David Rosenboom

Active since the 1960s, composer/performer/educator/instrument builder and improviser David Rosenboom, has been at the cutting edge of contemporary music, scoring for orchestra, opera, solo performance, chamber ensembles, improvisers, electronics, dance and more. This exciting release presents his whispered chamber opera/concerto grosso for six instrumentalists, whispering voices, electronics and interactive computer software. Written in modular open form sections allowing each performance to be unique, the recording was produced and conducted under the composer’s direction and features the virtuosic CalArts Chamber Ensemble. A unique masterwork from this legendary composer

"From the time of my mid-1960s reading of William Butler Yeats’s A Vision, in which a system for visualising cycles of change in human faculties is unrolled, possible musical realisations simmered in my imagination. Much later, in 2001, this stew, peppered by thoughts on Yeats’s experiments with automatic writing, condensed into the form of an entirely whispered chamber opera, Naked Curvature (Four Memories Of The Daimon). In it we hear a rustling susurrus of words, freely spun off from Yeats, myself and others, flowing by us from margins of embodiment and imagination, perhaps seeming to be in conversation with the unseen instructors in Yeats’s conjuring. Sometimes comprehensible, sometimes merely entering the fringes of consciousness, they always play out as rhythmic instruments, part of the raw musical sound. The whispering voices and instrumental/electronic ensemble members are all actors playing a cycle of roles in relation to each other. Naked Curvature invokes conundrums hard to avoid when conceptualising things living outside orienting frameworks like background grids or coordinate planes. Naked Curvature’s poetic adaptation comes from mental and spiritual states invoked while trying to see things in relation only to each other, uncloaked by the artificial contexts we often impose upon them. The curves are naked. This brief excerpt is from one of the 28 parts that make up the complete, whispered chamber opera, which is due out on a CD from Tzadik in 2015." D. Rosenboom