The Sisterhood

New Amsterdam and Nonesuch Records release The Blue Hour, a song cycle written collaboratively by the female composers Rachel Grimes, Angélica Negrón, Shara Nova, Caroline Shaw, and Sarah Kirkland Snider; this unique joint vision among a female collective is available October 14, 2022. The cycle was commissioned by, and is performed with, the Boston–based chamber orchestra A Far Cry. (Nova also is featured as vocal soloist.) Set to excerpts from Carolyn Forché’s epic poem On Earth, the music follows one woman’s journey through the space between life and death via thousands of hallucinatory and non-linear images. Exploring memories of childhood, of war, of love, and of loss, The Blue Hour amplifies the beauty, pain, and fragility of human life from a collective female perspective.

From hijabs to hen harriers, Instar is the cutting-edge of contemporary folk music, an important album that sees folk’s poet-laureate at the height of her creative powers.

Songs of Our Native Daughters gathers together kindred musicians Rhiannon Giddens, Amythyst Kiah, Leyla McCalla, and Allison Russell in song and sisterhood to communicate with their forebears. Drawing on and reclaiming early minstrelsy and banjo music, these musicians reclaim, recast, and spotlight the often unheard and untold history of their ancestors, whose stories remain vital and alive today.

The material on Songs of Our Native Daughters - written and sung in various combinations - is inspired by New World slave narratives, discrimination and how it has shaped our American experience, as well as musicians such as Haitian troubadour Althiery Dorval and Mississippi Hill Country string player Sid Hemphill, and more.

This new recording celebrates a triple anniversary – the 250th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth, the 20th birthday of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, and it will be released 40 years after the legendary Triple Concerto recording made by Anne-Sophie Mutter and Yo-Yo Ma under Herbert von Karajan.