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Albi

from ORDO by Philip Blackburn

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  • Compact Disc (CD) + Digital Album

    6 panel wallet with 2 CDs and 16 page booklet

    Includes unlimited streaming of ORDO via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
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about

Growing up on Boar’s Hill near Oxford, on Sundays I would visit my neighbor who was an antiquarian book dealer. Albi Rosenthal was not just any book slinger, though. He was one of the world experts on historical musical manuscripts from mediaeval times to the current day. Tea was surrounded by his cousin Mendelssohn’s watercolors, pages from illuminated codices, Paganini, Mozart, and Monteverdi letters, and whatever had arrived that week for his valuation skills for auction houses, libraries, and collectors. After he began working as Paul Sacher’s right hand man to collect 20th century music archives in Basel, the original scores out on his desk at Half Acre included Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, Cardew’s Treatise, and stacks of Nancarrow, Birtwistle, Ligeti, Boulez, Carter, and Brant. As time allowed between world travel and leading the Oxford University orchestra, he enjoyed playing string quartets in his music room.

I was in high school and enjoying summer schools at Dartington with Peter Maxwell Davies. I was singing in choirs, taking tabla lessons, and listening to Messiaen, late Stravinsky, Ives, and David Munrow’s Music of the Gothic Era. I was a hack trombonist, not a string player. All the above lurk behind the string quartet I wrote for – and subsequently named – Albi in 1981 when I was 18 at his request (it was also my first paid commission). He never had a chance to play it and it lay forgotten until Max’s death prompted its memory.

All the pitch material derives from a quasi-tonal eight-tone row. Instead of Italian tempo or expression markings, I serialized the form around the eight Rasa or moods found in Indian Classical music (and, for that matter, Cage’s Sonatas & Interludes). This mood-catalog, united by common harmonies (and by extension integrating multiple aspects of a single personality), is a nod to one of the other fellows on Albi’s shelf (and himself a neglected composer), Nietszche. The eight Rasa are: Rati (Love), Hasya (Mirth), Soka (Sorrow), Krodha (Anger), Utsaha (Energy), Bhaya (Terror), Jugupsa (Disgust), Vismaya (Astonishment).

credits

from ORDO, released October 21, 2023
The Mänk Quartet:
Nicholas Bentz, violin 1
Maitreyi Muralidharan, violin 2
Amy Tan, viola
Kahler Suzuki, cello

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Philip Blackburn Saint Paul, Minnesota

Philip Blackburn was born in Cambridge, England, and studied music there and at the University of Iowa with Kenneth Gaburo. He is a public artist specializing in sound — a composer/environmental sound-artist. Blackburn’s works have been heard in ships’ harbors, state fairs, forests, and coming out of storm sewers, as well as in galleries, parking lots, and on concert stages.

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