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Stuart Saunders Smith: A River Rose

by Airi Yoshioka

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1.
Hearts: I. The Disembodied Heart 01:40
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2.
Hearts: II. Passage To Heaven 01:23
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3.
Hearts: III. Physical Love 01:43
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4.
Hearts: IV. Alcoholism - The Broken Heart 01:31
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5.
Hearts: V. A Couple Having A Picnic And Watching The Clouds Go By 02:34
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6.
Hearts: VI. Humor - The Light Heart 00:41
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7.
Hearts: VII. Palindrome - The Shape Of The Heart 02:17
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8.
Three for Two: I. Across the Kennebec 02:18
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9.
Three for Two: II. The Forks 01:16
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10.
Three for Two: III. Caratunk 02:19
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11.
A Gift for Bessie 10:14
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12.
Minor 04:51
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13.
A River Rose: I. 02:45
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14.
A River Rose: II. 03:10
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15.
A River Rose: III. 01:40
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16.
A River Rose: IV. 02:43
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17.
A River Rose: V. 03:01
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18.
I've Been Here Before: I. 13:56
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19.
I've Been Here Before: II. 01:02
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about

Music for Violin

Stuart Saunders Smith (b 1948) describes himself as "a confessional composer who focuses on revealing in his music the most personal aspects of his life, in the belief that the revelations of the particular speak to the universal." These six works feature the violin, unaccompanied and in a chamber context, and span four decades of compositional activity.

Minor (2001) and Hearts (2004)－the unaccompanied violin works on this album－offer a Janus-faced comparison of two interrogatory paths. Minor is unifocal, a soliloquy that delves into and elaborates upon a singularity. Hearts, on the other hand, is a series of miniatures that articulates a complex idea by moving from perspective to perspective, like a photographer trying to capture a sculpture by taking pictures of it from many angles.

Both works, though, evince the characteristics of Smith's compositional language: free atonality, occasional nods toward the extended triadic harmonies of avant-garde jazz, the intuitive use of pitch cells, and registral displacements that create implied counterpoint and compound melodies within single lines.

The four chamber works on this album－Three for Two (1972), A Gift for Bessie (1971), A River Rose (2005), I've Been Here Before (2008)－rely to varying degrees on elements of what Smith calls "music of coexistence"－ music where each performer's material is set, but its deployment in time in relation to other performers is not fixed. (Smith has sometimes referred to this practice as writing parts without a score.)

The scores for these works do not appear to be especially complex－they look similar to his conventional solo and chamber scores－but by adjusting the synchronic relationships of the performers, Smith creates sounding objects that are breathing, vivid, and complex beyond the confines of intellectualism.

credits

released June 1, 2014

Airi Yoshioka, violin; Sue Heineman, bassoon; Lee Hinkle, percussion; José “Zeca” Lacerda, percussion; Maria Lambros, viola; John Novacek, piano

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New World Records Brooklyn, New York

Anthology of Recorded Music, Inc., which records under the label New World Records, was founded in 1975.

We are dedicated to the documentation of American music that is largely ignored by the commercial recording companies.

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