Meyer Media will release Crossing Brooklyn Ferry, the cinematic and evocative new album from Florida-based composer Paul Richards out on Friday, December 12th.
Featured musicians include: tenor Christopher Pfund; pianists Jasmin Arakawa, Evan Mitchell, and Hsiang Tu; flutist Kristen Stoner; guitarist Silviu Ciulei; clarinetist Dale Fedele; violinist Janna Lower; cellist Steven Thomas; percussionist Kenneth Broadway and conductor Archie Birkner IV. All of the chamber works presented on this recording are connected through an engagement with cyclic patterns in time, engaging our senses of memory and expectation, generating fresh contexts for the presentation of similar materials.
The eponymous work which lays at the heart of this album, set to Walt Whitman‘s Crossing Brooklyn Ferry, ponders an ethical decision-making process considering of persons yet to be born. Our actions impact those around us now, but they also impact the future, potentially the far-distant future, and current technological developments may well mean that we are at a critical juncture in human history that can have profound implications for the living conditions, or even existence, of countless future persons. Whitman describes his experiences on the Brooklyn ferry and imagines future people having similar experiences to his own, and through this process he recognizes the common humanity, and value, in the people he is currently surrounded by, and in those who will someday “cross from shore to shore.” The poem moves seamlessly through various tenses and temporal orientations, reflecting its themes through a structure that is self-referential and repetitive in intriguing ways. Richards was inspired by both the structure and content of the poem, aiming to refract these ideas through a musical prism in an exploration of cycles of time and harmony.
Crossing Brooklyn Ferry will be available for downloading and streaming starting on December 12th from Amazon, Apple Music, Naxos, Spotify, Bandcamp & Meyer Media. Pre-orders are available at the link below.
Bandcamp:
TRACK LIST
Crossing Brooklyn Ferry
1. Entanglements
Kristen Stoner, flute & Evan Mitchell, piano
2. Ouroboros
Kristen Stoner, flute; Dale Fedele, clarinet; Janna Lower, violin; Steven Thomas, cello; Hsiang Tu, piano; Kenneth Broadway, percussion
Archie Birkner IV, conductor
Syncretisms
Silviu Ciulei, guitar
3. Sonorities
4. Aggregates
5. Ragas
6. Attacks
7. Song
Crossing Brooklyn Ferry
Christopher Pfund, tenor & Jasmin Arakawa, piano
8. Flood-tide below me!
9. The impalpable sustenance of me …
10. It avails not …
11. These and all else …
12.What is it then between us?
13. It is not upon you alone …
14.Closer yet I approach you …
15. Ah, what can be more stately …
16. Flow on river!