Jason Eckardt is one of the leading American composers of his generation. Undersong is a cycle of works that explores voice of the oppressed in society, constructed around Laura Mullen’s text of the same name. Eckardt says: “The more I thought about the metaphorical implications of the title and its relationship to my music, the richer it became. The shards that comprise much of the music’s surface also came to represent the ‘noise’ that often covers, distorts, or skews a simpler essence that lies below.”

A way [tracing] is a six-minute cello solo tracing a way toward and back from various interpretations of undersong, extremely excited in character, even hectic, introducing a dialectic that will continue throughout the cycle. It is performed by acclaimed cellist Fred Sherry.

The title 16, the composer has explained, “refers to the sixteen words that should have been excised from George Bush’s January 2003 State of the Union address: ’The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.’ In the opening solo, and on into much that follows, the flutist projects consonantal sounds, either directly or into the instrument, as if struggling to enunciate words, words that are perhaps being obstructed, or else words that are not yet fully formed. A spectrum is opened between speech sounds and pure musical tones, through breathy sonorities of more or less distinct pitch, all brought into play through a conjunction of virtuosities from composer and performer.

Aperture picks up from “16” and, varying from flurried activity to sustained sounds, leading toward the next movement.

The Distance (This) opens onto a larger plane, the cycle’s finale plays for almost half an hour, expands the performing group to the scale of a compact orchestra (solo woodwinds and strings, piano, and vibraphone briefly doubling glockenspiel), and brings forward the human voice-not muffled, as in “16”, but overt and lyrical, the voice of a soprano singing the words by Laura Mullen already implicit.

Liner notes by Paul Griffiths.

Undersong (2002-08)
A way [tracing] for cello solo (6:30)
16 for amplified flute and string trio (12:19)
Aperture for flute, clarinet, violin, viola, cello and piano (17:59)
The Distance (This) for soprano and ten instrumentalists (26:39)

Fred Sherry, cello
Claire Chase, flute
Tony Arnold, soprano
International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), Steven Schick conductor