*AND is a multi-city, multi-country project featuring the collaborative work of Chicago artists/teams of artists and their cohorts in other cities. We asked them to explore what it means to be a collaborative entity and how they might make something specific to the recorded medium.

Other than that, it was basically just… “Do whatever you want, guys…like…whatever…we’ll record it…or you can…..seriously…”

It felt nice to say.

And the results are even nicer to hear.

Some people traveled, some Skyped, some maxed out a Google Drive sharing recordings, and everyone blew our minds.

Thaw by Ted Hearne

If there is a larger theme to be gleaned from this grouping of apparent extremes from Thomas’ output, it would surely be that for this of all living composers, music acts as the ultimate means of communication, be it in the shape of a ceremonial orchestral work such as Radiant Circles, or a surprise wedding gift such as Capricci.

Part of a major series of recordings of works by Augusta Read Thomas being released by Nimbus Records, this CD originates from a concert by musicians of the University of Illinois, which took place on December 9th 2014 in celebration of Thomas’ 50th birthday. The works of Thomas gathered here cover a relatively short span in this composer’s chronology – just 13 years from the earliest work (Bells Ring Summer, from 2000) to the most recent (the song Twilight Butterfly, from 2013). Thomas the large-scale thinker is very much on display here, with two substantial orchestral works dominating the proceedings. But Thomas the deft miniaturist is also present, with a brace of vocal and instrumental jeux d’esprit written either for specific occasions or as personal messages to friends and colleagues. The largest work presented here is the gently meditative and brazenly celebratory, Astral Canticle, for flute, violin and orchestra. It was premiered on June 1st 2006 by flutist Mathieu Dufour and violinist Robert Chen under Daniel Barenboim as part of his final concerts as the Chicago Symphony’s Music Director. The work’s two soloists are heard only very lightly supported, and their alternation with the fanfaresque sections which showcased the Chicago Symphony’s legendary brass section imparts the work a “call-and-response” quality. The music’s harmonic environment moves seamlessly from the open diatonicism of the chant-like solo lines at the opening through dissonances which are bracing without ever being abrasive. Such harmonic flexibility seems to embody Thomas’ own words: “Old music deserves new music and new music needs old music”

Resounding Earth, II. Prayer – Stardust Orbits by Augusta Read Thomas

Making its harmonia mundi début, New York-based Ensemble Signal performs Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians (1974-76), a seminal masterpiece by a pioneering composer who changed the course of 20th-century music

Music for 18 Musicians by Steve Reich

Rock Paper Scissors is a document of composer Ryan Ingebritsen’s years-long work with some of his closest fellow musicians. These six collaborative, composed, and improvised pieces were recorded in locations throughout the city of Chicago chosen specifically for acoustic properties which best served the music at hand. Part improvisation, part electronic, part interactive with the acoustic space itself, each work explores the world that exists between the notes on the page, the speakers in the room, and the space where instrumentalist and electronic manipulator react to one another in real time. The result: a static moment, recorded in history. Like two people playing a game of Rock Paper Scissors.

In collaboration with: Erica Dicker, Erica Mott, Josh Rubin, Sam Scranton, Spektral Quartet, & Third Coast Percussion.

4×4 #2: Improvisation in an Altered State by Ryan Ingebritsen

This CD, the sixth instalment in this series documenting Augusta Read Thomas’ work in all its protean variety, is dominated by some of her most recent music. Except for the last 3 brief works on this programme, which date from 2004-06, the music gathered here dates from 2014-15, effectively turning this CD into a kind of compositional diary for these years.

The New Yorker Magazine called Thomas “a true virtuoso composer.” Rising early to the top of her profession, a member of both The American Academy of Arts and Letters and Academy of Arts and Sciences, former Chairperson of the American Music Center, Thomas has become one of the most recognizable and widely loved figures in American Music. A Member of the Conseil Musical of the Foundation Prince Pierre of Monaco, she has won a Grammy and received the Ernst von Siemens Music Prize. Her composition Astral Canticle was one of two finalists for the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in Music.

