BMOP/Sound Releases New Album By Robert Carl

Known as the nation's foremost label launched by an orchestra and devoted exclusively to new music, Grammy Award-winning BMOP/sound today announced the release of Robert Carl: White Heron, led by conductor Gil Rose and performed by the intrepid Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP). Featuring four of the composer's orchestral works, this portrait album concerns Carl's life-long fascination: time and space-concrete, geographical, and metaphorical.

Currently chair of the composition department at The Hartt School, University of Hartford, Carl is a prolific writer penning reviews for Fanfare Magazine and books on 20th and 21st century aesthetics. He was originally a student of history before he refocused his efforts to music. As a result, his music plays with a sense of time and of the past being present. "My work has always been concerned with time. For me, time is a substance both malleable and 'crystallizable,'" explains Robert Carl. "By shaping form in a manner similar to making a sculpture, I have found that I am able to create an ever-broader sense of space in my pieces, even when they are information-rich."

Robert Carl: White Heron opens with the eponymous work inspired by the birds of the Florida Keys followed by the most radical and direct piece on the album, What's Underfoot. Symphony No.5 "Land" comes from the composer's experience driving across the American midland from the Great Plains to the Rocky Mountains. Rocking Chair Serenade celebrates the composer's time spent in a rocking chair both currently in his home, his childhood on a porch in Alabama, and on the site of the piece's premiere in the Appalachian Mountains.

Drawn to the orchestra for its additional dimension to explore in space, Carl hopes that his music creates something of a model for how the listener can cope "with our increasingly fragmented, intense, and vertiginous experience of life today, and find a sense of energizing peace. Above all, I hope this space is one in which the listener can feel freedom and be amplified. If there is exhilaration or a gentle transcendence, then I've done my job."