Steven Mackey to Release New Album BEAUTIFUL PASSING in November

On Friday, December 9, 2022, GRAMMY-winning composer Steven Mackey will release a portrait album of his music for violin and orchestra, Beautiful Passing, on Canary Classics. Works include Mackey's violin concerto Beautiful Passing (2008), with soloist Anthony Marwood, and his symphony, Mnemosyne's Pool (2014), both recorded live by the Sydney Symphony Orchestra led by conductor David Robertson. Mackey shares deeply personal accompanying notes in the booklet, followed by a conversation with longtime collaborator of more than 15 years, David Robertson. The conductor leads the National Symphony Orchestra in performances of Mnemosyne's Pool on December 1, 2, and 3, 2022 at The Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. The NSO, alongside the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Sydney Symphony Orchestra, and New World Symphony, commissioned the symphony.

Mackey introduces the album, "All of the music on Beautiful Passing engages with memory, albeit in different ways. Mnemosyne's Pool deals with memory within the music itself, and in so doing it deals with our memory, the human capacity for memory and the act of remembering. Beautiful Passing deals with my memory, a particular memory from my personal experience which gave rise to the music and may in turn invite related memories from the listener."

Steven Mackey's violin concerto Beautiful Passing (2008) - performed on this album with British violinist Anthony Marwood MBE - is a work in two halves, separated by a cadenza. It was inspired by Mackey's experience watching his mother pass away from esophageal cancer. He shares, "During this time, I was working on a violin concerto which was intended to be a flashy show piece, but I lost my mojo for that and could not stop thinking about the three states of being that this experience had drawn so expressively: First, my mother's serenity and strength as she assumed control of her destiny. That calm stood in sharp contrast to, second, the frantic, albeit benign, chatter around her from the electric, phone, and cable TV companies haggling over prorated charges, as well as the nurses, aides, and friends (myself included) who did not believe that she had any agency in in this matter. Third and finally, my insomnia and the flickering consciousness between wakefulness and sleep. As I reflected on this last state, I pondered what my mother's experience of flickering consciousness between life and death might have been like. I was filled with admiration as I realized that I had been unable to relinquish consciousness for a mere six to eight hours, while my mother let go for eternity, as far as we know. Beautiful Passing does not attempt to retell the story of my mother's passing but rather to distill those three states of being into musical threads that interact with one another as musical elements do, not as my story did. The 'story' is a linear narrative, while the composition follows a quite different, musical logic."

The work was co-commissioned by the BBC Philharmonic and St. Louis Symphony, with Music Director David Robertson, and premiered by violinist Leila Josefowicz with the BBC Philharmonic led by Juraj Valcuha in 2008. The Guardian raved, "It contends, asserts, floats and flickers, but entirely on Mackey's own stylistic terms. The piece is all the stronger for the negativity it grapples with, and maybe that will prove to be so of his work as a whole."

Described by Musical America as "the first great American symphony of the 21st century," Mnemosyne's Pool (2014) is a 40-minute symphonic saga in five movements with recurring musical characters that develop an expansive narrative. Mnemosyne was a Greek titaness, the goddess of memory and mother to the nine muses. She personified the memory required to preserve and retell the sagas of history and myth. She also presided over a pool in Hades which was the counterpart to the River Lethe, from which those who journeyed through the underworld drank to forget their past lives when reincarnated. Mnemosyne's pool of remembrance was less frequented. Mackey explains, "While I composed Mnemosyne's Pool, the role of memory in the perception of music was more of a conscious fascination than usual for me. Consider a note that does not flow naturally from the note it succeeds but is recalled from an earlier point in a musical line. A large awkward leap can signal to the listener and performer that this note relates more to its own previous occurrence than it does to the immediately preceding note. This disjuncture can ask the listener to remember an earlier point in the line instead of moving inexorably forward. We get to taste the peculiar flavor of the awkward leap but ultimately digest it. Ostensibly odd musical grammar in the present tense can be understood as an artifact of the past tense when it accompanies a remembered event, like a film's sepia hue telling us that the scene is meant to be a recollection. Musical grammar and memory can work together to create various shades of (dis)continuity." The symphony was premiered by the Los Angeles Philharmonic under the baton of Gustavo Dudamel in 2015.

