This debut solo release from Xenia Pestova follows on the heels of her piano duo recordings of seminal works by Stockhausen and Cage for Naxos Records, and brings together six carefully crafted new works for keyboard instruments and electronics in an intricate and seductive blend of unusual sonorities and shimmering hues. Far from being 'effects' or tools for processing instrumental sound, the electronic identities blend and interact with the acoustic sounds in the same way that complex technologies extend our minds in daily life, becoming transparent and inseparable from ourselves. This project is also a collaboration with photographer and visual artist Veronika von Volkova, whose sensual, dark and dreamlike images are featured on the CD and it's companion book of photography, available directly from the artist.

“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.

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.

With a tally of more than ninety commissioned works for band, Matthew George and the Minnesota-based University of St. Thomas Symphonic Wind Ensemble are blazing the trail in spurring new works for the medium. The Other Side is the seventh installment on their ongoing UST Symphonic Wind Ensemble Commissioning Series. This golden volume has something for everyone: symphonic Romanticism, allusions to Surrealism and Abstract Art, and virtuosic solos performance, not to mention the unlikely pairing of a rock group with wind band. The music of Spanish composer Luis Serrano Alarcon bookends the album, starting with his B-Side Concerto. A rock/jazz fusion band and the symphonic wind ensemble tackle and support each other over the course of three sections in a concerto that Vivaldi could never have imagined. Nigel Clarke's Mysteries of the Horizon was inspired by the artwork of Rene Magritte, and the four movements are named after some of his most popular paintings. The performance features the virtuosic cornet soloist, also from Belgium, Harmen Vanhoorne, whom the composer had in mind while writing this dazzling work. Another British composer and another work inspired by art follow; this time Kit Turnbull and Wassily Kandinsky respectively. The title, Everything starts from a dot, is a direct quote from Kandinsky when answering a question about how he goes about starting a painting. Staying with Russia for the final work on the album, Serrano Alarcon's Second Symphony for Wind Orchestra pays tribute to the era of Russian Romantic symphonic composers. The emotional content of the music matches the powerful forces of the symphonic wind ensemble.

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.

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.

Given the high energy and dazzling colors of Huang Ruo's musical interests, it is no surprise that his music traverses typical confines and explores new territories. Into the Vast World - the first collection of his symphonic works - does just that. Both fragmented and tuneful, wacky and solemn, Huang Ruo's vision brings a broad perspective to what an orchestra might do. The album bursts to life with an improvised vocal solo in a made-up language performed by Huang Ruo in the Chinese folk-rock style. This opens Shattered Steps, an energetic tour-de-force of frozen moments and ongoing motion. Like a puzzle with no beginning nor end, it carries the listener along helter skelter, one step at a time in the exhilarating rush of the now. Becoming Another likewise focuses on evolution and transformation, stillness and motion, yin and yang. Still / Motion takes these ideas even farther. Written in response to the 50-year-old Chinese classic "Butterfly Lover" Violin Concerto, Huang Ruo's work is a dialog with Chinese traditional musical forms, specifically Chinese Opera and Chinese Court Music. Folks Songs for Orchestra engage with his native country in yet a different way; not as arrangements of actual melodies but new compositions inspired by a variety of songs and dances familiar from his travels. Huang Ruo's music is inherently dramatic and the album features two excerpts from his opera, An American Soldier, with libretto by David Henry Hwang. It tells the story of Private Danny Chen, an American U.S. Army soldier who served in Afghanistan in 2011, whose death resulted in a military investigation and charges against eight US soldiers, ultimately with four being court martialed. The investigation found that Chen had been racially harassed and beaten by his fellow soldiers before his death on October 3, 2011.

Classical Music

Lansing McLoskey’s Zealot Canticles is based on Wole Soyinka’s Twelve Canticles for the Zealot (2002)- a strangely beautiful and terrifying look into the minds of fanatics. Seven of these poems form the bulk of the libretto, interwoven with excerpts from Soyinka’s plays, interviews, lectures and speeches; they reflect his upbringing in an environment of tolerance and condemn the current climate of intolerance, bigotry, and violence. The result is a concert-length choral ‘oratorio’ for clarinet, string quartet, and 24-voice choir, commissioned and performed by The Crossing, conducted by Donald Nally and winner of the 2018 Grammy Award for Best Choral Performance. Soyinka’s texts and McLoskey’s responses are universal pleas for peace and tolerance, yet they force us to look into the mirror and recognize the thin line between devotion and intolerance, zealotry and radicalism- themes that dominate our public discourse every day. Wole Soyinka is a Nigerian poet, playwright, novelist, and recipient of the 1986 Nobel Prize for Literature, the first African American recipient of the award. Throughout the set of canticles, Soyinka makes universal pleas for peace from multiple languages and religious cultures. Seven of these poems form the core of the libretto of Zealot Canticles. Interwoven with these poems are excerpts from Soyinka’s book The Man Died, his play Madmen and Specialists, and interviews, lectures, and speeches reflecting on his upbringing in an environment of tolerance, and condemning the current climate of intolerance, bigotry and violence.

