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Composer David Claman has released a fascinating and eclectic collection of exceptionally diverse works on his new album – aptly titled – “Gradus.”  His musical explorations take us through a broad range of artistic expression and diverse sonic experiences.

As an informed contemporary composer of our global age, he draws inspiration from many aspects of culture, history, and style – but with respect, integrity, and a deep understanding of the intricacies that form the basis of music as a unique vehicle of human communication.

The roster of musicians on this album is impressive.  This is a fine collection of interesting and compelling works.

–James Ricci, composer

Gradus is David Claman’s new Albany Records release: a varicolored collection of his repertoire, joined by world class figures in classical, Indian, and experimental music.

Between music that sends you on a journey of textures, styles, and with support from places like SoundWordSight, Vents Magazine, and kind support from industry colleagues, Gradus is surely an album worth your attention.

Meet just some of the musicians that contributed their talents to Claman’s vision below:

STEVE MACKEY – a GRAMMY Award® winner, lauded by Gramophone for his “explosive and ethereal imagination” – is regarded as one of the leading composers of his generation, with compositions ranging from orchestral and chamber music to dance and opera. Born in 1956 to American parents stationed in Frankfurt, Germany, his first musical passion was playing the electric guitar in rock bands based in northern California. He blazed a trail in the 1980s and ‘90s by including the electric guitar and vernacular music influences in his classical concert music. He regularly performs his own work, including three electric guitar concertos and numerous solo and chamber works. He is also active as an improvising musician, and performs regularly with his band Big Farm.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjoMNEC0WK0

Loose Canons features guitars from Mackey, Mark Zaki and Matthew Wuolle.

New York City native OREN FADER is highly regarded as a performer of classical and electric guitar repertoire, from Bach to Babbitt. For the last 30 years, he has performed around the globe to critical acclaim, both as soloist and chamber musician.

In addition to performing as a soloist, Mr. Fader is much in demand as a New York City chamber musician. He has performed hundreds of concerts with a wide range of classical and new music groups, including the Met Chamber Ensemble (directed by James Levine), New York City Opera, New York Philharmonic, New York City Ballet, Mark Morris Dance Group, Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, New World Symphony, and many others.

Guitar by Fader, cello by Susannah Chapman, violin by Calvin Wiersma, mandolin from William Anderson, vocals by Jessica Bowers and Elizabeth Farnum, and lyrics by Dr. A. Dasarathan

Praised by the New York Times for her “honeyed tone”, ELIZABETH FARNUM is one of the world’s most highly sought-after vocalists in the field of modern music. Widely known for her high level of musicianship, versatility and range, she has performed in several genres and has toured throughout the United States, Europe, Japan and Australia with a number of varied ensembles.

For the past 15 years, Elizabeth has specialized in modern music, for which she is world-renowned. She has performed in venues such as Lincoln Center, Alice Tully Hall, London’s Institute for Contemporary Art, the American Academy at Rome, the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam and the Library of Congress, collaborating with such composers as Samuel Adler, Ricky Ian Gordon, John Harbison, Peter Schickele, Charles Wuorinen and John Zorn. She has appeared as a guest soloist with many prominent modern music ensembles throughout the U.S. and Europe. A prolific studio artist, Elizabeth has been featured on over 30 recordings, four of which were nominated for Grammy awards, on such labels as DeutscheGrammophon/Archiv, Delos, Bis, Naxos and Koch.

With vocals by Farnum, piano by John McDonald, and poetry by David Ignatow.

 

FATHER PAUL POOVATHINGAL, popularly known as ‘Paadum Paathiri’, disciple of Padmabhushan Dr. K. J. Yesudas and Chandramana Narayanan Namboothiri, is an ordained priest in the congregation of Carmalites of Mary Immaculate, a religious order founded by blessed Cyriac Elias Chavara. He is the first Christian Priest who has completed Ph.D. in Karnatic music in India. He has shown great aptitude in music right from his childhood. Though he was initiated into Karnatic music at the age 17 by Sodharan Bhagavathar, it is only after his priestly studies that he started learning Karnatic music seriously. Nevertheless, during his studies in philosophy and theology at Dharmaram College, Bangalore, he continued his music education under the tutelage of Vidwan Bangalore V. K. Krishnamurthy.

After having graduated in English and Psychology from Christ College Bangalore, in 1992, he joined the Faculty of Music and Fine Arts in Delhi University and passed Sangita Shiromani course (B.A. Music) with first rank and passed M.A. Music with a gold medal. In Delhi, he learned music from Prof. T. R. Subramaniam, Dr. Guruvayoor T. V. Manikandan and Dr. Vasanti Rao.

