New Albums featuring Annie Gosfield and Ted Hearne

by Chris Watford on March 21, 2017, 3:12 p.m.

Two albums out this month by Philadelphia-based ensembles showcase the music of Ted Hearne and Annie Gosfield. The Jasper String Quartet's album Unbound, released on March 17, includes a recording of Gosfield's string quartet The Blue Horse Walks on the Horizon, and the intrepid chamber choir The Crossing releases a recording of Hearne's Sound from the Bench on March 24.



Gosfield's The Blue Horse Walks on the Horizon, which was commissioned and premiered by the Jaspers in 2010, was inspired by the radio broadcasts, encryption methods and secret codes used by European resistance groups during World War II. The work's title references one of the statements broadcast from the British to the French Resistance in their "messages personnels" radio program ("Le cheval bleu se promène sur l'horizon"), and which Gosfield uses as a rhythmic basis for the work's opening figure. The new album, released on New Amsterdam Records, also includes an excerpt of Hearne's Law of Mosaics, as well as works by Caroline Shaw, Missy Mazzoli, Judd Greenstein, David Lang and Donnacha Dennehy. 

Following performances of Hearne's politically-charged cantata Sound from the Bench in Philadelphia, Boston and New York, The Crossing's new album (released by Cantaloupe Music) features the first recording of that work alongside new recordings of Hearne's Consent, Ripple and Privilege. 

Donald Nally, who leads The Crossing, notes that Hearne's works on the album are "fundamentally about asking questions—questions about the world we live in, about art, and about language and music." The album, containing some of Hearne's most adventurous works to date, demonstrates his socially conscious approach to composition and his goal to "bring the chaotic forces of life into the work itself." Listen to a sample of Hearne's Consent:

The Daedalus Quartet Premieres Fred Lerdahl's "Chaconne"

by Ted Gordon on March 14, 2017, 4:25 p.m.

Fred Lerdahl's writing for string quartet has, since 1978, played with musical form and syntax to achieve strikingly dramatic and engaging works. Lerdahl's three string quartets can be heard on a pristine recording performed by the Daedalus Quartet, for whom Lerdahl's Third Quartet was commissioned in 2008, completing the trilogy.

Now Lerdahl, with support from New Music USA, has written another work for Daedalus—entitled Chaconne—which diverges from Lerdahl's asymmetrical "spiral form" and instead explores the symmetrical periodicities inherent in the form of the chaconne. Eight bars of paired symmetrical phrases spell out the name of the Daedalus Quartet in the names of pitch-classes, using the German spelling of Eb (D-A-E-D-A-Es); Lerdahl uses this motive throughout the work to make a piece that is, in his words, "outward and transparent, one that projects delight in playful patterns."

Listen to Lerdahl's first three quartets performed by Daedalus below. 

Jeffrey and Gabriel Kahane Perform Works by Timo Andres

by Ted Gordon on March 9, 2017, 11:13 a.m.

The music of Timo Andres glimpses the history of Western art music while steadfastly looking at the present. Thus it's fitting that his music be performed by two generations of the same musical family on America's two coasts, in the span of only six days. On March 12th, Jeffrey Kahane performs Andres's Heavy Sleep in Berkeley—a work that begins to obsess with a musical idea from a Chopin nocturne in dream-like free association. Check out Bruce Levingston's Naxos recording below: 

And on March 18th, Andres will see a performance of his song cycle Work Songs at National Sawdust with a group of close collaborators including Gabriel Kahane, Becca Stevens, Ted Hearne, Nathan Koci, and Taylor Levine. Work Songs, which premiered in 2014, begins from the long tradition of American folk songs that thematize labor—Andres remembers the Fireside Book of Folk Songs from his childhood—and explores the habits and methods of working artists today, including Andres himself and his collaborators. Listen to a 2015 performance below.