Present Music has been a champion of contemporary music since its founding in 1982. The Milwaukee-based ensemble has worked closely with our generation’s foremost composers, and now releases their tenth studio album. The album focuses around the Turkish-American composer Kamran Ince, who has had a relationship with the ensemble for over two decades. Ten of Ince’s pieces have been commissioned by the ensemble. Ince’s compositions are characterized by the synthesis of Turkish and Balkan folk music and the traditions of European art music and American popular music. Ince led the recording sessions for this album himself.

A champion of new and experimental music, saxophonist Drew Whiting has been described (by Diakcritical.com) as a virtuoso whose performances are “exquisite and emotive... managing everything with aplomb.” His debut album on Innova Recordings, In Lights Starkly Different, features seven recent compositions for saxophone and electronics. From beginning to end, Whiting’s album – as the title implies – has lots of variety. He performs on soprano, alto, tenor, and baritone saxophones, and the electronics are just as varied. The opening track, Random Access by John Mayrose, utilizes live electronics and gradually layers Whiting’s alto saxophone (stored in RAM) until there are dozens of him performing by the end of the piece. Whiting also lent a plethora of saxophone sounds to the creation of the electronics for Ed Martin’s raucous work Break for baritone saxophone (that explores the harmonics of its low A), as well as Jeff Herriott’s pensive work As brightness is smeared into memory for soprano saxophone. Judith Shatin’s For the Fallen juxtaposes the soprano saxophone against the clash of the Capana dei Cauditi (Bell for the Fallen, cast from canons melted after World War 1), similarly to how Alexis Bacon uses the sounds of rocks and metals with the tenor saxophone in her piece Ötzi (after a 5,000 year old mummy of the same name). Letting the listener (and performer) relax a bit, Nathan Edwards creates mellow, ambient electronics for Whiting’s tenor saxophone lines to wash over in Saudade Study (titled after the Portuguese for foggy melancholy). Edwards also happens to be the recording engineer for the majority of works on the album. Rounding out the album is the title track written by Robin Julian Heifetz. The computer-generated sounds made by Heifetz range in character from serene to apocalyptic, and Whiting’s tenor saxophone responds accordingly to achieve a near-hallucinatory sonic environment.

When violinist Mary Rowell asked Rick Baitz to write a piece for her quartet, what emerged was Chthonic Dances, a mashup of rhythms, patterns and harmonies gleaned from his early years living in Brazil and South Africa. Rick says: “The healing energy of dance is a constant wherever I’ve lived. From South African township music to Brazilian samba, the juxtaposition of dance and story-telling creates catharsis- and if you’re down, the act of dancing your pain is a force in transcending it. So the dance of chthonic spirits brings out their complement, the spirits of light.” The New York Times described it as “a bright-hued, vigorously melodic score,” and it opens his new innova album, Into Light. ‘Hall of Mirrors’ is also permeated with the spirits of light and groove, merging the tribal with the computerized, employing mbiras, windwands, table, and electronics, which refract the instruments into processed and transformed versions of themselves. Kind of like when you go into a funhouse and see a bizarro reflection of yourself. Commissioned by the Juilliard School, ‘Hall of Mirrors’ is both earthbound and celestial, dance-like and trance-like, with an underlying sense of rhythmic slight-of-hand and a prevalent- but at times ambiguous- drone. The final piece on the album, ‘Into Light,’ dates back to 1984, but philosophically it’s in the same ballpark as the others. Rick thinks of it as both a dance and a meditation; a voyage through light and darkness with a lot of harmonic and rhythmic trickery along the way.

