The Color of There Seen from Here

To mark its 40th season, the celebrated San Francisco vocal new music ensemble Volti releases premiere recordings of works of dazzling range and diversity by five American composers- Robin Estrada, Tonia Ko, Ziboukle Martinaitye, Forrest Pierce and Mark Winges. Four of the works are among the twenty Volti has commissioned since 2013. Gary Snyder’s poem “A Prayer to the Great Family” provides the test for the Forrest Pierce’s lush and luminous Gratitude Sutra, in which Snyder’s words of simple Gratitude become, according to Pierce, “a discourse on the generous beauties that sustain us on this voyage around the sun.” The piece was commissioned by the Barlow Endowment for Music Composition at Brigham Young University for Volti, the BBC Singers, and the Latvian Radio Choir. Next up is From Ivory Depths, Tonia Ko’s evocative and inventive setting of fragments of text from a short story by Virginia Woolf. Ko, the recipient of many awards including a Gugenheim fellowship, wrote this work under Volti’s 2016 Choral Arts Laboratory commission, a competition for American composers under age 35. Robin Estrada melds Western forms with Southeast Asian musical styles in Caeli Enarrant, written as a reflection on the current conflict-filled sociopolitical climate. Mark Winges, Volti’s resident composer, contributes All Night, setting the poetry of Gustaf Sobin. The closing piece is The Blue of Distance, by Lithuanian-born composer Ziboukle Martinaityte. The textless, atmospheric work was inspired by Rebecca Solnit’s book A Field Guide to Getting Lost, which also provided the title of this recording.