★Neuma Records
Turning
When James Lyon touches a violin, people listen; he can turn a phrase or a tune like few others. So, after a long career teaching at Penn State, it is high time he had a solo album to his credit: Turning is a deeply personal collection of works that celebrates his 35-year tenure at the institution.
The title Turning carries multiple meanings for Lyon, reflecting both transition and opportunity. “For well over three decades, I have been taking my turn being a professor of violin,” Lyon explains. …
Fumée
Smoke, sometimes, gets in your ears. Neuma Records announces the release of Fumée, featuring world premiere recordings of three major orchestral works by British-American composer Geoffrey Gordon. Each composition transforms visual art into music: Willem de Kooning’s explosive Abstract Expressionism, a haunting Belle Époque chanson, and the early-20th-century Synchromist movement’s “color orchestration” all find new life through Gordon’s vividly imagined scores. The album opens with Gotham News …
Continuous Interior
With Continuous Interior, Abby Fisher unveils a solo album that reimagines percussion and electronics. The album includes two immersive works that explore scale, space, and perception. The title track – the evocative Continuous Interior by New York composer Robert Honstein – draws inspiration from the modern experience of limitless, bounded spaces – shopping malls, airport terminals, vast warehouses – and translates that feeling into waves of resonant sound, where vibraphone tones sparkle above …
Kinesis, Vol. 3
If 3 is the perfect number, Galan Trio’s third installment in their series dedicated to the American piano trio hits the jackpot. Following the critical success of the first two volumes, which explored works from the easterly states, Kinesis: Volume 3 expands the project’s acoustic horizons by incorporating electronics for the first time, all while remaining true to the series’ guiding principle: dynamic motion. The double-album presents thirteen world-premiere recordings that treat the piano tr…
Yet
“Most times in trauma, there is no exit,” composer Sarah Genevieve Burghart Rice writes in her album introduction. “Yet every once in a while, a door is ajar and we are left to wonder if we really could leave. All the music of Yet revolves around suffering in captivity juxtaposed with the possibility of liberation.” Yet is a powerfully imaginative and intimate collection of contemporary classical music that navigates the stark – sometimes Surreal and satirical – landscapes of trauma and hope.
D…
Waldmusik
Forests have inspired composers from Schubert to Messiaen, but Christopher Shultis takes it one step further with Waldmusik, a sonic chronicle of fourteen years of walking and listening. This cycle of compositions traces a personal and artistic evolution sparked by solitary walks in woodlands and mountains across the globe. The genesis of Waldmusik dates to a 2003 residency in Taos, New Mexico, where its core idea—”walking in woods / listening … / what I hear”—became a lifelong creative mantra. …
Three Circuitous Paths
2002 release (RARE) ** Transfigured Wind III (1984) for flute, ensemble, and tape / Ambages (1965) for flute / Mistral (1985) for chamber ensemble. "Pierre Boulez was widely praised as an innovator for his Rèpons when he premiered it at IRCAM in 1981. This is a piece where a computer samples the live sound of a chamber ensemble, recalculates it to a programmed algorhythm and then scatters the sounds back out into the hall. Not to knock Boulez, but American composer Roger Reynolds had been workin…
The Canopy
"Ken Field’s triumphal music enables listeners to see with their mind’s eye what the dancers are performing on stage, helping us to contain loss, survive sorrow, live through grief, and ultimately transform us via this journey." - Mark Corroto, AllAboutJazz.com
Resonance Unbound
With Elisabet Curbelo as your travel guide, you may hear the world in a whole new light. Her debut album, Resonance Unbound, invites you to expand your aural imagination and follow in her musical footsteps through places she has lived including the Canary Islands; Madrid, Spain; Istanbul, Turkey; and San Diego. This album is a sonic exploration of her nomadic life, where diverse influences manifest through words, sonorities, instrumental resonances, organic shapes, and the resonant chorus of urb…
August Light
Recorded at Dreamland, a historic church converted into a studio just a few miles from Woodstock, NY, August Light captures the organic and spiritual essence of its unique setting. Owned by acclaimed drummer Jerry Marrota, Dreamland’s sensational acoustics and vibrant wood surfaces provided the perfect backdrop for Richard Carr’s collaborative explorations. Joining him on this musical outing are cellist Clarice Jensen and violist Caleb Burhans, both shining lights of the new music scene. Togethe…
12 Views on Life
Pianist Eunmi Ko’s latest double album, 12 Views on Life, offers a profound musical reflection on the tumultuous years of 2020 and 2021. Through two major projects, SPAM! for solo piano (and other objects she could find around her house) and Project GŪT for ensemble, Ko, alongside the Contemporary Art Music Project [CAMP], delve deep into the existential questions posed by the global pandemic and personal struggles with identity and creativity. Conceived for livestreaming from home, SPAM!, embra…
Emphatic Now
Douglas Ewart is no stranger to present moments. He has been a creative force – and AACM pillar – for decades and brings his life-affirming energy and formidable artistic prowess to bear wherever he goes. Emphatic Now finds him in Provo with fellow improvising gurus, Christian Asplund and Steven Ricks. The E A R Trio (get it?) found time to record their musical encounter at Brigham Young University during Ewart’s 2022 residency there (12 years in the making). They planned for a long session in M…
Dystophilia
Dystophilia: A fascination with the rate of societal decline. An unravelling of order as it careens into a dystopian AI future where melodies pile helter-skelter over phrases, genres melt seamlessly into one another, metal textures crash into chamber-like enclaves, forms teeter on the edge of collapse, violent rhythms transform into ghostly voices, and spiralling polyphonies end in jazz riffs or pop songs.
