American Composers Orchestra Releases Third Digital Album

American Composers Orchestra (ACO) has announced the release of its third digital album, Orchestra Underground: X10D. Following the March 2011 release of the orchestra’s inaugural digital album, Playing It UNsafe, and the February 2012 release of Emerging Composers Series: Vol. 1, this new album features live recordings of music performed by ACO between 2006 and 2008 as part of Orchestra Underground, ACO’s cutting-edge orchestral series at Carnegie Hall’s Zankel Hall, and recorded later. By making available never-before-recorded orchestral music, ACO goes beyond the concert hall, reaching new listeners and gaining greater exposure and visibility for the composers it showcases on its recordings. In fall 2012, ACO will release its fourth digital album – a collection of multimedia works featuring both audio and video.

Orchestra Underground: X10D (X10D stands for “extended”) explores the extremes that become possible when featured soloists play atypical – in some cases bizarre – instruments with the orchestra. The album includes Keeril Makan’s Dream Lightly for electric guitar and orchestra, with Seth Josel as soloist; Evan Ziporyn’s Big Grenadilla featuring the composer on bass clarinet; composer/baritone saxophonist Fred Ho’s When the Real Dragons Fly!; Ned McGowan’s Bantammer Swing featuring the composer as the contrabass flute soloist; and Neil Rolnick’s iFiddle Concerto featuring Todd Reynolds as soloist on a “cyborg” violin.

Three of these pieces explore and gather their power from the extreme low register. Evan Ziporyn demonstrates the virtuosic possibilities of the bass clarinet, integrating his own ideas with influences ranging from Balinese Gamelan to jazz to Stravinsky, in Big Grenadilla. Fred Ho makes “real dragons fly” in a tour-de-force and call-to-action for baritone saxophone and orchestra that combines Chinese folk song with an avant-jazz perspective. Perhaps the most unusual instrument on this album is the seldom-heard contrabass flute, an instrument that, in the hands of Ned McGowan, is capable of everything from near breathless calm to driving bass riffs that propel the orchestra forward.

The other two works on the album partner electric instruments with the orchestra. Keeril Makan’s Dream Lightly features the electric guitar of Seth Josel. There are no amped-up power chords here, only the most delicate and ethereal of guitar harmonics, making the piece an almost anti-concerto. Finally, Neil Rolnick, a pioneer in electronic music, introduces us to the cyborg-fiddle he created with soloist Todd Reynolds, an instrument that seamlessly takes us from flashy Pagagini-esque pyrotechnics to cyberspace.

Each of the five pieces was commissioned and premiered by ACO for Orchestra Underground, its entrepreneurial ensemble and concert series at Carnegie Hall’s Zankel Hall that seeks to re-invent and re-imagine the orchestra with unusual instruments, eclectic influences, new collaborations and technologies, and important new compositional voices.