Common Sense Composers' Collective & American Baroque Announce: THE SHOCK OF THE OLD The Common Sense Composers' Collective has been experimenting, since 1993, with the ways that new music is conceived, developed, and presented. Back then, the grand idea had been to see what would happen if a collaborative, workshop-oriented approach was brought to the world of Contemporary Classical Music. It worked. After the success of our first project, (recorded on CRI, Emergency Music 731), we've gone on to complete six other such collaborations. The Shock of the Old contains the resulting works from our 1996 collaboraion with American Baroque. From the get-go this was one of our most dynamic and interactive projects. While American Baroque was no stranger to new music, some of us in Common Sense had lots to learn about their period instruments and all the aesthetic and technical issues that went along with writing for them. How to sum up the collaboration? …Nine months, several work-in-progress sessions, a zillion phone calls, dozens of faxes, one crazed goose chase frantically hunting down a late (and seemingly lost) Fed Ex truck which contained some electronic gear needed Right Then, one near nervous breakdown, lots of revisions, one conductor, and finally, one glorious evening of music -- which we had to repeat 45 minutes later due to an overflow audience. The results are a wonderful and motley assortment of pieces. We hope you enjoy.

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Introduction by Richard Taruskin:

It used to be fashionable for new music groups to play a bit of old music at their concerts, perhaps to show that modernism had a prehistory, or perhaps just to bracket the mainstream and pretend it didn't exist. In any case, the appeal of old music and new music alike, in those days, was the appeal of esoterica--a snob taste. Now the shoe is on the other foot. Both new music and early music have decided to grow up and renounce snob appeal, and old music groups, along with their ever-widening audiences, are reveling in the new, and even commissioning it. Postmodernism? No need to call it that. rom the beginning modernists have prized "pattern and precision," to quote an admiring essay by Ezra Pound, the modernist pioneer, on Arnold Dolmetsch, the early music pioneer. The loopy (as in tape-loopy) music of what some people still call minimalism is a joyous rebirth of P&P, and it informs most of the pieces recorded here. Just as Pound had already realized in 1914, it sounds stunning in the clean, bright colors that "old" instruments produce. The Common Sense composers are "musical" in a way that graduate schools once tried to cure. They find their music not in imagined better worlds but in this one, including its existing music. And their idea of what the world's music is or can be is refreshingly broad--not just Telemann and gamelans (to mention two of the ingredients you'll find here), but all the sounds musicians make. As a former gambist I took special delight in Randall Woolf's "Artificial Light," where the sound the player's fingers make in shifting position over metal-wound strings (Cowell's Banshee in miniature) is taken as musical material in its own right and turned to haunting effect. But players of every instrument displayed here will be as intrigued by the new possibilities these attractive compositions suggest as composers will be. I wish both American Baroque and the Common Sense Composers' Collective a lot of competition in this venture. Nothing better could happen to new music or old music than for their audiences to merge.

Track Order Belinda Reynolds CIRCA Marc Mellits 9 Miniatures: Slippery Marc Mellits 9 Miniatures: Metoclopramide Marc Mellits 9 Miniatures: Lefty's Elegy Marc Mellits 9 Miniatures: Dark Age Machinery Marc Mellits 9 Miniatures: Carpal Tunnel Marc Mellits 9 Miniatures: Lunacy Marc Mellits 9 Miniatures: Nomadic Marc Mellits 9 Miniatures:Lego Marc Mellits Elegy for Lefty Randall Woolf Artificial Light Dan Becker Tamper Resistant Carolyn Yarnell More Spirit Than Matter I: Ein Bischen Carolyn Yarnell More Spirit Than Matter III: Spinning Music John Halle Spooks Melissa Hui Shall We Go? Ed Harsh authentically classic American Baroque: Stephen Schultz, baroque flute Gonzalo X. Ruiz, baroque oboe Elizabeth Blumenstock, baroque violin Roy Whelden, viola da gamba Katherine Shao, harpsichord With: Paul Hale, baroque cello Andrea Fullington, soprano Visit Santa Fe New Music Read the Review in the San Francisco Chronicle Check out the other Common Sense CDs, TIC and Common Sense

randall WOOLF belinda REYNOLDS ed HARSH melissa HUI carolyn YARNELL marc MELLITS john HALLE dan BECKER Copyright 2002-2007 Common Sense | 4348 26th St. | SF CA | 94131 | 415 285 8680 | CREDITS