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Playing on the Edge 2
Bruce Babcock composer
Dayton Kinney composer
Roger Fong composer
Daniel Burwasser composer
John Summers composer
Gregory J. Harris composer
Sirius Quartet
PLAYING ON THE EDGE 2 follows up Navona Records' first Gramophone-lauded album in this series for string quartet. Like the first installment, the award-winning Sirius Quartet plays the entire catalogue to perfection.
Bruce Babcock opens the album with Watcher of the Sky, a piece commissioned to celebrate the sesquicentennial of the birth of American astronomer George Ellery Hale. Four movements chronicle the astronomer's achievements throughout the course of his career: the listener follows the rise from humble beginnings to great discoveries, always enveloped in a sense of marvel at the infinity of outer space. The Canary Who Sang by Dayton Kinney is a politically-inspired piece drawing parallels between the historical canaries in coal mines and today's whistleblowers: a musical testament on how one voice can potentially disrupt a larger society.
Happiness, anger, sorrow and joy are the underlying emotions of Roger Fong's Variations on Emotions. Derived from a Chinese saying that it is these emotions that make up life, Fong examines the nature of these heterogeneous sentiments with great accuracy. Daniel Burwasser's Puck's Game is a cinematically illustrative characterization of Shakespeare's mischievous sprite Puck from A Midsummer Night's Dream. Rhythmic and exciting, the work is somewhat reminiscent of Shostakovich, but more light-hearted and humorous.
The first movement of String Quartet by John Summers is a meditation on sound, with thick harmonic layers and long, luscious melodic lines. The eclectic Landscapes by Gregory J. Harris round off the album. Careful to give every note, every idea ample space, the three-movement work exploits the tension between grandeur and intimacy – and the string quartet setup is the perfect conjunction of both.
PLAYING ON THE EDGE 2 is a solid follow-up to the first installment; and since it skillfully continues the thematic arc of the first album, one might well be able to expect a third.
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Track Listing & Credits
| # | Title | Composer | Performer | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | Watcher of the Sky: I. In 1903 | Bruce Babcock | Sirius Quartet | Fung Chern Hwei, violin; Gregor Huebner, violin; Ron Lawrence, viola; Jeremy Harman, cello | 2:37 |
| 02 | Watcher of the Sky: II. Night of First Light | Bruce Babcock | Sirius Quartet | Fung Chern Hwei, violin; Gregor Huebner, violin; Ron Lawrence, viola; Jeremy Harman, cello | 2:49 |
| 03 | Watcher of the Sky: III. 1938 | Bruce Babcock | Sirius Quartet | Fung Chern Hwei, violin; Gregor Huebner, violin; Ron Lawrence, viola; Jeremy Harman, cello | 3:01 |
| 04 | Watcher of the Sky: IV. Palomar | Bruce Babcock | Sirius Quartet | Fung Chern Hwei, violin; Gregor Huebner, violin; Ron Lawrence, viola; Jeremy Harman, cello | 2:57 |
| 05 | The Canary Who Sang | Dayton Kinney | Sirius Quartet | Fung Chern Hwei, violin; Gregor Huebner, violin; Ron Lawrence, viola; Jeremy Harman, cello | 7:32 |
| 06 | Variations on Emotions | Roger Fong | Sirius Quartet | Fung Chern Hwei, violin; Gregor Huebner, violin; Ron Lawrence, viola; Jeremy Harman, cello | 4:17 |
| 07 | Puck's Game | Daniel Burwasser | Sirius Quartet | Fung Chern Hwei, violin; Gregor Huebner, violin; Ron Lawrence, viola; Jeremy Harman, cello | 5:11 |
| 08 | String Quartet: I. | John Summers | Sirius Quartet | Fung Chern Hwei, violin; Gregor Huebner, violin; Ron Lawrence, viola; Jeremy Harman, cello | 10:03 |
| 09 | String Quartet No. 1 "Landscapes": I. Scenes from a Dark Wood | Gregory J. Harris | Sirius Quartet | Fung Chern Hwei, violin; Gregor Huebner, violin; Ron Lawrence, viola; Jeremy Harman, cello | 4:48 |
| 10 | String Quartet No. 1 "Landscapes": II. In the Moon's Wake | Gregory J. Harris | Sirius Quartet | Fung Chern Hwei, violin; Gregor Huebner, violin; Ron Lawrence, viola; Jeremy Harman, cello | 5:48 |
| 11 | String Quartet No. 1 "Landscapes": III. A Wild Wind | Gregory J. Harris | Sirius Quartet | Fung Chern Hwei, violin; Gregor Huebner, violin; Ron Lawrence, viola; Jeremy Harman, cello | 4:53 |
All tracks recorded September 24-26 & October 8, 2019 at Futura Productions in Roslindale MA
Session Producer Brad Michel
Session Engineer John Weston
Assisstant Engineer Jacob Steingart
Executive Producer Bob Lord
Executive A&R Sam Renshaw
A&R Director Brandon MacNeil
A&R Chris Robinson
VP, Audio Production Jeff LeRoy
Recording Sessions Director Levi Brown
Audio Director Lucas Paquette
Editing, Mixing, and Mastering Brad Michel
VP, Design & Marketing Brett Picknell
Art Director Ryan Harrison
Design Edward A. Fleming
Publicity Patrick Niland, Sara Warner
Artist Information
Bruce Babcock
Applauded by Aaron Copland, inspired by Desmond Tutu, and mentored by Hugo Friedhofer and Earle Hagen, Bruce Babcock has spent his working life composing music for the musicians of Los Angeles. Successful in both film and television, and the concert hall, he is known for vibrant, sonorous, expressive pieces that immerse audience and performers alike in an inclusive and exuberant celebration of the musical art.
