Bergamot Quartet - In the Brink All in all, the Bergamot Quartet's debut album successfully presents premiere recordings of new works by their group of top-notch performers. While not all the pieces are equally captivating, Bergamot still creates music with extreme technical skill and intense dedication to the support of new music. In the Brink , the Bergamot Quartet 's debut album, showcases premiere recordings of four works for string quartet. The album features music by mid-career composers Paul Wiancko , Tania León , and  Suzanne Farrin , as well as the titular, four-part work, "In the Brink", by violinist/composer Ledah Finck , a co-founder of the quartet. The ensemble makes a solid attempt to introduce new music into the string quartet's contemporary canon (listen to the album here ). Wiancko's Ode on a Broken Loom  launches off the album with musical narrative of densely weaving threads. Bergamot gets a chance to show off their technical chops and impe...

 Payton MacDonald - Explorations 54 (ALN commissions) MacDonald presents convincing and musically-intelligible recordings, a difficult feat for pieces which hinge on interpretation of graphic scores. Payton MacDonald  is an innovative percussionist and composer who performs and records an awful lot of music. His bandcamp project,  Explorations ,  explores the realm of contemporary improvisation and expression on solo marimba with and without electronics. Explorations 54 , titled accordingly, is the 54th installment in MacDonald's series of full-length albums, and showcases four new works by MacDonald and three other composers. MacDonald commissioned these new pieces when students at the 2021 Arts Letters & Numbers virtual summer workshop offered to compose new works for solo marimba. All four works are focused around the implementation of graphic and other non-standard notational techniques (listen to the bandcamp album here ). Oswald Huỳnh 's  Ngũ Hành ope...

 Kyle Grimm - Compulsion Loops The 'barrage of square waves' employed in the piece allow Grimm to get away with demented musical ideas, while still enabling the audience to comprehend them. Compulsion Loops , composed and performed by Kyle Grimm ,   is a wild and energetic work written for Max/MSP and a Nintendo GameCube™ controller. The work is somehow both lovingly nostalgic and terrifyingly anxiety-inducing. Grimm performs the entire work using just his controller to trigger and change sounds in MAX. I would love if in future performances Grimm hooks up a small hand camera so that we can watch the controller being using in live time. It would increase the amount of interest in watching the performance, almost as if Grimm is literally 'controlling' the music. The 'barrage of square waves' employed in the piece allow Grimm to get away with demented musical ideas, while still enabling the audience to comprehend them. Using relatively simple and recognizable soun...

 Don Freund - Urban Pastorale Urban Pastorale  is yet another work which is unsurvivable in the legitimate musical world, and will hopefully not cause musicians or audiences to suffer through subsequent performances. Urban Pastorale   is an almost thirty-minute long 'symphony' in five movements by composer Don Freund . Freund was commissioned by the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University, where he is also professor of music composition. The work was premiered on March 6 by the IU Symphony Orchestra led by Thomas Wilkins . Freund calls for an incredibly large orchestra, writing for triple woodwinds (with multiple doublings), two saxophonists, four horns, three trumpets (first doubles flugelhorn), three trombones, a euphonium, and tuba. He also writes for quite the menagerie of percussion, calling for four players and a separate timpanist, each in their own sea of instruments, necessitating the first be a steel pan specialist. The expansion of the orchestra give...