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Shades

Sean Friar composer
Joan Arnau Pàmies composer
Nicholas Cline composer
Gala Flagello composer

Jeff Siegfried saxophone
Sean Friar piano

Release Date: January 19, 2024
Catalog #: RR8096
Format: Digital
21st Century
Avant-Garde
Solo Instrumental
Piano
Saxophone

Saxophonist Jeffrey Siegfried explores new possibilities for his instrument’s dynamic and versatile voice on SHADES from Ravello Records. The title work, Shades, composed by Sean Friar, is a dark and capricious piece, pairing bursts of musical complexity with unsettling stillness. The album also includes Candlewood by Gala Flagello, water-witching by Nicholas Cline, and Λήθη – επιβεβαίωση – ἀλήθεια [Homage to C.P.] by Joan Arnau Pàmies, all of which were composed specifically for Siegfried. The works are inspired by the natural and supernatural worlds; Siegfried aims to express the ineffable through saxophone techniques like multiphonics, which require careful control of the embouchure, fingering, and air-pressure. The resulting music is hauntingly beautiful and deeply compelling.

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Track Listing & Credits

# Title Composer Performer
01 Shades Sean Friar Jeff Siegfried, saxophone; Sean Friar, piano 11:27
02 Λήθη - επιβεβαίωση - ἀλήθεια [Homage to C.P.]: I. “Parker-truth” Joan Arnau Pàmies Jeff Siegfried, saxophone 0:17
03 Λήθη - επιβεβαίωση - ἀλήθεια [Homage to C.P.]: II. Lethe I Joan Arnau Pàmies Jeff Siegfried, saxophone 5:05
04 Λήθη - επιβεβαίωση - ἀλήθεια [Homage to C.P.]: III. “Colored emptiness” Joan Arnau Pàmies Jeff Siegfried, saxophone 2:44
05 Λήθη - επιβεβαίωση - ἀλήθεια [Homage to C.P.]: IV. Ovum Joan Arnau Pàmies Jeff Siegfried, saxophone 0:44
06 Λήθη - επιβεβαίωση - ἀλήθεια [Homage to C.P.]: V. “Souls for whom a second body is in store” Joan Arnau Pàmies Jeff Siegfried, saxophone 1:10
07 Λήθη - επιβεβαίωση - ἀλήθεια [Homage to C.P.]: VI. Lethe II Joan Arnau Pàmies Jeff Siegfried, saxophone 1:57
08 Λήθη - επιβεβαίωση - ἀλήθεια [Homage to C.P.]: VII. “Bow anchors out, the sterns rest on the beach.” Joan Arnau Pàmies Jeff Siegfried, saxophone 3:48
09 water-witching Nicholas Cline Jeff Siegfried, saxophone 13:05
10 Candlewood Gala Flagello Jeff Siegfried, saxophone; Sean Friar, piano 8:16

Tracks 1, 10
Recorded July 21, 2021, October 9, 2022 at Newman Center for the Performing Arts, Hamilton Hall in Denver CO

Tracks 2-9
Recorded October 16, 2021, October 6, 2022 at Newman Center for the Performing Arts, Recording Studio, in Denver CO
Recording Session Producer & Engineer, Mixing, Mastering Michael Schulze

Photography Nick Zoulek nickzoulek.com

Executive Producer Bob Lord

A&R Director Brandon MacNeil
A&R Danielle Sullivan

VP of Production Jan Košulič
Audio Director Lucas Paquette

VP, Design & Marketing Brett Picknell
Art Director Ryan Harrison
Design Edward A. Fleming
Publicity Kacie Brown

Artist Information

Jeff Siegfried

Jeff Siegfried

Saxophonist

Jeff Siegfried is an artist who takes joy in the wild diversity of the saxophone’s flexible voice. From classical to jazz to klezmer to free improvisation, there are few styles or settings where he doesn’t feel comfortable. He combines a “rich, vibrant tone” (South Florida Classical Review) with “beautiful and delicate playing” (Michael Tilson Thomas) to deliver “showstopper performances” (Peninsula Reviews).

Learn More

Sean Friar

composer, piano

Composer and pianist Sean Friar grew up in Los Angeles, where his first musical experiences were in rock and blues piano improvisation. His music keeps in touch with the energy and communicative directness of those musical roots, now along with an expansive classical sensibility that is “refreshingly new and solidly mature… and doesn’t take on airs, but instead takes joy in the process of discovery [and] in the continual experience of suspense and surprise that good classical music has always championed.” (Slate Magazine).