These Wicked Things is the fourth release from the determinedly eclectic Boston-based band Beat Circus and the final installment in singer/multi-instrumentalist/composer Brian Carpenter’s “Weird American Gothic” trilogy. The record bridges a number of disparate genres including experimental music, cowpunk, post-punk, Mexican folk music, mariachi music, and “spaghetti western” and giallo film scores. These Wicked Things began after Carpenter was commissioned by the Berkeley Repertory Theater in Berkeley, California to compose music and lyrics for Dominic Orlando’s play The Barbary Coast in 2014. Based on the true crime book by Herbert Asbury, The Barbary Coast detailed the violent rise of San Francisco in the late 1800s. The play centers around Joaquin Murieta, a Mexican who went on a revenge spree after his wife was killed by miners. Two versions of “Rosita” and some incidental music from the play are included. After recording These Wicked Things with Beat Circus at the legendary Q Division Studios in Boston, Carpenter flew out to Tucson, Arizona to mix the record with esteemed producer Craig Schumacher. Carpenter worked with Schumacher previously on his singer/songwriter outing The Far End of the World. Special guests on These Wicked Things include trumpeter Jacob Valenzuela of Calexico, bass saxophonist Dana Colley of Morphine, and guitarist Stephen Ulrich of the NYC guitar noir trio Big Lazy.

Under the direction of founder and artistic director Robert Geary, the twenty professional singers that make up Volti lead the nation in the discovery, creation and performance of new vocal music. They are the only six-time winners of the Chorus America/ASCAP Award for Adventurous Pro-�gramming of Contemporary Music. On their new album, House of Voices, they introduce six 21st-century works from American composers of dazzling range and diversity, including five Volti commissions.

Contemporary art song is alive and well in the hands of soprano Polly Butler Cornelius and the team she has gathered for Wild Songs, a song recital as suitable for an environmental conscious-�ness-raising event as for the salon. Drawing on impassioned pleas and the enigmatic nature-centered poetry of Emily Dickinson these powerful, lyrical songs charm and chasten.

Classical Music

HOVDA Onyx. Song in High Grasses. Snapdragon. Leaning Into and Away. Ariadne Music. Coastal Traces Tidepools 1. Shenai Sky. Record of an Ocean Cliff. Crossings in a Mountain Dream. Glacier Track. Glosses Glacier. Beginnings. Coastal Traces Tidepools 2. Borealis Music. Boundaries. Cymbalmusic: Centerflow/Trail II. Journey Music. Lemniscates. Regions. Jo Ha Kyu. Ikima. Breathing The Proclamation: excepts. Dancing in Place. Spring Music with Wind. 40 Million Gallons of Music • Prism Players; Libby Van Cleve (ob, English horn, shenai); Jack Vees (el gtr, b gtr); Eleanor Hovda (pn, cymbals, shakuhachi); Relache; Cassatt Qrt; California EAR Unit; Jan Weller, David Gilbert (fl); Elizabeth Panzer (hp); Lee Humphries (pn); et al. • INNOVA 808 (4 CDs: 4:20:03)


I’ve written about Eleanor Hovda (1940–2009) in these pages before; indeed, in the program notes for this release I’m quoted at length. For that I’m honored, because I feel she is a major composer in need of a certain rescue now. She died of cancer far too young; she forsook positions in the Ivy League and New York artistic life for grassroots arts administering in her native and beloved Minnesota; she wrote music that, despite genuine complexity, often looked simple or naïve in score. In short, by life and aesthetic choices she herself made, and by the cards dealt her over which she had no control, she was marginalized in the broader culture of American music. But we still need her.


