The pieces brought together here were assembled as the fruit of collaboration undertaken by Falzone and Evans-Weiler. Instrumentation is the strongly unifying element. The reed organ, once ubiquitous in the private music setting of the home as well as a default practice instrument for organists, is now regarded as something of a relic of the past. However, the instrument continues to afford certain distinct advantages, particularly with regard to dynamic variation by virtue of the player’s direct operation of the bellows.

The two pieces of Ascending Music are the most forthrightly collaborative. After some days of rehearsing and recording together, as the session drew to a close, Evans-Weiler and Falzone felt sufficiently inspired by the richly reverberant acoustic of the stairwell in Baird Hall to relocate their recording equipment and to wheel out the reed organ to hear it together with the violin in this unique setting. Careful attention was given in listening to favorable frequencies highlighted by the resonance of the space. Pauline Oliveros and the Deep Listening Band were an immediate inspiration. If an underground cistern invited deep listening, would not a stairwell suggest ascendent listening? 22nd Century Music is a sort of double homage to Laurence Crane and Joseph Kudirka. Natural and Artificial Conclusions is a reference to a curious text in the history of science published by Thomas Hill in 1581. This “brief and pleasant treatise” concerns, among other things, the explanation of magic either as illustrative of natural phenomena or as human artifice.

Morgan Evans-Weiler is an interdisciplinary artist and musician living and working in Philadelphia, PA. He writes sound scores, performs on violin, makes installations, drawings, sculpture, and photographs.
James Peter Alfonse Falzone is a composer-performer who recently co pleted his doctoral studies at SUNY Buffalo. Falzone's work as a composer seeks to bring together systems and processes that approach harmony outside of conventional functionality.