A winner of the Rome Prize, Friar composes for ensembles within and outside traditional concert music; including orchestra, wind ensemble, chamber ensemble, laptop orchestra, and a junk car percussion concerto. He has been commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Berlin Philharmonic Scharoun Ensemble, American Composers Orchestra, New World Symphony, Alarm Will Sound, Ensemble Modern, Eastman Wind Ensemble, Piano Spheres, Chamber Music America, and the Fromm Foundation, among many others. His music has been featured at festivals including Aspen, Bang on a Can, Bowdoin, Cabrillo, Carlsbad, Gaudeamus, Music Academy of the West, Norfolk, and the Venice Biennale. His album, Before and After, was released in late 2021 on New Amsterdam Records to international critical acclaim.

Friar is Chair of Composition at the University of Denver and previously taught at the University of Southern California and UCLA. He holds a Ph.D. in Music Composition from Princeton and undergraduate degrees in Music and Psychology from UCLA. His principal teachers were Paul Chihara, Paul Lansky, Steven Mackey, and Dmitri Tymoczko.

Joan Arnau Pàmies

composer

Joan Arnau Pàmies is a composer, a multi-instrumentalist, and a performing artist. His music has been described as “beautiful in the Aristotelian sense of proportion and harmony” (Revista Musical Catalana) and “chaotic and elemental yet discernibly balanced” (The New York Times).

Born in Catalonia, Pàmies was introduced to music at a very early age. At home, his father, a professor of Catalan literature, would often play records by Miles Davis, Lester Young, the Academy of St Martin in the Fields, and Glenn Gould. At age three, his mother, a public school teacher, gave him a toy saxophone as a birthday gift. A few years later, Pàmies started learning the piano at a local music school.

Today, Pàmies’s career spans 15 years of highly diverse work, which encompasses chamber and ensemble music, unusual forms of music notation, electroacoustic pieces, live electronics, and free improvisation on multiple instruments. An artist who unhesitatingly walks uncharted aesthetic paths, Pàmies has never been comfortable working within the boundaries of specific musical genres and traditions. For him, music is a liberating space where elements of classical and electronic music, free jazz, modernism, noise rock, and experimental music coexist and can be combined to generate unique results.

Known for their extreme technical demands and complexity, Pàmies’s pieces have been performed by prominent ensembles and soloists, including BCN 216, Chartreuse, Diamanda La Berge Dramm, Ensemble Dal Niente, Ensemble Recherche, Fonema Consort, the JACK and Arditti quartets, Jeff Gavett, Jeff Siegfried, Jessica Aszodi, Joan Martí Frasquier, Kathryn Schulmeister, Kevin Toksöz Fairbairn, Laura Cocks, Liam Hockley, Loadbang, Marc Horne, Miranda Cuckson, Moscow Contemporary Music Ensemble, NO_Input Ensemble, TAK Ensemble, Tessa Lark, Tony Rymer, Uusinta, Vertixe Sonora, and William Lang.

Consistently seeking new outlets to express himself musically, Pàmies started performing as an electronic musician in 2019. That year, he launched Inlet Industry, a pseudonym through which he creates music that mixes elements of ambient, glitch, synth-pop, and techno.

He holds a B.M. from the New England Conservatory of Music and a D.M.A. from Northwestern University.

Nicholas Cline

composer

Nicholas Cline makes music for voices, acoustic instruments, and by electroacoustic means. Deeply influenced by the natural world, Cline’s music draws on a broad range of subjects and experiences with the belief that music reveals, challenges, and shapes the listener’s understanding of the world. Recent projects include collaborating with the The Crossing for a performance and recording of his work, Watersheds, for 24 voices, tenor saxophone, and live electronics.

Cline’s music has been performed by Spektral Quartet, International Contemporary Ensemble, Ensemble VONK, Bienen Contemporary/Early Vocal Ensemble, Northwestern Contemporary Music Ensemble, Jeff Siegfried, Jena Gardner, Square Peg Round Hole, Stare at the Sun, Constellation Men’s Ensemble, and F-Plus. He has presented my music at festivals and conferences in the United States and in Europe, and his work is featured on the SEAMUS electroacoustic miniatures recording series Re-Caged.

Cline has been an artist-in-residence with High Concept Labs and the Chicago Park District. His principal teachers include Hans Thomalla, Chris Mercer, Jay Alan Yim, Aaron Travers, Don Freund, John Gibson, Jeffrey Hass, and Ilya Levinson. Cline studied at Northwestern University, Indiana University, and Columbia College Chicago, and lives in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina with his family and teaches composition and music theory at Appalachian State University.

Gala Flagello

composer

Gala Flagello is a composer, educator, and nonprofit director whose music has been described as “both flesh and spirit, intensely psychological without sacrificing concrete musical enjoyment” (I Care If You Listen). She is the Festival Director and co-founder of the nonprofit contemporary music festival Connecticut Summerfest.

