Dark Matters

Dark Matters

Description: 
Tiffany in the belfry
Composers: 
Stephen Rush
Performers: 
Tiffany Ng
Stephen Rush
Keenan Bakowski
Zoe Cutler
Dominic Hayes
Michael Stern
Jacob Taitel
Tanner Tanyeri
Catalog Number: 
#1 050
Genre: 
new classical
Location: 

Ann Arbor, MI

Price: 
$15.00
Release Date: 
Mar 26, 2021
Liner Notes: 
View
1 CD
One Sheet: 

Trailblazing a path for the carillon in the 21st Century, Tiffany Ng commands towers of bells that ring across great distances. On Dark Matters, Ng masterfully helms the carillon works of composer Stephen Rush. These works and Ng’s playing possess a kind of magical cacophony that is in equal parts powerful, intimate, and entrancing. 

Since Stephen Rush’s debut carillon work Three Etudes reshaped the soundscape of carillon composition in 1987, he has steadily fashioned new campanological sounds in partnership with trailblazing carillonists like Margo Halsted and Neil Thornock. When Halsted premiered Six Treatments for Carillon in 2002, they launched a tradition of carillon with live electronics at the University of Michigan that flourishes to this day. In 2013, Dark Matters invited Rush to attend to time, space, and chance on a vast scale. Through the visceral experience of music, movement, and space, this piece leads into the unknown, questioning the origin of life, coincidence and inevitability, macro and micro, the stars and the elements, the instant and the eternal. 

As an oeuvre, Rush’s carillon music is singular in style, compelling in its driving rhythmic effects, and pushes the technical boundaries of the instrument while remaining idiomatically true to it. Ng recorded this album in collaboration with Rush, Jason Corey, Roger Arnett, Jessica Glynn, and Matias Vilaplana.

A “virtuoso” (HKSNA) in command of a range of expression from “eerie sonance” (Diapason) to “jumpy athleticism” (Chicago Classical Review), Tiffany K. Ng, Ph.D., is assistant professor of music and university carillonist at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. An energetic advocate of diversity in contemporary music, she has premiered or revived over sixty pieces by emerging and established composers from Augusta Read Thomas to Yvette Janine Jackson, pioneered models for interactive “crowdsourced” carillon performances and environmental-data-driven sound installations with Greg Niemeyer, Chris Chafe, Ed Campion, Ken Goldberg, John Granzow, and Laura Steenberge, and through her composer collaborations significantly increased the American repertoire for carillon and electronics. She has performed solo concerts across Europe, Asia, Australia, and North America.

Reviews: 

NEW YORK MUSIC DAILY

"The recording quality is sublime: it’s as if you’re there in the tower with Ng. What a ravishingly beautiful album." [FULL ARTICLE

THE WHOLE NOTE

"The Sonata is a revelation, titanic chamber music by turns soulful and dancelike." [FULL ARTICLE]

 

JAZZ WEEKLY

"Tiffany Ng plays a series of Carillon bells on modern pieces in various formats. The bells sound  like  Big Ben clock telling the time on the churchlike “Three Etudes’ while “Six Treatments” include some live electronics that create harpsichord effects and hints of wind chimes. “September Fanfares” includes a brass quintet and percussion for a medieval atmosphere" [FULL ARTICLE]