New Music Friday - Laura Steenberge
Discover the Intriguing Score of Piriforms | Performed by Jess Basta, Julia Holter, Cat Lamb, & Laura Steenberge
Piriforms by Laura Steenberg (2010)
Laura Steenberge released Piriforms - A startlingly beautiful collection of pieces for singing flutist and voices by the American composer and musician Laura Steenberge feauturing close friends and collaborators Julia Holter, Catherine Lamb, Evelyn Saylor, Yannick Guédon, and a special collaboration with Rebecca Lane.
The hand stamped cover is a replication of the original score images for the title composition Piriforms. Sacred Realism is very proud and pleased to bring Steenberge's remarkable music to a wider audience.
"In medieval chant, music seems to have come from elsewhere. It is the angels that are singing, they said, like gourds hung up for purple martins. By the time notation started coming around, hundreds of chants were already hundreds of years old. New chants followed in their footsteps, trying to seem unwritten. In some monasteries, the monks sang for six hours a day. Through the daily toil of reenacting eternity, subtler shapes become audible. Sometimes the angels show up when the consonants are taken away, or some other change is made that renders the language unintelligible. Swedenborg said there are some angels who speak with U and O and other angels that speak with E and I, but that in the center, inmost heaven, language is made of patterns of numbers. The labor required to hear the angels is mundane and physical. Singing for hours a day sounds idyllic but also laborious. Singing for so long in such reverberant spaces, I wonder about the complexity of harmonics, combination tones or whatever other sonic artifacts that the monastic singers gained sensitivity to.
In this collection there is a piece for one performer, a piece for two performers, a piece for three performers, and a piece for four performers. But even in the solo it is about relationships, as the two parts are created with the same breath. The demonic energy is in between things, the sounds cast shadows upon each other."
- Laura Steenberge
