Featuring two works for orchestra. The text of Cantata for the Children of Terezin, uses poems written by children incarcerated at the Terezin concentration camp during the WW II. By shining a light on the thoughts of children in the camps, the composer hopes to bring about global awareness of these atrocities committed in the hope that these acts will never happen again. Likewise, Aceldama highlights horrors of the 21st century, serving as a meditation on human suffering occurring on such a large scale where it's enormity is incomprehensible.

I Dream Awake consists of chamber music composed by new PARMA composer Bill Whitley. Whitley’s music is characterized by meditative and trance-like qualities inspired by various forms of meditation practice, and, above all, the artistic installations of Alexander Calder. Indeed, Whitley’s music seems to be primarily concerned with depicting and embodying experiences, whether they be sensory, natural, spiritual, or human experiences. Lily of Force (for vibraphone, contrabass, piano, and soprano saxophone) takes its name from a Calder mobile of the same name. Whitley credits the piece with solidifying a compositional approach influenced by Calder’s work: using the idea of objects suspended in time and space as the basis of a meditative musical language in both content and syntax. Sharing this approach is Los Cielos, written for piano and soprano saxophone. Little White Salmon, a multi-movement cycle for piano and narrator, uses the life cycle of a pacific salmon as an allegory for the human experience. The music, along with the text by Whitley and Donna Henderson, depicts sensory experiences of the salmon—“humming summers’ roar and thrum of falls”—as they are passed on to the next generation. The most recently-composed pieces on the album concern spiritual experiences from around the world. Awake (for soprano saxophone, piano, and flute) was commissioned by trIaD in 2015, and expresses an Indian mandala experience. The Creation of the World, a two-movement piece for two guitars, was written in 2016 for South Hill Guitars. The first movement, “Ocean and Her Cloud Daughters,” depicts a South-Asian creation story and uses Indian modes and rhythmic cycles. The second movement, “Coyote Draws Yakail-Wimakl,” is based on a Chinook creation story in which Coyote, the creator, dances to cure his loneliness and in the process, creates the world. It is structured as a dance, beginning in sadness and culminating in a rapturous fugue in an 11/8 meter. Composer and pianist Bill Whitley’s music heavily engages in themes of mysticism and nature, incorporating musical elements as diverse as Gregorian chant, raga music, and progressive rock. He names Brian Eno, John Cage, Laurie Anderson, Meredith Monk, John Luther Adams, and others as major musical influences. Bill Whitley has written music for a variety of instrument groups, ranging from chorus to orchestra to solo electric guitar. His music has been performed in Europe and in the United States. Whitley’s music is recorded on Teal Creek Music, and his choral works are published by Trinitas Choral Series. A native of the Northwestern United States, Whitley studied organ, piano, and composition at Gonzaga University. He later earned a Master of Music degree and a Ph.D. in composition at the University of Idaho and the University of Oregon, respectively. Whitley has taught at these universities, as well as at Western Oregon University and the University of Portland. Whitley has studied music with Robert Kyr, David Crumb, Robert Dickow, Dan Bukvich, and Fr. Kevin Waters. Composers with whom he has taken master classes include Lou Harrison, George Crumb, Velio Tormis, John Adams, and John Corigliano.

Innovative New Music trumpeter Stephen Ruppenthal commands attention right out of the game. Or perhaps, more specifically, he commands it right out the "NGate" - the subtitle of the opening track on Flamethrower, his Ravello Records debut.The album contains world premieres of five pieces for trumpet, flugelhorn, voice, and crotale, composed specifically for Ruppenthal by Allen Strange, Bruno Liberda, Elainie Lillios, and Brian Belet. From the first notes of Velocity Studies V: NGate, listeners might recall the spirit of Miles Davis's Electric Era, as delayed trumpet blasts echo deep into their psyche. Ruppenthal's playing also alludes to the works of trumpeters like Jon Hassell and Nils Petter Molvaer. What sets Ruppenthal's expressive trumpet performances apart is the way they're informed by digital sound processing and interactive electroacoustics. The combination of organic and synthesized sounds come together to form a cohesive sonic landscape steeped with an edgy, introspective feeling throughout. Tracks like "a sphere of air is bound" show the trumpeter extending his instrument from its traditional sound. Ruppenthal's trumpet is simultaneously processed and multiplied by the Kyma system, which mimics sounds from deep within a dense jungle soundscape. Ruppelthal uses the haunting reverberations of the crotale to open Lillios' November Twilight, the album's centerpiece. As his bursts of trumpet pierce through the track's sonic landscape, the trumpeter adds intermittent vocalizations, taking inspiration for the Haiku poem by Wally Swist, and substratal sonance, contributing further ripples to the atmosphere. This all builds to a triumphant swell of trumpets that shimmer amid the piece's darker tones, a dichotomy creating contrast and depth, and enhancing the many facets and moods of the work.

