Ways You Went
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The Crossing, Donald Nally, conductor
PRISM Quartet
Timothy McAllister, soprano
Zachary Shemon, alto
Matthew Levy, tenor
Taimur Sullivan, baritone
Scott Dettra, Organ
Track Listing:
Self-Portraits 1964, Unfinished by Martin Bresnick
The Crossing | Donald Nally, conductor; PRISM Quartet
1. His Own Identity
2. I Wake
3. Where Lies The Final Harbor
4. The Darkling Thrush
5. Of Mortal Beauty
6. To Fling Out Broad Its Name
Mass Transmission by Mason Bates
The Crossing | Donald Nally, conductor; Scott Dettra, Organ
7. The Dutch Telegraph Office
8. Java
9. Wireless Connections
Martin Bresnick on Self-Portraits 1964, Unfinished
This video was recorded for the 2023 world premiere performance.
Three-time GRAMMY® winning new-music choir The Crossing releases Ways You Went, featuring music of Martin Bresnick and Mason Bates, on Navona Records. The album leads with Bresnick’s Self-Portraits 1964, Unfinished, a co-commission of The Crossing and PRISM Quatet, with whom The Crossing won their first GRAMMY® award. Setting words by Herman Melville, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Thomas Hardy, and James Joyce, Bresnick explores the uncannily organic marriage of saxophones and voices, effectively interweaving two disparate instruments, both carried by breath. The celebrated composer and highly influential composition teacher at Yale, looks back to a formative time. Bresnick writes:
“When I was seventeen, I was living alone in New York, working as a maintenance man and trash collector in one of the city’s Housing Projects to earn enough to attend a new school. I would rise in darkness and travel to my job by train. In breaks, high on rooftops where sea birds took refuge in the hot summer of 1964, I read books carried in my back pocket and reflected on others I had studied in my first year at university. After work, at small clubs and coffee houses, I listened to music with others of my kind, returning late at night. Now a much older man, I imagine that the texts I read and the music of the six movements of Self-Portraits 1964, Unfinished, are a memoir evoking my youthful state of mind then – rising before dawn, traveling, working, reading, listening, coming home.”
Mason Bates’ Mass Transmission incorporates pre-recorded sounds in unlikely and highly effective pairings; for example, static radio and Gamelan music provide the backdrop to an extraordinarily moving work that tackles a timely topic: communication. Bates sets a telegraph conversation between a mother in Holland and her young daughter sent to work for the Dutch government in colonial Java in the 1920s, contrasting the warmth of human communication with the new, mechanistic medium by which voices are conveyed. As such, the paradox is immediately apparent; by making the connection, the distances are magnified. The words of both mother and daughter try to navigate this delicate balance. Mass Transmission features Scott Dettra at the Mander Organ of the Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill, with Kevin Vondrak on electronics.
Credits:
Album artwork by Christopher St. John
Recording Session Producers Paul Vazquez, Donald Nally and Kevin Vondrak
Project Keyboards John Grecia and Chuck Foster
Guest Keyboards John Conahan, Tim Lambert and John Walthausen
Recording Session Engineer Paul Vazquez
Assistant Recording Session Engineer Codi Yhap
Editing, Mixing, and Mastering Paul Vazquez
Acknowledgements:
Ways You Went was made possible through the generous support of Carol Westfall. Self-Portraits 1964, Unfinished was commissioned by The Crossing, Donald Nally, conductor, and PRISM Quartet with generous support from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Musical Fund Society.
Guest Artists:
The Crossing (choir), Donald Nally, conductor with PRISM Quartet, Scott Dettra, organ
Record Label / Catalogue Number:
Navona NV6648
Release Date:
September 20, 2024