Instrumentaion: Percussion

FLEETING REALMS is an inviting compilation of chamber music featuring six composers. Though the album obviously mixes different compositional voices, the different pieces share many characteristics. FLEETING REALMS is defined by a pervasive uplifting quality. Many of the album’s works feature driving rhythms and a joyfully relaxed sensibility. Even dissonance is used playfully or as a counter weight to beautiful lyricism. Such consistency in manner across six pieces by six diverse composers is obviously remarkable, and it makes FLEETING REALMS a very special musical collection.

A potent representation of Australian composer Bruce Crossman’s music, LIVING COLOURS is inspired by his strong spirituality and eclectic, multicultural interests. Both overtly and subtly, Crossman’s music seems to embody the expansive geography of Oceania. To this end, the works on the album draw explicitly on the native music of other Asia-Pacific cultures – particularly the Philippines, Korea, and China – and feature vast musical spaces that seem to symbolize the great distances that separate Australia from its neighbors. In his own words, Crossman describes his desire to evoke a “resonance of space” with his music, which arises from a “deep-felt emotion and sensibility linking heaven and earth.”

Navona Records presents RIPPLES, a collection of contemporary works from composers Mathew Fuerst, Heath Mathews, Bill Pfaff, Sally Reid, and William Thomas McKinley, that showcase percussion alongside either a pianist, saxophonist, or chamber ensemble, exploring the textures and tonal colors possible within each instrument combination.

The Navona Records debut from chamber-jazz group Douglas Detrick's AnyWhen Ensemble features composer and trumpeter Douglas Detrick's ten-movement suite, The Bright and Rushing World, commissioned by Chamber Music America. This work, which George Grella called "impressively clear, inventive and compelling," (Big City Blog, 2.4.14) is not a pastiche of styles, but a thoughtfully-constructed hybrid of music with a unique and personal sensibility inspired by sources as diverse as Duke Ellington, Gil Evans, Benjamin Britten and Igor Stravinsky.

Santa Barbara-based composer Emma Lou Diemer (b. 1927) is a fixture in the Californian classical music community, having received commissions and performances from orchestras and ensembles throughout the state and worked throughout her career to advance the musical community.

Mexican composer Juan Sebastián Lach Lau's music presents an amalgam of technology and sound without self-prescribed historical justification. With subtle influences ranging from Stockhausen, Cage and the New York avantgarde of the 50s, up to Satie, dub music and Thelonious Monk, Lach Lau's music blends programming and algorithmic generation with traditional instruments, creating diverse, unique works that define their own aesthetic.

Meditative yet propulsive. Structured yet sprawling. Gossamer yet muscular. Inspired yet meticulously constructed. METHOD MUSIC by Lawrence Ball is all of these and more, a double album of highly adventurous electronic music by a master innovator of algorithmic composition.