Cikada Ensemble, cond. Christian Eggen
Live at Sound of Stockholm 2013 Festival

Henrik Strindberg - One Pen, performed by the Cikada Ensemble

Full title: "Waft: piano prelude in the form of a double bass in the rain for airports" is an homage to Chopin, Satie and Eno and is a musical dialogue with Chopin's Piano Preludes, Satie's musical sense of play (Three Pieces in the Form of a Pear etc.) and Brian Eno's Music for Airports as well as his other ambient music. Waft is constructed from the available natural overtones playable on the double bass - indeed a version composed for solo double-bass was premiered in NYC at Merkin Concert Hall in the winter of 2005 by renowned bassist Robert Black on the same concert series - The Hartford Commissions - as was this piano version. Both versions were composed while I was in residence at the Artists' Enclave at I-Park in the fall of 2004.

This recording, by Canadian pianist Megumi Masaki, was captured during a rain storm in 5.1 in Millard Auditorium at The Hartt School, University of Hartford in June 2019. We placed some mics near a noisy drainpipe near the fly tower and grid.  It was subsequently edited mixed, with some additional electronic sustain extension/manipulation, in 5.1 and stereo in Studio Alpha at Visby International Centre for Composers (VICC) in Gotland, Sweden in Sept. of 2019.

Waft

Megan Lathan - viola
Mat Nichols - violoncello
Krista Kopper - contrabass

Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is is an intimate, reflective work that plays with the concepts of perspective and memory.  The title comes from a poem by Wallace Stevens:
One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;
And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter
Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,
Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place
For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

Waft

Ken Steen

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