an album of chamber music

This is a collection of chamber music. A seemingly unnecessary, apodeictic statement already proffered by instrumentation, form, biography, and context. 

The concept of ‘chamber music’ holds more tension in its historicity than might be apparent, however; the intimacy of the performance is the first pirouette of the lazy reviewer, a vague eros that occludes the dynamism of the form: risk, claustrophobia, trust, collectivity.  

In this dance of sound and bodies, I am with Stravinsky: the ontological foundation of music is temporal, not sonic.  Sound is a tool, ready-to-hand, for the reshaping of the everyday's temporal flow to something richer, something intoxicating, but also more demanding. In performance, time is shaped and reshaped, and its contingency is revealed as an entanglement that both reinforces and trespasses defined perimeters of aesthetic potential.  This is the peculiar capacity of music to bring together performers and listeners to temporality far from the everyday, a time of history's simultaneity with the present.  The illud tempus of Eliade, the time of ritual that transforms the profane to the sacred, here is rendered and kept sacred by  performers and audiences, music's hierophants and initiates.

And so, in the end, this is chamber music, this is musicking constituated of interactions between biologicals and mechanicals, delicate and connective even in this great severity called the Modern.  But in this particular moment, as we gingerly, hopefully, emerge from isolation, chamber music’s intimacy affords the opportunity to re-establish the ancient rituals with a greater care and wider connectivity, a response made all the more urgent by music's accelerating transition from embodied performance to the new metaphysic of the digital.