Poovathingal has composed a number of albums both in Hindi and Malayalam. His compositions include Karnatic music forms such as Kriti, Kirthanam and other popular forms like Bhajans, Hymns, Ballet, National Integration songs and Awareness songs.

with voices from Poovathingal, Deena Abu-Lughod, Stephan Winkler, and Sunita Vatuk.

TARA HELEN O’CONNOR is a charismatic performer noted for her artistic depth, brilliant technique and colorful tone spanning every musical era. Recipient of an Avery Fisher Career Grant, a two-time Grammy nominee and the first wind player chosen to participate in The Bowers Program (formerly CMS Two), she is now a Season Artist of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. A Wm. S. Haynes flute artist, Tara regularly participates in the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, Music@Menlo, Chamber Music Festival of the Bluegrass, Spoleto Festival USA, Chamber Music Northwest, Mainly Mozart Festival, Music from Angel Fire, the Banff Centre, Rockport Music, Bay Chamber Concerts, Manchester Music Festival, the Great Mountains Music Festival, Chesapeake Music Festival and the Bravo! Vail Valley Music Festival.  Along with her husband Daniel Phillips, she is the newly appointed Co-Artstic Director of the Music From Angel Fire Festival in New Mexico.  

Tara is a member of the woodwind quintet Windscape, the legendary Bach Aria Group and is a founding member of the Naumburg Award-winning New Millennium Ensemble. She has premiered hundreds of new works and has collaborated with the Orion String Quartet, St. Lawrence Quartet and Emerson Quartet. Tara has appeared on A&E’s Breakfast for the Arts, Live from Lincoln Center and has recorded for Deutsche Grammophon, EMI Classics, Koch International, CMS Studio Recordings with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and Bridge Records.

Tara is Associate Professor of Flute, Head of the Woodwinds Department and the Coordinator of Classical Music Studies at Purchase College School of the Arts Conservatory of Music. Additionally, Tara is on the faculty of Bard College Conservatory of Music, the Contemporary Performance Program at Manhattan School of Music and is a visiting artist, teacher and coach at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto.  She lives with her husband, violinist Daniel Phillips and their two miniature dachshunds, Chloé and Ava on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

With alto flute by O’Connor and percussion by Ian Rosenbaum

NEW THREAD QUARTET was formed with the mission to develop and perform impactful new music for the saxophone, and to provide high level ensemble playing to feature today’s compositional voices. In 5 seasons, the quartet has commissioned and premiered over 20 new works by composers such as Richard Carrick, Ben Hjertmann, Scott Wollschleger, and Kathryn Salfelder, with recent commissions from Max Grafe and Taylor Brook as part of its annual Explorations concert series.

Based in New York City, NTQ has performed at Carnegie Hall, Roulette, Dance Theatre of Harlem, the Bang on a Can Summer Festival Benefit, Monadnock Music, and the World Saxophone Congress in St. Andrews, Scotland, and has performed or recorded more than 30 important works for saxophone quartet including Kati Agócs’ Hymn on New England Conservatory’s Composer Series at Jordan Hall, a revival of Michael Djupstrom’s 2001 work Test at Arizona State University’s Katzin Concert Hall, and the premiere recording of Elliott Sharp’s seminal work Approaching the Arches of Corti for 4 soprano saxophones, now available on New World Records.

Ensemble members are Geoffrey Landman (soprano saxophone), Kristen McKeon (alto saxophone), Erin Rogers (tenor saxophone) and Zach Herchen (baritone saxophone). NTQ is a presenting partner of Composers Now.

Performed by the New Thread Quartet

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On Monday, December 7th, 2020 from 6 to 7:30pm PT, Fulcrum Arts presents an interactive session with Peter McDowell, going over the basic principles of how to raise money for a project as an individual artist or small artist collective. Peter puts particular emphasis on virtual events, as he has just completely two successful online fundraisers. This is recommended for artists of all kinds, and is particularly relevant during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The event is $5 and is online. Click here to RSVP.

Fulcrum Arts is based in Pasadena, CA, and champions creative and critical thinkers at the intersection of art and science to provoke positive social change and contribute to a more vibrant and inclusive community. They are dedicated to building cultural equity into the very structure and fabric of the organization at all levels ensuring that underrepresented populations and voices are included and heard. Fulcrum Arts supports creative practices that incorporate broader, non-western, and Indigenous traditions that resonate within the nexus of art, science, and social change to expand, define, and further human achievement.

