Almanac

Performed live at The Jazz Gallery, May 2, 2019

Featuring Variant 6, Warp Trio, and the Kevin Sun Quartet

IV. Inviting a Friend to Supper - text by Bens Jonson & Franklin
V. The Gardener/Spelt from Sibyl's Leaves - text by Patricia Hooper & Gerard Manley Hopkins
VI. A Catalog of Cliches (for when there's nothing left to say) - text by Jenny Schwartz

Variant 6 - Rebecca Myers & Molly Netter, soprano; Elisa Sutherland, mezzo-soprano; Steven Bradshaw & James Reese, tenor; Daniel Schwartz, bass-baritone

Warp Trio - Mikael Darmanie, keyboards, Josh Henderson, violin, Ju-Young Lee, cello

Kevin Sun Quartet - Kevin Sun, tenor saxophone, Tree Palmedo, trumpet, Walter Stinson, bass, Matt Honor, drums

When I was eight years old, I received the newest edition of The World Almanac and Book of Facts for Christmas. Though it may seem like an odd gift for a child, my favorite books at the time were the Dorling Kindersley World Atlas and my dad’s 30-year collection of the Who’s Who in Baseball. I loved poring over almanacs and memorizing facts, whether flags of the world or U.S. presidents or how many home runs my favorite baseball players hit each year. I can’t say why I would get absorbed in lists rather than stories, but I did, and that penchant for collecting and list-making has carried over into my musical life as well. Like the character Rob Fleming in Nick Hornby’s novel High Fidelity, I could tell an autobiographical story through an arrangement of my CD collection.

Out of this penchant for list-making—musical and otherwise—comes Almanac, an evening-length work for voices and instrumentalists featuring both fixed and improvised sounds. The piece is a musical almanac of sorts, featuring a catalog of diverse texts and musical styles. But the piece also examines an almanac’s dual nature as information compendium and prophetic text. The earliest editions of the Farmers’ Almanac in the 19th century, for instance, featured long-range weather forecasts so farmers could pick the best crops to plant in the coming season. While printed almanacs are likely headed for obsolescence (the Who’s Who in Baseball ceased publication in 2017, for instance), the impulse to compile information in order to predict the future is still immensely strong, whether forecasting athletic performance, election results, or the fate of our planetary climate. Yet with increasingly powerful tools to store and interpret data, our predictions still fail a lot. In response to these failures, computer scientist and information studies scholar Philip Agre writes that “activity in worlds of realistic complexity is inherently a matter of improvisation.” Like its forebears and despite its best efforts, this Almanac fails to predict its own fate. Confronted with both dark prophesies and unforeseen circumstances, the performers improvise.

Almanac - Part 2

Almanac

Performed live at The Jazz Gallery, May 2, 2019

Featuring Variant 6, Warp Trio, and the Kevin Sun Quartet

I. Palette/Inkjet
II. A Patter Song
III. Oystercatchers in Flight - text by Eamon Grennan

Variant 6 - Rebecca Myers & Molly Netter, soprano; Elisa Sutherland, mezzo-soprano; Steven Bradshaw & James Reese, tenor; Daniel Schwartz, bass-baritone

Warp Trio - Mikael Darmanie, keyboards, Josh Henderson, violin, Ju-Young Lee, cello

Kevin Sun Quartet - Kevin Sun, tenor saxophone, Tree Palmedo, trumpet, Walter Stinson, bass, Matt Honor, drums

When I was eight years old, I received the newest edition of The World Almanac and Book of Facts for Christmas. Though it may seem like an odd gift for a child, my favorite books at the time were the Dorling Kindersley World Atlas and my dad’s 30-year collection of the Who’s Who in Baseball. I loved poring over almanacs and memorizing facts, whether flags of the world or U.S. presidents or how many home runs my favorite baseball players hit each year. I can’t say why I would get absorbed in lists rather than stories, but I did, and that penchant for collecting and list-making has carried over into my musical life as well. Like the character Rob Fleming in Nick Hornby’s novel High Fidelity, I could tell an autobiographical story through an arrangement of my CD collection.

Out of this penchant for list-making—musical and otherwise—comes Almanac, an evening-length work for voices and instrumentalists featuring both fixed and improvised sounds. The piece is a musical almanac of sorts, featuring a catalog of diverse texts and musical styles. But the piece also examines an almanac’s dual nature as information compendium and prophetic text. The earliest editions of the Farmers’ Almanac in the 19th century, for instance, featured long-range weather forecasts so farmers could pick the best crops to plant in the coming season. While printed almanacs are likely headed for obsolescence (the Who’s Who in Baseball ceased publication in 2017, for instance), the impulse to compile information in order to predict the future is still immensely strong, whether forecasting athletic performance, election results, or the fate of our planetary climate. Yet with increasingly powerful tools to store and interpret data, our predictions still fail a lot. In response to these failures, computer scientist and information studies scholar Philip Agre writes that “activity in worlds of realistic complexity is inherently a matter of improvisation.” Like its forebears and despite its best efforts, this Almanac fails to predict its own fate. Confronted with both dark prophesies and unforeseen circumstances, the performers improvise.

Almanac - Part 1

Composer, drummer, and lover of megamixes. I write music that lives in a netherworld between contemporary classical and improvised music traditions.

New tracks tagged #third stream?