Release Date: January 13, 2017
Catalog #: NV6068
Format: Digital & Physical
21st Century
Chamber
Solo Instrumental
Flute
String Quartet
Violin

The Passing Sound of Forever

The Chamber Works Of Jane O’Leary

Jane O’Leary composer

Sound and space are two elements that emerge at the heart of Jane O’Leary’s THE PASSING SOUND OF FOREVER. The collection showcases O’Leary’s compositional gifts through a variety of her chamber compositions. O’Leary’s string writing soars in THE PASSING SOUND OF FOREVER, and demonstrates her remarkable sensitivity to the instruments’ sonic palette and expressive potential. Every color, from ethereal natural harmonics to frenetic bowing, is at O’Leary’s disposal, and is exploited beautifully to produce evocative and compelling soundscapes.

O’Leary is imaginative and creative in her string writing, resonating the instruments’ strings in a wide variety of ways. Harmonics and arpeggiations create vast open spaces.  In the case of A Winter Sketchbook, violin sounds are integrated with those of the alto flute, matching colors and creating new blends of sound. A Winter Sketchbook resonates profoundly as it casts the indelible image of deep winter.

THE PASSING SOUND OF FOREVER’s title track is composed for string quartet, which makes it a shining and exemplary representation of O’Leary’s expressive string writing. The Passing Sound of Forever, originating from a motif found in a Beethoven quartet, plays with fragmentary gestures which emerge and disappear, echo and reflect. The work is filled with a deep yearning, which is communicated by the accumulated gestures and sounds of the quartet’s four string instruments. The Passing Sound of Forever epitomizes O’Leary’s unique ability to evoke vivid emotions from the simplest aspects of string instruments’ sound.

Not every work on THE PASSING SOUND OF FOREVER features strings, but all seem to engage with the same themes of space and sound. O’Leary’s clarinet and piano duo Murmurs and Echoes, for example, creates the sense that its two instruments are communicating across great time and distance, most notably so in its last movement.  When their respective gestures mirror one another’s, they do so with the distortion of an echo crossing a vast space. In this way, Murmurs and Echoes reminds of A Winter Sketchbook, as both works use modest forces to generate a surprisingly resonant musical space.

Listen

Hear the full album on YouTube

Stream/Buy

Choose your platform

Artist Information

Jane O’Leary

Composer

Born in Hartford, Connecticut (1946), Jane O'Leary studied piano from an early age,graduated from Vassar College and completed a PhD in composition at Princeton University, where she studied with Milton Babbitt among others. In 1972 she moved to Ireland and has made her home in Galway on the west coast. A founding member of Aosdána, Ireland's state-sponsored academy of creative artists, she was awarded an Honorary Doctor of Music Degree by the National University of Ireland in 2007.