Exasperating Perpetuation is John K. Leupold II’s debut release with Ravello Records. His work has been called “an imaginative exploration of instrumental timbres,” by the Washington Post. His music consistently delivers vigorously rhythmic and tonally sensitive works. Leupold’s works have been performed by such ensembles as Inscape Chamber Orchestra, the Left Bank Quartet, and Capital Reeds. In addition to being an accomplished composer, Leupold is also an active percussionist, and an Assistant Professor of Music at Washinton College in Chestertown, MD.

An individual’s experiences might well be laid out like a map: some moments connected to others, some isolated, and still some yet to be explored. + Composer Matthew Malsky creates an aural map of emotions on his five-work debut Ravello release, Geographies & Geometries. + Mr. Malsky’s works have been performed internationally at events including the Ultima Festival in Oslo, the NYC Electroacoustic Music Festival and the Int’l Computer Music Festival in Kobe, Japan.

Frances White's music has been featured as part of the soundtrack of three of Gus Van Sant's award-winning films Elephant, Paranoid Park, and Milk. Kristin Norderval is a composer and singer specializing in developing new works for voice, cross-disciplinary work, and works using interactive technology. Valeria Vasilevski's madrigal comedy Jukebox in The Tavern of Love, a collaboration with composer Eric Salzman, was released on Labor Records in 2014. It was cited in Gramophone Magazine as one of the best albums of the year and was also a featured pick of the week on WQXR-FM in NYC.

Classical Music

Chilean-American composer Miguel Chuaqui presents beautifully crafted works for small chamber and solo instruments on his release Confabulario. The works on this album present a wide range of interrelated musical materials arrayed into artfully crafted forms. This quality is perhaps most salient in the solo piano work Blues En El Corazon, which features three movements based on musical idea of teh blues scale. Written for American pianist, Marilyn Nonken, teh role of the blues scale's influence shifts from movement to movement in differing disguises.

Pittsburgh-based composer Philip Thompson presents Separate Self, his debut release on Ravello Records. Thompson writes that the release is "a reflection of the creative energy that comes from being deeply rooted in a vibrant artistic community." True to this communal spirit, several of the pieces were composed in collaboration with artists form different disciplines - from robotics and dance with Separate Self to visual art with Nocturnes to film with the score to Will Zavala's documentary Virgil Cantini: The Artist in Public. Thompson’s music is delicate and atmospheric, the distinct sounds of his instrumental palette shifting and rearranging across his musical canvas. In other moments, he captures a kinetic current, sending sounds rippling and tumbling into one another.

A collection of Seattle-based violinist and singer Hope Wechkin's original works, paired alongside her inventive arrangements of traditional Balkan folk songs. Full-bore, all-out, utterly unselfconsciously (Seattle Times).

With Sufficient Trouble, his debut release on Ravello Records, composer and performer Brian Belet offers a selection of compute rmusic composed over the last twenty years. Featuring acoustic instruments and responsive electronic materials the album offers a degree of variety in timbre and musical content that is sometimes lacking in electronic music. In Lyra, the album's opening track, Belet establishes an aural world in which the organic material and electronic content merge seamlessly, clearly defining the musical language to come as the album progresses. A sense of musical humor and clear intent runs throughout Belet's work, and one quickly concludes that the composer, while wonderfully fluent and virtuosic in his chosen medium, is not at all above poking fun at tradition. Name Droppings, assembled from fragments of spoken text, is crafted solely using quotations from program notes and biographies the composer encountered while attending concerts. The resulting piece, with narrative thrusts provided by unexpected textual content, succeeds as both a strong composition and humorous commentary on the concertgoing experience. While Belet proves adept throughout this release at crafting strongly evocative electronic materials, his writing for acoustic instruments also shines through in the works tha tdraw from mixed disciplines. In various pieces, strings, brass, and the piano all interact with electronic materials, often leading to shimmering textual content. By often utlizing responsive electronics and real time controls, as in Radiance and Still Harmless [Bass]ically, Belet allows for the ''performance'' element to remain a crucial, and often defining aspect, of these selections. Still Harmless [Bass]ically presents the electric bass in an electronic environment for which it is aptly sutied. Harmonics and wide-ranging bass flourishes weave in and out of responsive electronic surroundings, creating an atmospheric palette that is at once intriguing and impressively emotive.

