Clark U. Faculty Composer John Aylward Releases Album, Second During The COVID Pandemic

Described by The Boston Globe as "a composer of wide intellectual curiosity," John Aylward today announced the release of his latest album Celestial Forms and Stories (New Focus Recordings).

Inspired by the stories of Ovid's Metamorphoses, Aylward attempts to rewrite the myths that Ovid immortalized through a five-piece suite of atmospheric chamber music. The acclaimed Viennese ensemble Klangforum Wien interpret the visible, sometimes clouded textures, gestures, instrumental counterpoints, and delicate and poetic harmonies beautifully led by one of the ensemble's many guest conductors, Finnegan Downie Dear.

Aylward has always been enraptured by Greek mythology, having already sought new pathways of musical interpretations in previous works. Aylward's fascination with the Metamorphoses dates back to his youth in the Sonoran Desert where one of his brothers was studying the classics. Unlike other artists who have mined Ovid's imagination for subject matter, Aylward is more interested in the writer's narrative strategies. "Just as Ovid reduced improbably and fantastical transformations down to simple processes, I thought perhaps there was a way to build a musical world from similarly simple musical materials," Aylward explains. As expounded in Italo Calvino's essay "Ovid and Universal Contiguity" (1979) and Six Memos for the New Millenium, Ovid was a master of lightness, quickness, and precision-the same qualities that are central to Aylward's musical storytelling.

What started as musical analogs soon became short studies and subsequently vivid musical transformations. The album begins with Ephemera for clarinet and cello, which sets forth the ideas that are expanded and developed through the varied forms and differing stories in the works that follow. The middle three movements embody figures from Ovid's tales: Mercury, Daedalus, and Narcissus. The album closer, Ananke, blends mythological impulses with a contemporary French harmonic palette. Ananke is a work of fractured continuities evoking the impulses and desires of the Three Fates: Clotho, the spinner, Lachesis, the giver, and Atropos, the inflexible. In timeless conversation, the music embodies these characters as tensions rise, perhaps as a destiny unfolds.

This mark's Aylward's second release during the COVID pandemic. The first, Angelus (Released 2020, New Focus Recordings), was hailed as "a triumph (Classical Modern Music Blog), and "a perfectly recorded...engrossing sonic experience (Oberon's Grove)." Unlike Angelus, Celestial Forms and Stories was entirely produced, recorded, edited and mastered remotely due to COVID restraints. "Aside from the challenging time difference between me and the European-based musicians, this unique recording process was much more efficient!"

A child of an immigrant mother from Germany (herself a World War II refugee) and in circumstances of both tremendous diversity and economic instability, Aylward musically processes the impacts of his earlier life, filled with a deep sense of community, rich expressions of converging cultural histories, and the otherworldly landscapes of the desert.

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