Scott Wollschleger wrote Lost Anthems as part of The 20/19 project, violist Leilehua Lanzilotti's commissioning enterprise. The twenty five minute work is divided into fifteen discrete sections, what Wollschleger describes as "a melodic, song-like structure in search of itself." By titling the works "anthems," Wollschleger invokes a music that is inherently communal and symbolic of something larger than itself; by presenting music that is often introspective, he subverts the bombastic underpinnings of many anthems.
| # | Audio | Title/Composer(s) | Time |
|---|---|---|---|
| Total Time | 25:31 | ||
| 01 | Lost Anthems | Lost Anthems | 25:31 |
Composer Scott Wollschleger writes that Lost Anthems initially had as its subtitle “Songs intended to bring people together but after there are no people left to bring together,” though he ultimately decided to forego its inclusion. Putting aside that this album is being released at a moment when we are still here, presumably open to be brought together, Lost Anthems is permeated throughout with a kind of alienated tenderness that suggests nostalgia experienced in a hollowed out version of our world.
The work is composed of fifteen sections, or anthems, that explore contrasting timbral languages and “time-feel bubbles.” The expansion of sonic resources, both through the use of keyboard preparations and extensive playing inside the piano and in the incorporation of a rich suite of extended viola techniques, are a key component of how Wollschleger delineates these fields of material. In fact, they exist in the piece as constellations of a sort, moving between each other without transitions, almost like tableaus of color arranged around a sonic gallery.
The library of expression that violist Leilehua Lanzolotti and pianist David Kaplan realize from Wollschleger’s score is vast. Ethereal high register viola lines are supported by bell-like, widely spaced piano sonorities. Sinister, gnawing ostinati feature inside-the-keyboard plucked pitches and over-pressure viola drones. Delicate ponticello tremolandi and circular fortspinnung in the viola emerge and recede, while the piano plays luminous harmonics. Despite the overall frame of introspection, Lost Anthems also contains vigorous music, like the raw, undulating bending figure in the viola that is punctuated by chords in alternating registers and followed by a mechanistic, toggling ensemble machine that exploits the percussive timbres of the physicality of the piano.
A few minutes after the midway point of the work, the piano is left alone to tap out a Morse code like message, one repeated chord in a rhythmically irregular sequence. A transmission from an desolate future, interpreted in our time by a composer whose anticipation of impending isolation, or worse, expresses itself through socially oriented songs. Even in an imagined, humanless future, interconnection is the sustenance that binds creatures together.
– Dan Lippel
Recorded on April 1-2, 2023 at Oktaven Audio, Mount Vernon, New York
Editing and mixing: Ryan Streber, Scott Wollschleger, and Leilehua Lanzilotti
Mastering: Ryan Streber
Piano technician: Matthew Banks
Executive Producer: Leilehua Lanzilotti
Lost Anthems is published by Project Schott New York
Cover artwork and design by Jasmine Parsia
This recording has been funded in part by support from the Aaron Copland Fund for Music Recording Program
Scott Wollschleger is a composer who grew up in Erie, Pennsylvania and now lives in Brooklyn, New York. His music has been highly praised for its arresting timbres and conceptual originality. Wollschleger “has become a formidable, individual presence” in the contemporary musical landscape (The Rest Is Noise, Alex Ross), and his most recent piano work was praised as a “small masterpiece” (The New York Times, Seth Colter Walls). His distinct musical language explores themes of art in dystopia, the conceptualization of silence, synesthesia, and creative repetition in form; a musical blend that jazz pianist and blogger Ethan Iverson describes as “Morton Feldman meets Thelonious Monk meets H.P. Lovecraft.”