Here I Stand is the confident debut album of iSing Silicon Valley, the international-award-winning girls’ choir based in Silicon Valley, California. Here I Stand celebrates iSing’s focus on the power of girls to change the world as they raise their 200+ voices in remembrance, in strength, and in the pure, shared delight of coming together to sing. The album opens with a transcendent performance of the treble-voice version of ?riks Ešenvalds’ soaring, dreamlike work for solo voice and chorus, Only in Sleep. The pro-gram includes some of the stunning works commissioned by iSing during its first six seasons, with themes ranging from social justice, to individual growth and collective power. Among these: Never Shall I Forget, Adam Schoenberg’s haunting setting for treble voices, string quartet and percussion of excerpts from Elie Wiesel’s Holocaust memoir Night; Daniel Elder’s arrangements for iSing of his powerful commentary on gun violence, 365, and of In Your Light, his musical setting one of Rumi’s most ecstatic poems. Given first life on the concert stage and on this recording by iSing’s bright young singers, these commissions and commissioned arrangements make exciting, relevant additions to the repertoire for treble voices, here given definitive, top-notch renditions. The album artwork also includes original illustrations by a young choir alumna; together the package puts girls’ inspiring talents center stage in heartwarming fashion. Listeners, prepare to be moved by the breadth of performance of iSing girls: The musical finesse and the stunning vocal blend of iSing’s elite choirs; the clarity of expression of the soloists; and — on the later tracks of the album — the lovely ensemble sound of younger iSing girls ranging in age from 7 to 12.

"Haraldsdottir’s score, sung entirely in Icelandic, is human in its scope and eternal in its sound; Blóðhófnir conveys an elemental earthiness. It challenges past assumptions about culture and demonstrates that history ought to be interrogated and re-evaluated in light of contemporary realities." (Todd Tarantino, MATA Festival.) Blóðhófnir / Bloodhoof (2016) was written to the award-winning poetic cycle by Icelandic poet Gerður Kristný, with intimate visuals by actress and interdisciplinary artist, Tinna Kristjánsdóttir for an all-female cast; the critically acclaimed UMBRA Ensemble, with lead vocalist Lilja Dögg Gunnarsdóttir and guest performers, who all sing and play period instruments. The music reflects on the historic and the contemporary with vocal harmonies and earthy gut strings, underlining the continuing historical relevance of the story. The poetic cycle is a reevaluation of an Old Norse mythic poem from the Edda, in which the giantess, Gerður Gymisdóttir, is abducted from her homeland, Jötunheimar, or the Land of Giants, to be forced to marry the god Freyr in the Land of Gods. This contemporary retelling is told by the giantess herself, redefining what was traditionally perceived as a story of “love” into one of abduction and violence.“Gerður Gymisdóttir's story is a clear case of human trafficking”. (Gerður Kristný) Gerður Kristný's poetic cycle, Kristín Þóra Haraldsdóttir's composition and Tinna Kristjánsdóttir's visuals manifest and express Gerður Gymisdóttir's deep love for her home, her natural habitat and family, and her tragic fate of abduction and abuse in the Land of Gods. An intimate and powerful ode to women in sound, images and words.

David Liptak’s piano music has always displayed this composer’s personality as one intimately tied to the physicality of the instrument. Previously, he combined his work as a composer with that as a pianist, most often presenting new composition. The sound and feel of the piano as a contrapuntal instrument underlies his work as a composer. The two compositions of this recording are performed by pianist Eunmi Ko, whose grace and imagination as a performer is a perfect match to the music. David Liptak’s music has been described as “luminous and arresting,” “richly atmospheric,” and having “transparent textures, incisive rhythms, shimmering lightness,” and his compositions have been performed throughout the United States and abroad. In 1995, David Liptak was awarded the Elise L. Stoeger Prize, given by the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center in recognition of distinguished achievement in chamber music composition. He has received awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Barlow Endowment for Music Composition, both in 2002, and he is the 2006 recipient of the Lillian Fairchild Award from the University of Rochester. Much of his music written very recently has explored the poetry and magical quality of stars and starlight, imagined and real. David Liptak is a faculty member of the Eastman School of Music, where he has been a dedicated teacher of composition students taught since 1986.

