Alan Pierson conducts this premiere recording of Radio Rewrite, which was composed in 2012. Co-commissioned for and recorded by Alarm Will Sound, the title piece references two songs by the English band Radiohead. Nonesuch releases Pulitzer Prize winning composer Steve Reich s album Radio Rewrite on September 30, 2014. Splitting Adams is conceived and realized by Nadia Sirota, Alex Overington, and Alan Pierson, the creative forces behind Meet the Composer and Alarm Will Sound. It’s a story just right for the podcast-plus-album we’ve created here. Along the way, he pulls unexpected inspirations together and pulls Alarm Will Sound into his story. We hear John Adams rethinking his approach to composition, and we hear him reflecting on the journey he has made. The trajectory from Chamber Symphony to Son of Chamber Symphony is perfect for this kind of total-immersion illumination.
Through recorded interviews with the composer, performers, and a historian, we tell the story of the creation of these two seminal works, and of the struggle required to perform them. We’ve made-actually, we’ve composed the conversation to immerse us in Chamber Symphony and Son of Chamber Symphony. Instead, we’re having an on-the-album conversation with you about the music of John Adams while we play the music of John Adams. It does not separate stories about the music from the music itself. Splitting Adams fuses the powerful music of John Adams with the power of podcasts to dig deep and get personal.
Taken together, these performances - part of which were recorded in a video chat during the pandemic - find the composer testing the limits of the ensemble’s imagination and concentration, and paint a wide-angle sonic canvas that is by turns taut, trenchant, and profoundly moving.Īlarm Will Sound has teamed up with New York Public Radio’s Peabody Award-winning podcast Meet the Composer to create a new kind of album.
This pristinely recorded double-disc collaboration with the vaunted chamber orchestra Alarm Will Sound documents two unique works - the stately, still For George Lewis (dedicated to the legendary avant garde trombonist and composer) and the thorny, dramatic Autoschediasms (inspired by the real-time improvisational “conductions” of Butch Morris, with a special nod to Anthony Braxton’s “language music” system). Composer and musician Tyshawn Sorey has been described, in a January 2021 feature for the New York Times magazine, as “arresting a figure in contemporary classical and experimental new music as he is in jazz.” A recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship in 2017, Sorey has carved out his own territory as an artist and thinker whose range of vision, emotion and visceral power has made him a driving and defining force behind a young Black vanguard in new music.