Black Mountain Songs

Released March 31, 2017
New Amsterdam Records

At North Carolina’s Black Mountain College, erstwhile commune and artistic playground of John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Robert Rauschenberg and many others, a spirit of radical democracy prevailed. Students and teachers shared roles and work, boundaries between disciplines dissolved, and art bled into life, nurturing an atmosphere of unfettered creative collaboration.

In Black Mountain Songs, performed by the Brooklyn Youth Chorus, commissioned and produced by BAM and Brooklyn Youth Chorus, and curated by Bryce Dessner and Richard Reed Parry, that collective thread is renewed. Seven composers—Dessner, Parry, Pulitzer Prize winner Caroline Shaw, Nico Muhly, Aleksandra Vrebalov, John King, and Tim Hecker—collaborate with filmmaker Matt Wolf (Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell) to create an expansive choral and visual work that celebrates and rekindles Black Mountain’s utopian spirit.

Reviews

The New Yorker
http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/pushing-things-forward-in-choral-music

Variety, however, is the hallmark of “Black Mountain Songs,” a release on New Amsterdam Records that celebrates the extraordinary creativity at Black Mountain College, in North Carolina, where the postwar American avant-garde was incubated through the transformative genius of figures such as the composer John Cage, the choreographer Merce Cunningham, and the artist-pedagogue Josef Albers. The project was designed by the composer (and rock musician) Bryce Dessner and Dianne Berkun Menaker, who is the inspired leader of the extraordinary Brooklyn Youth Chorus, an ensemble of teen-age girls and boys for whom contemporary music is daily bread.

Originally staged as a choreographed pageant at BAM’s Harvey Theatre, in 2014 (the late Harvey Lichtenstein, bam’s dynamic director, was a Black Mountain alumnus), “Black Mountain Songs” earned a rave review in the Times—and when you hear the astonishingly secure performance of the young singers, who have been tasked with executing some formidably complex choral textures, you immediately understand why.

WQXR
http://www.wqxr.org/#!/story/brooklyn-youth-chorus-wildly-energetic-black-mountain-songs/

Black Mountain Songs, a new, collaborative choral song cycle curated by Bryce Dessner and Richard Reed Parry, certainly gives off waves of energy. But these composers, and the others they have brought onboard the project, pursue a far more lucid aesthetic than that of, say, a John Cage circa 1952. Dessner and Parry are both rock stars as well as composers – Dessner celebrated for his work as guitarist with the National, and Parry as a multi-instrumentalist in Arcade Fire – and it may be, in part, their firm grounding in the musical vernacular that keeps Black Mountain Songs so seemingly simple and direct.

It may also be – again, in part – the forces they have written for this time around. The Brooklyn Youth Chorus, under Dianne Berkun Menaker, sings each of these numbers with the light, rounded sound of young voices, warmed with gentle vibrato and brightened by idiomatic American diction.

Textura
http://textura.org/archives/b/brooklynyouthchorus_blackmountainsongs.htm

Though all involved can be proud of Black Mountain Songs for being an ambitious project superbly realized, perhaps Dessner and the Brooklyn Youth Chorus (along with its conductor Dianne Berkun Menaker, who founded the group in 1992) have reason to be most proud, given how instrumental they were in its creation. As Dessner himself astutely notes, “While we set out to create a work inspired by the College, ultimately what we have made is something entirely new and our own.”