August Read Thomas - Thomas: Terpsichore's Box Of Dreams - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

In ancient Greek mythology, the muse Terpsichore, a daughter of Zeus and Mnemosyne, is the goddess of dance and delight. With her in mind, I have sought to sculpt music that allows our individual and collective creative work to turn freely in the air. Terpsichore's Box of Dreams is by turns lively, sprightly, spry, energetic, vigorous, it is animated, traveling, flexible, versatile, changing, fluid and buoyant. While this is not exactly a Inchconcerto for ensemble,Inch each of the thirteen musicians is featured in several soloistic, virtuosic passages. What will pop out of Terpsichore's box next? [Augusta Read Thomas]

I am humbled by this opportunity to compose an octet to celebrate the opening of the Tanglewood Center for Music and Learning. The title MAGIC BOX hopefully captures the lively spirit, exquisite creativity, motion, enchantment and positive energy of the Center. I love composing. In a good way, my nerve endings for sound are always dialed up high - actually, they are on perpetual alert. If I hear one note or chord or if, for example, I play one on an instrument, I get lit up as if electric shock ribbons instantly race from my ears and fingertips to my imagination and then my creativity and craft play high-speed ping-pong! Where the ball is bouncing back and forth 100 times a second. The outcomes are unpredictable to me. I stay absolutely flexible. Everything is malleable, springy, stretchy, coil-able, color-able, twistable, bouncing, zig-zagging, and splinter-able. It feels like I am dancing with contrapuntal flickering sonic lights that accumulate into a spinning pinwheel spawning sound and form. I slide, skate, swivel, and spin with my materials - crafting nuance and finesse - and then I sculpt, shape, chisel, fashion, and form. At the end of all of that, I feel as if the piece wrote me - not as if I wrote the piece! My music has it's own inner life. If I listen carefully, the piece I am composing will tell me what it next needs. (Augusta Read Thomas, transcribed from the Miller Theatre at Columbia University MISSION COMMISSION Podcast interview)

For some twenty-five years I've had the inestimable privilege of collaborating with Augusta Read Thomas, and so it is with some authority that I claim she is a singular refutation of Newtonian physics she creates energy. In countless workshops, recording sessions, performances, and masterclasses I've watched her elicit previously undiscovered timbral nuance, dynamic possibility, and personal virtuosity from players and composers alike. Hers is a creative energy so irrepressible that somewhere amidst the cascade of commissions, awards, and international flights to attend performances of her work she, to mention just two examples, launched Chicago's largest-scale new music festival (Ear Taxi) as well as one of the country's most prolific incubators of new work, The Grossman Ensemble. I'm happy to report that the performances captured within this tracklist provide significant evidence in substantiating this bold claim. To my ears, Sol offers Gusty's compositional luminosity as a collection of rituals for introspection, spiritual stimulus, and, at the very least, a reminder that light can prevail in darkness. Particularly enticing is that when imbibed as a whole, this record shepherds us through an extraordinary ceremony that, as with each of the five rites comprising it, tenders the possibility for subtle yet substantive restoration and, ultimately, transformation. © Doyle Armbrust