Composer Christopher Cerrone Announces New Album On In A Circle Records

The warm, resonant and rhythmic music on The Arching Path is inspired by Cerrone's travels to Italy and composed between 2010 and 2016.

By: Mar. 05, 2021
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Composer Christopher Cerrone Announces New Album On In A Circle Records

In a Circle Records will present composer Christopher Cerrone's latest album, The Arching Path. A follow-up to Cerrone's 2019 GRAMMY-nominated The Pieces that Fall to Earth, The Arching Path is a piano-driven, electro-acoustic album of chamber music featuring pianist Timo Andres, percussionist Ian Rosenbaum, soprano Lindsay Kesselman, and clarinetist Mingzhe Wang. The warm, resonant and rhythmic music on The Arching Path is inspired by Cerrone's travels to Italy and composed between 2010 and 2016. The album was produced by longtime Cerrone collaborator, Mike Tierney, who also worked on The Pieces that Fall to Earth.

According to program notes by Jennifer Gersten, "The works on The Arching Path examine how we metabolize place-not an attempt to inscribe experiences exactly, but rather to chronicle their aftershocks long after we have returned home." Featured on the album are:

-The Arching Path, a virtuosic piano solo inspired by the vertiginous arcs of the Musmeci Bridge in Potenza in Southern Italy.

-Double Happiness, an electro-acoustic duet for piano and percussion featuring field recordings of the Umbrian countryside

-I Will Learn to Love a Person, a set of love songs adapted from poetry by Tao Lin sung by Lindsay Kesselman (who is also featured on The Pieces that Fall to Earth) and,

-Hoyt-Schermerhorn, an ambient electro-acoustic piano solo inspired by a subway stop where Cerrone has spent many a night of his commute.

Gersten continues: "Cerrone's longtime fascination with sound as a dynamic object-how it can transform not only as it is being produced, but also after it has been released-finds an analogue here in the process of remembrance. His writing situates the ensemble itself in the act of recollection, with voice, percussion, winds, and piano aping each other in pitch, dynamics, and timbre. These pieces propose a more sensuous approach to cartography, one whose contours account for how a place seeps into the mind."

As Cerrone puts it: "This album is a collection of pieces written over the last ten years memorializing essential moments in my life, performed by some of my closest friends and collaborators. Part of the joy of the project has been creating an album that goes far beyond the replication of live performance and instead becomes an object all its own, where recording, editing, and mixing techniques are as essential to the process as composition. I'm particularly thrilled to be collaborating with In a Circle Records, who have a long history of releasing works that cross the boundaries of classical music and other genres."

In a Circle Records was established in 2008 by Johnny Gandelsman, GRAMMY-winning producer and violinist. In Fall of 2020 ICR released Falling Out of Time, a major new composition from MacArthur Fellow, Osvaldo Golijov, written for and performed by the Grammy award-winning Silkroad Ensemble. Other recent releases include original music recorded for Ken Burns & Lynn Novick's highly anticipated film, Hemingway (March 26th, 2022), Brooklyn Rider's GRAMMY-nominated Healing Modes, and two albums from Johnny Gandelsman featuring the complete solo works for violin and cello by JS Bach.

For more information on the artist and complete liner notes to The Arching Path, please visit: https://cerrone.bandcamp.com/album/the-arching-path

Christopher Cerrone (b. 1984) is internationally acclaimed for compositions characterized by a subtle handling of timbre and resonance, a deep literary fluency, and a flair for multimedia collaborations. Recent commissions include a new opera, In a Grove, for LA Opera, a violin concerto for Jennifer Koh and the Detroit Symphony, an antiphonal brass concerto for the Cincinnati Symphony, a piano concerto for Shai Wosner and the Phoenix and Albany Symphonies; a percussion concerto for Third Coast Percussion, and three works for the LA Philharmonic. His opera, Invisible Cities, based on Italo Calvino's novel, was a finalist for the 2014 Pulitzer Prize and his sophomore album, The Pieces That Fall to Earth, was released on New Amsterdam Records in July 2019 to critical acclaim and a GRAMMY nomination. He is also the winner of the 2015-2016 Samuel Barber Rome Prize in Music Composition.

Christopher Cerrone holds degrees from Yale and the Manhattan School of Music, and is published by Schott NY. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife. www.christophercerrone.com.



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