Mary Jane Leach - Celestial Fires (1993)

2019-09-28T15:49:17Z

Mary Jane Leach - Celestial Fires (1993)


1 	Bruckstück 	12:42
2 	Feu De Joie	8:51
3 	Green Mountain Madrigal 	8:44
4 	Mountain Echoes 	11:04
5 	Trio For Duo	10:10
6 	Ariel's Song 	10:50

Chorus – The New York Treble Singers (tracks: 1, 3, 4, 6)
Conductor – Virginia Davidson (tracks: 1, 3, 4, 6)
Vocals – Adrienne Edgar, Arlene Travis, Cynthia Richards-Hewes, Judith Pannill,
  Karen Krueger, Maureen Haley, Nancy Wertsch, Therese McCormick 
+
Bassoon – Shannon Peet (2)
Flute [Alto] – Barbara Held (5)
Voice – MJ Leach (5)

Beginning from simple means -- close harmonies with phasing rhythms --, each of the 6 compositions on this CD gradually blossom in the intricacy of their exquisite movement and sound. Each uses an ensemble of instruments or voices of a similar family, which emphasizes the textural binding -- "Bruchstuck," "Green Mountain Madrigal," "Mountain Echoes" and "Ariel's Song" for 8 treble voices, "Feu de Joie" for solo bassoon and 6 taped bassoons, and the illusionary "Trio for Duo" for live and taped alto flute and voice. Truly beautiful. ---"Blue" Gene Tyranny, AllMusic Review

MARY JANE LEACH is a composer/performer whose work reveals a fascination with the physicality of sound, its acoustic properties and how they interact with space. In many of her works Leach creates an other-worldly sound environment using difference, combination, and interference tones; these are tones not actually sounded by the performers, but acoustic phenomena arising from Leach’s deft manipulation of intonation and timbral qualities: “an acoustic Through the Looking Glass world based on sound that the performer is not making.” ---soundcloud.com

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Mary Jane Leach ‎– Ariadne's Lament (1998)

2019-10-22T13:34:30Z

Mary Jane Leach ‎– Ariadne's Lament (1998)


1 	O Magna Vasti Creta	9:16
2 	Call Of The Dance	9:57
3 	Windjammer	10:12
4 	Tricky Pan	9:33
5 	Ariadne's Lament	8:12
6 	Song Of Sorrows	7:59

New York Treble Singers
Arlene Travis (soprano)
Cassatt String Quartet:
Jennifer Leshnower, Muneko Otani - violin
Michiko Oshima - viola
Kelley Mikkelsen - cello
The Rooke Chapel Choir
David Lee Echelard (countertenor)
Libby Van Cleve (oboe)
Patrick Burton (clarinet)
Klyph Johnson (bassoon)
Virginia Davidson (conductor)
William Payn (conductor)

The music of Mary Jane Leach on this album draws on several sources of inspiration. The first is early music, with its polyphony and modal harmonies. Modal writing, as adapted to twentieth-century thought, focuses on the prolongation of a fixed collection of notes, arranged into either a traditional or an invented scale. Melodies and harmonies are created freely from this collection, without forcing them into highly directional and strongly articulated phrases. The result is a luxurious stasis, with poles of attraction-pitches that serve as points of repose-strongly stated. From modal antecedents, Leach dervices her own unexpected twists and innovations.

The influence of early music is evident in other ways. Like those of the Renaissance, Leach's scores are free of dynamic and expressive markings. Two of the pieces draw their musical material directly from Renaissance works: Ariadne's Lament from Monteverdi, and Tricky Pan from the fourteenth-century poet and composer Solage. The languages Leach sets-early Italian and French, ancient Greek and Cretan-also evoke a sense of connection to a remote past.

In her early compositional work, Leach experimented with recording individual lines on 8-track tape and then accompanying herself. This enabled her to be musically self-sufficient, and also allowed for more intricate textures than she could create with a single-line instrument. Tricky Pan, for solo countertenor and tape, is modeled directly on this technique. Gradually, as her music began to be more widely sought after by ensembles, Leach's fascination with multiple tracks led her to adapt it to live players: The choral pieces on this album all divide the chorus into eight independent parts.

While there is a substantial body of twentieth-century music that delights in the chimerical and the quickly transformed, Leach's music is from the esthetic which favors prolongation, resonance, long statements of subtly varied persistence. In that sense, her music is both easy to follow and mellifluously unpredictable. She has a careful ear for pacing and structural unfolding, often building her pieces to ardent, expressive arrivals. The traditional distinction between consonance, as pillars of stability, and dissonance-unstable moments that must inevitably seek out resolution-is maintained, though she will allow dissonances to flower and persist in ways her predecessors did not. ---Anthony K. Brandt, mjleach.com

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Classical

Mary Jane Leach - Celestial Fires (1993)

Mary Jane Leach ‎– Ariadne's Lament (1998)