This album is my love letter to the bassoon, and to bassoonists, who are the most generous and lovely collaborators. After a decade of commissioning a slew of new solo works, I longed for the collaborative aspect of bassoon ensemble playing. Although this album is realized as a solo project, the idea behind the commissioning of these pieces is to create a deep and varied repertoire for bassoon choir to be performed with myriad voices, and to encourage others to keep adding to this new library. I’m grateful to my bassoonist colleagues who joined me in exploring early premieres of many of these works at the Fridman Gallery in June of 2024 (you can find their names in the thank yous).

My obsession with the sound of multiple bassoons started with the commissioning of the title track from my second album, Metafagote, by Felipe Lara. Written in 2015 for solo bassoon and 6 pre-recorded bassoons and contrabassoons, this richly-textured sound world unlocked something deep in my imagination. While impressive as a solo piece, performing it with seven live bassoons on my album release show, and feeling the vibrations of the overtones of so many bassoons changed me on a cellular level.

Fast forward to a chance meeting with my neighbor, Steve Reich. I had been a huge fan of his iconic minimalist compositional style since my conservatory days, but what are the odds that we would both move into the same building on the Lower East Side of Manhattan within months of one another? We became friendly, then friends, and once the global pause of 2020 hit, I was determined to use my newly minted home recording skills to arrange, then record a version of one of Steve’s iconic Counterpoint pieces, Cello Counterpoint, for solo bassoon with many accompanying bassoons. After lots of back and forth, we came to a version of Grand Street Counterpoint (our Manhattan address) that we both loved, and after a studio recording at Oktaven, Steve and I ended up co-producing the track.

Julius Eastman’s massive epic, The Holy Presence of Joan d’Arc, was a revelation for me. Suggested by my dear friend Marcos Balter to be a perfect companion to the new Reich piece, I was instantly struck by its pulsing, insistent rhythms and stunning harmonic complexity. Originally for 10 cellos, I arranged it for 10 bassoons from a painstaking transcription of Eastman’s 1981 live performance at The Kitchen by cellist and composer Clarice Jensen. The soul of this piece informs the shape and breadth of the whole album, and I feel grateful to be able to commune with Eastman’s spirit through this incredible work of art.

The three following pieces on this album came from close musical collaborations with the composers, and a single prompt from me: what might a bassoon ensemble sound like from your imagination?

I met and began working with Jessie Cox through International Contemporary Ensemble back in 2019. We’d already collaborated on a solo bassoon piece as well as a bassoon duo, and I knew I wanted to include his unique vision for this album. Sonic Cartographies, commissioned in 2021, is a microtonal and multiphonic forest of luxuriously slow-morphing textures and an exploration of many different ways of making sound on the bassoon.

From Jessie: “Sound describes the movement (or the absence thereof) of molecules of air. Usually conceived of as taking place in a container called space, sound brings the shape of a room to our ears and skin. But in this sense, what we call the shape is then simply a set of objects–like walls or other things that reflect sound. What then is the space we’re hearing? What is sound but movement? What is movement but the description of the meeting of things in sound(waves)?”

Fay Victor, a close friend, knows the bassoon up and down from our years of making on-the-spot compositions together in our voice/bassoon duo. I knew her compositional voice would bring a depth and vastness to this instrumentation (eight bassoons), and she definitely did not disappoint with the epic Nurture (for Ingram). In honor of her friend, the late Jazz Musician Ingram Washington, Fay suspends time using warm, static harmonies, rich with overtones, intercut with playful polyrhythms and improvised sections using air sounds and reeds alone.

From Fay: “Ingram Washington was one of my dearest friends…and he died while I was in the middle of writing what would become ‘Nurture.’ This was heartbreaking. Yet, Ingram led a full and rich life that combined peace, fun, an easy prosperity and a no-bullshit way to be in the world. He was so loved because he had all these contours to himself. It was clear that the contours within the composition align with the complex and calm person that Ingram Washington was.”

I met Brittany J. Green through her collaborations with International Contemporary Ensemble and was always drawn to her compositional voice. But it was her piece Thread and Pull (2022), with its devilishly difficult though impressively idiomatic bassoon part, that convinced me to commission her for this project. Righteous Rage began as a cello sketch in conversation with and inspired by Eastman’s The Holy Presence of Joan d’Arc, and evolved through our work together into the pulsing, rhythmic, and raging piece you’ll hear here. Its immediacy, its insistence, its rage spoke deeply to me, especially in this moment of global oppression under the triple evils of white supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism. I feel this fiery and righteous spirit every time I perform it.

From Brittany: “As I enter my mid-thirties, I find myself often thinking of the world I want to leave behind for the next generation and the work that must be done for that to happen. Sometimes I fear my grandchildren won’t know the smell of fresh pine in the fall or the feeling of salty ocean waves crashing at your ankles. I fear that, like me, they won’t know a world free of genocide, where Black and Brown people are free, where love is love, and where gender is looked at as an odd relic of the past. When I lay up at night thinking about these things, the work that must be done, and the oppressive resistance all around us, it angers me. This piece is a reflection of that rage.”