Parts of this comprehensive collection were originally released by O.O. Discs and I reviewed some of it in Fanfare 22:4; I’d urge interested readers to check this review out in the online archive, as it goes into much more technical detail about the music than I will here. The second disc, Coastal Traces , is more of an extended collective improvisation for dance featuring Libby Van Cleve, double reeds; Jack Vees, guitars; and Hovda on piano interior. But the other three discs consist of more clearly defined pieces, even though they still have the composer’s trademark openness.


I now think of Hovda to some degree as the American Scelsi. By that I mean there’s an emphasis on pure sound as an expressive medium, shaped at the macro and micro level to bring out what Wallace Stevens called “the beauty of inflections.” There’s also a mystical/spiritual bent, but it’s never overbearing. Unlike Scelsi’s, Hovda’s music is often fragile, gentle, and delicate. As a result, when it really rips loose, it carries a shocking impact. I now feel that she’s an example of what I call “sonic charisma,” a capacity to take basic sonic materials that should be simplistic, facile, messy, and then imbue them with such authenticity that you can’t resist them. (Christian Wolff is another such composer in my book.)


The performances are consistently imaginative and committed, and make the case for the music persuasively. Some of the recordings are more “archival” than others, but I’d never for a second preclude their inclusion because of some hiss or ambient noise. The works range from the exceptional oboe work Jo Ha Kyu (thrillingly performed by Libby Van Cleve) to the Cassatt Quartet’s glasslike rendition of Lemniscates to what sounds like a vast Tibetan tantric ritual in 40 Million Gallons of Music (in fact the real story is just as wild, as the piece is a sonic exploration of a giant underground water storage tank in Fayetteville, Arkansas, recorded just after 9/11). Hopefully that gives some idea of the range. As a grand bonus, the scores for works on three of the four discs are viewable on your computer as pdfs (as are extended program notes for the entire set). One senses both how free and how precise the composer was; her craft is evident in these striking scores in her own hand. Though there is one score, Cymbalmusic, whose graphic approach is incredibly beautiful and imaginatively focused, in all the scores one sees a magical touch at work, mixing scribbling doodles with more traditional notation.


A final word of thanks and recognition to Philip Blackburn and the entire Innova organization, as this is yet another of the incredibly important rescue operations they’re performing for composers who might otherwise slip through the cracks (I think of their great Henry Brant series, for example). Every music library in America, for example, should have this collection. Bravo; it gives us all a little faith in lean times. And this is unquestionably on the next Want List.


FANFARE: Robert Carl

Get ready for revelation! Mirror Butterfly: The Migrant Liberation Movement Suite is an epic jazz opera spanning four continents and five centuries. The opera is a tribute to the resistance of migrants to the destruction of ecologies, economies, and cultures unleashed by slavery, conquest, and colonization- in short, a history of capitalism from the point of view of women warriors from Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America. A trinity of revolutionary women converge to tell stories of migration, singing a Sermon on the Mount to bring down Babylon. The plot of Mirror Butterfly is inspired by The Story of the Sword, a Mayan parable shared with us by the Zapatista autonomous schools. The story symbolizes the centuries-long Mayan resistance to the conquest and Indigenous genocide through avatars of a tree, a stone, and water. In their story, a sword (representing the conquest) cuts down a tree (Mayan society). The tree transforms into a rock, which is underground and still; but the sword hacks at it and shatters it, though not without damage. Finally, the stone transforms into water, which the sword is unable to resist. The sword rusts and withers away in this eternal elemental. The water symbolizes the flourishing grassroots-organizing of indigenous communities and their allies in contemporary Mexico. The lesson of the tale is that we shall live to see an indigenous-centric Mexico and, indeed, an entire world.

Classical Music

When pipa player and composer Gao Hong has a potluck, the guests include a couple of Grammy winners, one of the nation’s foremost Arabic music authorities, and a healthy helping of string instruments.Featuring two original compositions by Gao and collaborations on both new and traditional songs, Pipa Potluck – half studio/half live concert – stirs up a warm and nourishing multicultural meal on pipa, banjo, fiddle, slack key guitar, oud and regular guitar.Ms. Hong is currently on the Carleton College music faculty and is Guest Professor at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing.

Electrocosmia is a daring exploration of electroacoustic music for solo piano that finds pianist Peng-Chian Chen diving head first into musical worlds that are at times explosive and at others mercurial and enigmatic. Much of this album finds Chen striking a balance between acoustic and electronic sound. Whether that be using an electronic keyboard and an acoustic piano simultaneously, interweaving fixed media and live performance, or using signal processing to experiment with sound being created in the moment. Featuring works by Cindy Cox, Pierre Chavet, Elanie Lillios, and Peter Van Zandt Lane, Electrocosmia brings new energy to keyboard music being written and performed today. Each piece contributes to a growing landscape of electroacoustic concert works that defy listeners expectations and expand what concert music can mean.

