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Album Notes
Victor Lowrie Tafoya

One of the pleasures of having an ensemble that focuses on contemporary music is having abundant opportunities to curate. In describing this to people, I like to compare it to a gallerist creating a group exhibition of paintings. Each painting must stand on its own yet also complement the other works on display—color, theme, time period, subject. There must be contrast and continuity, and in the end the viewers should be left with vivid impressions and lingering artistic ideas they can take home with them to enrich their experience of art in the future. The four works presented on this record were each written for Mivos over the past several years. Each composer brings a unique voice, a unique experiential background, and a different stage of their career to bear on the creative process for their pieces. Lewis’ String Quartet 2.5 bursts with the power and beauty of the Big Bang, encapsulating the energy and vitality of ecstatic improvisation while being almost completely through-composed. Catranis’ work begins with soft, intimate melodic lines morphing through changing timbres and harmonic octave displacements, weaving a deeply emotional work by creating a subtle and detailed dramatic buildup. Mumford’s amid floating depths could be the soundtrack to an impressionist painting, incorporating his intricate use of extended melodic lines together with harmonies both lush and terse, inviting listeners to open their minds and hearts to the vibrant colors of his sonic landscape. Akinmusire’s quartet, the title track of this album, is a beautiful summation of the intent of the pieces on this record, and our goal in sharing these works with you. Ambrose invites us into introspection, searching for the core of our individual and collective expressive voice as performers and bringing that to each audience in a unique way for every performance. The beautiful aesthetic diversity in these four works is a vivid demonstration of the possibilities of contemporary music. These composers are colleagues, friends, mentors, and fellow travelers in our shared musical journeys, and we are delighted and grateful to bring these first recordings to all of you.

String Quartet 2.5, “Playing With Seeds” 
George Lewis

commissioned by Musik der Jahrhunderte Stuttgart
 
The anthropologist Paul Richards has spent over thirty years studying rice cultivation via shifting cultivation among the Mende-speaking population of the village of Mogbuama in Sierra Leone.  Richards understands shifting cultivation as a system of improvisation that requires not only experience and intuition, but also knowledge of landscape, soil, weather, and at least 45 different rice varieties. Richards likens this form of improvisation to the musical, while also pointing out the difference between the safety net of the structured art performance context and a real-time, real-world practice in which false moves can result in hunger, debt, starvation, and death.
 
In this society, women are the principal investigators: cataloguing plant varietals, introducing new growing techniques, predicting and monitoring their impact on the environment, coping with contingencies, and serving as repositories of memory for outcomes. Seed experimentation by women on small plots—”playing with seeds”—has resulted in the emergence of new and hardier varieties of rice, and it is this practice that offers an analogy for how this string quartet operates.  The music is “grown” from “seeds” that are developed into new “varietals” through trajectories of register, temporal flux (stretching/compressing), sudden reversals of apparent fortune, and the nomadism that is central to shifting cultivation.
 
I want to suggest that like all listening, an engagement with this work constitutes a form of nomadic improvisation—not by the performers, who are dealing with fully notated music, but on the part of audiences. In Mogbuaman society, farming sites belong to “the living, the dead, and the yet unborn.” That’s actually quite a fine situation for a piece of music.
 
This quartet was written for the Mivos Quartet, with great appreciation for their brilliance.
Published by C.F. Peters Corporation
 
See Paul Richards, “Shifting Cultivation as Improvisation,” in The Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies, Volume 1, edited by George E. Lewis and Benjamin Piekut, 365-382 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).

luminous animal 
Michaela Catranis
Commissioned by the Fondation Royaumont with help from Christine Jolivet Erlih

This piece was inspired by Tony Moffeit’s poem “luminous animal” (1989). First reading this, I was struck by the music in his verse, the metaphorical language and the expressive way he conveys human struggle. Moffeit reiterates in his poetic way one of those ambiguities every one of us has experienced—on the other side of pain, we can uncover something luminous in ourselves. He makes the parallel to bioluminescent organisms that emit light in the deepest, darkest places. "There is only one answer: to go deeper into the heart of the wound to go deeper into the heart of the blues...like a luminous animal you glow from the fire of the pulse in your veins.” I used some of the metaphors and thematic material in the poem as I wrote this piece: A sense of shining, flickering light was the idea in the opening section, the strings hovering within an enclosed harmonic space, out of which emerge sharp, fiery accents, bursts of light. The viola solo later on in the piece was drawn from the themes of solitude/self-reflection: “like a luminous animal you dance alone like a luminous animal the night fills all your pores like a luminous animal you glow."

. . . amid still and floating depths
Jeffrey Mumford

co-commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic Association, Gustavo Dudamel Music Director, and the Library of Congress for the Mivos Quartet

The title for me suggests the image of a still place, resonant with varying intensities of light, which interact with one another on many levels. Often, as these relationships evolve, there are multiple layers of unfolding modes of expression, sometimes juxtaposing and superimposing more explosive and figurative material with that which is more lyrical and sparse. The work celebrates the many sonic possibilities of the string quartet medium, and in particular, the individual and collective brilliance and vision of the members of the Mivos Quartet.

May Our Centers Hold

Ambrose Akinmusire

commissioned by Musik der Jahrhunderte Stuttgart

May Our Centers Hold is both a title and a wish—a kind of mantra. The piece explores what remains when life strips away the surface. I’m drawn to the idea of the core—the center—and what holds under pressure. It’s a modular piece, so it shifts each time it’s played. The structure allows for the players’ personal feelings to guide it—but also how the world has impacted them in that exact moment. That’s important to me. I’m interested in how music can act as a kind of social space—a tool for problem-solving, for listening, for coming together. At the end of the day, I’m trying to write pieces that not only sound good, but also help people feel each other a little more.

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