Selene by Augusta Read Thomas

The result of a rich confluence of many different cultural threads, a vivid and open imagination, and a rigorous intellect, Lei Liang‘s (b. 1972) music has a dimensionality to it that’s quite remarkable. Of course acoustic, often luxuriantly so, it somehow also evokes tactility, it sounds like something that could be touched; it evokes shape and color, it sounds like something that could be seen. There are still other layers of significance, especially language and the drama of narrative action, its great sonic variety possibly conjuring character and scene, emotions and ideas different for each performer and listener. Through myriad avenues of potential perception, Liang’s music reaches out and embraces its audience, its intricacies and complexities part and parcel of its naturalness and its direct but highly nuanced communicative voice.

These five compositions represent further explorations of his long-standing research into traditional Asian arts and music and their incorporation into a contemporary music aesthetic. Verge Quartet (2013) is the latest example of Liang’s extensive study of Mongolian music. Trans (2013), written for virtuoso percussionist Steven Schick, incorporates audience participation by having them play more than a hundred pairs of rocks, creating a sonic “cloud” that can be interpreted as rain or other natural sounds. The moon is following us (2015) (for solo piano) represents the composer’s effort to search for a new harmonic language, based on spectral analysis of a Chinese folk song. Liang imagines the composition as a journey through the spectral landscapes hidden within a voice.

Inkscape (2014) (for percussion quartet and piano), one of several works in which Liang engages with the idea of Chinese traditional mark-making, either that of calligraphy or painting, is an exploration of the relationship between sound and Chinese ink paintings. In this piece, the piano functions as the “brush,” and the percussion quartet as the “ink.” Luminous (2014) is a concerto written specifically for the innovative bass improviser Mark Dresser. The composer writes, “The instrument’s rich spectra embody ‘voices’ that encompass extreme opposites – lightness and darkness, angels and ghosts, paradise and inferno – unified by a singular vibrating body.”

Inkscape by Lei Liang

This remarkable one hour long piece in nine sections, commissioned by the Barlow Foundation, written for Due East and performed here with Third Coast Percussion, marries a timeless stance to sound and pacing with a very contemporary approach to timbre and instrumentation.

Each movement patiently excavates a different sound world, unearthing subtleties and long structural shapes. But the sonic pairings are innovative, like the union of processed, undulating flute and bowed vibraphone in the third movement. Due East and Third Coast Percussion are ideal instrumentalists for this music, exploring the fine details in timbral shading as an archeaologist might examine an artifact. Herriott’s expansive formal process in The Stone Tapestry allows the work to breathe and inhabit the world of natural time. While the resultant sound of the music is very distinct, the temporal quality of the piece is reminiscent of the music of John Luther Adams. In this sense, Jeff Herriott joins Adams in allowing his music to draw attention to, and not away from, our natural landscape. Stones, like rivers, mountains, and valleys, move and change at a glacial pace, and Herriot’s deft use of repetition with subtle variation, avoidance of didactic rhythmic regularity, and penchant for static harmonic textures bring us into a sphere entirely apart from glowing screens, twenty four hour news cycles, and crowded metropolitan areas.

The Stone Tapestry by Jeff Herriott

The present collection of Augusta Read Thomas’s works spans 18 years, from 1999 to 2017. It juxtaposes the two sides of Thomas that we’ve already encountered in previous volumes, the large-scale thinker in the cello concerto Ritual Incantations, the piano trio Klee Musings and the recent string quartet Chi, and the miniaturist in the six other works which on this disc act as satellites to the above-mentioned three larger works.

Two sides that, paradoxically, seem to share more similarities than differences. Common to all the works collected here are the sunny, free-wheeling lyricism, luminosity, sense of colour, spontaneity, caprice, playfulness and spirituality which have long been ineradicable characteristics of her nuanced music, all tied up with an irrepressible energy and a sense of irreducible concision no matter how expansive the time frame, of taking all the time in the world to say everything that needs to be said in any given piece, but not a second more than that!

Label: Nimbus Alliance, 2017

Link: https://www.wyastone.co.uk/augusta-read-thomas-ritual-incantations.html

Work: qì (for four percussionists playing two marimbas), by Augusta Read Thomas world premiere performance