The Word Museum

The 2024 composition award winner in the Bridges Competition - David Baker Prize at the Ravinia Music Center, 2023 ASCAP Foundation Award (in composition) recipient, and a graduate from the prestigious Herbie Hancock Institute of Jazz Performance at UCLA, proudly presents an album of melody-driven compositions, brought to life by his band featuring Devin Daniels on alto saxophone, Javier Santiago on piano, Benjamin Ring on drums, and Genevieve Artadi – vocals on “Love In Small Spaces,” “Things As They Are,” and “Young Corn.”

If someone told you that mathematics is quite beautiful, you might be surprised. But you should know that some people do mathematics all their lives, and create mathematics, just as a composer creates music. Usually, every time a mathematician solves a problem, this gives rise to many oth­ ers, new and just as beautiful as the one which was solved. Of course, often these problems are quite difficult, and as in other disciplines can be understood only by those who have studied the subject with some depth, and know the subject well. In 1981, Jean Brette, who is responsible for the Mathematics Section of the Palais de la Decouverte (Science Museum) in Paris, invited me to give a conference at the Palais. I had never given such a conference before, to a non-mathematical public. Here was a challenge: could I communicate to such a Saturday afternoon audience what it means to do mathematics, and why one does mathematics? By "mathematics" I mean pure mathematics. This doesn't mean that pure math is better than other types of math, but I and a number of others do pure mathematics, and it's about them that I am now concerned. Math has a bad reputation, stemming from the most elementary levels. The word is in fact used in many different contexts. First, I had to explain briefly these possible contexts, and the one with which I wanted to deal.

If someone told you that mathematics is quite beautiful, you might be surprised. But you should know that some people do mathematics all their lives, and create mathematics, just as a composer creates music. Usually, every time a mathematician solves a problem, this gives rise to many oth­ ers, new and just as beautiful as the one which was solved. Of course, often these problems are quite difficult, and as in other disciplines can be understood only by those who have studied the subject with some depth, and know the subject well. In 1981, Jean Brette, who is responsible for the Mathematics Section of the Palais de la Decouverte (Science Museum) in Paris, invited me to give a conference at the Palais. I had never given such a conference before, to a non-mathematical public. Here was a challenge: could I communicate to such a Saturday afternoon audience what it means to do mathematics, and why one does mathematics? By "mathematics" I mean pure mathematics. This doesn't mean that pure math is better than other types of math, but I and a number of others do pure mathematics, and it's about them that I am now concerned. Math has a bad reputation, stemming from the most elementary levels. The word is in fact used in many different contexts. First, I had to explain briefly these possible contexts, and the one with which I wanted to deal.

The 2024 composition award winner in the Bridges Competition - David Baker Prize at the Ravinia Music Center, 2023 ASCAP Foundation Award (in composition) recipient, and a graduate from the prestigious Herbie Hancock Institute of Jazz Performance at UCLA, proudly presents an album of melody-driven compositions, brought to life by his band featuring Devin Daniels on alto saxophone, Javier Santiago on piano, Benjamin Ring on drums, and Genevieve Artadi – vocals on “Love In Small Spaces,” “Things As They Are,” and “Young Corn.”

Lawler + Fadoul (Zara Lawler, flute and Paul J. Fadoul, marimba) have performed in many of the United States’ most prestigious venues, including the Kennedy Center, Strathmore, Trinity Wall Street, and Vermont’s Yellow Barn Music School. Their Gronica Project is an ongoing program to increase the repertoire for their instrumentation both by commissioning new works from living composers and by creating their own arrangements of favorite works of the past. This CD is the culmination of the first years of the Gronica Project, which focused on preludes and fugues. (Lawler’s family coined the word gronica to describe a child’s main present at Christmas.) Dedicated and creative educators, Lawler + Fadoul are teaching artists for the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington, DC, and created Break it Down! for a week of Kinderkonzerts at the Kennedy Center in February 2013. They have worked as a duo since 2003.

Hailed by Downbeat for her “remarkable artistic facility” and by The New York Times for her “remarkable balance of fluidity and restless creativity,” New York-based flutist/composer and 2014 Guggenheim Fellow Jamie Baum is proud to announce the release of her sixth CD as a leader, Bridges, featuring The Jamie Baum Septet+. The highly anticipated follow-up to her 2013 recording In This Life, Bridges offers yet another recording of incredible depth, beauty, spirituality, undiluted zeal and is the culmination of Baum’s search for common links between some of the world’s great religious music traditions.

Firma Melodiya presents a recording of chamber works by Alban Berg and Olivier Messiaen. Four Pieces for Clarinet and Piano (1913) were created by Alban Berg, one of the pupils of Arnold Schoenberg, the founder of the Second Viennese School, in a period of an intense creative ascent, a year before he began to work on his opera Wozzeck. Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time is arguably one of the most amazing pages of chamber music of the 20th century. It was composed during the composer’s stay in German prisoner-of-war camp where it was premiered in January of 1941.

David Chesky's "Rap Symphony" is about a transitional society, a society that is shifting from the word to the image. Our civilization once used to believe in depth and reading and art; now abstract thought is changing into a simplistic, superficial society where one is consumed with the quick Starbucks or Twitter fix. It's all lightness of being today. We don't celebrate anticipation anymore, people don't want to put the time in. This symphony is about the collapse of that whole ethos.