Composer Ross Feller's X/Winds contains multitudes. The work on this album is characterized by raw, ecstatic layers of material that percolate with refined, virtuosic gestures. Feller lets the contradictions in these elements animate the music, their clashes generating the energy of the pieces. Throughout, there is an emphasis on a deep-seated sense of resonance, and tactile and physical attributes of sound as they are experienced. This is muscular Modernism at its most immediate and urgent, in the grand tradition of Charles Ives and Henry Brant.A Chicago native, Ross Feller began in high school to systematically explore the boundaries of his saxophone through improvisation, and experiment with various compositional techniques. He co-founded the avant-garde, jazz-rock ensemble Dot Dot Dot, and then went on to study composition at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. "Feller sees sound itself as a primary material of his music, no matter how rigorously he structures pitch and rhythm. Sound is bent and smeared, layers bleed into one another and then detach. Instruments overlap and create morphing meta-instruments. All this is guided both by a scrupulous ear and by the metaphysical programs animating the flow...Feller proves that the idea of exploring new worlds, of breaking molds isn't dead at all. Modernism for him is a tradition of freedom and experiment, mixed with an intellectual armature of rigor and paradox. For listeners who have grown up with indie rock, free improv, industrial noise, this will be familiar terrain. Likewise those who like their art with a dash of conceptualism and philosophy will find plenty to satisfy their appetite. Dig in." - Robert Carl, composer and music critic

Mysteria Fidei represents the culmination of a six-year collaboration between Chicago-area composer David M. Gordon and Far Song, a husband-and-wife art song duo from South Carolina. Featuring three sacred chamber works, Mysteria Fidei explores the notion of “searching amidst life’s many difficulties—searching for understanding, searching for rescue, searching for hope, searching for fulfillment, searching for joy, searching for God.” Along the way, it deconstructs hymns spanning nearly two millennia and recontextualizes them within our polarized, fear-stricken, and increasingly isolated 21st-century milieu. Mysteria Fidei begins gently, with an elegiac prayer for peace. The short Swedish art song Fader, stilla våra andar draws on a hymn by Gordon’s great-grandfather, Frank Earnest, and pays homage to his cultural and spiritual roots by setting its words in Swedish. Though its plaintive strains gradually build in intensity, they belie deep pain roiling just below the surface. It is not until the opening of the second work—Consolation New—that the pain is laid bare. Scored for a single pianist simultaneously playing two microtonally-tuned pianos, Consolation New is “a meditation on suffering and the nearly universal desire for liberation from it.” Based upon an early 19th-century shape-note hymn of the same name, the piece is at turns aggressive, desolate, and contemplative, weaving a dense and ominous—yet strangely seductive—harmonic web. At the heart of Mysteria Fidei is Mysteria Incarnationis, a large song cycle for soprano, violin, prepared piano, and various auxiliary percussion, string, and wind instruments. Featuring texts by fourth-century poet/theologian Ephrem the Syrian and sung in ancient Syriac, Mysteria Incarnationis ponders the manifold complexities of Christ’s incarnation. Ephrem’s richly paradoxical verses are set to music that is at once ancient, exotic, and otherworldly.

AND I PAINT STARS WITH WINGS is composer Stanley Grill’s most ambitious album to date, presenting several related works for larger ensembles. Expanding on the same themes that influence most of his work, the music on the album represents the composer’s attempt to influence the minds and hearts of those who hear it in such a way as to encourage thoughts about the possibility of world peace, as well as music composed in an attempt to translate something about the nature of the physical world. At the core of the works on the album is the string orchestra, an ensemble that is particularly well suited for composer’s delicate sound landscape based on Renaissance influenced modal, contrapuntal writing, employing extended, interweaving lines of melody. The one work for string orchestra alone, Pavanne (for a world without war), is the first in a series of works for various instruments belonging to the composer’s Music for Peace project, composed, as described by the composer “after having made a decision that my music needed to serve another purpose besides the obvious one of touching the hearts of those who listened to it. However unlikely of success, that purpose is the achievement of world peace.” The work, intended to encourage a spirit of non-violence in those who hear it, imagines music that might be played in a world without war.

