic Suite” (Boots) takes the listener on a three-movement journey to the underworld with reflective, joyful and rocking moments. “Uncanny Valley” (Sempert) offers a glimpse into a future world of artificial intelligence and the struggle between synthetic and organic minds. Both of these works were commissions from Areon.

For more than 16 years, Quey [“Kway”] Percussion Duo (QPD) has dazzled audiences worldwide with their unmistakable style that blends traditions of Western percussion, “world,” contemporary, classical, and popular music to create colorful sound worlds that often place focus on interlocking counterpoint and musical multi-tasking. In other words, breathtaking and virtuosic.This recording is a small selection of the many works written for the duo over the past 16 years, which have been created through three large com-mission contests and by working directly with composers. Two of the titles represented on the recording are winning compositions from the group’s composition contests in 2005 (In the History of Man) and 2012 (Rhapsody for Vibraphone and Marimba). In addition, many works composed by duo member Gene Koshinski were written specifically for QPD, two of which are represented here on this album. The most prominent composition is the double percussion concerto entitled, soniChroma, recorded here with full orchestra. As the title suggests, soniChroma (meaning “sound color”), is focused on creating unique sonic and instrumental combinations. This can be seen throughout the orches-tra, but prominently in the large percussion solo setup which contains over 80 instruments, including skins, metals, woods, strings (guitars), non-Western instruments, and found objects. The solo parts reflect the diverse performance demands of the 21st Century percussionist, ranging from classical percussionists, drum set players, keyboard soloists, contemporary multi-percussionists, and world music performers. Comprised of members Gene Koshinski and Tim Broscious, Duluth-based QPD has performed in Argentina, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Jordan, the UK, and extensively throughout the US. They have worked with music festivals, art galleries, chamber music series’, conventions (including 4 PASIC appearances), professional orchestras, and have engaged in more than 50 university residencies worldwide. They also can be heard in the score of the award winning short film The Passage, which was premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2018.

Speed of Sound celebrates both the Centennial of the McIntire Department of Music at the University of Virginia and the Bicentennial of the entire institution. I-Jen Fang, the Director of the UVA Percussion Ensemble, curated this album, showcasing UVA composers and performers. These include faculty, as well as alumni, graduate and undergraduate students, with all of the music created between 2014 and 2017. The program opens with Judith Shatin’s inventive Khamsa, which means ‘5’ in Arabic and is a symbol of protection shared by all three Abrahamic religions. Next is Rite of the Elves, by Sophia Shen. Its highly rhythmic character is sometimes disrupted, conveying an exciting sense of disorientation. Then come To Live To Be Free by Mark Panetti, inspired by the Canadian rock group Rush and #Ferguson by Jon Bellona, based on live tweets surrounding the terrible shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO on August 9, 2014; Gentle Rain on Delicate Wings by Maxwell Tfirn offers a beautiful contrast, with the music inspired by a gentle storm and the image of a butterfly trying to fly through rain. The remaining pieces are guided improvisations. Choose, by Kristina Warren, commissioned and premiered by So Percussion, employs graphic, color-based notation. Two PFR-3 Poems by Jackson Mac Low, by Kevin Davis, is based on some of the earliest computer-generated poetry. Lastly, Speed of Sound in An Ice Rain, by Alaskan-born composer Matthew Burtner, is for pitched percussion with a field recording of an ice rain crackling on the leaves of a magnolia tree. All of this music resulted from extensive collaboration between the composers and performers, fusing their efforts in this propulsive, richly-textured, exploratory, and colorful album.

To mark its 40th season, the celebrated San Francisco vocal new music ensemble Volti releases premiere recordings of works of dazzling range and diversity by five American composers- Robin Estrada, Tonia Ko, Ziboukle Martinaitye, Forrest Pierce and Mark Winges. Four of the works are among the twenty Volti has commissioned since 2013. Gary Snyder’s poem “A Prayer to the Great Family” provides the test for the Forrest Pierce’s lush and luminous Gratitude Sutra, in which Snyder’s words of simple Gratitude become, according to Pierce, “a discourse on the generous beauties that sustain us on this voyage around the sun.” The piece was commissioned by the Barlow Endowment for Music Composition at Brigham Young University for Volti, the BBC Singers, and the Latvian Radio Choir. Next up is From Ivory Depths, Tonia Ko’s evocative and inventive setting of fragments of text from a short story by Virginia Woolf. Ko, the recipient of many awards including a Gugenheim fellowship, wrote this work under Volti’s 2016 Choral Arts Laboratory commission, a competition for American composers under age 35. Robin Estrada melds Western forms with Southeast Asian musical styles in Caeli Enarrant, written as a reflection on the current conflict-filled sociopolitical climate. Mark Winges, Volti’s resident composer, contributes All Night, setting the poetry of Gustaf Sobin. The closing piece is The Blue of Distance, by Lithuanian-born composer Ziboukle Martinaityte. The textless, atmospheric work was inspired by Rebecca Solnit’s book A Field Guide to Getting Lost, which also provided the title of this recording.

