Mivos Quartet - Lei Liang: Six Seasons [CD]

<p>A cycle of six movements and a coda, Six Seasons (2022) is as protean as the ocean waters that serve as its substance and underlying metaphor. In creating a space of many spaces and multiple temporalities, Lei Liang (b. 1972) resides in select company, artists who have fashioned a syntax of exploration both attendant to and divergent from music history's established grooves and curves of innovation and tradition. Of the composers now lionized through the ever-expanding and often-arbitrary canon, George Crumb, John Cage, and Pauline Oliveros come most directly to mind, given their penchants for the enlarging of an instrument's sonic palette in the service of extra-musical concerns.</p> <p>The Chukchi Sea, north of Alaska, is one of the most inaccessible places to humans on earth - Six seasons in the Arctic, according to the Inuit, are not demarcated by a fixed calendar, but by what we hear in the changing environment. Hydrophones were placed about 300 meters below the sea surface at a seafloor recording location 160 km north of Point Barrow. They capture the sound of sea ice, marine mammals, and the underwater environment throughout an entire year. --Lei Liang</p> <p>At the heart of Liang's vision is an all-inclusive and ever-evolving concept of presence in dynamism. When describing the experience of performing and recording Six Seasons, it is the idea most often revisited by the Mivos Quartet. To be present as listener, as reactor, performer, and planetary citizen is paramount. Liang's goal is to create a totality, an experience to be shared in a common space.</p> <p>Mivos Quartet: Olivia De Prato, Maya Bennardo, violins; Victor Lowrie Tafoya, viola; Tyler J. Borden, cello</p>