Studio recording of "Back Porch Requiem for John Fahey" by Luke Gullickson, included on the new CD "American Vernacular: New Music for Solo Piano" by pianist Nicholas Phillips.

Available from iTunes, Amazon, and New Focus Recordings
www.nicholasphillips.net

"Back Porch Requiem for John Fahey" by Luke Gullickson

Live recording from MM degree recital. 
Auer Hall, Indiana University, April 2002.
Nicholas Phillips, piano

Schubert, Sonata in B-flat Major, D.960 I. Molto moderato

Karnavalito No. 1 is inspired by the distinctly Andean concept of mestizaje, as championed by Peruvian folklorist José Maria Arguedas (1911-1969), whereby cultures can co-exist without one subjugating another. Allusions to the rhythms and harmonies of the mountain music of my mother’s homeland of Perú abound in this boisterous work, albeit freely transformed in the blender of my personal imaginations. Karnavalito No. 1 is dense in its virtuosity, with stylistic nods to the Hungarian composer Béla Bartók, a music hero of mine. - notes by Gabriela Frank
Panoramic Recordings (PAN901). Release date, March 1, 2019.

Shift

Karnavalito No.1

Based on the poem “Carpet Weaver” by Brenda Najimian Magarity, Aghavni (“Doves”) follows the lives of a group of women before (1910) and during the Armenian genocide (1915), closing with a retrospective look at those women and what they lost from a “present day” perspective (1986).
Panoramic Recordings (PAN901). Release date, March 1, 2019.

Aghavni (I. 1910, II. 1915, III. 1986)

Reunion Ibis is from the Extinction Series – a collection of small one to six-minute miniatures written for both vocal and instrumental soloists. Each movement is a musical obituary to an extinct animal on the ever-growing extinction list. The concept for this compositional constraint was developed in 2014, and is an indeterminate and likely never-ending work, as the list of extinct animals is already daunting, and it continues to add members yearly. The sheer volume of the series is a commentary on mankind's carelessly destructive tendencies and manifest destiny attitude towards other living creatures on this planet. With this thought in mind, the composer has chosen to embark on a piece that can never be completed without the necessary reversal of our outlook on the environment and our impact on it. - note by Whitney George
Panoramic Recordings (PAN901). Release date, March 1, 2019.

Reunion Ibis from "Extinction Series"

One of the most fascinating raags I have yet encountered in my study of Hindustani music is Raag Basant. Basant means ‘spring’ in Hindi, but it couldn’t be further from the Western conception of the season. Against a canvas of chirping birds and pastel colors, Basant feels dark and exotic, rendered in bold colors, and winding through passages of sinewy chromaticism.

The piece starts with large dense chords that change one note at a time, until they find their way slowly into Basant. This is followed by an excerpt from a short Hindustani composition (called a bandish) in Basant, stylized and notated to accommodate the sonic possibilities of the piano. This bandish builds and eventually which vanishes back into the dense chords, only to have a little bit of Basant bleed through at the end. The title of the piece comes from an iconic Hindi film, “Rang De Basanti” (which literally translates to “Give it the color of Saffron”). Instead of giving this piece the color of saffron, I wanted to “color” it with the aesthetic of Raag Basant. - note by Reena Esmail

Panoramic Recordings (PAN901). Release date, March 1, 2019.

Rang De Basant

La Intervención is a piece about the moment when you gather your strength and decide to talk to a special person to tell them something needs to change in their lives.  Something intense happens in someone else's life and this is the moment that follows what happens after that.  It's a piece about the strategies that you use in talking to that person who's in a very different state of mind.  The considerations of tone, subtlety, directness and compassion that one has to contemplate in this situation. There's profound despair and sorrow but also a sense of relief and inexplicable calmness. - note by Angélica Negrón 
Panoramic Recordings (PAN901). Release date, March 1, 2019.

La Intervencion

White Piece 2, a quiet rapture, is my response to H.D. (Hilda Doolittle)’s poem The Whole White World, (1921). The poem palpitates with excitement and anticipation which I animate musically by creating a breathless, oscillating sextuplet (ii6/4 – i5/7) in the left hand. A melodic line soars over it, through it, under it and over it again, suggesting a fundamental key but never resolving to it, perpetually aloft. The B-C-D-C-B turning motive is embedded in the fabric of the music and is heard throughout. - note by Libby Larsen
Panoramic Recordings (PAN901). Release date, March 1, 2019.

White Pieces No.2 by Libby Larsen

In the Midst. When I first thought about what kind of piece this would be, a mental image appeared that stayed with me throughout my writing process. I imagined myself in the concert hall following Van Cliburn’s legendary performance of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 at the International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow in 1958 – the resonance of the concerto lingering, the chords ringing in the air, the emotional energy expanded by Van Cliburn still palpable and the legacy of the performance imprinted onto the hall, the audience and history. As I was creating my own soundworld, I found myself in the midst of this energetic reverberance, filtering musical fragments of the concerto through my own compositional voice and reimagining the music as a tribute to all the great performances that leave behind an emotional imprint on the listener. In the Midst is a remembrance, a celebration and an appreciation of an extraordinary musical life forever in our midst.  In the Midst was written for Van Cliburn gold medalist, Stanislav Ioudenitch in memory of Van Cliburn and premiered by Ioudenitch on April 4, 2014 at the Van Cliburn Tribute Concert. - note by Ingrid Stölzel 
Panoramic Recordings (PAN901). Release date, March 1, 2019.

In the Midst

I have a quasi-religious relationship to Chopin’s Ballades. If I stumble on one of them unexpectedly–on the radio, in a hotel lobby, or walking past a pianist’s practice room–I have to stop and sit down. Years ago, I communed with the Ballades to such a degree that now I almost fear them. Of all the Ballades, I was most affected by the Fourth. I’d read that Chopin wanted this piece to have a “sickly, creepy” feeling, which reminded me of an interview I’d read with Thom Yorke in which he’d said the goal of Radiohead’s “OK Computer” was to make the listener feel “emotionally nauseated.” In both cases these characterizations struck me as poignantly apt; there is a point at which introspection can feel vertiginous. I'm not sure I shared this artistic objective for this piece, but I kept thinking about it as I was writing it. Because of this, and in homage to the many technical and structural features of Chopin’s Ballades that inspired the writing of this piece, I decided to call it Ballade. - note by Sarah Kirkland Snider

Panoramic Recordings (PAN901). Release date, March 1, 2019.

Ballade

Beethoven Piano Sonata in E Major, Op.109
Performed by pianist Nicholas Phillips
www.nicholasphillips.net

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