Kyong Mee Choi – “The Eternal Tao”
Mexican composer Juan Sebastian Lach Lau's music presents an amalgam of technology and sound, blending programming and algorithmic generation with traditional instruments, creating diverse, unique works that define their own aesthetic. The six pieces on “Islas” are presented as musical islands, each its own labyrinth, isolated and cut out from the others while sharing some underwater features through the molten rock that chains them together. Each island is a world within a world, a point of view that contains others within it.
Jeffrey Stadelman's unusual, arresting, exacting musical voice has evolved over 25 years, amounting to a complex musical practice that suggests no obvious counterpart. “Messenger” includes a variety of his orchestral, instrumental, and electroacoustic works: Messenger for Orchestra, an ode to the universal language of our bodies, music, and dreams; Nine Bagatelles for piano and recorded sound, a conversation between the piano and electronic distortions; Evans House for flute, a series of observations of suburban Buffalo; and the electroacoustic Koral 19, a fragment of a piece involving hundreds of segments.
About 100 years ago, classical music made a jagged turn away from the harmonic structures that had comprised its underpinnings for several centuries. This departure was initially dubbed atonalism, and opposed the functional harmony that prevailed during the great musical flourishing of the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. Composer Sparky Davis, who takes a "modern, not modernistic" approach to writing his music, continues this forward movement, expanding the vocabulary of music to include non-traditional elements and adding to the functional uses of long-established note combinations.
“Shakespeare’s Memory” is the first offering The Shakespeare Concerts Series. A salmagundi of selections from Josef Summer's The Oxford Songs, this album includes previously unreleased recordings spanning the life of the series. This first volume includes Summer's original chamber and vocal compositions set to Shakespeare's dramas and sonnets and the poetry of Milton and Yeats, performed by a slew of musicians: the Kalmia String Quartet, baritone Chad Sloan, soprano Andrea Chenoweth, mezzo-soprano Kellie Van Horn, tenor Justin Vickers, pianists Miroslav Sekera and Ian Watson, and harpist Lydie.
“Keyboard3” - Parma's second all-Sergio Cervetti album - takes the listener to a world of kinetic and emotionally charged sound forged from three keyboard instruments. Sometimes it is the pianoforte, the king of instruments or the double keyboard of the harpsichord. Moments where melody and counterpoint reflect a phrase from the literature of Milton, the shifting syncopations of dance, emotions from bittersweet opera or the fluidity of the Magellan clouds and the shimmering Antarctic are given structure and concept in six works by Cervetti for piano, harpsichord, and organ.
Lifelong guitarist Alex Lubet has created a unique niche, combining his instrumental experience with his traditional studies of composition. On “Spectral Blues”, a full album of his works for steel-string acoustic guitar, Lubet combines the characteristics of blues and Eastern styles with classical methods of composition to create remarkably unique pieces that push the boundaries of the instrument. Combining natural harmonies with single-string multiphonics and dyads, Doppler bends, and more, Lubet presents multi-layered guitar music with an edge.
“The Eternal Tao”, a one-act multimedia opera for voices instruments, video, electronics, dancers, and lighting presents the text of Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching translated and re-imagined in the context of modern society. Through this opera-which has parallels with traditional opera, but differs from singer-oriented opera in the sense that the vocalists are a part of the ensemble as a whole-composer, director, and choreographer Kyong Mee Choi seeks to have viewers experience a shared moment of seeing ourselves with open eyes and understand our purpose in the world.
