Shifting Direction - album cover
Download Album Cover*

Shifting Direction

Texas Tech University Contemporary Music Ensemble
Eric Allen conductor

Joan Tower composer
Jennifer Jolley composer
Jennifer Higdon composer

Release Date: November 15, 2024
Catalog #: NV6681
Format: Digital

A resilient voice for new music, Eric Allen conducts the Texas Tech University Contemporary Music Ensemble in SHIFTING DIRECTION, a collection of three works by composers Joan Tower, Jennifer Jolley, and Jennifer Higdon. Elevated by Allen’s precise conducting and careful attention to detail, SHIFTING DIRECTION provides three unique listening directions for contemporary music enjoyers to delight in.

In Petroushskates, Tower paints an image of a carnival on ice, a whirling winter affair inspired by the thematic material of Stravinsky’s Petrushka as it appears in the opening Shrovetide fair sequence. Weaving and flowing, the music creates the graceful effect of seeing a figure skating routine.

Jolley’s Blue Glacier Decoy pays tribute to the path of modern dancer and choreographer Trisha Brown, who revered the glacier and incorporated its landscape and movement into her work.

SHIFTING DIRECTION closes with a bang — or rather, a zap — with Higdon’s Zaka, a word which is defined as doing the following at great speed: zap, sock, race, turn, drop, sprint. The ensemble moves at an electric pace to capture the essence of the term.

Listen

Hear the full album on YouTube

Stream/Buy

Choose your platform

Track Listing & Credits

# Title Composer Performer
01 Petroushskates Joan Tower Texas Tech University Contemporary Music Ensemble | Eric Allen, conductor; Spencer Hartman, flute; Hsiao-Ju Chen, clarinet; Lauren Pokorzynski, violin; Daria Miskiewicz, cello; Se-Hee Jin, piano 5:47
02 Blue Glacier Decoy Jennifer Jolley Texas Tech University Contemporary Music Ensemble | Eric Allen, conductor; Julia Griffith, flute; Hamed Shadad, clarinet; Kayla Abel, bass clarinet; Natalie Wilson, alto saxophone; Taylor Burks, vibraphone; Hyejin Go, piano 6:51
03 Zaka Jennifer Higdon Texas Tech University Contemporary Music Ensemble | Kennzie Greenlee, flute; Hamed Shadad, clarinet; Nilshmid Santiago Jimenez, violin; Daria Miskiewicz, cello; Anna Vander Boon, piano; Taylor Burks, percussion 13:04

Petroushskates
Recorded August 22, 2023 at Crickets Theater at The Buddy Holly Hall in Lubbock TX
Recording Session Executive Producer & Engineer Hideki Isoda
Recording Session Associate Producers Saikat Karmakar, Pershauna Johnson

Blue Glacier Decoy; Zaka
Recorded March 2 & May 3, 2023 at Hemmle Recital Hall at Texas Tech University in Lubbock TX
Recording Session Executive Producer & Engineer Hideki Isoda
Recording Session Associate Producers Saikat Karmakar, Brad Cawyer, Ben Hinkie

Editing, Mixing & Mastering Hideki Isoda

Executive Producer Bob Lord

VP of A&R Brandon MacNeil

VP of Production Jan Košulič
Audio Director Lucas Paquette

VP, Design & Marketing Brett Picknell
Art Director Ryan Harrison
Design Edward A. Fleming
Publicity Aidan Curran
Digital Marketing Manager Brett Iannucci

Artist Information

Eric Allen

Conductor

A versatile conductor, Eric Allen is sought as a conductor of all types of ensembles. At Texas Tech University, Allen serves as director of the Contemporary Music Ensemble. Under his direction, the CME has performed exciting and innovative programs in a variety of venues, providing opportunities for musicians to experience exploratory repertoire in a nurturing and collaborative environment.

Learn More

Jennifer Jolley

Composer

Jennifer Jolley (b. 1981) is a West Texas-based composer of vocal, orchestral, wind ensemble, chamber, and electronic works.

Learn More

Notes

The title Petroushskates combines two ideas that are related to this piece. One refers to Stravinsky’s Petrushka and the opening Shrovetide Fair scene which is very similar to the opening of my piece. The celebratory character and the busy colorful atmosphere of this fair provides one of the images for this piece. The other is associated with ice skating and the basic kind of flowing motion that is inherent to that sport. While watching the figure skating event at the recent winter Olympics, I became fascinated with the way the curving, twirling, and jumping figures are woven around a singular continuous flowing action. Combining these two ideas creates a kind of carnival on ice — a possible subtitle for this piece.

— Joan Tower

The 2017 obituary in The New York Times for the modern dancer and choreographer Trisha Brown only casually mentioned her debt to the landscapes of the Pacific Northwest. It was an unusual characterization for an artist who once told her fellow Washingtonian, the choreographer Merce Cunningham, that “The rain forest was my first art class.”

Indeed the Pacific Northwest’s instruction is found in many of Brown’s works. Her 1970 piece Floor of the Forest employs a steel scaffolding to hold a cloth canopy of ropes threaded with colorful used clothing to create a synthetic forest where dancers writhe and wiggle.

Her 1979 piece Glacial Decoy is similarly derived from these experiences. In this work Brown and Robert Rauschenberg created fleeting images via gossamer-clad dancers and an ongoing found image slide projection. The mechanical and physical movements become an elegant analog to the glaciers. The images and dancers move and shift forward and back, side or other side, or anywhere in between, like a lateral melt. The fleeting projections become a visual metaphor melting and congealing anew.

I have never been to Olympic National Park, so I followed Brown’s example and combined my own experiences with what I learned from an artist who followed the Hoh River Trail, studied the Hoh Rainforest, and revered the Blue Glacier. We should follow her lead and do the same. We must “give [ourselves] a moment to feel this very mobile sense of how the balance is.”

— Jennifer Jolley

za ka (zo ko) v. To do the following almost simultaneously and with great speed: zap, sock, race, turn, drop, sprint.

Commissioned as part of the national series of works from Meet the Composer Commissioning Music/USA, which is made possible by generous support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Helen F. Whitaker Fund, the Target Foundation, and through fiscal sponsorship of Concert Artists Guild.

— Jennifer Higdon