About Steven Mackey

"My entire life was changed by a single note." As a teenager growing up in Northern California obsessed with blues-rock guitar, Steven Mackey was in search of the "right wrong notes," as he often likes to say, referencing Thelonius Monk. The single note in question occurs in the second movement of Beethoven's last string quartet, which a 19-year-old Mackey heard while driving around northern California: an unexpected unison E-flat that wielded the power to explode assumptions he had about classical music. He would later describe it as the most psychedelic rock music he'd ever heard.

Mackey cites this as the moment he decided to become a composer, and it set the young guitarist on a path that has defined his music to this day: Colorful notes (including blue) creating vivid topographies that serve as landmarks on fantastical journeys.

Today, Steven Mackey is a GRAMMY-winning composer of works for chamber ensemble, orchestra, dance, and opera - commissioned by the greatest orchestras around the world, and winner of several awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Kennedy Center Friedheim Award. Bright in coloring, ecstatic in inventiveness, lively and profound, Mackey's music spins the tendrils of his improvisatory riffs into large-scale works of grooving, dramatic coherence.

Mackey began composition studies at the University of California at Davis and received his PhD at Brandeis University. Upon graduating and becoming a professor at Princeton, Mackey came to realize his true creative voice by merging his academic training with the free-spirited physicality of his mother-tongue rock guitar music. Signature pieces incorporating rock vernacular into traditional classical ensembles emerged: Troubadour Songs (1991) for string quartet and electric guitar; Physical Property (1992) for electric guitar and string quartet; and Banana/Dump Truck (1995), a concerto for solo electrified cello plus a ripieno group of cellists and orchestra.

The decades that followed saw Mackey create many of the defining pieces in his repertoire: Dreamhouse (2003) for solo tenor, vocal quartet, electric guitar quartet and orchestra, nominated for four GRAMMY awards; A Beautiful Passing (2008) for violin and orchestra, an emotional reflection upon the death of his mother that Leila Josefowicz premiered with the BBC Philharmonic; and Slide (2011), an experimental music theater piece that won a GRAMMY Award for a recording featuring Mackey on electric guitar alongside vocalist Rinde Eckert and eighth blackbird. In 2021, the LA Phil, Gustavo Dudamel, and trumpet soloist Thomas Hooten gave the world premiere of Shivaree, a fantasy for trumpet and orchestra. Mackey further expanded his theatrical catalog with his short chamber opera Moon Tea about the 1969 meeting between the Apollo 11 astronauts and the Royal Family, premiered by Opera Theatre of Saint Louis in 2021, as well as with his 2022 music theater work Memoir, based on the pages of his late mother's memoirs.

This season sees three world premieres: Concerto for Curved Space with the Boston Orchestra and Andris Nelsons; Red Wood, a new environmentally concerned work for The Soraya's Treelogy Project; and RIOT with mezzo-soprano Alicia Olatuja, Mackey on electric guitar, New Jersey Symphony, Princeton University Glee Club, and conductor Xian Zhang.

Today, Mackey lives in Princeton, New Jersey with his wife, composer Sarah Kirkland Snider, and their son Jasper and daughter Dylan, and teaches at Princeton University, where he mentors young composers as director of the Edward T. Cone Composition Institute. In fall 2022, Mackey also joins the composition faculty at the Curtis Institute of Music. He continues to explore an ever-widening world of timbres befitting a complex, 21st-century culture, while always striving to make music that unites the head and heart, that is visceral, that gets us moving. Learn more at www.stevenmackey.com.

Beautiful Passing Track List

1. Steven Mackey (b. 1956) - Beautiful Passing, for violin and orchestra [24:33]

Steven Mackey - Mnemosyne's Pool, for symphonic orchestra [42:50]
2. Variations [9:12]
3. Déjà vu (Medley) [10:01]
4. Fleeting [4:53]
5. In Memoriam A.H.S. [05:51]
6. Echoes [12:49]

Total: 67:23

Anthony Marwood, violin
David Robertson, conductor

Canary Classics CC-22
Recording Producer: Beautiful Passing, Philip Powers; Mnemosyne's Pool, Tony David Cray & Raff Wilson
Sound Editor and Engineering: Beautiful Passing, Bob Scott; Mnemosyne's Pool, Tony David Cray
Post-Production Mastering: Daniel Shores, Sono Luminus Studios
Original Recording 24 bit/96kHz
Beautiful Passing Recorded Live in the Sydney Opera House Concert Hall June 1-6, 2015
Courtesy ABC Classic. Licensed by Australian Broadcasting Corporation
Mnemosyne's Pool Recorded live in the Sydney Opera House Concert Hall August 21-26 , 2017
Original Cover Art & Design: DM Stith

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