Dayton Kinney
Dayton Kinney creates music that has won and has been recognized at numerous competitions at the national and international level. Performed in the U.S. and abroad, Kinney’s music concentrates on “transforming the circle… into a spiral.” Through this notion, Kinney explores the limits of ambiguity in thematic material, accessibility, harmony, and form with the goal of striking a balance between the certainty of a circle and the ambiguity of a spiral. Her eclectic style is inspired by juxtapositions and accessibility, exploring the concept of tonal ambiguity through patterns, sectional comparisons, and repetition.
Roger Fong
Since he first encountered a piano, Roger does not just play on it but branches out himself into different music activities.
Daniel Burwasser
Daniel Burwasser, born in New Brunswick NJ, is an American composer who has been writing and playing music since the age of 5. Originally a student of the piano, he eventually progressed to other forms of percussion, including drum set and orchestral percussion. He received his Bachelor’s degree from Temple University, a Master of Arts degree from Rutgers University, and his Ph.D. in Composition from the Graduate School of CUNY. He is a recipient of grants from both The American Music Center and Meet the Composer.
John Summers
John Summers began his professional composing career in 1973, writing music for schools for a touring theater company, where he produced every type of production, from educational musicals for young kids to setting curriculum poetry (Shakespeare, Eliot, etc) to music. This continued until 1977, and in the process, he visited every small and large town in the Eastern states of Australia.
Gregory J. Harris
For Gregory Harris, the process of becoming a composer was one of absorption. By opening himself to soak up an unbounded array of sounds, influences, and genres -- a process he began formally at age 6, with piano lessons at his grandfather’s bench -- he has lived a life of near-constant immersion in music. His childhood years of youth orchestras, jazz band, chamber music and piano recitals led to writing music for some of the small ensembles he played with. The first time he heard one of those ensembles play a piece of his music, the experience supercharged his passion for composition.
Sirius Quartet
Sirius Quartet combines exhilarating repertoire with unequaled improvisational fire. These conservatory-trained performer-composers shine with precision, soul and raw energy, championing a forward-thinking, genre-defying approach. Since their debut concert at the original Knitting Factory in New York City, Sirius has played some of the most important venues in the world, including Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall, the Beijing Music Festival, the Cologne Music Triennale, the Beethoven-Haus Bonn, Stuttgart Jazz, Musique Actuelle in Canada, the Taichung Jazz Fest — Taiwan’s biggest jazz event — and many others.
Notes
People have been asking me (well, one person has), why have you been chosen to compose a piece in celebration of the sesquicentennial of the birth of astronomer George Ellery Hale? And who was Hale?
George Hale, born in 1868, founded Kenwood, Yerkes, Mount Wilson and Mount Palomar Observatories. He also built the largest telescope in the world four times – the 40-inch refractor at Yerkes, the 60-inch and 100-inch at Mount Wilson, and the 200-inch at Mount Palomar. Among many other achievements. (To learn more, check out the documentary film www.journeytopalomar.org by Todd and Robin Mason.) My family has been connected to George Hale and his legacy since 1893.
Kenwood Observatory, built by Hale's father for George, age 12
In 1893, at age eleven, my grandfather Harold Delos Babcock attended the Columbian Exposition of 1893, also known as the Chicago World's Fair. There he saw the then world's largest telescope, the 40-inch refractor, on display, built by Hale, then 25.
The Yerkes 40-inch refractor at the Chicago World's Fair
In 1909, Harold was hired by Hale to join the staff at Mount Wilson Observatory near Pasadena, which was founded in 1904. Harold remained on the staff for 40 years. He then continued his observations of the sun at the Hale Solar Lab, Hale's private solar observatory in San Marino, for another 15 years. During World War One, Harold performed defense work for the National Research Council, for which Hale served as chairman of the organizing committee and first chairman of the council itself.