When composer Jenny Olivia Johnson moved to Boston in 2009 to teach at Wellesley College, she had no idea that one of her most idolized poets and authors, Sylvia Plath, had grown up in the small town of Wellesley. Learning this fact, while settling into her new position among the crisp blue skies and ornate, sometimes skeletal tree branches that adorn Wellesley’s landscape, planted the slow-growing seed for this eventual collection of songs: songs about the short life of Sylvia Plath, and songs about Jenny’s adjacent life experiences in some of the same places in which Plath once lived and worked: New York, Boston, and Wellesley. It was Sylvia Plath’s now famous summer in New York City- the summer that inspired her novel “The Bell Jar”- that would initially lure Jenny into Plath’s archive. Jenny’s own impactful years in New York City, where she attended college and graduate school, coincided with some of her most profound self-discoveries, several of which felt strangely in concert with the ways in which Plath described Esther Greenwood’s “queer, sultry” New York summer in 1953, and her exhausted return to Boston in the moody steam of August. Jenny’s move to Boston from New York in 2009 provided further inspiration and in 2012 Jenny became inspired to set these feelings of emotional closeness to Plath to music. Sylvia Songs is both an offering and an archive, a memorial and a reverie. It is a meditation on the nostalgia of place, and an exploration of the complexities of mental health and loss.

Classical Music

Third Sound, hailed as a “forward-looking, expert ensemble” (The New Yorker), presents its debut album, Heard in Havana, featuring music by ten living American composers. In November 2015, the American Composers Forum (ACF) sent Third Sound and a delegation of ten composers to Havana, Cuba, to present a program of contemporary American music at the Havana Contemporary Music Festival. The program, presented in Havana’s eighteenth-century Basílicia Menor de San Francisco de Asís, offered a unique snapshot of the vitality and diversity of the contemporary American musical landscape. The concert moreover represented an historic occasion: against the sociopolitical backdrop of normalizing relations between the United States and Cuba, Third Sound presented the first concert entirely comprising contemporary American music, and with all composers in attendance, to take place in Cuba since before the Cuban Revolution. Heard in Havana documents Third Sound’s Cuba residency, presenting the works performed at the Havana Contemporary Music Festival—music by Kati Agócs, Ingrid Arauco, Kai-Young Chan, Cindy Cox, Jeremy Gill, Michael Harrison, Jennifer Higdon, Christopher Wendell Jones, Amadeus Regucera, and Spencer Topel—all written since 2001 and representing a diverse group of composers from across the United States. The album encompasses a broad spectrum of modern musical aesthetics, reflecting the dynamism of American composition in the twenty-first century.

Paul Elwood has many strings to his bow: among them, banjo player, composer, and improviser. From Colorado to Marseille, Iowa City to London and Boston, Emissions Transparents documents his far-flung visions and musical adventures. The title track, Emissions Transparents, features Pablo Gomez on electric guitar with the Callithumpian Consort of the New England Conservatory directed by Stephen Drury. This five-movement composition explores invisible communications- be they radio transmissions, angelic apparitions, or ghostly voices from the unknown, that manifest Elwood’s interest in the paranormal and interstellar space travel. Since he was a teenager, Elwood has been drawn to the New York School of composition from the 1950s and 1960s that highlighted composers John Cage, Christian Wolff, Morton Feldman, and Earle Brown. Elwood has been fortunate to work under the baton of Cage and to perform on a couple of occasions with Wolff. He commissioned Wolff to compose a work for solo banjo, the result being the aptly-named “Banjo Player,” completed in 2015. This is the premiere recording of this virtuosic tour de force. Two tracks on the recording were improvised with percussionist Eddie Prevost of the legendary AMM ensemble, during a long and leisurely summer Sunday afternoon session in London 2016. Ashe County Lament features pianist Rose Chancler and the voice of Freight Hoppers alum, Carrie Fridley, singing the Appalachian folk tune The Girl I Left Behind. The track mixes live piano with manipulations of Fridley’s voice- all reflective of both Elwood’s background in folk music and her fascination with electronic sound design. Another stellar voice on the album is that of Aly Olson with the University of Iowa Percussion Ensemble singing text written specifically for this project by poet Albert Goldbarth, two time National Book Critics Circle Awards winner. Plutonic Winds connects with Emissions Transparents in a science-fiction-like world in which cold winds from Pluto rake the Kansas plains.

