The Crossing's 34th Album 'Ways You Went' Releasing This Friday

Three-time GRAMMY winning new-music choir The Crossing releases their first album of the 2024-2025 season, Ways You Went, featuring music of Martin Bresnick and Mason Bates, on Navona Records Friday September 20.

The album leads with Bresnick's Self-Portraits 1964, Unfinished, a co-commission of The Crossing and saxophone quartet PRISM, with whom The Crossing won their first GRAMMY award. Setting words by Herman Melville, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Thomas Hardy, and James Joyce, Bresnick explores the uncannily organic marriage of saxophones and voices, effectively interweaving two disparate instruments, both carried by breath. The celebrated composer and highly influential composition teacher at Yale, looks back to a formative time. Bresnick writes:

"When I was seventeen, I was living alone in New York, working as a maintenance man and trash collector in one of the city's Housing Projects to earn enough to attend a new school. I would rise in darkness and travel to my job by train. In breaks, high on rooftops where sea birds took refuge in the hot summer of 1964, I read books carried in my back pocket and reflected on others I had studied in my first year at university. After work, at small clubs and coffee houses, I listened to music with others of my kind, returning late at night. Now a much older man, I imagine that the texts I read and the music of the six movements of Self-Portraits 1964, Unfinished, are a memoir evoking my youthful state of mind then - rising before dawn, traveling, working, reading, listening, coming home."

Self-Portraits 1964, Unfinished, was commissioned by The Crossing, Donald Nally, conductor, and PRISM Quartet, with generous support from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Musical Fund Society of Philadelphia.

Mason Bates' Mass Transmission incorporates pre-recorded sounds in unlikely and highly effective pairings; for example, static radio and Gamelan music provide the backdrop to an extraordinarily moving work that tackles a timely topic: communication. Bates sets a telegraph conversation between a mother in Holland and her young daughter sent to work for the Dutch government in colonial Java in the 1920s, contrasting the warmth of human communication with the new, cold, and unreliable mechanistic medium by which voices are conveyed. As such, the paradox is immediately apparent; by making the connection, the distances are magnified. The words of both mother and daughter try to navigate this delicate balance.

Mass Transmission features Scott Dettra at the Mander Organ of the Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill, with Kevin Vondrak on electronics.

Self-Portraits 1964, Unfinished was studio recorded March 21-23, 2023, at St. Peter's Church in the Great Valley, Malvern, Pennsylvania.

Mass Transmission was recorded live in concert December 18, 2022, at The Crossing @ Christmas, at The Crossing's home, The Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Ways You Went is The Crossing's 34th album. Named Musical America's 2024 Ensemble of the Year, they have been nominated for the GRAMMY Award for Best Choral Performance nine times, winning three in 2017, 2018, and 2023.

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