Brooklyn Youth Chorus' Debut Album 'Black Mountain Songs'

New Amsterdam Records is proud to announce the release of Black Mountain Songs, the debut album from the Grammy Award-winning Brooklyn Youth Chorus, out today and available for purchase from Bandcamp, iTunes, and Amazon. The album has already garnered much praise ahead of its release, with NPR Music writing that it "vividly captures the broad variety of songs in agile, energetic performances by a chorus of nearly 50 vocalists" and The New Yorker praising the "astonishingly secure performance of the young singers, who have been tasked with executing some formidably complex choral textures."

This expansive choral work celebrates and rekindles the utopian spirit of Black Mountain College, where iconic artists including Willem de Kooning, John Cage, Buckminster Fuller, Merce Cunningham, Josef and Anni Albers, Franz Kline, and Robert Rauschenberg converged and collaborated in the mid 20th Century. Black Mountain Songs features works by Bryce Dessner (who also created the project), Richard Reed Parry, Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Caroline Shaw, Jherek Bischoff, John King, Nico Muhly, Aleksandra Vrebalov, and a collaboration between Dessner and Tim Hecker. Black Mountain Songs is the studio recording of an evening-length stage work of the same name, which premiered to acclaim in BAM's 2014 Next Wave Festival. The project was co-commissioned by the Chorus and BAM, co-curated by Dessner and Parry (of the rock bands The National and Arcade Fire), and produced by the Chorus. Dessner, Parry, and Shaw, along with the Chorus, perform on the album.

Black Mountain Songs, a highlight of Brooklyn Youth Chorus' 25th anniversary season, will be celebrated with a special performance, on the evening of the album's release, at The Jerome L. Greene Performance Space at WQXR.The event is part of the Chorus' 2016-17 Season artist residency.

Brooklyn Youth Chorus re-envisions choral music performance through artistic innovation and collaboration, in addition to a distinctively beautiful sound. Black Mountain Songs expresses the spirit of the Chorus as well as Black Mountain College-a richly collaborative, multi-dimensional approach to music making and artistic creativity. Black Mountain College operated from 1933 until 1957, and was fundamentally different from other colleges and universities of the time. It was owned and operated by the faculty, and was committed to democratic governance and to the idea that the arts are central to the experience of learning. Dessner went to a summer camp in the mountains of North Carolina as a child, not far from where Black Mountain College had been, and created Black Mountain Songs to serve as a collaborative work that pays tribute to the college and its ideals. Brooklyn Youth Chorus is perfect for his narrative song cycle in both principle and skill.

Most of the words featured in Black Mountain Songs come from poems and texts from Black Mountain faculty or students, including John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Josef and Anni Albers, Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Buckminster Fuller, Robert Duncan, Fielding Dawson, Ruth Asawa, Basil King, and MC Richards.

Black Mountain Songs Tracklisting:

1. Black Mountain Song (Bryce Dessner)
2. there is a sound (Richard Reed Parry)
3. Its Motion Keeps (Caroline Shaw)
4. ars imitatur naturam (John King)
5. My World (Bryce Dessner)
6. Bubbles (Aleksandra Vrebalov)
7. Childhood's Retreat (Jherek Bischoff)
8. Fielding Dawson in Franz Kline's Studio (Nico Muhly)
9. Maximus to Gloucester (Bryce Dessner)
10. Spaceship Earth (Richard Reed Parry)
11. M.C. Richards (Tim Hecker and Bryce Dessner)
12. Anni's Constant (Caroline Shaw)
13. Their Passing in Time (Richard Reed Parry)

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