Release Date: February 10, 2017
Catalog #: NV6073
Format: Digital & Physical
21st Century
Vocal Music
Choir

Clay Jug

Edie Hill composer
The Crossing | Donald Nally conductor

The choral music of Minnesota-based composer Edie Hill shines on CLAY JUG, a compendium of large and small works for a cappella choir and choir accompanied by chamber ensemble. Though the works featured on CLAY JUG vary in scope, they all demonstrate Hill’s keen sensitivity to ensemble texture and harmonic density, as well as the incorporation of text across four languages.

In CLAY JUG, Hill excels at shifting the listener’s perspective as they listen to the choir. In the most straightforward cases, such as in The Fenix, Hill moves the choir in between the music’s foreground and background to accommodate a vocal soloist. More dramatic is what happens in From the Wingbone of the Swan and “Clay Jug” – an excerpt from a large work of Hill’s entitled A Sound Like This – wherein three or four musical layers converse within the choir itself, or between the choir and accompanying instruments.

It is obvious in the works on CLAY JUG that Hill has a strong connection to the texts she sets. Three of the album’s works – The Fenix, Alma beata et Bella and Cancion de el Alma – draw their texts from very old European sources dating back to the 10th, 15th and 16th centuries, respectively. Hill does not necessarily modernize these ancient words in her settings of them, but she succeeds in meaningfully personalizing them through her musical language.

Along these lines, Hill describes the influence of the language these works’ texts on their aesthetics, particularly in the case of The Fenix, which uses its poetry’s original medieval Anglo-Saxon language. Similarly, Alma beata et Bella seems to make homage to Renaissance-era musical tropes contemporaneous to its text’s origins, but, in both works, Hill’s individual voice comes through with only slight alteration.

The works on CLAY JUG feature a musical language that pairs beautifully with choir, employing dissonance with care and purpose, as well as freely shifting texture to serve Hill’s compositional designs.

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Artist Information

Edie Hill

Composer

For Edie Hill, writing music is an opportunity to research, learn, muse, reach down deep, and allow inspiration to come from the stuff of life. Her compositions are fueled by her experiences, passions, and curiosities.

The Crossing

Choir

The Crossing is a Grammy-winning professional chamber choir conducted by Donald Nally and dedicated to performing new music. It is committed to working with creative teams to make and record new, substantial works for choir that explore and expand ways of writing for choir, singing in choir, and listening to music for choir. Many of its nearly 150 commissioned premieres address social, environmental, and political issues.

Donald Nally

Donald Nally

Conductor

Donald Nally collaborates with creative artists, leading orchestras, and art museums to make new works for choir that address social and environmental issues. He has commissioned over 180 works and, with The Crossing, has 29 recordings, with two Grammy Awards and eight nominations. Nally has served as chorus master at the Lyric Opera of Chicago, Welsh National Opera, Opera Philadelphia, and the Spoleto Festival in Italy.