European American Music Distributors Company is a member of the Schott Music Group
Information Regarding COVID-19

Our New York City office remains closed to protect the health and safety of all of our employees. During this time, we are doing everything possible to minimize disruptions to our daily operations. All employees are working remotely and remain fully contactable. If you have had to cancel or postpone a performance of a work from our catalogue, or are considering live streaming performances or streaming archival material, we are prepared to assist you in facilitating changes. Please direct all questions or concerns to rental@eamdc.com.

Please note:

  • All materials from canceled or completed performances should be returned to our Verona, New Jersey library only.
  • Please do not return materials to our New York office. Unfortunately, we cannot be responsible for lost materials that are returned to our New York office while it is closed. If materials are lost, we will have to charge the full replacement value.

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Michael Hersch and Christopher Cairns Present New Concert Series: ...thus far and no further...

by Ted Gordon on Oct. 20, 2020, 4:06 p.m.

As the landscape of live musical performance continues to change in the era of COVID-19, composer Michael Hersch and his long-time collaborator, the sculptor Christopher Cairns, have planned an intimate series of concerts—each limited to 15 audience members—held in Cairns's studio in Havertown, Pennsylvania. Titled ...thus far and no further..., this series revives Carins and Hersch's practice of small, intimate, informal concerts held in Carins's studio among his work; both artists hope that this new five-event series will help (re-)imagine what live music can look, feel, and sound like in the current global climate. 

Featuring world premeires by Hersch, Missy Mazzoli, Christopher Fox, Alican Çamci, and Patricia Kopatchinskaja—who is increasingly augmenting her profile as a composer, in addition to her work as a violnist—this series will feature some of Hersch's closest collaborators, including Miranda Cuckson, Ah Young Hong, Emi Ferguson, Daniel Gaisford, and the FLUX Quartet.

Carins's sculptures, which were also featured in the set design of Hersch's monodrama On the Threshold of Winter, will surround the small audience, who will be presented with musical programs that pair world premieres with other works of our time by composers such as Rebecca Saunders, Meredith Monk, Georg Friedrich Haas, Anthony Braxton and Isabel Mundry, among many others.  Pre- and post-concert sound installations will also enhance the sonic experience of these five events, allowing audience members time and space to contemplate sculpture and music in a haptic, three-dimensional experience. 

The first of Hersch and Cairns's five programs falls on October 24th, and will pair early vocal music by Machaut and Josquin with three works by Hersch (including the premiere of unwrung, apart, always), book-ended by Morton Feldman's sparse, enigmatic Only, for solo voice. This program will be performed by violinist Miranda Cuckson and flutist/vocalist Emi Ferguson. 

Cairns's Sculpture Studio

Tags: Michael Hersch

Richard Carrick's "lanterne" Released on New Focus Recordings

by Ted Gordon on Oct. 6, 2020, 2:38 p.m.

Richard Carrick has often felt most at home composing music for intimate spaces. In his chamber music, Carrick brings his own sense of virtuosity and structure to the interaction between nimble performers, adding his own meticulous artistry to the act of small-scale musical performance. As a performer himself, and as co-director of the Either/Or Ensemble, Carrick seeks out the precarious nuance and subtlety of live performance, writing works for small instrumental forces that focus both performer and listener to the present moment. 


lanterne, Carrick's latest release with New Focus Recordings, brings several of his works together on an album that celebrates this kind of small-scale intimacy in a time when so many people have been forced into social isolation, and in a time when the reflection made possible by his music is all the more valuable. Though this album was conceived well before COVID, Carrick's music takes on even more meditative power. In the titular composition lanterne, for example, Carrick explores the intricate possibilities of the bass flute, creating a kind of "wall of sound" that emerges from its lower register and climbs rhythmically throughout the instrument's harmonics and even the performer's own voice. The gasping, breathy sonorities of lanterne also emerge metaphorically in Carrick's 2018 string quartet Space:Time, which imagines the physical barriers of space travel—from the claustrophobia of the interior spaces for humans, to the pull of gravity and acceleration "into the light", as its coda is titled. 

Like many composers, Carrick often works with the musicians for whom he has written many of the works on lanterne both in person and remotely—this latter method involving correspondence including scores, recordings, videos, and voice memos. The ability for Carrick and his collaborators to share sketches, ideas, and sounds together, even though they are not in the same space, enables Carrick to compose works that evoke liveness and virtuosity through careful craft and technique. Carrick often draws inspiration for this refinement of performative gesture from gugak, the traditional music of Korea, which often features highly controlled yet wildly expressive sounds generated on instruments intended for small spaces. On lanterne, three works explicitly incorporate structural and sonic elements from gugak: Danga, Seongeum, and sandstone(s), the last of which incorporates traditional Korean instruments put into timbral dialogue with flute, violin, and cello.  

Recorded before the current crisis, but mixed and mastered in the isolation of a global pandemic, Carrick's lanterne is a prescient reminder of the possibilities of smallness and intimacy that emerge from the interaction between composers, performers, carefully crafted as scoee and recording—even in a time when we all must remain physically alone. Check out an interview with Carrick by New Focus Recordings below.

Tags: Either/Or EnsembleNew Focus RecodingsRichard Carrick

Christopher Cerrone's "Liminal Highway" Released as Album and Film

by Ted Gordon on Aug. 21, 2020, 11:53 a.m.

Back in 2016, Christopher Cerrone continued his innovative exploration of new possibilities for musical composition with a work for the flautist Tim Munro: Liminal Highway, for flute and electronics. Originally co-commissioned by Miller Theatre & New Music USA, this work continued to develop into more than a work for live performance: in 2018, Cerrone and Munro teamed up with Four/Ten Media to produce a film of the piece, shot aboard the decaying SS United States—a decomissioned ship that lives in the Philadelphia harbor. 

Like many of Cerrone's works, Liminal Highway takes inspiration from a poem: "Liminal Highway," by John K. Samson, known for his work with the indie-rock band The Weakerthans. In conversation with the Classical Post, Cerrone and Munro discuss the making of the piece, including Cerrone's amateur explorations of the flute, taking inspiration from the world's longest reverberation, and the process of "fixing" a piece in recorded media. In addition to the film, Liminal Highway is also released as an audio recording on New Focus Recordings. Liminal Highway joins many other of Cerrone's works as hybrid works that are simultaneously fixed and open, existing in multiple media yet also begging to be performed live. 

All five movements of Liminal Highway are now streaming on Bandcamp, where the album is also available for sale:

Tags: Christopher CerroneMiller TheatreNew Focus RecodingsNew Music USATim Munro
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