American Dream Bearthoven

• Scott Wollschleger (b. 1980)
• 1 Gas Station Canon Song 02:30
• American Dream:
• 2 American Dream: I. MM. 0-84 05:17
• 3 American Dream: II. MM. 85-218 09:32
• 4 American Dream: III. MM. 219-392 06:31
• 5 American Dream: IV. MM. 393-610 10:15
• 6 American Dream: V. MM. 611-646 03:18
• Scott Wollschleger:
• 7 We See Things That Are Not There 07:44
• 8 American Dream 34:54
• Total Runtime 01:20:01

Info for American Dream

Bearthoven (Karl Larson, piano; Pat Swoboda, double bass; and Matt Evans, percussion) releases its second album, "American Dream", featuring the works of composer Scott Wollschleger, including his "Gas Station Canon Song", "American Dream", and "We See Things That Are Not There".

Karl Larson describes American Dream as “a reflection of the contemporary American state of mind.” Rather than making a direct political statement, the works on the album reflect the paradoxical nature of the “American Dream” in our current socio-economic climate. Wollschleger says, “This music expresses the strongest sense of urgency I've experienced in my entire life, channeling feelings of doom, optimism, hopelessness, and the sublime. Much like a dream, these pieces weave an interconnected musical fabric of contradictory worlds.”

The title work on the album, Wollschleger’s American Dream, is a substantial trio for piano, double bass, pitch pipes, and a wide array of percussion instruments including vibraphone, water crotales, and vibrators. The piece consists of numerous “broken songs” dispensed throughout a fragmented time-field. This formal dissonance, often heightened by disruptively recurring drone-clusters, sets the tone for the entire album: the beautiful/hopeful is pervasive but constantly shadowed by the repugnant/forlorn.

We See Things That Are Not There engages the vibraphone and piano in a constant repetitive dialogue with one another – both instruments recite the same phrase back and forth without an ultimate agreement. Gas Station Canon Song for solo piano is an unscrambled statement of one of the “broken songs” from American Dream. It was inspired by the synchronous existence of the beautiful and the grotesque encountered by Wollschleger in an I-80 gas station, a direct reference to a modern American paradox: how the majestic and the repellent always seem to coexist in a state of flux, no matter the medium.

Bearthoven

Produced by Ryan Streber, Scott Wollschleger, and Bearthoven

Bearthoven
is a piano trio creating a new repertoire for a familiar instrumentation by commissioning works from leading young composers. Karl Larson (piano), Pat Swoboda (bass), and Matt Evans (percussion) have combined their individual voices and diverse musical backgrounds, coming together to create a versatile trio focused on frequent and innovative commissioning of up-and-coming composers. Bearthoven is rapidly building a diverse repertoire by challenging composers to apply their own voice to an instrumentation that, while common amongst jazz and pop idioms, is currently foreign in the contemporary classical world.

Formed in 2013, Bearthoven has quickly established themselves as a forerunner in the New York City contemporary music scene. Commissioning over 30 new works in their first six seasons, the trio has created its own diverse repertoire ranging from the driving, post-minimal voices of Ken Thomson, Brooks Frederickson, and Shelley Washington to the atmospheric and abstracted offerings of Sarah Hennies, Scott Wollschleger, and Anthony Vine. Bearthoven’s commitment to collaboration and innovation has garnered both critical and peer acclaim and has led to featured performances on notable series including the MATA Festival, the Bang On a Can Marathon, the Music/Sound Series at EMPAC, the Princeton Sound Kitchen, and the Ciclo de Conciertos de Música Contemporánea in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The group's debut album Trios was released on Cantaloupe Music in May of 2017. Their second album, American Dream, features the works of Scott Wollschleger, and will be released in February of 2019 on the same label. Bearthoven was recently selected as 1 of 24 ensembles to be a part of the inaugural New Music USA Impact Fund cohort.

Scott Wollschleger
(b. 1980)s music has been highly praised for its arresting timbres and conceptual originality. Wollschleger has become a formidable, individual presence (The Rest Is Noise, Alex Ross) in the contemporary music landscape. His distinct musical language explores themes of art in dystopia, the conceptualization of silence, synesthesia, and creative repetition in form and has been described as apocalyptic, distinctive and magnetic, and possessing a hushed, cryptic beauty (The New Yorker, Alex Ross) and as evocative and kaleidoscopic (The New York Times).

Wollschlegers concert works can be heard across the US and the world, most recently featured at MATA Festival Interval Series, the International Music Institute at Darmstadt, and the Festival of New American Music in Sacramento. His critically acclaimed piano concerto, Meditation on Dust, was recently performed by pianist Karl Larson at the Bang on a Can Festival at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. His apocalyptic monodrama, We Have Taken and Eaten, was featured on NPRs Arts & Letters. Upcoming and recent projects include commissions from andplay, Bearthoven, violist Anne Lanzilotti, Metropolis Ensemble with violinist Rachel Lee Priday in collaboration with the String Orchestra of Brooklyn, and Third Angle Music. His debut album, Soft Aberration, was released on New Focus Records in 2017.

Following lightly in the footsteps of the New York School, Wollschleger received his Masters of Music in composition from Manhattan School of Music in 2005, where he studied with Nils Vigeland. Wollschleger was a Co-Artistic Director of Red Light New Music, a 501c(3) non-profit organization dedicated to presenting and crafting contemporary music. In addition to his musical ideas, he frequently delves into the philosophical writings of Deleuze, Nietzsche, and Brecht and maintains an ongoing collaboration with Deleuzian scholar Corry Shores. Their recently co-authored thesis, Rhythm without Time, was successfully presented at the London Graduate Schools academic conference, Rhythm and Event. Wollschlegers work is published by Project Schott New York.

Booklet for American Dream