Volti’s professional singers, under the direction of founder and Artistic Director Robert Geary, are national leaders in the discovery, creation, and performance of new vocal music. They are the first ensemble to have won the ASCAP/Chorus America Award for Adventurous Programming of Contemporary Music six times. In this recording they introduce 21st-century works they commissioned from American composers of dazzling range and diversity. Volti’s resident composer Mark Winges contributes “Canticles of Rumi,” settings of five poems by the 13th-century poet and founder of Sufism. Seattle-based composer John Muehleisen contributes “…is knowing…”- a musical analogy to Gertrude Stein’s linguistic Cubism. Album closer “Paradise” by Shawn Crouch was originally commissioned by Chanticleer in 2009 and then substantially revised for Volti in 2013. The work is based on the poems of American poet Brian Turner, an Iraq War veteran, whose moving accounts of war are set alongside the poetry of the 12th century Persian poet Hafez. “…undoubtedly the finest collection of new music singers we have.” – San Francisco Classical Voice.

A new recording of world premieres addressing a topic of our national discourse: diaspora. If There Were Water, from Philadelphia’s 2017 Grammy-nominated choir, The Crossing, is a testament to the expressive range of the human voice. These two strikingly diverse, yet equally compelling unaccompanied compositions were commissioned for The Crossing’s Month of Moderns festival and premiered in June 2017. Drawing from literary and historic sources, the works are highly personal reflections that speak with clarity to contemporary concerns of displacement, while weaving together past and present. In Crossings Cycle, Greek composer Stratis Minakakis creates a visceral musical response to the experience of observing Syrian refugees on the Isle of Lesbos. ‘un/bodying/s’ by composer Gregory W. Brown explores the history of the displaced populations of Quabbin, the Swift River Valley in Western Massachusetts, including the Native Americans moved by incoming Europeans, and then those Europeans relocated by the State when creating the massive reservoir that supplies Boston with water. Gregory and librettist Todd Hearon tell these stories from a variety of perspectives. The Crossing is a professional chamber choir conducted by Donald Nally and dedicated to new music. Consistently recognized in critical reviews, the ensemble regularly collaborates with some of the nation’s most accomplished ensembles and imaginative composers. It is committed to working with creative teams to make and record new, substantial works for choir, most often addressing social issues. The group is the American Composers’ Forums’ 2017 Champion of New Music.

David Kechley’s latest album of orchestra music is a lot easier to listen to than pronounce. It draws from far flung parts of the world, and historical origins, and brings them into a grand compelling vision. The album features two large scale orchestra works recorded with dazzling clarity by the Sudeten Filharmonie in a small Polish town, Walbrzych (most recently in the news for supposedly being the subterranean hiding place of the infamous Nazi gold train.) The first work, ‘Karasuma: A Fast Funk for Orchestra,’ started life as a classroom exercise at the Donisha Women’s College in Kyoto, Japan, here Kechley demonstrated how acoustic musical fragments could be combined in various ways by computer. The work was so successful it was expanded and premiered by the Boston Pops in 1993. The other major work on the album is a symphony exploring various aspects of dreams, ‘Wakeful Visions/ Moonless Dreams.’ Each of the four movements is associated with literary references; from the Old Testament, a haiku by Buson, the Witches’ scene from Shakespeare’s Macbeth, and musings on remembrance by Marcel Proust. David Kechley recently retired from teaching at Williams College, Massachussetts. Taken as a whole this is a record of an expansive imagination and an intercontinental achievement.

Classical Music

The title of this release, Triangle of Resistance, is taken from the three-part suite by Miya Masaoka which opens this album. During World War II, under Executive Order 9066, Masaoka’s family was imprisoned in a Japanese internment camp, which was the inspiration for the piece. The final work, Four Moons of Pluto, explores musical intervals like orbits of planets. The detuned bass used for this piece delves into sonic depths that mirror the music of the spheres. Miya Masaoka is based in New York City. She has written works for traditional instrumentations as well as pieces for solo koto, laser interfaces, laptop and video, and sculpture installations. She frequently works with the sonification of data, and has mapped the behavior of plants, insect movement, and brain activity to sound.

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.

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.