My father, Horace Welcome Babcock, graduated from Caltech (founded by Hale) and earned his doctorate at UC Berkley. My parents met while Horace was working at Yerkes Observatory, the home of the 40-inch refractor Harold had first seen in 1893. Horace joined the staff of Mount Wilson in 1946. He became Director of the Carnegie Observatories in 1964 and remained so until his retirement in 1978.
Yerkes Observatory
As early as 1903 Hale had begun to anticipate the creation of a major observatory in the Southern hemisphere. Under my father's direction, the Carnegie Observatories established the Las Campanas Observatory in the southern Atacama Desert of Chile in 1969.
The 60-inch telescope at Mount Wilson
The 100-inch telescope at Mount Wilson
The 200-inch telescope at Mount Palomar
The Magellan Telescopes at Las Campanas
In 2004, at the Caltech memorial event for Horace, I met Todd and Robin Mason, who were working on their documentary of the life of George Ellery Hale, "Journey to Palomar," eventually shown on PBS. Todd, in addition to being a documentary filmmaker and Juilliard-educated composer, has been creating digital images of what the GMT will look like when complete in a few more years. Harold gave me the Columbian half-dollar you see at the top of this post in 1961.
Bruce and Harold Babcock
— Bruce Babcock
Brought into the coal mines caged, canaries were used to warn the people around them that danger was imminent. The birds’ songs and chirps would sound in these dark, manmade echo chambers. Their silent deaths would bring a final warning to the coal miners that the suffocating danger was imminent, prompting the miners to run for their safety. Through their sacrifice, these birds saved many miners from deadly catastrophes. The Canary Who Sang is an allegorical comment on today’s political climate of how a single voice can disrupt, challenge, and change opposing and unrelenting forces of power to create a hopeful future for change.
Inspired by women’s voices and stories from the Me Too movement, I was drawn to composing a piece for the early whistle-blowers whose stories and reports are often not told or silenced. Through the choice of medium, references, sonorities, and its opening theme, The Canary Who Sang follows the narrative of a young girl coming forward as a force of power tries to stomp and stifle her voice. Through her bittersweet return of her canary-theme, a sense of hope is potentially on the horizon.
— Dayton Kinney
Through a so-called theme and four variations that follow, this little piece hopes to depict how four emotional states – happiness, anger, sorrow and joy – can be captured and displayed. The combination of the above states comes from a Chinese phrase, which simply means the different emotions that we have in our lives.
In the theme, two simple lines stem out from the violin and cello part. They are not that dissonant, but when the other two parts come it, the music starts to go tweaky and bumpy in terms of its smoothness. Some tremolos at the end reveal tensions, showing palpitations before the music closes and proceeds into the 1st variation.
The 1st one is simple and direct, symbolizing happiness, perhaps some Classical style there. It is straight forward, casually sprinkled with interesting scales and vertical harmonies. The G# interjections from second violin open up the anger part in the 2nd variation. Highly dissonant, the second violin (finally) gets its chance to do its “melodic” part but never too pleasant – irritating enough. Those angry tremolos come at the end and the music fades into the sorrow part, led by viola.
The melancholic 3rd variation is directly delivered from the viola, with sentimental phrases, accompanied with harmonies in 7th and 9th spaced distantly. It looks to the distance and sighs. Weighty grievances are sensed at the end of the variation, only with the cello picking up at the 4th variation that joy returns. Cello leads the 4th variation, not explicitly happy but with some subtlety that eventually turns into a pleasant smile.
The pizzicatos come out, eventually tutti from all part. Well, negative emotions always linger and ponder on us not far away as the final phrase remind us. But let us hope for the best and that is the end of some brief glimpses on our emotions.
— Roger Fong
Puck’s Game is inspired by the actions of Shakespeare’s mischievous sprite, Puck, the fairly-like jester from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The music reflects Puck’s playful and restless nature through leaping gestures, frolicking motives and restless rhythmical figures. While there is a moment in the work when Puck exudes a more tender side, his truly impish nature quickly returns at the conclusion of the piece.
— Daniel Burwasser
The string quartet featured on Playing on the Edge 2 was completed in 2018, and is characterised by a first movement where melody and structure are shared equally by all the players; a second movement of stark contrast where the 1st violin solos over an ostinato figure shared by various combinations of the other instruments, and a third movement which talks constantly between the players.
For “Landscapes,” I wanted each movement to evoke an environment or setting into which the listener would be carried through several scenes, each with its own emotional terrain. I sought to create a strong tactile quality to the imagery, for example, where the listener not only hears the cry and laughter of the wind, but also feels it whooshing upon their skin. All of the material is derived from the melodic and rhythmic motifs introduced in the first couple of minutes.
— Gregory Harris