Wollschleger’s concert works can be heard in the United States and abroad. Notable commissions and premieres include those from Adam Tendler, Miranda Cuckson, Mivos String Quartet, Third Angle Music, longleash, Karl Larson, The String Orchestra of Brooklyn, Bearthoven, William Lang, Leileihua Lanzilotti, Du.0, and loadbang. His debut album, Soft Aberration, was released on New Focus Recordings and was named a 2017 Notable Recording in The New Yorker. His second album, American Dream, written for the trio Bearthoven, was released on Cantaloupe Music in 2019. His third album, Dark Days, and his work on The String Orchestra of Brooklyn’s most recent album, enfolding, were released on New Focus Recordings in 2021 and 2022.
https://scottwollschleger.comLeilehua Lanzilotti (b. 1983) is a Kanaka Maoli composer, multimedia artist, curator, scholar, and educator. Lanzilotti’s practice explores radical indigenous contemporaneity, integrating community engagement into the heart of projects. By world-building through multimedia installation works and nontraditional concert experiences/musical interventions, Lanzilotti’s works activate imagination around new paths forward in language sovereignty, water sovereignty, land stewardship, and respect. Uplifting others by crafting projects that support both local communities and economy, the work inspires hope to continue.
Lanzilotti was honored to be a finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Music for with eyes the color of time (string orchestra), which the Pulitzer committee called, “a vibrant composition . . . that distinctly combines experimental string textures and episodes of melting lyricism.” Previous honors include a MacGeorge Fellowship at the University of Melbourne, McKnight Visiting Composer Residency with the American Composers Forum, and a SHIFT – Transformative Change and Indigenous Arts Award among other accolades.
As a composer, Lanzilotti’s works are characterized by expansive explorations of timbre. These works have been premiered at international festivals such as Ars Electronica (Austria), Thailand International Composition Festival, and Dots+Loops—Australia's post-genre music and arts series. Lanzilotti has written new works for ensembles such as Roomful of Teeth, Argus Quartet, ETHEL (with guest Allison Logins-Hull), [Switch~ Ensemble], and the Borderlands Ensemble. Additionally, Lanzilotti is part of the network of musicians / artists in the Wandelweiser collective.
Lanzilotti’s new multimedia work, the sky in our hands, our hands in the sky, is currently on tour through 2026, having just premiered at The Noguchi Museum. Planned venues include the Cranbrook Art Museum (October 9, 2024–January 12, 2025), the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (March 2–May 18, 2025), the Chazen Museum of Art, University of Wisconsin-Madison (September 8–December 23, 2025), and the Honolulu Museum of Art (February 13–July 26, 2026).
As a recording artist, Lanzilotti has played on albums from Björk's Vulnicura Live and Joan Osborne's Love and Hate, to David Lang’s anatomy theater. Lanzilotti has premiered many new works including Wayfinder—a viola concerto by Dai Fujikura inspired by Polynesian wayfinding. in manus tuas—Lanzilotti’s solo viola album debut—was featured in Steve Smith’s Log Journal Playlist (Live life out Loud), Bandcamp’s Best Contemporary Classical Albums of 2019, and The Boston Globe’s Top 10 classical albums of 2019, and was called “an entrancing new album” by The New Yorker’s Alex Ross.
As a performer, recent projects include: performing Dai Fujikura's Wayfinder Concerto as a soloist with the Nagoya Philharmonic, a project that uplifts native knowledge and indigenous intuition while encouraging courageous and active listening; performing with object instruments created by Adam Morford (metal), Toshiko Takaezu (ceramic), and others; and improvising as a member of The Yes &.
Lanzilotti’s curatorial work extends from museum collaborations such as the currently touring Toshiko Takaezu: Worlds Within, to institutional commissioning at EMPAC as the Curator of Music.
As an educator, Lanzilotti has been on the faculty at New York University, University of Northern Colorado (Director and founder of the experimental UNCOmmon Ensemble and Asst. Professor of Viola), and University of Hawaiʻi—Mānoa in both composition and viola. Additionally, Lanzilotti created Shaken Not Stuttered, a free online resource demonstrating extended techniques for strings.
Written publications include contributions to a new monograph honoring the life and work of Toshiko Takaezu published by Yale University Press, and to Tuning Calder’s Clouds, edited by Vic Brooks and Jennifer Burris (Calder Foundation and Athénée Press)—the first book to explore the artistic, technological, and political intersections of Alexander Calder’s sculptural Acoustic Ceiling. Other contributions to books include featured works: the work beyond the accident of time (2019)—honoring Noguchi’s never-fully-realized Bell Tower for Hiroshima (1951)—is included in Walking From Scores, a bilingual anthology of text and graphic scores to be used while walking, from Fluxus to the critical works of current artists, through the tradition of experimental music and performance. “Lanzilotti’s score brings us together across the world in remembrance, through the commitment of shared sonic gestures.” (Cities & Health)
Dr. Lanzilotti is a graduate of Oberlin Conservatory of Music, Yale School of Music, and Manhattan School of Music. In addition, Lanzilotti was an orchestral fellow in the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin and New World Symphony, participated in the Lucerne Festival Academy under Pierre Boulez, and was the original violist in the Lucerne Festival Alumni Ensemble. Mentors include Hiroko Primrose, Peter Slowik, Jesse Levine, Martin Bresnick, Wilfried Strehle, Karen Ritscher, and Reiko Füting.
