New York Composer Debra Kaye To Release New Album: TIME IS THE SEA WE SWIM IN

Following up on her recent Navona Records release, IKARUS AMONG THE STARS, New York-based composer Debra Kaye has curated a colorful retrospective of chamber works spanning her entire career, from the improvisatory piano solo At Liberty (1988) to the jazzy, multi-media Colossus 1067 (2021) written to accompany Gus Foster's time-distorting panoramic photograph taken with a handheld rotary camera while riding the largest wooden roller coaster of its time. Titled TIME IS THE SEA WE SWIM IN, Kaye's eclectic catalog showcases a variety of influences from the poetry of Zen monks to current events and European Romanticism all providing reference material for Kaye's philosophical, even metaphysical meditation on time and the creative process.

Kaye embraces a faith in the restorative properties of the imagination that has implications far beyond music: it's centering, even healing. Likewise, her gift in combining diverse sounds and styles invites her listeners to join her on this voyage of discovery and dip a toe into this existential sea that we all swim in.

At Liberty (1988) was in many ways, a milestone in Kaye's early artistic development, evolving through a series of improvisations, Kaye surrendered to where the music would lead her. The piece was a personal response to the philosophical aesthetics of her mentor at the time, Rowena Pattee Kryder, its form is based on Kryder's Four Stages of Creativity, from the seed to the manifestation/fruit. At Liberty would prove to be liberating for the composer, and became a confirmation of Kaye's decision to become a composer.

While We Were Sleeping (2012), was written nearly a quarter of a century later and exhibits Kaye's continued interest in being able to transform improvisatory gestures into a formally cohesive piece. Kaye found her inspiration in the very real sense of peril she experienced while listening to the weather report the night before Superstorm Sandy. As with the earlier At Liberty, While We Were Sleeping is also scored for solo piano and explores the experience of how time seems to slow down when confronted with the anticipation of a storm's sudden, violent unleashing.

The current album also includes Kaye's String Quartet No. 2 (2017), nicknamed the "Howland Quartet" in honor of the Howland Chamber Music Circle which commissioned the piece for its 25th Anniversary. The piece's origins grew out of the long association between Kaye and the Howland Music Circle, and in composing this homage she intentionally set out to "tell the story" of the Music Circle's founding, growth, and ongoing spirit. In contrast to the First Quartet, which appeared on IKARUS AMONG THE STARS, Kaye has overlaid a very specific narrative on the work's structure. The work's first two movements (A shimmering idea...you decide to follow, The beauty of the dream upon reflection), focus on specific incidents in the Circle's history, while the third, Danza Energico, is a general celebration of art flourishing in such an environment featuring a chorale tune that morphs into Jesu Joy of Man's Desiring before reaching to a joyous fiddling Hoe-Down finish.

Kaye has had a lifelong interest in unusual instruments, so when she was commissioned to write for New York's acclaimed Kyo-Shin-An Arts Japanese music ensemble she leaped at the opportunity. The result was three zen poems for shakuhachi, viola & cello, (2019/rev. 2022). Finding inspiration in the poetry of Zen monks of the 15th and 16th Centuries, Kaye crafts a dialogue between the Japanese shakuhachi bamboo flute (played by ensemble founder, James Nyoraku Schlefer) and the viola and cello. Here, the subject matter of the haiku evokes three phases of a life in music - enchantment, hope in times of need, and the fulfillment that's possible in a creative life, providing Kaye with another opportunity to engage with the role of the artist as mediator in our relationship with time!

Kaye's temporal explorations are perhaps most fully realized in her piano trio, Time is the Sea We Swim In (2020/rev. 2022). As in the earlier haiku, she challenges us to examine our changing perceptions of time, of how it can seem to speed up as we get older or slow down during times of intense "being in the now." Time is the Sea We Swim In was composed for the Lincoln Trio who premiered the piece on March 1, 2020, on the Howland Chamber Music Circle series to an enthusiastic sold-out audience, their performance can be heard on Kaye's new album.

The program concludes the cryptically titled Colossus 1067 (2021). Commissioned by Gus Foster in celebration of his retrospective at the Harwood Museum in Taos NM, Kaye's jazzy score was the soundtrack for a live multi-media performance of Gus Foster's panoramic photograph taken on "The Colossus", one of the last wooden roller coasters in the U.S. The enigmatic number 1067 refers to the camera's 3 rotations (360 degrees x 3 = 1080), about 3 seconds in all. The repetitions, resonances and occasional blur of the rotating camera, are all suggestive of the metaphor of "Einstein's Clock" that says that anything that rotates can be a clock, themes that are beautifully complimented by Kaye's unusual chamber jazz. Sadly, the work is also a threnody for a monument of a bygone age: Colossus closed on August 16, 2014, after a 36-hour continuous riding event.

Kaye identifies herself as a "baby boomer, with one foot in the 20th and the other in the 21st century," and as such, she presents a compelling perspective. "I feel grounded in the pre-digital age while embracing at least a certain level of technology. I can be as addicted as the next, to my cell phone. But I also put it down and feel the difference, the change in tempo, the coming back to my own rhythm, unconnected to the screen," she writes. As a contemporary woman experiencing the upheavals and challenges confronting all women these days, she hopes that her music will ultimately inspire hope. "There's always hope," Kaye says, "because there's always creative potential. Sometimes that is our only hope and we as artists can point the way through our work and creativity."

Special mention is also due to the extraordinary assemblage of musicians whose talents have made this album possible: Craig Ketter piano, Lincoln Trio, (Desirée Ruhstrat violin, David Cunliffe cello, Marta Aznavoorian piano), James Nyoraku Schlefer shakuhachi, David Yang viola, Hikaru Tamaki cello, Voxare String Quartet (Emily Ondracek-Peterson & Galina Zhdanova violins, Erik Peterson viola, Wendy Law cello) and Debra Kaye herself, piano.

As Albert Einstein said, "Creativity is contagious, pass it on."

Time is the Sea We Swim In (Navona Records) will be released on March 1, 2024, and available in both physical and digital formats.

On release day, the entire album can be streamed for FREE on the Navona Records website: https://www.navonarecords.com/catalog/nv6604/

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