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    Jerome Kitzke (b. 1955) has described himself as being as much a storyteller as a composer, and that description makes sense. Throughout his music there is a strong dramatic, narrative, theatrical component. Performers shout, sing, move and dance, often as though possessed by the music. An obvious ancestor here is Harry Partch, and though Kitzke’s music does not use just intonation, it projects that “corporeal“ quality that this predecessor valued as essential.

    The pieces on this disc make for intersecting pairings. There are two works for a pianist who vocalizes and produces sound beyond the keyboard (Bringing Roses With Her Words [2009] and There Is a Field [2008]). There are two works that are portraits of individuals. There are two ensemble pieces that are idiosyncratically theatrical (For Pte Tokahewin Ska [2015] and The Redness of Blood [1994–95]). Listening to them in sequence, they begin to feel like a multi-movement work about life that culminates in The Redness of Blood, the longest and most substantial piece of the program.

    On a first hearing, for some more accustomed to the complexities of modernist practice, Kitzke’s music may sound somewhat simple. Conversely, those more used to the open spaces of minimalism, or the grand gestures of neoromanticism, may find the music too mutable as it morphs, quicksilver-like, through an invigorating stream of consciousness. The fact that this music does not fall easily into any “-ism” is a tribute to its individuality, and its strength. Ultimately, the music has the quality of a crazy kaleidoscope, tumbling from one moment to another, the sonic palette constantly refreshed.

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about

There Is a Field (2008) is another piece for a multi-faceted pianist (singing, speaking, playing the instrument both traditionally and percussively). But it is a song cycle, rather than a portrait. It emerged from an experience of Kitzke’s in 2003: Despondent over the advent of the second Iraq war, he saw a poetry poster in the New York subway with a text by Rumi [something of an “only in New York” story], which would give the work its title, and evoked a very real and yet also transcendental “place of peace.” The words were a balm to him, and he filed it away for future use. When Bay Area pianist Sarah Cahill commissioned a work on themes of anti-war and peace, he saw how he could use it in conjunction with three of Walt Whitman’s Civil War poems.

credits

from Jerome Kitzke: The Redness of Blood, released November 4, 2021
Texts by Walt Whitman and Rumi

Sarah Cahill, piano, speaking, vocals, whistling, percussion

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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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