Composer William Brittelle has shared the full score for and story behind "Forbidden Colors," the fifth track from his new album, Spiritual America, out now on Nonesuch/New Amsterdam Records.
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Albums
One of the most astonishing records of 2019 has slipped under many radars, likely because it’s hard to describe, categorize, and explain.
For contemporary classical artists, metadata is not just an abstract consideration.
A striking blend of orchestral and goth music, this album is a slow-burner that is equal parts heart wrenching, sexy, and meditative.
“William Brittelle – Spiritual America – Wye Oak, Brooklyn Youth Chorus, Metropolis Ensemble/Andrew Cyr (New Amsterdam/Nonesuch; due May 3, 2019)”
Ignorance and persistence and willful belligerence. Working really hard and I would say treating it like it was my career before I was making any money. Giving it the same amount of time and investing in it as if it was my full time job until it was.
“Wye Oak, The Brooklyn Youth Chorus, and Metropolis Ensemble join together to perform a song-cycle written by composer William Brittelle, and a Wye Oak piece reimagined by Brittelle, on Spiritual America, due out May 3 via Nonesuch. The first single from the project, “Forbidden Colors,” places Jenn Wasner’s vocals over a multilayered chamber orchestra piece.”
For this world is too ___ for you, Emily Wells works in the space between art-pop and neoclassical chamber music using electronic and acoustic instruments and hip-hop production in elegant layers to support her singular and dramatic vocals.
Emily Wells’ This World Is Too ____ For You is a gorgeous orchestration of how “too much” we can feel the world, life, or a person is within our sphere.
Discovering Well’s music feels like finding Narnia on Spotify. I keep returning to the trove of music trying to unpack all the little bits all the while worried that I’m going to miss the larger picture.
“Violinist, singer, composer and producer Emily Wells confirms the release of her forthcoming album.”
William Brittelle’s Spiritual America has drawn from classical music, punk rock, and electronica to produce music that is at once free-ranging and a thrill to experience.
You remember your ancestors who have passed away. But bangsokol also gives hope to people who are still alive … It’s good to not only think about death, but also about the living.
The Metropolis Ensemble community is delighted to congratulate our good friend Timo Andres on being named Pulitzer Prize finalist in the music category for “The Blind Banister”, a piano quintet written for Jonathan Bliss. This three-movement piece inspired by Beethoven takes listeners on a beautiful quest in which they rise and fall with the music’s ascending and descending scales. (Pulitzer.org)
Andres has been a close collaborator with Metropolis Ensemble since 2009. In 2013, Metropolis Ensemble’s studio album Home Stretch, released on Nonesuch Records, paired the title work with two Metropolis-commissioned works from Andres: a recomposition of Mozart’s “Coronation” Piano Concerto and “Paraphrase on Themes by Brian Eno”.
Stay tuned for exciting news about future plans for next season with Timo Andres and Metropolis…
About The Blind Banister
Like when the light goes out on the stairs and the hand follows—with confidence—the blind banister that finds its way in the darkness.
Andres’ concerto, which debuted in Saint Paul, Minnesota in November 2015, is the first concerto of pianist Jonathan Biss’ latest Beethoven project, Beethoven/5, for which the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra has commissioned five composers to write new piano concertos, each inspired by one of Beethoven’s five piano concertos.
Andres describes his piece saying, " Beethoven gave his early second piano concerto (‘not one of my best’, in his own estimation) a kind of renovation in the form of a new cadenza, 20 years down the line (around the time he was working on the Emperor concerto). It’s wonderfully jarring in that he makes no concessions to his earlier style; for a couple of minutes, we’re plucked from a world of conventional gestures into a future-world of obsessive fugues and spiraling modulations. Like any good cadenza, it’s made from those same simple gestures—an arpeggiated triad, a sequence of downward scales—but uses them as the basis for a miniature fantasia.
“My third piano concerto, 'The Blind Banister,' is a whole piece built over this fault line in Beethoven’s second, trying to peer into the gap. I tried as much as possible to start with those same extremely simple elements Beethoven uses; however, my piece is not a pastiche or an exercise in palimpsest. It doesn’t even directly quote Beethoven. There are some surface similarities to his concerto (a three-movement structure, a B-flat tonal center) but these are mostly red herrings. The best way I can describe my approach to writing the piece is: I started writing my own cadenza to Beethoven’s concerto, and ended up devouring it from the inside out.”
Mr. Dorman lets his Baroque influence run wild. The works are concise three-movement forms in the standard configuration, but he has not entirely removed the rhythmic complexities that drive his other works.
It may seem surprising to hear that Vivian Fung, born and raised in Edmonton, has built an international reputation as a classical music composer that has led her to a commissioned orchestral work for the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, as a way of introducing its 2015 season in September. But there it is. Fung knows no bounds, nor does her compositional groove.
Nina Simone's creepy-while-somehow-soothing voice is a perfect paint for the canvas that the string-heavy beat provides.
The angular melody, dissonant background strings and Simone’s nervous, vibrato-laden voice establishes a menacing presence.
It manages to balance its weird orchestra breakdown with a rather contemporary beginning and ending.
Metropolis Ensemble joined The Roots on May 20, 2014 for a live performance on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon to celebrate the Philadelphia hip-hop group’s newly released album “…And Then You Shoot Your Cousin,” which also features Metropolis artists and conductor Andrew Cyr. The performance, bathed in all white, included the album’s trip-hop “Never” with Canadian DJ A-Trak, Black Thought, Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, and Raheem DeVaughn.