Silkroad Ensemble And Osvaldo Golijov Announce New Album

On October 9th, In a Circle Records will release Osvaldo Golijov's Falling Out of Time, written for and recorded by the composer's longtime collaborators and friends, the Silkroad Ensemble. The group's most recent albums include the Grammy award-winning Sing Me Home and the soundtrack for Ken Burns & Lynn Novick's film, The Vietnam War.

"Silkroad's gorgeous new recording of Osvaldo Golijov's latest creation is not to be missed. This transcendent work achieves a remarkable in-between space, one in which each of us can explore the grief and intimacy that no one lives without. Falling Out of Time is a reminder to pause and listen to all that we have in common." Yo-Yo Ma

Album will be released on October 9th, and is now available for pre-order on Bandcamp.

Rhiannon Giddens, Silkroad's newly appointed Artistic Director described the album like this:

"The first thing I noticed about Silkroad's new recording of Osvaldo Golijov's Falling Out of Time was its beauty. As I listened more, I was struck by how deeply rooted this work is-rooted in places, in people, and in relationships. It's rare to hear something that is at once so personal and so interconnected, so specific and so global."

The seed of this musical project was sown at a 2002 encounter between Osvaldo Golijov and Yitzhak Frankenthal, founder of The Parents Circle, an organization of Israelis and Palestinians who have lost family members to the ongoing conflict. Mr. Frankenthal shared the story of a bereaved father who could not reconcile himself to leaving his dead son and reentering the world of time. For many days he remained at his son's side, at night sleeping upon the grave. Narrating with his actions a story of madness and truth.

The seed found soil 12 years later, when Osvaldo read David Grossman's brilliant, almost unbearable novel about a man who walks, a father who describes with his feet impossible, ever-widening circles, driven to go to his dead son. Part play, part poem, part fable, the book is a journey "out of time" as parents grieve the death of a child, a quest to comprehend a loss beyond words. Osvaldo has conceived this 80-minute tone poem in voices for 13 members of the Grammy-winning Silkroad Ensemble, the collective whose delicacy of musical expression he describes as like "a harp of a thousand hairs." In a form that he calls an "epic lament" and in a voice that draws from the musical and narrative roots of the the ballads of Central Asia and early Delta Blues, Osvaldo gives new expression to the timely notion that, as Edward Hirsch writes in his New York Times review of the book, "Grief is democratic. It crosses barriers and strikes at will."

Osvaldo Golijov says: "When I first read David Grossman's novel Falling Out of Time, I could think of nothing else. I felt I had to set it to music. And I knew the only people who could manifest in sound the infinitely nuanced world of the book are the musicians of the Silkroad Ensemble."

Over the course of 2017-2019, the composition was workshopped at the Juilliard School in NYC, and in the Joyce Contemplative Center at the College of the Holy Cross, where Osvaldo has taught in since 1991. David Grossman described one of the workshops in this way:

"In late January of 2019, I spent three days with Osvaldo and the Silkroad Ensemble in the Joyce Contemplative Center at The College of the Holy Cross. I told the artists gathered there about my son, Uri, who was killed in Israel's war in Lebanon in 2006. His death created this book in me. I named my book Falling Out of Time, and the subtitle of the Hebrew edition was A Story in Voices, because while I wrote I felt that the written work would find its most apt expression when it had a voice. Not only in the reader's internal awareness, but a voice that would be heard outside, in the world. In the Joyce Center's chapel, the book was given that voice. It was granted a new and powerful presence."

Grossman continues: "In this work by Osvaldo and the wonderful Silkroad Ensemble, I heard the voice of human pain and grief laid bare-the scream of an animal. Osvaldo's music reached me from inside, from a place that has no words and can probably be reached only by music. It embodies a distilled expression of bereavement, bordering on a shout-or on the border between a shout and utter silence. Because how can one articulate logical, coherent, human speech when the foundations of logic and proper order, the so-called natural order, the order whereby parents should not mourn their children-have foundered"

He concludes: "Writing this book, and listening to Osvaldo's music being born, taught me something: it is true that no one knows what hides behind the impenetrable wall of death. But there is one place, or rather one dimension, where we can feel, if only for an instant, both the absolute nihility of death and the full abundance of life. And that dimension is art. It is literature and poetry, music, theater and cinema, painting and sculpture. When we are in that place we can sense, concurrently, both the everything and the abysmal void. The negation of life and its affirmation."

Osvaldo Golijov adds: "It so happens that we all are, as a world, living in a moment in which the "natural" order of things has been upended. More than ever, we are in need of stories that help us make sense of the broken pieces."

In a Circle Records' recording of Falling Out of Time will be released on October 9, 2020. Scheduled Silkroad Ensemble performances at the Tanglewood Music Festival, Carnegie Hall and Boston's Celebrity Series have been postponed till the 21'-22' season. ICR's recent releases include Brooklyn Rider's Healing Modes, Sandeep Das & HUM Ensemble's Delhi to Damascus and Christina Courtin's Situation Station. Music from ICR catalogue is also featured in Ward Serrill's film, The Bowmakers, which tells the story of the hope and beauty of the "silent servant" of the music world - the bow.

About the Collaborators:

David Grossman's books have been translated into more than 30 languages, and Grossman is the 2017 recipient of the Man Booker Prize and the 2018 recipient of the Israel Prize for literature.

A recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship and the MacArthur "genius" Fellowship, Osvaldo Golijov has enjoyed collaborations with some of the world's leading chamber music ensembles such as the Kronos Quartet and the St. Lawrence String Quartet, in addition to relationships with artists such as Yo-Yo Ma, Dawn Upshaw, and Robert Spano. In 2000, the premiere of Golijov's La Pasin segn San Marcos (St. Mark Passion) took the music world by storm. The Boston Globe called it "the first indisputably great composition of the 21st century."Golijov has also received acclaim for other groundbreaking works such as his opera Ainadamar and the clarinet quintet The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind, as well as music he has written for the films of Francis Ford Coppola.

Inspired by the exchange of ideas and traditions along the historical Silk Road, cellist Yo-Yo Ma established Silkroad in 1998 to explore how the arts can advance global understanding. Since 2000, the musicians of the Grammy Award-winning Silkroad Ensemble have been central to Silkroad's mission. Representing a global array of cultures, the artists of the Ensemble draw on the rich tapestry of traditions from around the world that make up our many-layered contemporary identities, weaving together the foreign and familiar to create a new musical language. Earlier this year, celebrated singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Rhiannon Giddens was named the new Artistic Director of Silkroad.

As a producer, Johnny Gandelsman's credits include 2 albums with the Silkroad Ensemble and Yo-Yo Ma, the Grammy-winning Sing Me Home (Sony 2016) and Music for The Vietnam War, a film by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick (In a Circle, 2017). Currently, Johnny is producing music for two forthcoming films by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick for PBS.

Among them, the artists and production team on Falling Out of Time have won 13 Grammy awards.

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