The title of this collection of David Dzubay’s recent solo, chamber, and ensemble music comes from Toni Morrison: “You know, they straightened out the Mississippi River in places, to make room for houses and livable acreage. Occasionally the river floods these places. “Floods” is the word they use, but in fact it is not flooding; it is remembering… All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was. Writers are like that: remembering where we were… It is emotional memory—what the nerves and the skin remember as well as how it appeared. And a rush of imagination is our “flooding.” The first part of this double album presents recordings by professionals Dzubay has worked with over the years, including the Orian String Quartet and the Voices of Change. The second part features the student ensemble Dzubay leads at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music, the IU New Music Ensemble. Though the personnel for this ensemble shifts semester to semester, the performance level is consistently high thanks to the exceptional student performers at IU. Faculty members Simin Ganatra and trumpeter John Rommel join the ensemble for the Chamber Concerto.

Trailblazing a path for the carillon in the 21st Century, Tiffany Ng commands towers of bells that ring across great distances. On Dark Matters, Ng masterfully helms the carillon works of composer Stephen Rush. These works and Ng’s playing possess a kind of magical cacophony that is in equal parts powerful, intimate, and entrancing. Since Stephen Rush’s debut carillon work Three Etudes reshaped the soundscape of carillon composition in 1987, he has steadily fashioned new campanological sounds in partnership with trailblazing carillonists like Margo Halsted and Neil Thornock. When Halsted premiered Six Treatments for Carillon in 2002, they launched a tradition of carillon with live electronics at the University of Michigan that flourishes to this day. In 2013, Dark Matters invited Rush to attend to time, space, and chance on a vast scale. Through the visceral experience of music, movement, and space, this piece leads into the unknown, questioning the origin of life, coincidence and inevitability, macro and micro, the stars and the elements, the instant and the eternal. As an oeuvre, Rush’s carillon music is singular in style, compelling in its driving rhythmic effects, and pushes the technical boundaries of the instrument while remaining idiomatically true to it. Ng recorded this album in collaboration with Rush, Jason Corey, Roger Arnett, Jessica Glynn, and Matias Vilaplana. A “virtuoso” (HKSNA) in command of a range of expression from “eerie sonance” (Diapason) to “jumpy athleticism” (Chicago Classical Review), Tiffany K. Ng, Ph.D., is assistant professor of music and university carillonist at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Dorothy Hindman’s musical journey took a circuitous route. From studying rock and electronic music to finding a home writing music for ensembles, Hindman built her unique musical language from seemingly disparate parts. Her music often finds itself in between aesthetics, borrowing from both punk/grunge music and a kind of angular pattern-based music. Blow by Blow showcases new works for winds and percussion by one of today’s most energetic composers. A double-album, one-two punch traversing three decades of musical territory, it pulses and soars, hammers and roars – popping and crackling with harnessed energy. Insistent rhythms whip riffs into intricate, towering formations in Mechanisms for flute ensemble, Cascade for saxophone ensemble, and Fission for concert band. Shimmering colors waft equally through the wind-up clockwork of Hindman’s Drift (for sax quartet) and Multiverses (for percussion quartet), and the nebulous soundscapes and solos of Trembling for flute, Soliloquy for Clarinet, Beyond the Cloud of Unknowing for marimba, and Untitled I. An air of bouncy humor suffuses the short, sweet Big Fun for baritone saxophone, CONTENTS UNDER PRESSURE for reed quintet, and Lost in Translation for soprano saxophone, while Stuart Gerber’s breathtaking, thundering Tapping the Furnace for vocalizing percussionist leaves behind a deafening wake. In over 75 works fusing a punk/grunge background with classical refinement, Dorothy Hindman has pushed the boundaries of the technically possible with unique, visceral elegance. At Birmingham-Southern College, Hindman’s music theory courses paired college students with underprivileged 5th graders to write, compose, and perform original youth operas. Hindman’s Justly Tuned concert series under the auspices of the Foundation for Emerging Technologies and the Arts (FETA), presents new music that engages with social and political issues, exploring music as communication, commentary, and catalyst for change, and promoting unheard stories, underserved voices, and fresh ideas.