Flagello was selected as a 2023 Composition Fellow at Tanglewood Music Center, a 2022–2023 Composer Fellow at the Gabriela Lena Frank Creative Academy of Music, and a 2022 Composition Fellow at Aspen Music Festival. She was awarded the Musicians Club of Women Gerts and Hammond Award (First Prize, 2022 Composition Competition) and was commissioned by Hub New Music to write The Bird-While, a concerto for Hub New Music and symphonic winds premiered by Michael Haithcock and the University of Michigan Symphony Band in March 2023. Other recent commissions include works for the Albany Symphony, the Virginia Tech Wind Ensemble, the Peabody Essex Museum, the Keene State College Concert Band, the University of Michigan Men’s Glee Club, and the Young New Yorkers’ Chorus. Recent accolades include the 2021 Composer Residency at Promenade Opera Project, first prize in the 2020 Sinta Quartet Composition Competition, and the 2020 Michigan Music Teachers Association Commissioned Composer Prize.

Flagello holds a Bachelor of Music in Composition degree from The Hartt School, a Master of Music in Composition degree from the University of Michigan, and a Doctor of Musical Arts degree from the University of Michigan. Please visit galaflagello.com for more information.

Notes

When we encounter something unexpected and unfamiliar (whether a person on a secluded street or a wild animal on a hiking trail) we are often consumed with feelings of both intense interest and wariness as we try to determine whether it is benign or dangerous. Shades is a dark, capricious piece that tries to capture the essence of these sorts of encounters with an elusive and mysterious figure, one who is only partially visible to us and whose intentions are unknown. Sometimes inviting and other times haunting or menacing, the music tends to move in bursts of complexly interwoven activity followed by unnerving stillness, only later offering us a more unguarded glimpse of itself.

— Sean Friar

In 1923, the philosopher György Lukács published History and Class Consciousness, a book in which he introduced an influential analysis of the Marxist notion of “reification.” For Lukács, reification (German: Verdinglichung; “making into a thing”) is a process that takes place in modern capitalist societies, whereby living, dynamic properties of human interaction become static, alienated objects. Lukács argues that the commodification of social relations under capitalism is such a ubiquitous phenomenon that one can end up wrongly assuming that the capitalist organization of society is an eternal condition of existence. Reification, as a number of leftist thinkers have argued, leads to a significant issue: imagination, trapped in such a reductionistic human experience, is largely unable to project alternative forms of existence outside of the prevailing political economy.

Since the publication of History and Class Consciousness, critical thinkers have argued that art can operate as a means to counteract reification and provide an aperture for manifold phenomenological possibilities. Along this line, the philosopher Martin Heidegger writes that art is capable of “un-concealing” (a-letheia) new “worlds.” For Heidegger, this type of disclosure can lead to the establishment of an ontology through which humans understand themselves in relation to their world. According to the philosopher, this is representative of “truth” or “aletheia.”

The intersection between Lukács’ notion of reification and Heidegger’s “aletheia” is the starting point for Λήθη – επιβεβαίωση – ἀλήθεια [Homage to C.P.], a piece for amplified alto saxophone and prerecorded electronics. This music hopes to foster unknown modes of aural consciousness, not only through the creation of rare sonic structures and materials, but also by engaging the performer in a unique performance practice derived from the particularities of unconventional notational procedures. It is an exercise in “counter-reification.”

Three sources from different musical and literary traditions are employed:
1. An original transcription of Charlie Parker’s solo from the 1953 studio recording of Confirmation
2. The “Kyrie” from Johannes Ockeghem’s Missa prolationum
3. Aeneas’ travel to the Underworld as described by Virgil in The Aeneid

Parker’s transcription of the Confirmation solo operates as the central artifact of the piece. It is treated as an “aesthetic truth” that has lost much of its potency due to the commodification that bebop — a groundbreaking genre originally created by working-class Black musicians — has endured over the past decades. Pitch-set transformations and original contextualizations of melodic trajectories embedded in the solo are the most prominent compositional procedures that stem from the transcription. In this context, Parker’s “confirmation” (επιβεβαίωση; epivevaíosi in the Roman alphabet) represents the foundation upon which new aesthetic truths may be built. Nihil novi.

Ockeghem’s Missa prolationum and Virgil’s The Aeneid are secondary sources of inspiration. They both suggest antiquity and the relentless pursuit of truth that humans have sought since the origin of our species. In particular, the mensural relationships from the Kyrie of Missa prolationum provide an excellent source of numerical data for the development of virtually endless temporal proportions. Furthermore, the use of Virgil’s description of the Underworld in The Aeneid emphasizes the etymological connection between the Heideggerian notion of “aletheia” and Lethe, one of the five rivers of the Underworld. As told by Anchises, Aeneas’ father, the dead who are meant to return to earthly life must drink the water of the Lethe in order to forget their past lives:

“Souls for whom
A second body is in store: their drink
Is water of Lethe, and it frees from care
In long forgetfulness.”