Fulcrum Arts’ Emerge fiscal sponsorship program increases the capacity of independent artists, collectives, and small arts organizations by offering financial management, fundraising consulting, and the ability to seek funding through fiscal sponsorship. Our goal is to provide artists with the necessary tools to create sustainable practices, while allowing them to remain independent, dynamic, and responsive to the shifting social and economic contexts in which they live and work.

For more information, please visit fulcrumarts.org

ABOUT PETER
Peter McDowell is an arts management expert with more than two decades of experience serving artists and organizations at the highest level. Currently Director of Development for American Friends of the Louvre in Los Angeles, he has held leadership positions at Opera America, the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, and most recently as managing director of the Grammy-winning ensemble Eighth Blackbird. His firm, Peter McDowell Arts Consulting, offers a wide range of strategic career services for performing artists. As a publicist, Peter has garnered press coverage for his clients in the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, the New Yorker, and many other important outlets.

Peter is in demand as a speaker and workshop leader on diverse topics in career development and arts entrepreneurship. He has been an invited presenter at the Manhattan School of Music, Northwestern School of Music, Eastman School of Music, The Colburn School, Chamber Music America, and the Association of Performing Arts Professionals (APAP). He is also a documentary filmmaker and is currently at work on his full-length feature, Jimmy in Saigon. He is a recently graduated International Fellow from the DeVos Institute of Arts Management at the University of Maryland. He received his undergraduate degree in French from the University of Illinois and his Masters in Business – Arts Administration from the University of Wisconsin.

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In October 2020, New York City based Composer David Claman is releasing his new album, Gradus, on Albany Records. A thirteen track collection of new recordings of compositions and interpretations from throughout Claman’s whole career, Gradus borrows from a canyon of inspirations: from Indian Classical to electronic experimentation. The album also gathers performances from several celebrated musicians, including India’s singing priest Paul Poovathingal, twice GRAMMY®-nominated flutist Tara Helen O’Connor, New York’s New Thread Saxophone Quartet, guitarist-composer Steve Mackey, and vocalist Sunita Vatuk, Claman’s wife and collaborator.

Loose Canons II opens the album as a preview towards the end, where it is reprised in more movements, taking as its model Johannes Ockeghem’s Missa Prolationum. Here, a continuous three-part composition is presented by three electric guitars with sustain devices, leading into an interpolation of Jimi Hendrix, before completely dissolving the canon.

The one-minute track Brit finds Claman narrating a famous passage from Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, surrounded by an unlikely ensemble of computers, cellphones, toys, CD players, microwaves, all recorded with a telephone tap. Claman conjures Melville’s allegorical ‘sea of the human soul’ with his own ‘ocean’ of electromagnetic sounds.  Literary allusions continue in both From a Dream and Rescue The Dead, featuring soprano Elizabeth Farnum singing the text of the late American poet David Ignatow. Claman again finds joy in contradiction, nuance, existentialism, and importantly, open interpretation — a concept that he takes in the aptly titled Liberties Taken. There, the New Thread Quartet plays through Tiruvottiyur Tyagayya’s Sahana Raga Varnam, adding in newly arranged elements, while preserving much of the work’s original character.

With musicians and inspirations from all walks of life, Gradus presents a throughline in Claman’s work that he says, “speaks to each other across decades, continents, and centuries of shared influences.” Claman, a self-described ‘hard-core atheist’ adds nevertheless that the works evoke “an underlying and unspoken yet certain spirituality. Just in time for our very uncertain world.”

For more about David Claman, please visit davidclaman.com

To inquire about a physical or digital review copy,
please write to [email protected]

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This year, Toronto-based vocalist Fides Krucker‘s first foray into improvisatory composition Vanishing is released in the United States and internationally on guitarist Tim Motzer’s own 1k Recordings imprint.

Made up of spontaneous compositions, the album finds the musical unit of Krucker and Motzer exploring six surreal, melancholic, and emotionally charged tracks they dub as ‘lost worlds’ and ‘sonic films’. Born of five days of improvisation in 2017 in a Philadelphia heatwave, Vanishing’s six tracks are intended to present wordless stories and ‘conversations’ between the musician’s organic interplay. Of the compositional process, Motzer notes that, “[regardless of] the choice of a key or mode, the parameters of loops, or microphones; it did not take much for one of us to begin and the other to follow. Twice—when one voice was not enough—Fides added a second improvised line.”

