Henry Threadgill

Listen Ship is the latest masterpiece in the ever-expanding sound world of Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Henry Threadgill, whom The New York Review of Books recently described as “one of American music’s great Romantics and a lifelong seeker of the sublime.” The new work is a suite for six acoustic guitars – including individual stylists such as Bill Frisell, Miles Okazaki and Brandon Ross – and two pianos that utilize Threadgill’s unique intervallic syntax to illuminate his idiosyncratic vision. The eight string instruments revel in the music’s painstaking detail with intricate gestures that miraculously entwine to form a grand statement. The meticulous orchestration highlights all of the usual characteristics of Threadgill’s music: unusual forms, unexpected timbres, and slippery counterpoint and rhythms, all shaped by the composer’s conducting into a singular experience.