VOX

VOX, the premiere recording of the Heare Ensemble, celebrates the 90th birthday of iconic American composer George Crumb with a scintillating rendition of VOX BALAENAE [Voice of the Whale] for Three Masked Players: Electric Flute, Electric Cello, and Electric Piano (1971).The Heare Ensemble (Jennie Oh Brown, flutes; Jennifer Blyth, piano; and Kurt Fowler, cello) first performed Vox Balaenae as graduate students at the Eastman School of Music. Since then, the ensemble has performed this powerful, environmentally-conscious piece more than 25 times. It was written after Crumb heard hydrophone recordings of Humpback whale song that opened up a whole new/ancient sonic world; timeless, reverberant, atmospheric. Additional works on the album were programmed for their thematic relevance to Crumb’s ideas. Having grown up and lived for many years in Virginia, the ambient sound of the Appalachian Mountains infused much of Crumb’s writing. Stacy Garrop’s Silver Dagger is based on an Appalachian fo