Violinist and producer Erik Carlson has a powerful attraction to musical works whose parameters provoke questions and interrogate boundaries. Here, Carlson releases Canone nel Nodo de Salamone (Canon in Solomon's Knot), a 1631 canon by Pier Francesco Valentini, a unicorn of a work due to its austere and quixotic restrictions. He assembled a remote ensemble of 100 of his colleagues to record parts of the canon, all pitches of a rotating G major triad, and assembled them into this timeless dialogue with a fellow musical contrarian from centuries ago. The result challenges notions of period performance and the assumption that experimental necessarily means contemporary.
| # | Audio | Title/Composer(s) | Time |
|---|---|---|---|
| Total Time | 51:17 | ||
| 01 | Canone nel Nodo de Salamone | Canone nel Nodo de Salamone | 51:17 |
"This is a recording of a canon from 1631 called “Solomon’s Knot” by Pier Francesco Valentini. The canon consists of a 4-voice chorale, in which every note is part of a G-major chord, which gets repeated over time in exact imitation by a series of quartets.
The piece is composed for a potentially limitless number of performers. Valentini described it as “for 512 voices, and also for infinite voices.” The blueprint that Valentini mapped out easily accommodates doublings of the total number of lines, and every increase in the number of players invites an increase in the total duration of the piece. Describing the canon in 1650, Athanasius Kircher imagined a version lasting 1000 years.
This album is a more modest project to assemble a recording of a version for 1024 parts (256 repetitions of the chorale), which has a total length of about 51 minutes.
When I first found the score to this piece, I felt like I had met a musical soulmate from 400 years ago. I took that feeling as a cue to interweave my own playing in this recording with the sounds of some of the musicians in my life, from my earliest musical experiences to my latest.
In the credits is a list of the musicians, who mean so much to me, who have given me a life of extraordinary musical pleasures, and who have agreed to play along with me in this recording."
– Erik Carlson
Performed by Ensemble Combinatoria
Erik Carlson, director
Critical listening by A.F. Jones, Andrew Weathers, Samantha Dunscombe, Matt Sargent, and Matthew Barber.
Produced by Erik Carlson
COLLABORATORS
Peter Ablinger, Casey Anderson, Jim Baker, Matthew Barber, Mattie Barbier, Emily Barger, Steven Beck, Dania Binkowski, Krys Bobrowski, Marguerite Brown, Anthony Bun, David Byrd-Marrow, Jack Callahan, Jay Campbell, Hunter Capoccioni, Henrik Carlson, Mark Carlson, Mary Carlson, Michael Caterisano, Laura Cetilia, Anthony Cheung, Marlena Chow, Jon Cole, Larry Copes, Julia Anne Cordani, Christina Courtin, Charles Curtis, D. Edward Davis, Rosemary K. J. Davis, Jonathan Dexter, Mark Dresser, Matthew Dudzik, Freeman Edwards, Nomi Epstein, Tom Fallon, Tim Feeney, Gareth Flowers, Andrew Fuchs, Jeffrey Gavett, Randy Gibson, Assaf Gidron, Jennie Gottshalk, Kevin Good, Madison Greenstone, Chris Gross, Judith Hamann, Nora Harris, Matthew Henson, Myra Hinrichs, Nick Hoffman, Eva-Maria Houben, Ethan Iverson, JoAnna James, Evan Johnson, A.F. Jones, Blake Jones, Brendan Kane, Aleck Karis, Matt Kline, Karl Larson, Dan Lippel, Rebecca Lloyd-Jones, Curtis Macomber, Rane Moore, Adrian Morejon, Ellie Moser, Amir Norouz Nasseri, Dave Nelson, Michael Nicolas, Christopher Otto, Michael Pisaro-Liu, John Popham, Kory Reeder, Wendy Richman, Joshua Rubin, Steven Schick, Craig Shepard, Miranda Sielaff,Teodora Stepancic, Cory Smythe, Audrey Stuart, Greg Stuart, Wilfrido Terrazas, Mike Truesdell, Nathan Vack, Christina Vermillion, Anthony Vine, Emma Noel Votapek, Samuel Vriezen, Nuiko Wadden, Ilana Waniuk, Manfred Werder, Sarah Williams, Christian Wolff, Scott Worthington, Emily Yaffe, Camilo Zamudio, Jeffrey Zeigler, Randall Zigler, Adam Zuckerman
Erik Carlson has performed as a soloist and with many chamber and orchestral ensembles throughout Europe and the Americas. He is a highly active performer of contemporary music and has had works written for him by numerous composers, including Karlheinz Stockhausen, Tom Johnson, Jürg Frey, and Georges Aperghis. Mr. Carlson is an enthusiastic proponent of interdisciplinary collaboration, and performs frequently with poets, dancers, actors, and film.
He is a member of the International Contemporary Ensemble and the Talea Ensemble and is the founder of the New York Miniaturist Ensemble. He has been featured on over a dozen recordings, including his own two recent albums of music for violin. Also a composer, he has had his musical compositions performed in a wide variety of venues. He studied violin with Jorja Fleezanis, Ronald Copes, and Robert Mann, and holds a Master's degree from The Juilliard School. Mr. Carlson enjoys expensive bourbon and long walks on the beach.
New Focus Recordings is an artist-led collective label featuring releases in contemporary creative music of many stripes, as well as new approaches to older repertoire. The label was founded by guitarist Dan Lippel, composer Peter Gilbert in 2004, and composer/engineer Ryan Streber in 2004, formed …Read More …
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