account
basket
Challenge Records Int. logo
Idle Fancies

Gwendolyn Dease

Idle Fancies

Format: CD
Label: Bridge
UPC: 0090404945427
Catnr: BRIDG 9454
Release date: 01 April 2016
1 CD
 
Label
Bridge
UPC
0090404945427
Catalogue number
BRIDG 9454
Release date
01 April 2016
Album
Artist(s)
Composer(s)
EN
DE

About the album

This exceptionally beautiful recording presents Paul Lansky's complete music for solo marimba, performed by the young marimba virtuoso, Gwendolyn Dease. The composer writes: "One of the highlights of my life as a composer occurred when I got an email from Gwendolyn Burgett Dease pointing me to a video of her wonderful performance of "Idle Fancies". Her performance of the piece was so excellent that it took me quite a while to lift my jaw from the floor." Ms. Dease returns the compliment giving the listener performances that are bouncy and seductive.
This exceptionally beautiful recording presents Paul Lansky's complete music for solo marimba, performed by the young marimba virtuoso Gwendolyn Dease.

Artist(s)

Gwendolyn Dease (marimba)

Gwendolyn Dease is currently associate professor of percussion at the Michigan State University College of Music. Dease is passionate about educating the next generation of young musicians. She regularly gives master classes at universities throughout the US and abroad and is currently on the faculty at the Brevard Music Center. She has served on the faculty for the Filarmonica Joven de Colombia and the Interlochen Arts Camp. Dease began her musical career very early, studying piano and violin at the age of two. As a percussionist, she has maintained a career as an active solo, chamber, and orchestral musician. She has performed solo and chamber recitals throughout the United States, Asia and South America. Dease is passionate about new music and...
more
Gwendolyn Dease is currently associate professor of percussion at the Michigan State University College of Music. Dease is passionate about educating the next generation of young musicians. She regularly gives master classes at universities throughout the US and abroad and is currently on the faculty at the Brevard Music Center. She has served on the faculty for the Filarmonica Joven de Colombia and the Interlochen Arts Camp.
Dease began her musical career very early, studying piano and violin at the age of two. As a percussionist, she has maintained a career as an active solo, chamber, and orchestral musician. She has performed solo and chamber recitals throughout the United States, Asia and South America. Dease is passionate about new music and has participated in consortium’s to commission new works from composers such as Alejandro Vinao, Peter Klatzow, Paul Lansky, Martin Bresnick, John Serry and Roshanne Etezady. She is currently principal percussionist with the Lansing Symphony Orchestra and the Brevard Music Center Orchestra. She has also performed with the Detroit Symphony, Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra, the Moscow Chamber Orchestra, the Solisti New York Orchestra, the Grand Rapids Symphony and the Traverse Symphony Orchestra. In January of 2012, Dease was a recipient of the Michigan State University Teacher Scholar Award. She was the winner of the Keiko Abe Prize at the second World Marimba competition in Okaya, Japan, and the top prize winner at the National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts’ ARTS competition. She was awarded the performer’s certificate from the Eastman School of Music and has also been the recipient of the Outstanding Young Musician award from the Peabody Conservatory and the Yale Alumni Award.
Dease released her first solo CD in October of 2007 entitled “Marimba Suites” on the Blue Griffin label. She released her second solo CD “Boomslang: New Works for Marimba” on the Blue Griffin label in the fall of 2012. Her third solo CD “Idle Fancies” was released on the Bridge Records label in December of 2015.
Dease has studied with world-renowned professors Robert van Sice, Keiko Abe, and John Beck. She holds degrees from the Interlochen Arts Academy, Eastman School of Music, Peabody Conservatory, and the Yale School of Music.
less

Composer(s)

Paul Lansky

In his 2011 James Baldwin Lecture for the Center for African American Studies at Princeton, Paul Lansky quipped that his career had been spent “trying to make dumb computers sing.” He has succeeded in not just that, but also in defining an entire generation of composition. Most often he has made machines sing familiar songs: American folk tunes (on the album Folk Images, 1995), blues harmonica (“Guy’s Harp,” 1984) and guitar riffs (“Blue Wine,” on Folk Images), rap dialogues (“Idle Chatter,” 1985), conversations with his wife (“Smalltalk,” 1990), and the cacophony of his kids clearing the dinner table (“Table’s Clear,” 1990). Throughout his 40 years writing computer music (along with the necessary software to create it), Paul has never foresworn the human...
more

