This new CD presents the works of Ryan Carter, performed by Present Music and David Bloom.
Ryan Carter's musical imagination is characterized by its sensitivity to the sound world of electronics, even when as here he is writing for acoustic instruments. In the pieces collected on his first album, Chamber Works (0015048KAI), the influence of technology manifested itself as interruption and challenge. The compositions on this album, by contrast, take up technological themes in the spirit of sublimation and resolution. Bit Rot, for example, a composition that explicitly addresses technical failure, is plaintive, even elegiac in tone. This orientation to the presence and potential of technology invites the listener to consider the continuity between the digital mechanisms that pervade everyday life and the much older, peculiarly musical technologies that organize these works.
Carter's writing is polyphonic, even rigorously contrapuntal. There are startling moments of lyricism in these pieces, but no properly melodic lines. Instead, voices are individuated by timbre and texture, range and rhythm. While these voices are often very dissimilar in contour, they nonetheless constantly inform one another.
Ryan Carter composes for instruments, voices, and computers. Ryan's work often explores new musical possibilities presented by emerging technologies, while remaining critical of the assumptions and unintended side effects embedded in them. Alternately playful, quirky, visceral, and intense, his music has been described by the New York Times as "imaginative ... like, say, a Martian dance party." Ryan has been commissioned by Carnegie Hall, the National Flute Association, the MATA Festival, the Metropolis Ensemble, Present Music, The Milwaukee Children's Choir, the Calder Quartet, and Seattle Symphony Artist-in-Residence Seth Parker Woods, with support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Jerome Foundation, the American Composers Forum, and Meet the Composer. Ryan has collaborated with the Berkeley Symphony, the Cleveland Chamber Symphony, Hub New Music, the International Contemporary Ensemble, the JACK Quartet, the Mivos Quartet, the Nieuw Ensemble, NOW Ensemble, the Princeton Laptop Orchestra, Quartetto Maurice, Transit, Yarn/Wire, RYAN CARTER and many others. Awards include the Lee Ettelson Award, the Aaron Copland Award, the Left Coast Composition Contest, the Red Jasper Award, the National Association of Composers/ USA Composer's Competition, and the Publikumspreis at the Heidelberg Spring Festival.