The music of this album from MC Maguire’s apocalyptic aural imagination, is poured into tw…
Kinesis, Vol. 2
In 2021, the Galan Trio – an epic classical piano trio hailing from Athens – built a bridge from Greece to the USA in the form of ten new works for piano, violin, and cello from composers based in the Southeast and Northeast. The project, aptly named Kinesis, met with such acclaim that their odyssey now continues with another phase: twelve commissioned works covering the Midwest and South Central states. Praised by Fanfare magazine for the “open ears and flexibility they display in so many idiom…
The Night Shall Break
Violinist, Hanna Hurwitz, is a musician who champions the very latest contemporary classical works – she is a member of Chicago’s cutting-edge Grossman Ensemble and Ensemble Dal Niente after all – but she is equally at home among solo and chamber works from past eras. For this album, she goes back one hundred years into neglected jewels of the repertoire from that time, bringing her fresh perspective to current ears. She writes, “I wanted to highlight my orientation toward collaboration through …
Crescent
Crescent is the first solo album from acclaimed composer and performer Kamala Sankaram. Summoning a wide array of timbres and styles, the album traces the impact of human technologies on the natural world, fusing the sounds of steam engines, helicopters, and electromagnetic static with field recordings from across New York State in both composed and improvised settings for voice, percussion, and electronics. The song cycle Crescent is a showcase for Sankaram’s expressive singing and use of exten…
Infinity Avenue
Robert Carl is no stranger to space. Standing on the shoulders of such visionaries as Charles Ives, Carl’s early compositions ranged far and wide through musical history, the “ultramoderns,” and beyond. Recently, however, his works have forged a new direction: a personal take on the ever-expanding spiral structures of the overtone series. Infinity Avenue offers six of these monumental sound experiences, taut in their simplicity yet expansive in consciousness. A state of being “close to nature” i…
Cello Unlocked
It is often said that the cello seems like an extension of the human body; the intimate, resonant pairing melds the two into a larger instrument. It is said too that the cello ‘sings’ when played well. In this album, however, it becomes an even larger whole and enters the realm of speech and language, melody and narrative. In the hands (and vocal cords) of Bryan Hayslett, the cello-human bond takes on new dimensions. Cello Unlocked is a foray into the synthesis of language and melody, blurring t…
Nieuw Amsterdam New York
If music grows out of a sense of place, then it follows that related places might have related musics. That idea is the springboard for this album that nods at 400 years of links between two vibrant cities. When the Dutch founded Nieuw Amsterdam in the 17th century, they provided the impetus for the growth of a city that shared many values of its model. The multitude of languages, ethnicities and nationalities, as well as an atmosphere of religious tolerance, made for an astounding uniqueness of…
Where Songs Go at Night
During the Covid doldrums of 2020, the wind faculty at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, like so many of us, experienced acute loneliness and isolation. As musicians accustomed to the musical and social connections that come from the intimate art of chamber music, they longed to channel their creative loss into something meaningful. Bandwidth – a mission as much as a group – emerged to champion chamber repertoire for wind instruments, foster connections between faculty, and provide a mode…