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Artist: William Susman
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William Susman:

Quiet Rhythms Live at Spectrum NYC

Quiet Rhythms is a piano cycle at once sprawling in scope and introspective in practice. Quiet Rhythms has the warmth and immediacy of a late-night improvisation—an artist following the melodies where they lead him. Quiet Rhythms brings together traditions Susman has spent a lifetime studying: the harmonic language of jazz, the rhythmic pulse of Latin music, the circling melodies of minimalism, the complex structures of medieval fugues, the ingenious simplicity of the American Popular Songbook.
Quiet Rhythms is united in its sense of quiet introspection, its lush pastel colors, its soft syncopations. The works are not harmonically loud, but they are dynamic. The pulse ebbs and flows: the music is at times delicate, reflective, even meditative—at other times fervent, urgent, and hypnotic. The music’s “quietness” then is less about volume than it is about connecting with the inner voice; listening in those fragile, delicate moments where quiet prevails.

As French musicologist David Sanson describes it: “a rarefied tightrope between vulnerability and sublimity. When I set out to perform a one-hour concert of selections from Books I and II at Spectrum in 2013, it was not my plan to record a live album. I did not revisit the recording of this concert until the summer of 2020 during the pandemic. After a 7-year hiatus, I liked what I heard and I am excited to share it.”

The album features thirteen selections from Books I and II. Quiet Rhythms 13, 16, 18, 20, 21, and 22 are world premiere recordings.

William Susman:

Music for Moving Pictures

Grammy-nominated cellist Joan Jeanrenaud, vocalist / accordionist Mira Stroika and composer / pianist William Susman perform a blend of influences in these film scores seen on PBS Television, over 20 film festivals world-wide, museums in New York and San Francisco, and WINNER of the Tribeca Film Festival. Films during the Silent Era were called moving pictures. Live performance of the music helped provide a "narrative" and intensify the emotion. Setting the mood for these early films, a musician, often a pianist, performed live accompanying the projection of the film. In some of the larger picture houses an organist or orchestra played a score live-to-picture or improvised to pre-determined themes.

William Susman:

A Quiet Madness

"When you think you have a clear idea of a composer's purpose, suddenly you realize that something is hiding behind it, and behind it, again and again. I will keep playing William Susman's music for a long time." –Francesco Di Fiore, 2012

Violinist Karen Bentley Pollick, pianist Francesco Di Fiore, bayan accordionist Stas Venglevski, and flutist Patricia Zuber have been knitting restorative sonic garments from the compositional yarn of William Susman for over a decade. Their rapport is deeper and more apparent than ever on A Quiet Madness, an appropriately titled new masterwork for our zeitgeist. 

A Quiet Madness immerses the listener in a photorealistic sound world of understated beauty. At once calming and thought-provoking, it allows the ear and mind to make their own connections without feeling overwhelmed by thematic constraints. Susman's precise harmonic and rhythmic languages invite us into a subdued, enchanting expression of madness that roams all over the map, akin to the mind wandering during a rainy day-or, perhaps clairvoyantly, akin to the strange passage of time spent in self-isolation during the collective trauma of COVID-19.

William Susman:

Fate of the Lhapa

Scoring the documentary Fate of the Lhapa was an inspiring experience. I worked with a marvelous director, Sarah Sifers, who trusted my musicianship and gave me the freedom to compose a score that attempts to capture the place, culture, spirit and passion of the Tibetan Shamans and their broader historical context. 

 

As with many of my scores, I look for melody and instrumentation that the filmmaker has captured on film. In Fate of the Lhapa, there were stunning musical moments including ritual chanting, a prayer vigil, bells, gongs, drumming and dance. All of these sonic elements contributed to my choice of melody, harmony, rhythm and instrumentation. 

William Susman:

Scatter My Ashes w/OCTET ENSEMBLE

OCTET''s inaugural album has been recorded over the past few years with renowned engineer John Kilgore and was released by Naxos on the label Belarca. The album features the music of William Susman including two song cycles (with poems by his sister Sue Susman) Scatter My Ashes and Moving in to an Empty Space performed by soprano Mellissa Hughes, as well as his Piano Concerto and the ensemble work Camille.

OCTET takes the instrumentation of the American big band and scales it down to a brass section of saxophone, trumpet, and trombone and a rhythm section of piano, electric piano, double bass and drums plus vocals.

"William Susman's remarkable achievement is to take the familiar instrumentation of American popular music, harmonic and rhythmic influences from jazz and Afro-Cuban music and sinuous melodic lines that are uniquely his own and weave them into something new and fresh, yet timeless and haunting. Memorable yet enigmatic, simple yet profound, Susman's music is irresistible." - John Kilgore (Grammy Award-Winning Classical Engineer)

Scatter my Ashes reached No. 1 on Amazon's Classical Hot New Releases, No. 8 on Billboard's Classical and was featured in iTunes Classical New and Noteworthy.

William Susman:

Collision Point

Belarca Records presents Collision Point, a new album by American composer William Susman and Rome-based ensemble Piccola Accademia degli Specchi celebrating a 10-year collaboration. Collision Point features music inspired by love, loss, redemption, and the writings of Allen Ginsberg, Colum McCann and Francis Bacon.

The album brings together four premiere recordings including two pieces for the full ensemble: Camille (2010), which was written for the ensemble, and The Starry Dynamo (1994), as well as a piano trio, Clouds and Flames (2010) and a duo, Motions of Return (1996) for flute and piano.

Susman's music is described by AllMusic as "the next developments in the sphere (of) minimalism," and has earned praise from The New York Times for being "vivid, turbulent, and rich-textured," from Gramophone as "texturally shimmering and harmonically ravishing," and from textura as "distinctly American."