Jonah Sirota STRONG SAD

Strong Sad is a classical new music commissioning and recording project featuring newly composed elegies for violist Jonah Sirota.  The elegy as a musical form has often found a home in the plaintive middle-register voice of the viola—it tugs, and makes us aware of our inner landscape. On Strong Sad, rather than the big catastrophes, the music will mourn the small, everyday losses. While some of these works may refer to lost friends and loved ones, this project will reaffirm that mourning is too important to save only for funerals, and that sadness, when given a chance to breathe, can be our best path to deep and lasting contentment and joy. The project features new works by Paola Prestini, Nico Muhly, Valgeir Sigur∂sson, Robert Sirota, A.J. McCaffrey, and Rodney Lister, as well as a new work from the duo Mondegreen, and a debut composition by Jonah Sirota.

“Maybe this is the secret chord – that each of us is whole within ourselves, to fully know and sing out our single note, so that we may join the wider chord, the set of strings, so that the sound we make moves and shakes each of us together in a dynamic, terrifying, shivering joy, covering us like light, clinging to us like dark.”  (Wes Sam-Bruce)

I made this album not because I am particularly obsessed with the emotion of sadness, but because I believe in the humanity of every feeling. We can’t have joy without sadness. We can’t be whole without knowing our brokenness. Each of the composers on this record has offered their own beautiful, vulnerable response to a sadness. Let us learn to mourn every day a little. To help heal ourselves, each other, and this world. (Jonah Sirota)

RICHARD REED PARRY Music for Heart and Breath

Music for Heart and Breath is a series of compositions that use involuntarily moving organs of the human body (specifically the lungs and the heart) as performance parameters. There are no time signatures: the tempos and rhythms are always governed by either the heart rates or the breathing rates of the individual players. In the case of the latter, the performers are instructed to play directly in sync with their own or another player’s individual breathing (playing at the speed of their inhalations, their exhalations or both). To enable the players to hear and play in sync with their own heartbeats, they wear stethoscopes and, naturally, generally play quietly. That, in combination with the natural variation between the performers’ heart rates, results in a delicate musical “pointillism”: starts and stops that are somewhat staggered, melodies that repeatedly align and then fall out of sync with the rising and falling of individual pulses.

The idea is less about “performance” in the traditional musical sense and more about attempting to translate directly into music the quiet internal rhythms of the body, using the naturally varying tempos inherent within each musician to guide and shape the dynamics of the pieces. Music for Heart and Breath requires that the performers let go of their regular approach to musical interpretation and phrasing, replacing it instead with a commitment to following the subtle rhythmic “instructions” of the body.

This kind of performing can yield a subtlety, a spaciousness and a uniquely fragile style of interplay between performers and musical score that always fluctuates and never repeats itself: each piece is a distinct, gentle collision of notes, dynamics, timing and shifting harmonies that, literally, has new life breathed into it every time it is played. (Richard Reed Parry, 2014)

RICHARD REED PARRY Music for Heart and Breath

Arcade Fire multi-instrumentalist Richard Reed Parry will issue his new solo album, Music for Heart and Breath, on June 9th through Deutsche Grammophon. It’s his first piece of solo material since 2009′s From Here On Out and follows collaborations with The National, Islands, The Unicorns, and Belle Orchestre, where he plays alongside Arcade Fire violinist Sarah Neufeld. Parry had previously debuted the work live, but this marks the first time it’s been properly released. While the LP’s title might imply it’s a record about love and relationships, it’s actually quite literal: “very soft, very quiet music, played utterly in sych with the heart rates and breathing rates of the musicians performing it”, Parry explained in a statement. “Every note you hear is either in synch with the heartbeat of the person playing it, the breathing of the person (or one of the surrounding persons) playing it,” Parry added. “So what you hear when this music plays is played precisely in time with someone’s quiet, internal rhythms. Brought to musical life by a handful of different ensembles. And now, at last, recorded in full, and coming out on Deutsche Grammophon in a few weeks from now. It has been a joy to create this work, and even more of a joy to have it brought to life by such a fantastic cast of musical minds.”

(Michelle Geslani)