Vanishing opens with the brief “Scintilla”: Krucker’s voice sings with crystal clarity on simple vocables, as Motzer’s plaintive guitar crawls in, and the song comes to a natural, grieving crescendo. Throughout the rest of the album, Krucker continues to masterfully present various haunting colors from her voice: hums, lilt, sob, twang, fry, chant, breaks, drones, and operatic wails that veer into glossolalia. She evokes the broad kinship of other vocal pioneers like Patty Waters, Cathy Berberian, and Lisa Gerrard — all while maintaining her own identity. 

Similarly exploratory is Motzer, who sympathetically uses prepared guitar, e-bow, and electronic elements to ensure an immersive, otherworldly soundtrack. On the title track “Vanishing”, he uses reversed sounds and a Spanish-like guitar feel for a beautiful underlay; whereas on “Ruins” and “Eema”, both artists weave unnerving but engaging dark, synthetic atmospheres with real-time loops and modification.

New York-based drummer Jeremy Carlstedt joins the duo on both “Density” and the title track, adding sensitive textural support throughout. Of “Density”, Krucker says, “it was made after a conversation about Trump — that’s why it is so heavy — and that was Summer 2017. Things are so much worse now. There is a grieving in the album and a sharing of culture…”

Advanced praise from a previously limited Canadian release of Vanishing comes by way of Innerviews, where Anil Prasad paints Krucker’s voice as both “lovely” and “elastic” — and All About Jazz, whose Geno Thackara boldly glows, “Fides Krucker’s voice is less an instrument than a force of nature.” The Whole Note’s Andrew Timar also described the album as “cinematic in scope”, pegging the musicianship as “superb”. Timar also quips, “some days taking a walk on the sonic wild side is what the doctor should order.”

Vanishing is now available for download and streaming on Bandcamp: https://1krecordings.bandcamp.com/album/vanishing

A special CD pressing is also available, signed by the artists. The CD is limited to 200 copies, and includes an 8” x 12” poster. Photography for the album was provided by Avraham Bank, and designed by Yesim Tosuner of Backyard Design.

Works on the album are:
1 Scintilla・2 Vanishing・3 Ruins・4 Rime・5 Density・6 Eema

For more about the artists, please visit fideskrucker.com and timmotzer.com

To inquire about a physical or digital review copy,
please write to [email protected]

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This Spring, Lawler + Fadoul, the duo of flutist Zara Lawler and marimbist Paul J. Fadoul formally launch and celebrate their second album Clickable: The Art of Persuasion, released earlier this year on Ravello Records, an imprint of PARMA Recordings. The album is the foundation of their theatrical concert that explores both the “music and words of persuasion.” With powerful storytelling, the album masterfully conveys both positive and negative angles of coercion, pressure, manipulation, and coaxing with virtuosic instrumentals, song, and theatrical text.

Clickable deals with timely issues of propaganda, self-promotion and social media, and the power of music to create community. At a time when many people are at home consuming media, one can become unaware of the persuasive language entering our consciousness daily. Clickable both calls attention to that phenomenon, and provides an antidote through fun, rich, and complex music making.

The album includes: a spoken-word commentary on social media (Click. Tweet. Like. Repost., with words by poet Liza Jessie Peterson); dust jacket texts set to music (one of the books being Power Money Fame Sex, from the self-help satire book of the same name by Gretchen Rubin), — plus a lullaby, a protest song, a serenade, and four commercial jingles.

“I always thought it would be cool to do a show that had live commercial breaks! And then once we started to think of jingles as this incredibly American artform of persuasive music, it just expanded into these other kinds of persuasive music.”
—Zara Lawler

Clickable includes commissioned works by Canadian composer Jason Nett, American composer Ralph Farris, and hip-hop poet Liza Jessie Peterson. Comprised of studio and concert hall recordings, and one live track, the theatrical bent of Clickable is presented in the audio-only experience by way of different sound environments, sound effects, layering, and unusual instrumentation. Beyond the core of flute and marimba, Lawler + Fadoul’s fresh arrangements of folk and baroque composers plays with a palette of vocals, dulcimer, washboard, and even boxes of candy used as maracas.

Clickable was incubated and debuted at nancy nanocherian’s the cell theatre.

Please note: A previously announced performance which was to be held this Spring at the Leonard Nimoy Thalia Theatre at New York’ Symphony Space will be rescheduled for Fall 2020.

For more about Lawler + Fadoul, please visit lawlerandfadoul.com

To inquire about a physical or digital review copy,
please write to [email protected]