Orison is a sound prayer and meditation in seven parts. Composer Chris Campbell originally conceived Orison as a spatial piece within a sacred space. He envisioned presenting it in a church or a Zen center with performers, visual media, and planes of sound inhabiting different zones or rooms throughout the space. This album is the linear, concert version of that original conception, recorded with a large ensemble. The music is phantasmagoric, moving and shifting fluidly from one part to the next. Its timbres and lines dovetail and transform, moving through time into new forms, but always retaining some essence of their previous identity as they blossom into the next textural idea or sonic image. For Campbell, creating this music has been a way to process the world around him, things rising up and falling away. Its been a way to bear witness to cycles and events, both macro and intimate. Chris Campbell is a collaborator, composer, producer, and the Director of Recordings at innova recordings ACF. Praised as heady, possessing elements of post-Minimalism, avant-garde rock, jazz and global fusion styles that mingle and merge with dreamlike mutability...(The New York Times) and a surreal (or super-real?) vortex...(Gramophone), Campbells music is focused on ritual and sonic texture, and how sound can transform space. In addition to his own music, Campbell has either produced or worked directly on the promotion and distribution of over 300 projects and albums (2 of them Grammy winners).

At first, two settings of the same words may seem odd album mates. But, owing to the riches to be mined in Hart Crane’s Voyages, two settings of this masterpiece of early-20th-century poetry complement each other in myriad ways. These are two major works from two of the most creative artists writing for voice today. As conductor Donald Nally remarks in his program note, “We’ve found thousands of ways to sing ‘Lord have mercy.’ What are two ways of finding the music in, ‘the bottom of the sea is cruel?” Indeed, that line is set so distinctly, so chillingly, by each composer that their individual world-views, expressed in counterpoint, linger long after the music has ended. Robert Convery’s Voyages follows Crane’s words verbatim, capturing the structure, exploring each poem as a miniature life lived, and focused on the inherently musical meters of Crane’s dazzling vocabulary. Convery’s world is one in which subtle harmonic shifts open up forgotten emotional universes, and abrupt tempo changes instantaneously transform a serene moment to one of complex feelings and desperation. His focus on color would lead one to believe the work was written for The Crossing. For his Voyages, Cantata No. 2, Benjamin Boyle has created a cantata-like structure excerpting some of Crane’s most intimate and wrenching moments. With the addition of a string chamber orchestra, it feels as if Boyle has considered Crane’s words distilled and he has blown a kind new life into them.

Matthew Barnson’s music does more than scrape the surface; it digs deep to reveal the skull beneath the skin. His new innova album brings together a range of his signature works that somehow manage to shimmer with harmony and concord even in their noisiest moments. The impetus for The Rule and Exercises of Holy Dying (Memento Mori after Gerhard Richter) arose after he was asked to compose a work to accompany Richard Strauss’ Metamorphosen for 23 solo strings shortly after his grandfather’s passing. It is marked by a gradual introduction of different techniques, often resolving to an uneasy calm. Pulsing rhythms push this high drama work toward extremes of fragility and brutality. By contrast, in Vanitas (Dance Forms), Barnson made his own rules for a new suite of dances inspired by the opulence, elegance, and audacity of the French courtly dances that were all the rage at Versailles and soon all of Europe for a century. With a nod to the viola da gamba and continuo repertoire translated to cello and marimba, Barnson created a new work refracted through myriad influences: the street art in Bushwick where he lived, the virtuosity of the not-so-recent avant gardes, and his recent foray into opera. He composed a work with surprising new tunefulness that emerges from his usual attention to dense textures. It is a work that questions, reinvents, is inspired by, and reacts to those ancient forms. The album also includes a short work, I Crossed the Samuel Beckett Bridge at Dusk. It was composed for two performers, a harpist and a single flute player playing piccolo, alto flute, and bass flute.

“by moonlight isn’t just a collection of works - it also provides a certain overview of my compositional life,” says Jeremy Beck. Bringing together music of his present and past, this selection of orchestral, chamber, and vocal music opens a window into Beck’s sound world. From the celebratory Concertino for two cellos and strings to the pensive Serenade for orchestra, Beck’s musical language is direct and distinctly American. His music embraces a continuum of tonal compositional thought that organically embodies previous developments while moving forward in his own individual style. Beck’s music has been called “... forceful and expressive. ... concise in structure and generous in tonal language, savoring both the dramatic and the poetic” (Gramophone, 2013), while the critic Joshua Kosman has noted that “...novelty isn’t the only thing music can provide, and the moody expressiveness of Beck’s writing is its own reward.” (SF Gate, 2013). Through his music – by turns confident and vulnerable, outgoing and intimate – composer Jeremy Beck reaches out to the world, sharing his artistic vision of the beauty, struggle, and thoughtful wonder that reflects part of our human experience.