See also: Anne Leilehua Lanzilotti
David Kaplan, pianist, has been called “excellent and adventurous” by The New York Times, and praised by the Boston Globe for “grace and fire” at the keyboard. He has appeared as soloist at the Barbican Centre with the Britten Sinfonia and Das Sinfonie Orchester Berlin in the Philharmonie, and this season makes debuts with the Symphony Orchestras of Hawaii and San Antonio.
Kaplan has consistently drawn critical acclaim for creative programs that interweave classical and contemporary repertoire, often incorporating newly commissioned works. He has given recitals at the Ravinia Festival, Washington’s National Gallery, Strathmore, and New York’s Carnegie and Merkin Halls. Kaplan’s New Dances of the League of David, mixing Schumann with 15 new works, was cited in the “Best Classical Music of 2015” by The New York Times. In the current season, he performs “Quasi una Fantasia,” which explores the grey area between composition and improvisation through works written for him by Anthony Cheung, Christopher Cerrone, and Andrea Casarrubios, together with Couperin, Beethoven, Schumann, Saariaho, Ligeti, and his own improvisations.
Kaplan has collaborated with the Attacca, Ariel, Enso, Hausman, and Tesla String Quartets, and is a core member of Decoda, the Affiliate Ensemble of Carnegie Hall. He has appeared at the Bard, Seattle Chamber Music, Mostly Mozart, and Chamber Music Northwest festivals, and is an alumnus of Tanglewood, Ravinia-Steans Institute, and the Perlman Music Program. Kaplan has recorded for Naxos and Marquis Records, as well as for Nonesuch as part of his longstanding duo with pianist/composer Timo Andres. In 2023 Bright Shiny Things released Vent, Kaplan’s debut album with his wife, flutist Catherine Gregory.
Passionate about teaching, Kaplan serves as Assistant Professor and Inaugural Shapiro Family Chair in Piano Performance at the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music, where he has taught since 2016. Kaplan’s distinguished mentors over the years include the late Claude Frank, Walter Ponce, Miyoko Lotto, and Richard Goode. With a Fulbright Fellowship, he studied conducting at the Universität der Künste Berlin with Lutz Köhler, and received his DMA from Yale University in 2014. Preferring Yamaha and Bösendorfer pianos, David is proud to be a Yamaha Artist. Away from the keyboard, he loves cartooning and cooking, and is mildly obsessed with classic cars.
http://www.davidkaplanpiano.comIn 2024, A Song For Friday featured Scott Wollschleger’s Between Breath, an album of chamber works I dubbed, “as rich and varied a collection as one could hope for.” In that piece, I gave a pocket account of my history with Wollschleger, going back to 2017, so I won’t recount the rewarding journey of discovery I’ve been on ever since. But I will say that even after all these years, he still manages to surprise me.
Lost Anthems is a 25-minute work commissioned by violist and composer Leilehua Lanzilotti for their 20/19 project that was originally subtitled “Songs intended to bring people together but after there are no people left to bring together.” While Wollschleger dropped the subtitle, it does reflect a spiky, bitter wit that the piece retains in parts. And even though it is a continuous piece, the 15 contrasting sections are brilliantly defined by Leilehua Lanzilotti and pianist David Kaplan’s fearless performance, which is captured in a dynamic and diamond-sharp recording.
Using a prepared piano and Leilehua Lanzilotti’s arsenal of extended techniques, Lost Anthems often takes an oblique approach to what we expect from these instruments. This is never more true than right at the beginning, with the viola’s dissonant drone supported by subterranean pulses from the piano. Soon, glassy high notes emerge from the strings, and the piano picks notes around them. That section is followed by a woozy figure from Leilehua Lanzilotti that soon grows strangled, with the piano hitting some brute chords in a square rhythm, as if trying to lasso a drunken moose. Giving up, the piano takes command with a pneumatic riff played at both ends of the keyboard, with the viola answering with a scrubbed note. That’s just the first five minutes! Listen to all of it and find your own anthems to sing within its multifarious movements.
