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M​ú​sica Callada / See the Welter

by James Rushford

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Ongoing Box
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Ongoing Box Gorgeous playing, little puzzles of compositions. Lovely work. Favorite track: Música Callada, Book I: Lent.
EAW
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EAW Clicked because my last name's Welter; bought because it's beautiful. Not sure if I saw myself, but I heard exactly what I needed. Favorite track: Música Callada, Book IV: Lento.
The gaye device
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The gaye device These piano compositions are perfect for those moments of stillness and meditativeness. Wonderful and unworldly,it takes my mind away to calm places.
Michael Hix
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Michael Hix Fantastic album of modern classical piano compositions. First half is very enjoyable with slight baroque inflections and crunchy mid-century harmonies. Second half very strong Morton Feldman vibes in the best way.
Giles
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Giles I've loved Mompou's own recording of Musica Callada for years, and I loved hearing these up-to-date and beautifully recorded alternative interpretations. But even more I love Rushford's composition. There's a sense I get in Mompou sometimes that he's being kind of nostalgic but ultra-modern at the same time, and these pieces pull out and amplify that strange, unusual, beautiful mood to create a new and wondrous sound world/meditation. Favorite track: See the Welter, Page 7.
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  • Compact Disc (CD) + Digital Album

    2 CD folding wallet with Tipped-in booklet containing scores and liner notes by Tim Rutherford-Johnson, Michael Pisaro, and James Rushford

    Includes unlimited streaming of Música Callada / See the Welter via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
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about

The imagery of musical forms emptied of earthly meaning, of solitude, and of a connection to the divine were irresistible to Federico Mompou. A desire to be alone had shaped Mompou’s early musical direction: as natural shyness ended his ambitions to be piano virtuoso, after studies at the Paris Conservatoire he turned to composition instead. His approach remained introspective – far removed from the overt and public expressions of the avant-garde, both before and after the Second World War – and pursued a line inwards, towards Catalan traditional music, idiosyncratic technique, and a spiritually clarified instinctivism inspired particularly by Erik Satie. The four books of pieces are considered by some to be Mompou’s masterpiece. Música callada creates a sort of musical negative space, in which presence (of external references) creates lightness, and absence (of formal complexity, of counterpoint, of thematic or harmonic development) creates weight and substance.

Metaphors such as these also lie behind James Rushford’s See the Welter, composed as a companion piece to Música callada in 2016. In See the Welter, Rushford introduces a concept of ‘musical shadows’. The aim is not a recognisable transcription or recomposition of Mompou’s twenty-eight pieces, but a sort of Proustian ‘sieving’, in which memories and sensations – such as finger pressures, resonances and harmonic rhythm – are projected across a new surface, in new forms, and as new memories. Just as a shadow both intensifies and diffuses the form of the object by which it is cast, so Rushford’s piece transforms and scatters the details of Mompou’s collection while intensifying its essence. Compositionally, the piece is the inverse of Mompou’s: a single block in place of a multitude of fleeting impressions; its long shadow. Expressively, however, See the Welter explores the same territory, if seen through the other side of the glass: resonances and absences, silences within sounds, luminosity and intensity, bodies within spaces.

credits

released October 16, 2020

Liner notes by Tim Rutherford-Johnson, Michael Pisaro, James Rushford
Recorded by Anthony Pateras at Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart, July 2018.
Mixed by Joe Talia, Tokyo 2019.
Cover art by Lou Beach, DARWIN (POSTCARDS FROM ’THE BEAGLE’)
Type and layout by D. Norsen
Mastering by Stephan Mathieu
Special thanks to Akademie Schloss Solitude, Pia Borg, California Institute of the Arts, Samuel Dunscombe, Judith Hamann, Lawrence Kumpf, Tommy McCutchon, Manuel Pessôa de Lima, Anthony Pateras, Michael Pisaro, Vicki Ray, Sara Roberts, David Rosenboom, Tim Rutherford- Johnson, Cedric Tai, Joe Talia and Rachel Yezbick.

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James Rushford Melbourne, Australia

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