In his 2011 James Baldwin Lecture for the Center for African American Studies at Princeton, Paul Lansky quipped that his career had been spent “trying to make dumb computers sing.” He has succeeded in not just that, but also in defining an entire generation of composition. Most often he has made machines sing familiar songs: American folk tunes (on the album Folk Images, 1995), blues harmonica (“Guy’s Harp,” 1984) and guitar riffs (“Blue Wine,” on Folk Images), rap dialogues (“Idle Chatter,” 1985), conversations with his wife (“Smalltalk,” 1990), and the cacophony of his kids clearing the dinner table (“Table’s Clear,” 1990). Throughout his 40 years writing computer music (along with the necessary software to create it), Paul has never foresworn the human element. His pieces “create a nostalgic ache in that they almost capture events which are, in reality, gone forever,” as the composer himself explains. The computer serves as but a microscope, a tool to examine—and ultimately to celebrate—the essential flesh and blood of music as of life.

There has been and will continue to be enormous, sincere, and utterly unique feeling in Paul’s music. His is an art that reflects the sadder consolations of life, but also keeps a rueful distance from them, clinging at times to a state that might be likened to childlike wonder, were not the harmonies so luxuriant, the resonances so haunting.

Born in 1944 to a recording engineer father and a politically progressive mother, Paul was named for famed African American bass Paul Robeson, and grew up in the Crotona Park neighborhood of the South Bronx. He attended the High School for Music and Art in Manhattan, whose school song is half-remembered in “Looking Back” (1996). Paul went on to receive an undergraduate degree from Queens College, where he pursued composition and French horn. He received his graduate degree from Princeton, studying with Milton Babbitt and Earl Kim, and joined the faculty in 1969. He retires as the William Shubael Conant Professor of Music.

One of his most notable early works, “mild und leise” (1973), harbingers a basic compositional preoccupation: The piece (and its title) references Richard Wagner’s music drama, Tristan und Isolde. Something old, something borrowed becomes something entirely new as Paul transforms the hoary harmonies of Wagner’s “Tristan” chord into something fresh and unusual, using an IBM mainframe with one megabyte of memory. He has influenced and been influenced by pop art, cinema, and animation. Auto-Tune derives from his technological innovations. Radiohead would not have been Radiohead without him, certainly not the album Kid A, which quotes “mild und leise.”

Paul’s setting of poetry by Thomas Campion (1979) as read by Paul’s wife, Hannah McKay, inaugurated his embrace of language itself as at once likewise freighted with past associations, possessing sematic meaning, and also as pure syntax to be reconstructed in the present by an active listener. The process of speaking and listening and understanding underlies a series of works: “Idle Chatter,” “just_more_idle_chatter” (1987), and “Notjustmoreidlechatter” (1988). There are mesmeric sequels about numbers and letters and the domestic menace of dust bunnies.

Since the mid-1990s, Paul has moved to writing for performers and instruments, rather than machines. Among his navigators in the turn has been the ensemble Sō Percussion, long in residence at Princeton. He returned to writing for his own instrument as well, writing an award-winning trio for horn, violin, and piano (“Etudes and Parodies,” 2005), and even produced a string quartet indebted to 17th-century counterpoint (“Ricercare Plus” 2004). In 2008, the Alabama Symphony premiered his concerto, Imaginary Islands, the culmination of his tenure as the inaugural composer-in-residence. While there, he worked with elementary school children. “I never thought I’d have a rapport with fifth graders,” he observed.

His aesthetic shift from computer to instrumental music was detailed in a 2008 feature piece in The New York Times. But the new means is being put to the same ends. Paul’s entire oeuvre is united by a single concern, which he himself has elegantly and succinctly described. “I view my work as a constant attempt to ‘get it right,’” he explains, “to find and express the implicit music within me rather than within an instrument or machine.” That integrity has marked his tenure at Princeton, during which as chair he directed the building of the new Woolworth Center of Musical Studies. This was his architectural achievement. His greater, artistic achievement is the cosmos of sound that he has brought to life in his humble home studio and offered up, with equal modesty, for listeners here, there, and everywhere now and evermore.


less

Press

Play album Play album

You might also like..

Un milagro de fe | A Miracle of Faith
Border CrosSing
Solos & Duos
Various Artists
Metamorphoses, Book I and II
Marcantonio Barone
Project Fusion
Project Fusion
Angles
Various Artists
Piano Sonatas
Kevin Gorman
Visca L'Amor
Isaí Jess Muñoz
Dream Catcher
Bjarke Mogensen
New England Trios
Joel Pitchon
A Lad's Love
Brian Giebler
American Gifts
Jack Van Geem and Nancy Zeltsman
Space Between Heaven and Earth
Various Artists