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Kenneth Kirschner — Three Cellos
(Bandcamp Greyfade Folio, 2024, Book+DL)

by Henry Schneider, Published 2024-09-03

Three Cellos Cover art

Composer Kenneth Kirschner’s Three Cellos is the inaugural release on Greyfade’s new folio format, a hardback book with a digital download of the music. Five years in the making, Three Cellos offers a detailed examination of Kirschner’s process, techniques, and experience of translating an intricate contrapuntal composition from its original electronic form, into a notated score for cello, and finally into the finished suite of cello recordings included with the book. Three Cellos is subtitled An Acoustic Adaptation of July 8, 2017; Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Vibrato. And this all came about through his compositional approach to Three Cellos. Kirschner started with a single improvised cello melody, and using MIDI he copied and pasted it over itself in different variations: scaling time and transposing by semitones. He stretched and contracted the MIDI loops, ultimately scoring the digital composition so he can acoustically perform the resulting modern chamber music. Over the course of ten movements and 41 minutes, the interacting chords and note sequences never bore the listener. In fact I am reminded of Khachaturian’s Adagio from the Gayane Ballet Suite. Three Cellos is truly modern classical music that does not sound academic or so experimental that only the intelligentsia or the literati will appreciate it. It offers not only beautiful, challenging, and innovative music, but also an inside look into the practices and struggles of a deeply engaged contemporary artist as he pushes the musical boundaries.

Filed under: New releases, 2024 releases

Related artist(s): Kenneth Kirschner

More info
http://kennethkirschner.bandcamp.com/album/three-cellos

 

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