D.J. Sparr not only lives on the mystical high plains of the Wild West, he also embodies an unconfined nature when it comes to making music. As comfortable playing a guitar concerto with a major orchestra as he is employing Tibetan singing bowls and banjos for a film score, his ears are as open as his horizons are wide. Electric Bands brings together four of his works for electronically-improved chamber ensembles; a format that allows for moments of magical realism. You might detect traces of layered Nancarrow-type rhythms deftly executed with guitar pedals or you might not; either way, Sparr’s effortless combination of composer-thinking and guitarist mind make his music as satisfying for the head as for the heart. I Can Hear Her Through the Thin Wall Singing for electric guitar and soprano imagines what kind of song cycle Debussy might have written if he’d had the full range of modern guitar effects available to him. Meta444 was inspired by a conversation between Killer Mike and Stephen Colbert. It is traditional ritual music for a religion and a place that exists only in the imagination. Sparr’s string quartet, Avaloch, for the Momenta Quartet, sprang from a place that very much exists- Avaloch Farm Music Institute, New Hampshire- and its attendant apple orchards and walks in the woods. But it’s a place where time is illusory, and the inhabitants are free of stress and dance with boundless joy. Earthcaster Suite was composed for a documentary about artist Thomas Sayre. Sayre’s work blends art and science, addresses the past and future, and joins the natural and man-made in a sometimes-dangerous dance of gravity and grace.

We tend to think of the past as what happened, the present as what’s happening right now, and the future as what’s to come, but the truth is that we are constantly engaged in the work of refashioning and recontextualizing the past. For composer and musician Grant Cutler, that process is at the center of his work. Self Portrait is Cutler’s third album for innova, following 2012 in 2011 and his collaboration with composer and producer Chris Campbell in 2013. Working with acclaimed musicians including Michael Lewis, Aby Wolf, Sarah Pajunen, Michelle Kinney and Jacqueline Ultan, and others, Cutler recorded artists improvising to delayed recordings of themselves, a kind of sonic déjà vu where memory and experience blend together in an evolving present. Slowly evolving colors wash over the listener; as though placing a mic in front of a fresh Rothko. In this way, this Self Portrait becomes a portrait not just of Cutler, but of all the musicians involved, and even becomes an act of memoir, an active reimagining of the self. Weaving together the capsules of time created by the musicians, Cutler pulls the tangent together into a long, circling recollection. This allows the music to become landscape, story, and document all at once. At first, the music here might sound spare, but repeated experiences with it peel back layers and reveal the beating human heart beneath it. Sound becomes a memory, cut up and rearranged in the retelling, then recorded again as a new memory, beginning the process over again.

Bob and Jim Freeman have both enjoyed wonderful careers in music. Several years ago, they conceived the idea of an album and commissioned three new pieces of music in memory of their parents, Henry and Florence Knope Freeman, both of whom graduated the Eastman School of Music in Rochester in 1930.They came up with the idea of recording an album, accompanied by a booklet, as a tribute to their parents, Henry and Florence, who were also both musicians and who were also children of musicians; in fact, their father Henry was not allowed to study music until his senior year in high school. Afterwards he performed in the Rochester Philharmonic and Civic orchestras and in the orchestra of WHAM in Rochester. In World War II, he was thrilled to be able to play a private audition for Serge Koussevitzky, where he advanced over twenty-two seasons from last bass to principal, while performing for many years as principal of the Boston Pops. Two of the composers featured on this album have won the Pulitzer Prize. Kevin Puts is currently at work on an opera for the Metropolitan Opera. Andrea Clearfield, who took her DMA at Temple, is the founder of the Philadelphia Salon Concert Series, featuring contemporary, classical, jazz, world, and electronic music, together with multimedia and spoken word arts. The late Gunther Schuller was one of the 20th Century’s music stars as composer, conductor, author and administrator. He was a great admirer of their father’s bass playing, and a good friend.

Mick Rossi's 160 began as a score for a short documentary film about the German oboist and instrument maker Albrecht Mayer. Now, fully fleshed out to be a standalone recording, the result is music that transcends genres - typical of the artist's voice. The album is multi-tracked in real time while Rossi plays all of the diverse instruments, including out-of-tune organs, drums with brooms, harmonium with a rat pedal and dog toy.

Originally from London but based in Los Angeles and New York, Danielle Eva Schwob is a “notable cross-genre composer” (The New Yorker) who writes concert works, experimental electro-rock and film scores. Danielle’s debut album as a composer in the classical realm, Out of the Tunnel, is an artful collection mixed by Grammy nominee Ryan Streber and Grammy-winners Silas Brown and Marc Urselli. Out of the Tunnel presents the first recordings of nine compositions, each as contemporary as it is alluring. The chamber music Danielle has composed is often inspired by nature and other art, such as painting. On Out of the Tunnel, there is a striking triptych for solo violin, solo cello and solo piano (commissioned by the American Composers Forum): “Reflections on Francis Bacon,” “Reflections on Lucian Freud” and “Reflections on David Hockney,” the title subjects being British painters who often socialized together and motivated each other. Similarly, many of the album’s performers are close colleagues of the composer, the relationships cultivated over years working alongside each other on stage and in the studio. The album’s titular string quartet, the thrilling “Out of the Tunnel,” was commissioned from Danielle jointly by New Music USA and the Grammy-nominated performing ensemble on the album: PUBLIQuartet, whose members the composer knows well. Harpist Ashley Johnson, who performs several pieces on the album, has a long collaborative history with Danielle, and violinist Jennifer Choi has also played with Danielle in various contexts, including on DELANILA’S Overloaded album.