Empyrean Ensemble

Wang's Beyond the Sound, There is... was inspired by classical Chinese landscape painting. In the classical Chinese art world, everything is related to two essential ideas: Xu and Shi. Xu translates literally as void and represents such qualities as softness and lightness; Shi represents fullness and solidness.

This is a 10-minute excerpt from a psychedelic rock opera called "Über Wildemann and the Dandy" by Liam Wade. The instrumentation is piccolo/flute, viola (played with chopsticks) and percussion (mostly mallet percussion and beer bottles also played with chopsticks).

The piece by Scott Perry, Psycho-crypto-ornithology, is a sonic portrait of a peppy but reclusive bird that looks and sounds something like a pigeon-tucan-turkey-hawk. The landscape in which this bird dwells is mostly depicted by the viola and piccolo. However, it isn’t totally clear where the bird’s body-call-song begins and the synaesthetic description of its environment ends.

Almetus' Transitoire expresses the gradual transition from time into eternity that people, buried under the rubble in locations inaccessible to rescuers, experienced after the devastating earthquake leveled the city of Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Although the piece is not descriptive of the concepts of time and eternity, the perceptual effect of a sustained sonority and the seemingly unrelated gestures allude to a non-temporal and temporal dichotomy in the piece.

Philippe Bodin's La Femme Adultere is performed in string quartet and percussion by Hrabba Atladottir, Michelle Maruyama, violin, Ellen Ruth Rose, viola, Thalia Moore, cello, and Chris Froh, percussion.

Michelle Maruyama, violin, and Chris Froh, percussion, perform Jesper Nordin's In the Midst of Trespassing.

Eric Mo's Jozaphine Freedom is performed by Haleh Abghari, soprano, Peter Josheff, clarinet, Eric More, paino/keyboard, Chris Froh, percussion, with Denise Duhamel, text, and Suzie Silver, video.

Wayne Peterson's Pas de Deux is performed with flute and marimba.

John MacCallum's El Arbol de la Noche Triste (The Tree of the Sad Night) is performed with viola and electronics.

Laurie San Martin's Dawn Song is performed with flute and marimba.