One would humbly hope that this piece, in its multifaceted nature, leads to the attainment of a modicum of freedom, perhaps so that the collective disorientation we endure — this seemingly perpetual bath in the waters of historical oblivion — vanishes and is replaced by the disclosure of new, fairer worlds.

— Joan Arnau Pàmies

The dowser offers a system of decision-making in which there is no demonstrable connection between the process of seeking and the anticipated outcome. A twitching rod, a swinging pendulum indicates, “dig here.” Often those who turn to this ancient practice of magical divination do so not out of a belief that it will work, but that it must. A dry well is a crisis. “Water witching,” as it is known in rural America, is a way of coping with one’s “environment under conditions of uncertainty and anxiety.” The water witch — like the hydrogeologist — is concerned with imagining underground flows of water. The basic materials of water-witching are saxophone multiphonics: fleeting acoustic phenomena that require subtle control of embouchure, fingering, and air-pressure. They are unstable and unpredictable sonorities that float between harmony and timbre. Water-witching wanders through this acoustic terrain. Frictions emerge from this “in-between-ness.” Stillness is filled with tension through the hint of something just below the surface. Water-witching was written for and in close collaboration with Jeff Siegfried and is dedicated to my mother and the memory of her father.

— Nicholas Cline

Candlewood (2021) was commissioned by Jeff Siegfried for his album, SHADES, which features themes of nature and the supernatural. This piece sits at the intersection of those two concepts by exploring the inherited mythology of Candlewood Lake, one of multiple supposedly haunted places in my hometown. Candlewood Lake is manmade, Connecticut Light and Power having seized the town of Jerusalem through eminent domain to be filled with water, turning a large valley into a lake for hydroelectric power to support five surrounding towns. The idea of this underwater town fascinated and terrified me as a child, and the lore of the lake was whispered from child to child as I grew up. Some say if you dive down far enough, you can touch an old church steeple. Some say they never moved the bodies that were in Jerusalem’s cemetery before the valley was flooded, so they’re still down there, ready to float up with just the wrong jostle of a boat motor on the surface. Candlewood musically weaves these tales of the lake, examining how a story transforms over time and how that story might transform us, the ones who inherited it decades ago.

Thank you to Jeff Siegfried for his constant support of contemporary music, his friendship, and his extraordinary playing.

The Legend of Candlewood Lake

You’re a child — constant fun, constant adventure, exciting days at the beach. Occasionally the seaweed or the sand or a rock covered in algae bother you, but you’re hanging out with your friends and your parents are right there, so you’re unconcerned. Lackadaisical. Carefree. Intrepid.

But the adventurousness sparks stories of the deep parts of the lake. You learn what “man made” means, and nobody will tell you why they did it, but they flooded a town. There’s a whole town down there. Did the people get out before they started pouring the water in the valley? The older kids tell you no. The people had to run for their lives, leave their clothes and books and cars and houses and flee, out of the valley, up the mountain. Mountain. That’s why the lake is so deep, they tell you. You can dive down and touch the church steeple (so watch out when you cannonball off Chicken Rock that you spring right back up. Your feet could touch anything if you sink down too low). Someone claims they’ve seen the steeple themselves — there’s a big old cross, and they could make out the roofs of nearby houses, too.

And then they start talking about the graveyards. “Did you know they didn’t move the bodies before they flooded the place?” they ask conspiratorially. “They’re all still down there.” Church Steeple Kid says they saw the headstones too. Another commandment to pop right back up after diving in or you’ll come face-to-face with a decayed body. Someone says they were preserved in the ground underwater, and sometimes, with all the boats and people swimming, a body’ll get shaken loose and float slowly to the top.

Oh, it’s happened dozens of times, they just keep it quiet, otherwise no one would swim here again!

Then why are we swimming here?

Well it doesn’t happen that often…but we know the truth.

You’ll be fine as long as you stay near the surface.

And don’t get tangled in the seaweed either! That stuff catches little trinkets when they float up — old children’s toys, maybe even valuable jewelry.

So do people go treasure hunting down there?

Definitely. There’s tons of stuff left down there — an old car, gold, money — they just can’t bring it all up.

Or if they already have, it’s sold by now.

But you may have to fight the dead bodies for it!

And the ghosts of the people who couldn’t escape in time are still down there, guarding their houses, waiting for their friends and family to come back to them. And if you go down there and they see you, they’ll make you stay with them forever. Keep them company.

Until their town is whole and above the surface once more.

— Gala Flagello