Scott Wollschleger's Between Breath contains four works for different duo and solo combinations that are presented here as a multi-movement complete work. Featuring performances by Miranda Cuckson, andPlay duo (Hannah Levinson and Maya Bennardo), Lucy Dhegrae, Anne Rainwater, William Lang, and Nathaniel LaNasa, Wollschleger's music balances exuberance and intimacy with characteristic sensitivity to timbre and structural proportions.

This album will be released in CD format, which will be available soon.

Scott Wollschleger’s music is full of glitchy sounds that are evocative of the sonic tapestry that has populated our mechanical and tech saturated age. But Wollschleger infuses these sounds with a wide range of expression, humanizing them with everything from tender to humorous affects. Repetition and development are also key components of Wollschleger’s music. Between Breath is his latest compilation of chamber works, presented here as an album length suite. From the restless energy of Violain, the cathartic release of the title track, the ethereal and hypnotic text treatment in Anywhere, where threads go, it all goes well, and finally to the multi-layered timbral counterpoint of Secret Machines no. 7, we hear a composer who mines micro-gestures and their variants for expressive impact that seeps into our musical consciousness.

Violain, written for and performed by the duo andPlay (Maya Bernardo, violin and Hannah Levinson, viola) opens with a dramatic series of swirling tremolo gestures, announcing the arrival of the album with ferocious exuberance. Wollschleger writes that the work was composed via a collage approach to its construction, assembling several fragments into longer ideas and then arranging them into a convincing whole. Much of the material generates from various delicate, fast bowing techniques that are extrapolated into integrated gestural and rhythmic ideas between the two instruments. After the boisterous opening of the first section, the texture settles into a patient exploration of repeated ideas, evolving and transforming ever so subtly. Echoes of the energetic opening are heard briefly — first percolating harmonics return briefly as a soft reminder, followed by a passage of fierce high-register squeals. Ultimately, the movement recedes into airy silence. In the second section, Wollschleger again establishes off-kilter ensemble machines, here imbued with gruff repeated chords, brittle pizzicati, and strident sustained tones. The vigor of the gestures accumulates into a climactic section in which the density of events and frequency of new ideas increases, before the energy disperses into diffuse tremolos.

Between Breath for trombone and piano (William Lang and Anne Rainwater respectively) begins with a musical embodiment of an internal scream through the trombone, driven forward by pointed, muted piano bass notes and punctuated by bell-like tones in the higher register of the keyboard. The piano introduces a hybrid constellation of pitch, timbre, and register, with inside the piano pizzicati coloring cells of arpeggiated notes and chord clusters. Behind this activity, Lang’s trombone growls, creating a drone that avoids stasis through its timbral graininess. Wollschleger revels in the rich overtone content of the trombone, employing an overpressure technique Lang developed that they dubbed a “Dirty Split Tone,” which sweeps through the harmonic series. Wollschleger does not neglect the higher reaches of the trombone however, excavating it for its compressed expressivity, and complementing all of these sounds with an equal enthusiasm for the sound palette inside the keyboard, including piano preparations that emphasize high partials of the overtone series.

The enigmatic text for Anywhere, where threads go, it all goes well for soprano Lucy Dhegrae and pianist Nathaniel LaNasa is a fake John Ashbery tweet that Wollschleger noticed the day after agreeing to compose the piece. Reminiscent of his work CVS for loadbang on their 2021 release Plays Well With Others, Wollschleger meditates on the limited text, turning the words around and upside down and deconstructing them as a path towards spinning out musical ideas. This Virginia Wolff approach to words lends itself to hearing them as rarefied musical objects. Watery piano chords alternate with breathy clusters on pitch pipe to accompany the voice and reinforce the disembodied contemplation of “Ashbery’s” posthumous poem via fake social media profile.

Secret Machine no. 7 for violinist Miranda Cuckson carves out an individual sound world through two adjustments to the instrument — the low G string is tuned down a minor third to E and the piece is performed with a metal mute throughout. The mute facilitates delicate fades to niente and gives the violin timbre a razor-like clarity and fragility. Skittering tremolo figures explode into a sudden loud double stop which is then followed by harmonics rocking back and forth like a gentle wave. Sometimes the material gets stuck as if a record player has skipped, tripping over itself to repeat an idea or echo the preceding gesture. Wollschleger uses these hiccups as a way to organically develop the ideas in the piece, and we are privy to the gradual evolution of a musical organism. As the piece grows, the range of the violin expands, introducing both lower and higher register material. Sliding gestures figure more prominently in the texture towards the work’s end, creating an ephemeral haze. As in many of his other works, Wollschleger builds musical machines and finds the personal resonance within their component parts, highlighting and sharing them with the listener like a secret message.

- Dan Lippel