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AVM Trailer
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On December 6th, the PRISM Quartet celebrates its 35th anniversary season with the release of its 25th recording, Animal, Vegetable, Mineral, featuring music by Emma O’Halloran, Kristin Kuster, Steven Mackey, Anna Weesner, and Julia Wolfe. With the exception of Kuster's Red Pine, all of the works on the album were commissioned by PRISM.
Click HERE to place an advance order of AVM.
In his liner notes, WNYC’s John Schaefer writes, “PRISM’s ambitious program of commissioning and championing new works for saxophone quartet has produced some wonderful, unexpected connections between pieces and composers. The opening work on this album, Emma O’Halloran’s Night Music, and the closing piece, Cha by Julia Wolfe, come from composers of different generations and different countries. But both, in their own ways, were inspired by the rhythms of Latin music. O’Halloran’s piece and Kristin Kuster’s Red Pine are both examples of tone painting; Wolfe’s Cha and Anna Weesner’s Vamp both have family stories behind them. Only Steven Mackey’s piece, which gives this collection its title, appears to stand alone. But since Mackey is a serial collaborator with PRISM, it’s not hard to connect his work to the entire project.”
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Watch AVM Composers Discuss Their Works
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The Music
Steven Mackey’s Animal, Vegetable, Mineral was inspired by the composer’s love of “steep and deep” skiing. “It is a sensual and exhilarating sport,” he says, “with dire consequences for missteps. Joy and fear commingle as a matter of course.” AVM is preoccupied with downward gestures. In the opening movement, “Jackass,” Mackey explores the change of saxophone timbre “from thin, pinched and oxygen starved in the very high register to robust, thick, and reedy in the low register. This plunging sax gesture reminded me of a bellowing hee-haw.” The opening melodic theme of “Machine” combines quick plunges and more gradual, controlled steps, “like the chatter of an enthusiastic but slightly off kilter machine. As I pursued this image by doubling the melody at an odd interval and adding some growls, an undeniable power-tool persona emerged.” In “Bagpipe,” plunging lines are ornamented with skirling grace notes over drones in 6/8 meter to evoke the music of Mackey's Scottish ancestors.
Night Music is a reflection on a year Emma O’Halloran spent living in Miami in her early twenties and draws from the Latin dance music she heard in clubs. “But I also experienced culture shock, having come from a small town in the middle of Ireland,” she writes. “There were moments when I felt connected to everything around me. But there were other times when I felt like parts of me were slipping away and I would go to the beach at night and listen to the sounds of the ocean.” John Schaefer notes that “a remarkable moment occurs in the piece where the musicians breathe through their horns, evoking the sound of the surf lapping the shore at night. After a pause, the world awakens to a musical sunrise reminiscent of the one in Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloe.”
Red Pine by Kristin Kuster is a sonic depiction of the simple beauty of Ontario's Pinery Provincial Park where she hiked the meandering Wilderness Trail. Schaefer writes, “the ever-shifting combination of very soft, sustained tones among the four instruments seems to evoke the sun poking through branches as they sway in the breeze. The striking finale is a study in changing tone-colors, even when the actual notes remain mostly the same. Though it may not be obvious, the piece is surprisingly virtuosic, requiring pinpoint control of pitch and ensemble playing.”
Composer Anna Weesner wanted to play the saxophone when she was 19. Her father dissuaded her by suggesting that the saxophone was a vulgar instrument. In her words, “he did not feel comfortable with the idea of his young daughter playing the saxophone, an instrument for boys or, maybe, vampy girls.” And so her ambitions went unfulfilled. Vamp is her belated response that explores the beauty and seductive qualities of the instrument, suggesting that, in her words, she “may not yet have come to terms with that old conversation.”
Julia Wolfe’s Cha is dedicated to her father. She writes, “My favorite memory is dancing the cha-cha-cha with my father. We danced together from when I was 10 until sometime into my early teens. It was great fun. As I thought about this way of remembering my dad I began to research the cha-cha-cha, and very quickly realized that our suburban version was hardly like the various Cuban versions with their wild sensuality, polyrhythms, and highly stylized movement. My piece takes the cha cha as a starting point and creates a joyful deconstruction/exaggeration of the style for sax quartet.”
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PRISM Quartet
Hailed by Chamber Music magazine for “pioneering achievements of the highest order,” the PRISM Quartet has performed in Carnegie Hall on the Making Music Series, in Alice Tully Hall with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, and throughout Latin America, China, and Russia under the auspices of the United States Information Agency and USArtists International. PRISM has also been presented to critical acclaim as soloists with the Detroit Symphony and Cleveland Orchestra, and conducted residencies at the nation’s leading conservatories, including the Curtis Institute of Music and the Oberlin Conservatory. Two-time recipients of the Chamber Music America/ASCAP Award for Adventurous Programming, PRISM has commissioned nearly 300 works, many by internationally celebrated composers, including Pulitzer Prize-winners Julia Wolfe, William Bolcom, Jennifer Higdon, Zhou Long, and Bernard Rands; MacArthur “Genius” Award recipients Tyshawn Sorey, Bright Sheng, and Miguel Zenón; and United States Artists Fellow Susie Ibarra. PRISM’s discography includes releases on Albany, ECM, innova, Koch, Naxos, BMOP/Sound, New Dynamic, New Focus, and its own label, XAS Records. The Fifth Century, PRISM’s ECM recording with The Crossing under Donald Nally, was awarded a 2018 Grammy for Best Choral Performance. In 2016, PRISM was named by its alma mater, the University of Michigan, as the first recipient of the Christopher Kendall Award in recognition of its work in “collaboration, entrepreneurship, and community engagement.” The PRISM Quartet plays Selmer saxophones exclusively.
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