Engage / Modney

Regular price $23.99
Label
New Focus Recordings
Release Date
August 3, 2018
Format
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    Featuring
    • COMPOSER
      BACH BRAXTON MODNEY PLUTA
    • PERFORMER
      Modney, Pluta, Soper, Wuebbels
    Product Details
    • RELEASE DATE
      August 03, 2018
    • UPC
      655646189055
    • CATALOG NUMBER
      FCR211
    • LABEL
      New Focus Recordings
    • NUMBER OF DISCS
      3
    • GENRE
    Works
    1. Jem Altieri with a Ring Modulator Circuit

      Composer: Sam Pluta

      Performer: Josh Modney, Sam Pluta

    2. Vocalise

      Composer: Taylor Brook

      Performer: Josh Modney

    3. Cipher

      Composer: Kate Soper

      Performer: Kate Soper, Josh Modney

    4. Composition No. 222

      Composer: Anthony Braxton

      Performer: Josh Modney

    5. Violin Partita No. 2 in D Minor, BWV 1004: V. Ciaccona

      Composer: Johann Sebastian Bach

      Performer: Josh Modney

    6. The Children of Fire Come Looking for Fire

      Composer: Eric Wubbels

      Performer: Josh Modney, Eric Wubbels

    7. Polyphony (for SP)

      Composer: Josh Modney

      Performer: Josh Modney

    8. Cadential

      Composer: Josh Modney

      Performer: Josh Modney

    9. Engage

      Composer: Josh Modney

      Performer: Josh Modney

    10. Pastoral

      Composer: Josh Modney

      Performer: Josh Modney

    11. Range

      Composer: Josh Modney

      Performer: Josh Modney


Violinist Josh Modney presents this release highlighting his remarkable versatility as a performer, collaborator, and improviser. The album is elegantly cohesive across the entire program, as concerns with alternate intonation systems, experimental approaches to timbre, and intensely collaborative work connect the pieces. Moreover, tying the collection together, from Braxton to Bach to Modney’s own powerful improvisations, is Modney’s focused virtuosity and a laserlike attention to sound and the details of the means for producing and shaping that sound. One hears this immediately in the first bars of the opening work by longtime Wet Ink Ensemble colleague, Sam Pluta. We hear not just a generic violin scraping sound along the string, instead we hear a whole vocabulary opening up inside this technique of sound production, a language Modney manipulates with as much subtlety of expression as we hear in his just-intoned performance of Bach’s timeless Ciaconna. Josh Modney’s improvisations demonstrate the sophisticated vocabulary he has developed for his work in this context. In his own words, “This way of working with material- allowing riorous investigations into sound to be the spark that illuminates a deeper path toward form, expression, emotion, language- represents an ethos that permeates all of the works on the album.”