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The title of this recording has multiple meanings for its composer, Larry Polansky (b. 1954). These are the generations… is a translation of the Hebrew title for the second work on the program, Eleh Tol’d’ot, the first words of the thirty-fifth verse of the first book of the Torah. Beyond referencing Polansky’s Jewish heritage, the phrase reflects this particular collection of works on several levels. The compositions included stem from different generations of Polansky’s musical output: Some were composed in the 1980s while he was teaching at Mills College in Oakland, California; some while living in New Hampshire when he was a Professor of Music at Dartmouth College; and others are recent compositions completed in Santa Cruz, California, around the time of Polansky’s retirement from the University of California, Santa Cruz.

The performers on the recording are similarly of different generations. Some have known and worked with Polansky since the 1980s or earlier; others are much younger and began working with him as graduate students within the last few years. Moreover, some of these works use some form of algorithmic composition while others use more conventional approaches to composing music. In some pieces, the musicians themselves must enact some kind of procedure to generate the sounds or structures they are to play.

New World Records is offering a variety of special offers and discounts on both the New World and New World/CRI catalogs. Take advantage today.

New World Records celebrates the rich history of American composers, and is also proud to have produced the premiere recording of The Mother of Us All, Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson''s 1947 opera about Susan B. Anthony.

New World Records is offering a variety of special offers and discounts on both the New World and New World/CRI catalogs. Take advantage today.

The music of Jordan Dykstra (b. 1985) reawakens in me a primal fascination with the simultaneity of sound. Because of the inventiveness of its compositional strategies, the music inspires a sense of open possibility, of something yet to come, of something yet not quite with us. Dykstra has a creative impulse, shared with many experimental composers, of not wanting to repeat in one piece what he has done in another. Each work seems to begin with a moment in an empty space. When I listen carefully before each piece on this disc starts, I have a keen sense of that space. It must contain an echo of the moment just before Dykstra started writing the piece: that moment when anything can happen. — Michael Pisaro (from liner notes)

New World Records is offering a variety of special offers and discounts on both the New World and New World/CRI catalogs. Take advantage today.

The James Johnson family of Jacksonville, Florida, was exceptional in many ways: They were middle class, educated, and had been free since before the Civil War. The father was a minister, and the mother, Helen, was Florida’s first black female schoolteacher. It was into this setting that their two remarkably talented and determined sons were born....

... “Lift Every Voice and Sing” is a truly great work, and an impromptu one: In January 1900 James Weldon Johnson, principal of Jacksonville, Florida’s segregated Stanton School, was casting about for student assembly ideas to celebrate Lincoln’s birthday. Johnson decided to write a poem for the occasion. Then a better idea occurred...

[New World Records has two recordings of Lift Every Voice and Sing: an arrangement by William Grant Still, as well as the only recording of the original 1900 score—and only recording of the complete piece—performed by the Paragon Ragtime Orchestra. This article is adapted from the liner notes for Black Manhattan Vol. I, and Black Manhattan Vol. III, by Rick Benjamin.]

New World Records is offering a variety of special offers and discounts on both the New World and New World/CRI catalogs. Take advantage today.

Chris Brown’s (b. 1953) compositions Some Centre (2019) and First Light (2016), performed with such assured lucidity and subtle shading by the three members of The Chromelodia Project, engage with significant precursors in music and in literature, drawing upon their words and innovations, their insights and adventurous spirits while, in the process, transporting those uncompromising benefactors to a different frontier. Brown makes songs from poems by Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) and Jackson Mac Low (1922–2004), and his settings make use of the 43-tone tuning system devised by Harry Partch (1901–1974).

Beyond being a cycle of songs, Some Centre is a multi-faceted drama of attentive engagement and imaginative transformation. It invites us to take a fresh look at Emily Dickinson through its refractive lens, just as First Light offers a new perspective on Jackson Mac Low. Both compositions place Harry Partch in unfamiliar and revelatory light, illustrating the value of his original thinking and independent spirit as a resource for composers breaking their own chosen ground.

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Wrestling with the notion of balancing both formal construction and creative spontaneity has allowed Scott Fields (b. 1952) to compose a powerful body of work with ties to extramusical concerns from the realms of literature, philosophy, and science. Seven Deserts (2019), rather than operating from a fixed narrative structure with predetermined events, lays out the ground rules for a manifestation that is absolutely identical in every performance in its operations and sonic vocabulary, but with each realization completely unique in internal detail and musical interaction. Improvisation fleshes out the structure yet also embeds itself in the musical foundation to help determine the overall shape. The conductor is improvising to the same extent that the individual players are and may set forces in motion, allow them to work, and then, based on the results, initiate the next iteration.

New World Records is offering a variety of special offers and discounts on both the New World and New World/CRI catalogs. Take advantage today.