Composer Steve Rouse constructs unique and indelible sound worlds on his album MORPHIC RESONANCE, his first release with PARMA Recordings. The album is a revue of Rouse’s chamber music from the last two decades and beyond, and the works featured on MORPHIC RESONANCE demonstrate Rouse’s powerful gifts to create compelling and idiosyncratic musical statements. This quality is most prominent in the work Ten Little Things, a set of short movements for clarinet and percussion. More appropriately, Rouse uses the work to pair solo clarinet with different pitched and unpitched percussion instruments, and he succeeds brilliantly in blending the clarinet’s sound with unlikely partners, such as the tambourine and snare drum, among others. Ten Little Things is endlessly impressive, as each movement sounds like a new world, thanks to Rouse’s willingness to explore the full color palette of the clarinet, namely through microtones, and his disciplined construction of melodic and rhythmic material. Across MORPHIC RESONANCE, Rouse displays the highest level of compositional ability, particularly in the unexpected ways he bases seemingly complex passages on repeated melodic and rhythmic ideas. This technique is critical to the success of Ten Little Things as it further links the clarinet and percussion in the common purpose of the movement, underscoring their total partnership in the music. In Form Fades, for flute, clarinet, cello, violin, piano, and percussion, Rouse demonstrates a winning approach to ensemble writing. Scored for a notably disparate group of instruments, Rouse unites them, at first with a shared melody, throughout with brilliant orchestration. Rouse’s treatment of the ensemble not only connects its components, but also energizes and brings unexpected earthiness to the whole ensemble, which, in the history of twentieth and twenty-first century music, is most commonly associated with intricate, delicate, and erudite compositions. A hidden gem on MORPHIC RESONANCE is Nevolution, Rouse’s duo for corno da caccia – a historical brass instrument dating back to the Baroque period – and piano. Once again, Rouse succeeds in transcending the difficulties of unusual instrumentation and creates an entirely unique, entirely personal, and entirely compelling composition. Most stunning is Nevolution’s middle movement, which is slow and lyrical, showing the tenderness that is also part of Rouse’s musical language. This album is replete with unusual combinations of instruments, particularly in Ten Little Things and Nevolution. Consider how Rouse is able to exploit these pairings and ‘normalize’ them, as it were, into his regular musical language. Although Rouse’s music tends towards intricate and complex ideas, he often employs repetition to make his works more straightforward. Listen for this and consider how this disciplined approach helps to make his music more compelling.

On his Ravello Records release Circle of Love and Other Choral offerings, composer Craig Madden Morris presents a song cycle for chorus and piano set to traditional texts from The Song of Songs, Ecclesiastes, the Book of Ruth, Malachi, and the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, as well as original verse by the composer. This work portrays the blossoming and growth of love, from the initial passion to the poignancy of later years. Morris offers two other works – The Tiger, set to the poem by William Blake, and And Abraham Remained Standing Before the Lord – both of which challenge our understanding of the paradoxes and actions of a just G-d. Arise My Love and The Rubaiyat were finalists in the 2010 Meistersingers Choral Competition.

Ravello Records presents Vanishing Point, featuring saxophonist Allen Harrington and organist Lottie Enns-Braun in an unusual instrumental pairing not often heard in classical repertoire. "The saxophone and organ are wind instruments that rarely occupy the same space at the same time," says Enns-Braun, "and it is our contention that this seemingly incongruous combination is actually quite perfect." The duo showcases this striking sonic blend with a vibrant collection of pieces, written mostly by livivng composers and those active in the 20th century. Guy de Lioncourt's Kyrie setting Melodies Gregoriennes juxtaposes 10th century liturgical chant styles with a modern harmonic sensibility, and on the transcription of Eugene Bozza's lullaby Chanson a bercer, the duo's regular encore, the saxophone gently soars over the organ's lush underpinnings.

The Preludes Project is Holly Roadfeldt's debut album and features a complete recording of Chopin's, Op. 28 Preludes for Piano and a new set of twenty-six piano preludes written by american composer Kirk O'Riordan. In her performance of these works, Roadfeldt takes claim to one of the most iconic pieces in the solo piano repertoire and also annoints O'Riordan's new work as an impressive achievement among Classical music's greatest sets of piano preludes. In the Preludes Project, Roadfeldt also makes the persuasive case that, as Chopin's preludes were to Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier, so might O'Riordan's preludes be to Chopin's. Certainly, O'Riordan matches Chopin's ability to create a vast collection of nuanced, indelible and - most importantly - satisfactorily self-contained musical statements. As one expects, the Twenty-Six Preludes vary a great deal, but each achieves it's beauty by crafting a unique space with the piano's voice. In this way, O'Riordan's preludes connect with the fundamental motivations underlying Bach and Chopin's famous preludes: exploring the sound of the isntrument.