If “home” is Minnesota, and “abroad” is transcontinental, reaching across historical eras, then At Home and Abroad is aptly named. A captivating and varied (not to say ravishing and sprightly) collection of music for violin/viola and guitar, the album features works dedicated to the Shank-Hagedorn Duo by Alf Houkom, Javier Contreras, and David Lang; first time recordings of works by Ian Krouse and David Hahn; and the Duo’s own arrangements of music by Maria Kalaniemi. For this release, violinist and violist Leslie Shank and guitarist Joseph Hagedorn have selected some favorite works from their past fifteen years of performances. The music is as wide-ranging as the Duo’s interests, with influences from South American and Finnish folk music to John Dowland and “Pop Goes the Weasel.” Among the works are a belated wedding gift from David Lang to the married duo partners; a serenade by Alf Houkom that simply celebrates the joy of making music together; a luminous- almost ambient- arrangement of Dowland’s ‘Frog Galliard’ by Ian Krouse that Brian Eno would find hard to beat; and David Hahn’s W is for Weasel.

It is said that the best way to discover a city is to get lost in it. After composing music for film, tv, theatre and animation for over 20 years, Montreal composer Mathieu Vanasse felt it was time to lose himself in a personal project of his own works and explore his own inner map, an archipelago of the mind. His approach on this gentle and evocative album, Archipel, is one where he blends electronic elements with piano and strings into pathless, hypnotic soundscapes - like travelling without a map. If his work as film composer was underscoring images, the original works on this opus are cinematic in their own right. Naming Erik Satie and Talk Talk’s last two albums, Spirit of Eden and Laughing Stock as influences, Vanasse goes on to say, “I feel that this album, although a departure for me, is still influenced by what is done in composing for image, that blending of the organic and electronic elements.”In order to let his subconscious flow as freely as possible, he began each piece on his main instrument, the piano. “I always composed the melody on the piano first and then built up around it afterwards, “ says Vanasse. His use of the piano on the album found him quite literally with one hand in the acoustic world and the other in the computer one. “I thought I would compose mainly on my grand piano, but I ended mixing things up. I sometimes used the MIDI piano for the left hand and the acoustic one for the right hand. The MIDI piano allowed me to distort sounds with the hammers and slightly detune things if I wished,” he says. The deceptively simple melodies are immersed in a carefully textured palette of live strings, bass clarinet and other instruments that are used in their natural state as well as going through a myriad of computer processing to achieve the sonic richness of the album. Mathieu elaborates on his process by saying, “ I sometimes used sounds from inside the piano, or found short samples that I would pitch shift or slow down. I used the same approach when needed on strings as well as brass samples

From a fiery, unexpectedly uplifting elegy, to a somber and despairing childhood flashback; From the bleakness of the Mexican desert, to the lilt of kelp strands along the San Juan Island shoreline; From homages to R. Schumann and L.V. Beethoven, to affirmations of the fragile power of healing herbs; From lyrical angularity, to frenzied comedy. This is ARCANA; a complete collection of solo piano works – spanning two decades – by Alex Shapiro. Prompted by the publication of a 2015 doctoral dissertation on her work, The Keyboard Works of Alex Shapiro, she realized she “wanted to create a unified collection of definitive performances of these very personal offerings.” The choice of Adam Marks to play them was a natural fit, as he relates: “To record someone’s complete catalog for piano is to live with their history—their ups and downs—and to listen to the world through their ears... ...at the root of all of Alex’s works is her stunning relationship to the elements. She’s surrounded by water at home, and connected to the earth yet constantly soaring above the clouds in her travels.”

Subtle, rich, atmospheric, meditative - almost transcendental - music of uncommon beauty.

This is the debut monograph of Icelandic composer Anna Þorvaldsdóttir (anglicised in most non-Icelandic contexts as Thorvaldsdottir, or Thorvalds for short). She is half a generation younger than Björk Guðmundsdóttir - plain 'Björk' in pop parlance - and writes music a thousand times more interesting whilst being subject of approximately one millionth of the hype - no sign of the Brodsky Quartet on this CD.

Hrím, Dreaming and Streaming Arhythmia are the key works. The five movements of Hidden, for piano played as a percussion instrument, are - interestingly or annoyingly, according to taste - split up and wrapped around these three, the reason for which is not explained in the notes.

Dreaming is the first of two minor masterpieces, a sprawling and deeply atmospheric canvas washed over by elemental waves of sound swishing enigmatically over prolonged or static bass chords. The stark open spaces and brooding skies evoked are Icelandic, no doubt, but may be familiar to townspeople too from their most unsettling, disorienting of dreams. Streaming Arhythmia is the second, scaling down the forces to create a more intimate space, but the sounds, ideas and moods are broadly similar to those of Dreaming, its greater debt to modernism albeit of more constrained appeal.

