Virtual Album Release: “the labor of forgetting”

Join Yale School of Music professor of composition Katherine Balch (MM ‘16) and fellow alumna soprano Lucy Fitz Gibbon (TD ‘10) for a free virtual album release party. Featuring a limited-edition visual version of their album, “the labor of forgetting,” the film draws on live recording session footage as well as environmental imagery gathered during the pandemic in the Pacific Northwest. The album’s featured works include Filipino-American composer Dante De Silva’s “Four Years of Fog” (2016) for solo piano, performed by pianist Ryan McCullough, which toys with youthful idealism distorted through the dual lenses of age and experience. The title is both an allusion to the period De Silva spent in cloud-socked Arcata, California, and the heady myopia of youth. Underscored by the unusual tuning system De Silva devised for the work, the four movements for solo piano move uncannily away from the moorings of traditional harmonic relationships, shimmering as if heard through the Doppler effect of passing
time.
Katherine Balch and poet Katie Ford’s song cycle “estrangement” (2020), commissioned by Brooklyn Art Song Society and funded in part by the National Endowment for the Arts, is a modern response to Robert Schumann and Heinrich Heine’s seminal “Dichterliebe.” In the thirteen-movement cycle, Balch alludes to Schumann’s harmonies while crafting her own exploration of lost love, grief, and carefully pruned rage. This tour-de-force for both voice and piano utilizes the full range of sonic possibilities for both instruments, from phonetic murmuring and disjointed leaps to evocative prepared piano sonorities. Balch’s choice to select phrases from Ford’s poem rather than set it verbatim further reinforces the intimate nature of the work, as if the listener has wandered not into a concert hall but rather into the fragmented thoughts of the singer herself. For more information see https://falseazurerecords.com/2022/09/01/the-labor-of-forgetting/