Acknowledgments This recording is supported by the American Music Center’s CAP Recording Program, made possible by endowment funds from the Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust and with funds from the Alice M. Ditson Fund of Columbia University. Additional support was provided by numerous gener- ous individuals, to whom Laura Kaminsky and the performing artists are grateful: Timothy R. Allan; Thom Collins; Cynthia Elliott; Eva & Leonard Kaminsky; Karen Kaminsky & Peter J. Tichansky. Vukovar Trio, Duo for ’cello and piano, Music for Artur, and Triftmusik produced, engineered, and edited by Bill Siegmund of Digital Island Studios, New York. Duo for ’cello and piano and Vukovar Trio recorded November 20, 2011 Assistant engineer: Joshua Meer Music for Artur and Triftmusik recorded December 17, 2011 Assistant engineer: Andrew Shire Cadmium Yellow, Transformations, and Wave Hill produced and engineered by Judith Sherman Engineering and editing assistant: Jeanne Velonis Cadmium Yellow recorded March 3, 2012; Transformations recorded March 10, 2012; Wave Hill recorded May 19, 2012 Cassatt Quartet Cover Art: “Palisades, October,” by Rebecca Allan Photo of Laura Kaminsky: Rebecca Allan CoLorado Quartet All works on this CD recorded in the Recital Hall of the Purchase College Conservatory of Music, SUNY Purchase, New York ensembLe Pi www.albanyrecords.com TROY1393/94 albany records u.s. 915 broadway, albany, ny 12207 tel: 518.436.8814 fax: 518.436.0643 albany records u.k. box 137, kendal, cumbria la8 0xd Laura tel: 01539 824008 © 2013 albany records made in the usa ddd waRning: cOpyrighT subsisTs in all Recordings issued undeR This label. KaminsKy The Composer Festival; Soundfest Summer Institute and Festival (Cape Cod); Green Mountain Chamber Music Festival (VT); Laura Kaminsky is a composer with “an ear for the new and interesting” whose works are “colorful and Seal Bay Chamber Music Festival (ME); Music from Salem (MA); Treetops Chamber Music (CT); Troika harmonically sharp-edged” (The New York Times) and whose “musical language is compounded of hymns, International and Sound Ways Festivals (Russia); Synthesis International Festival (Macedonia); International blues, and gestures not unlike those of Shostakovich” (inTune). She has received commissions, fellow- Festival of Women Composers (Brazil); and Casalmaggiore International Music Festival (Italy); among others. ships, and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Koussevitzky Music Foundation, New York She is Artistic Director of Symphony Space in New York City and is on the faculty of the Conservatory of State Council on the Arts, Aaron Copland Fund, Chamber Music America, American Music Center, USArtists Music/SUNY Purchase. Kaminsky’s scores are available for distribution through subitomusic.com and recordings International, CEC ArtsLink International Partnerships, Kenan Institute for the Arts, Artist Trust, Seattle Arts are available on the Albany, Mode, CRI, and Capstone labels. Kaminsky is a BMI composer. Commission, North Carolina Council on the Arts, Virgil Thomson Foundation, King County Arts Commission, and Meet the Composer, among others. She has received five ASCAP-Chamber Music America Awards for Adventuresome Programming as well as a citation from the Office of the President of the Borough of Manhattan, and was the recipient of the Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage 2010 Chopin Award. The Music She has been a fellow at artists’ communities including the Hermitage Artist Retreat Center, Virginia Center Laura Kaminsky is an astute and voracious listener. For decades, the journeys her ears have taken have for the Creative Arts, Centrum Foundation, Dorland Mountain Arts Colony, and the Millay Colony for the Arts. benefited audiences in her native New York City through all the concert programs she has presented at venues Her works are frequently performed across the U.S. and abroad, in Africa, Europe, Canada, China, and like Town Hall, the 92nd Street Y, Miller Theater, Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall, Roulette, The New School, Latin America. Her music has been presented in her native New York at Bargemusic, Merkin Concert Hall, and Symphony Space, where she currently serves as Artistic Director. But in addition to the staggering Tenri Cultural Center, Weill Recital Hall, Symphony Space, Miller Theatre, Greenwich House, Here Arts Center, amount of music of others she has made available to the public, she has also crafted a formidable oeuvre of and the 92nd Street Y, among other venues; and internationally at Wigmore Hall and King’s Place (London), original musical compositions that are deeply individual responses to the world around her. Glinka Hall and Dostoevsky Museum (Russia), Fundacion Juan March (Spain), Naregatsi Art Institute (Armenia) Social and political themes have been common in Kaminsky’s work, as has an abiding respect for and and the American Embassy in Ghana, among others. She has been featured composer at Boston, Oberlin, connection to the natural world. Her music has also been deeply informed by her extensive travels—from St. Petersburg (Russia) and Shanghai Conservatories; North Carolina School of the Arts; Mannes College of Eastern Europe and West Africa, to throughout the Americas. Her 1985 song cycle Twilight Songs (recorded Music; Ithaca College School of Music; Cornish College of the Arts; CalArts; Tisch School of the Arts/NYU; Ringling by Mode Records on the debut disc of Musicians Accord, the new music collective she co-founded) is a College of Art and Design; Bard, Hunter, St. Olaf’s, and Sarah Lawrence Colleges; SUNY at Stony Brook, response to the phenomenon of twilight featuring a text derived from a traditional Indonesian fishermen’s Purchase, and Plattsburg; Universities of Puerto Rico, Utah, Minnesota, and Puget Sound; National Academies chant. Another of her works, And Trouble Came: An African AIDS Diary (1993) for narrator and trio (recorded of Music of Armenia, Ghana, and Slovakia; Wolfson Center for National Affairs at The New School; Vernon on CRI and now available through New World Records), is a poignant musical response to the AIDS crisis Center for International Affairs at New York University; and festivals including the Seattle Chamber Music based on her encounters with AIDS sufferers in Ghana while she lived and worked there. Kaminsky often hears music in some extremely unlikely places—a remote Alpine vista accessible only via helicopter or a opens frenetically, but its initial relentlessness eventually dissipates and it concludes in a haze of ambiguity grueling hike, an extraordinarily beautiful public garden in the Bronx, a Croatian city devastated by the wars recalling the opening movement without actually reprising it. over the dissolution of Yugoslavia. The much more expansive solo piano suite Music for Artur from 2006 was composed for the Russian- Kaminsky’s in-depth study of the music of the different cultures she has lived and worked in has also had born Armenian pianist Artur Avanesov, who is also a composer. It was written for Armenia-America: Music a profound impact on her compositional language. For example, her idiosyncratic approach to meter and pulse Now, a festival of contemporary music that Kaminsky and Avanesov co-produced in Yerevan. Kaminsky’s have clear antecedents in the multi-layered rhythms that she learned while studying traditional drumming in own description of how this music came into being offers valuable insights into her compositional process: Ghana as well as the irregular metrical cycles she experienced during her years in Eastern Europe. Yet her music sounds neither African nor Eastern European; rather it is a personal and distinctive amalgam of these rich Cross-cultural collaboration is a powerful source of inspiration for me, and musical influences. immersing myself in contemporary Armenian music as I conceived the festival All seven works featured in the present recording (the first devoted exclusively to her own music), share with Artur was nothing short of exhilarating. I first became familiar with the common elements, despite their different narratives. Prevalent is the persistent use of irregular rhythms where ancient vocal Sharakans a decade earlier while living in Eastern Europe as groupings of five and seven are more common than those of four and six. Repeating patterns shift constantly artistic director of the international European Mozart Academy. I later had the as changing accents cause unexpected syncopations that throw things deliberately off-kilter. Though all good fortune of encountering this gorgeous spiritual music in live performance completely text-less, the solo and chamber works contained in this recording are filled with narratives from in the centuries-old troglodytic churches in the mountains outside of Yerevan a broad range of inspirations. during my first trip to Armenia in 2002 when I reunited with some of my Triftmusik, commissioned by the pianist Alan Feinberg, and Kaminsky’s first solo piano work, is the Armenian colleagues from the Mozart Academy, and first met Artur. Our interest shortest as well as the oldest composition featured herein. It is one of her many works written in response to in each other’s music led to an abiding friendship that stirred me to create a and as a reflection on the natural world; the other such work on this compilation is Wave Hill. Triftmusik is new work to honor him and the festival that we created together. The challenge a sonic evocation of a meadow in a mountain high above the town of Zermatt in