— Jeremy Shatan, 10.03.2025
Commissioned by violist Leilehua Lanzilotti for her 20/19 project—an endeavor to expand the contemporary repertoire for the instrument—Lost Anthems is a bracing, rapid-cut sonic sojourn by Scott Wollschleger. The piece puts serious demands on the violist and pianist David Kaplan, her duo partner, as they traverse 15 contrasting yet linked sections. The construction creates a kind of jarring back-and-forth of changing minimalist gestures that brings loads of variation to a ping-pong structure between ethereality and physicality. The composer had initially included the subtitle “Songs intended to bring people together but after there are no people left to bring together,” which indicates some of the darkness strewn across the piece; but at the same time, there’s something exhilarating about this performance. There are tightly-coiled rhythmic passages, with the prepared piano highlighting the instrument’s classification as percussion. Left-handed tones tangle with metallic preparations in the upper register, while the violinist staggers between throaty and piercing double stops, suggesting instability with impressive precision. The duo toggle suddenly and sharply to more contemplative passages where the sounds feel more spectral, elusive, and haunted. Yet within that back-and-forth structure there are all kinds of substantive variations—shifting rhythms, viscous harmonics, and bruising articulations. The composer’s interest in sound is palpable, but he doesn’t disregard narrative or movement. Even at 25 minutes, it feels utterly complete, taking the listener on a ride that is full of surprises.
— Peter Margasak, 11.06.2025
Composer Scott Wollschleger has turned up a few times in my recent listening. I quite liked the piece of his that opens Saxifraga, New Thread Quartet’s recent album of music for saxophones. And to Isaac Shieh’s album of music for natural horn Wollschleger contributed a work I described as “div[ing] deepest into the natural horn’s microtonal possibilities. In other words, it will sound glaringly ‘out of tune’ to Western ears.” This composer does not shy from stretching the sonic possibilities of traditional acoustic instruments, and that goes double for Lost Anthems, a 25-minute work consisting of 15 short pieces – he calls them “anthems” – for viola (Leilehua Lanzilotti) and piano (David Kaplan).
Lanzilotti, who has worked with Wollschleger before, commissioned the work.
The buzzing, industrial-sounding first anthem, with its pounding but unsteady rhythm, creates an expectation that we are in for a sequence of unbeautiful “noise.” But although the score calls for prepared piano and extended viola techniques, the sound world that Wollschleger patiently creates contains many landscapes.
We next hear deep groans from the viola over soft piano chords, giving way to percussive pounding on the piano, including on the keyboard’s highest notes, where tone is almost impossible to discern, together with high harmonic sighs. These figures alternate with the viola vigorously speed-sawing triplets, soon joined by softer piano chords that create an airy atmosphere. We’re at quite a distance now from the industrial.
Dissonant piano chords hop from low to high with high squeals from the viola, gravitating to something else and then something else again. A sequence of clinking sounds recapitulates the idea of machinery, but then harmonic musicality returns in a way that’s actually pretty. Through preparing the piano, Kaplan achieves sounds far outside the usual pianistic realm. It can almost sound like a small ensemble is present rather than a mere duo.
“Lost Anthems” feels something like a suite, something like a survey, but isn’t quite either. Slow tempos and open-ended rhythms predominate, producing at times a soothing effect. That’s in spite of the scratchiness and percussiveness of some of the sounds. In the final minutes Lanzilotti somehow draws from the viola a hollow, shakuhachi-like tone. The two instruments settle on a handful of notes defining a restful on-the-fly mode as the final anthem fades away.
I say soothing, but not meditative, as each segment lasts only a few minutes at most, so you’re always anticipating what the next anthem will sound like. Still, each makes its point. The composer writes that each section is “a melodic, song-like texture in search of itself,” hence the title “Lost Anthems.” That may be so, but cumulatively they sound confident to me, products of a creativity that maintains a distinct voice even as it explores.
— Jon Sobel, 12.11.2025
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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