According to the notes, Hrím refers to "the gradual growth of ice crystals, a notion paralleled in this piece not only by the frosty shimmer of individual sounds, but also in the ways these sounds cling together: as clusters of activity outlining moments of greater structural importance and as threads of memory echoing throughout the work's duration." That does not really give any unequivocal indication as to what the music sounds like, but for all three orchestral works it might be argued that a fondness for Penderecki or Schnittke - with elements from the different styles these composers went through - would put the would-be listener at a significant advantage, at least to begin with.

And yet, by the third listen-through, at least with headphones, what seemed like tundra bleakness or black smoke begins to turn warmer and lighter. This is subtle, rich, atmospheric, meditative - almost transcendental - music of uncommon beauty, predominantly piano and slow-moving, that does not yield its abundant, elaborate secrets to a first audition - and never will to a drive-by ear.

Hidden, despite its different forces, is another overwhelmingly quiet, mysterious piece. This is not a 'prepared' piano, by the way: the soloist-cum-contortionist mainly plays - strums, plucks, rubs - the always undampened strings directly, with occasional resort to the soundboard and frame for extra effects. It is more rewarding to listen to all the movements of this unusual work in succession, which is simply a matter of programming the CD player/software.

The case is of the digipak type, with an alt-trendy kind of recycled look about it. The back of the booklet is glued onto the card and continues the recycled theme. There are various faux-naive arty scrawlings and jottings all over the place, which may appeal to some - all in all, the CD case looks like something fans of Björk might go for, and the suspicion of a marketing ploy is enhanced by a complete lack of indication as to what kind of music this is, what the forces are, who the performers are, until the peruser has opened the case and thumbed right through the booklet. The notes are interesting, in any case, and surprisingly modest.

With intense, persuasive performances all round, this is a disc offering unusual but ultimately substantial reward for the more adventurous listener.

-- Byzantion, MusicWeb International

American Canvas is a tour de force of flute cello and piano trio repertoire featuring the premiere recordings of four powerful works by some of today’s most celebrated American composers. Pulitzer Prize winners Jennifer Higdon and Shulamit Ran, Andrea Clearfield, and Zhou Tian embrace a variety of sources from visual art, literature, and nature, telling musical stories in a pyrotechnic display of color and brushwork, an eerie nocturne on a lake, a vivid intoxication by the moon, a thrill ride in medieval Spain. The acclaimed Dolce Suono Trio conveys the diverse sonic landscapes, nuanced timbres, and emotional experiences with inimitable virtuosity and passion. Dolce Suono Trio, “one of the most dynamic groups in the US” (The Huffington Post), includes flutist Mimi Stillman, cellist Nathan Vickery, and pianost Charles Ambramovic. Soprano Lucy Shelton and cellists Gabriel Cabezas and Alexis Pia Gerlach complete the album. The trio has enthralled audiences with its programs spanning Haydn trios to its own commissions at prestigious venues including the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, Smithsonian American Art Museum, New York’s Symphony Space, Brooklyn’s Roulette, and Cornell University.

The latest album from cellist Laura Sewell, Threescore, is a dedication to family and place featuring chamber music from Minnesota composers commissioned by the Sewell family that span a vast range of musical expression. The culmination of decades of work and relationships, Threescore, highlights the cello in works that dive deep into the human experience. The first piece, Six British Folksongs, inspired by her time spent in London studying with – the legendary British cellist, Jacqueline duPré, and written by composer Paul Schoenfield, takes common old tunes and uses them as a foil to explore coming to terms with the diagnosis of a serious illness. Banchetto Musicale is just that, a neo-baroque musical feast set by composer Stephen Paulus, while From the Land of Song by David Evan Thomas takes the listener on a journey that both commemorates a family tragedy and goes back in time. Finally, Benediction, a work perfectly suited for poignant and touching moments, closes the album in peaceful acceptance. Minnesota native, Laura Sewell, was the founder and cellist of the award-winning Lark Quartet. During her tenure in the Lark, the quartet was a top prize winner in the Banff International String Quartet Competition and performed nearly 100 concerts a year in Europe, Asia, Canada, and throughout the United States. Later in her career, she was the cellist of the Artaria String Quartet from 2007-2016. As both a soloist and chamber musician, Ms. Sewell has premiered works by such distinguished composers as Libby Larsen, Stephen Paulus, Paul Schoenfield, Peter Schickele, Steve Heitzeg, Jon Deak, Andrew Waggoner, and Stanislaw Skrowacewski.