Time, silence, light, reflection and transcendence are all explored in Jane Antonia Cornish's new album, Into Silence. A breathless fragility on the precipice of liminal space imbues the album's six over-arching linear meditations; each work an inquiry into the transitory beauty of the unknown, through self-reflection and the conscious reorientation of perspective. These hallmarks of Cornish's aesthetic experience, along with the exquisitely balanced unfolding of her material, all contribute to a highly expressive and brave musical narrative that is unafraid, and, once heard, cannot be unheard. The six works featured here are not only unified conceptually, but also through their instrumentation; each features a subset of an aggregate ensemble of violin, piano, four cellos, and electronics. Throughout, Cornish brilliantly uses a carefully planned unveiling of instrumental sonorities to actuate and propel the over-arching design of the album's broader narrative. Memory of Time explores a distant nocturnal pathos as the solo violin's expressive presence floats, suspended, over the cello ensemble's irrevocable sighs. The titular Into Silence I incorporates piano and electronics into the sonic tableaux of the proceeding work, reorienting the seemingly unappesed yearning of the introductory material with a tender earthbound comfort. Scattered Light, scored for cello alone, expounds an unbridled moment of cadenza-like virtuosity. As the harmonic rhythm increases and intensifies the work concludes in an evaporated calmness. Elegia returns to the sound-world and material of the album's opening work, now examiend through the aperture of elegiac reflexivity. A meditation on solitude, Into Silence II, for piano solo, probes some of the album's most inner-directed moments of isolation. Luminescence is a culmination of the entire album's exploration of liminality. The electronic component returns with an exquisite and arresting subtly of hushed empyrean filigree. A solo cello momentarily transforms the sighing motif of the opening into a hopeful upward reach towards transcendence. The work ends in deliquesce silence, and the album concludes with a return of the opening motif, exemplifying the elegant notion that silence is the path to transformation.

Draw the Strings Tight pulls together a range of new music composed for the acoustic guitar. It features premieres of newly commissioned musical discourses on love, reflections on the nature of memory, the search for truth in the many voices of reality, and meditations on sense and enjoyment. The album title is also an evocative phrase that reflects the challenges facing a composer, performer, instrument, and listener, as they work togethe rto realize something of substance, meaning, beauty, and truth. In addition to the premiere recordings of music by Kevin Ernste, Edie Hill, Jesse Jones, James Piorkowski and Nicolas Scherzinger, this album also features the Drei Tentos of Hans Werner Henze. According to Henze, these ''three sketches'' set to the writings of Friederich Holderlin are, ''...the vision of a poet who has clouds of madness around his head, and who stammers in fragments, with beautiful, seemingly dislocated, phrases.'' As Kenneth Meyer writes, ''The Drei Tentos are included here as an homage to Julian Bream and the memory of how captivated I was the first time I heard his recording of these pieces. It opened my ears to the intimate language of my beloved instrument and placed a seed in my musical conscious.'' Kenneth Meyer, the national first-prize winner at the Music Teacher's National Association Collegiate Artist Competition, is regarded by the Washington Post as, ''A thinking man's guitarist - who focuses on the inner structure of a piece...and plays with impressive gravity and power.'' The Buffalo News has called him, ''Impeccably articulate with superb technique.''