Between The Kiss And The Chaos
Tracy Silverman

btk-cover-1024x1024.jpg

INFO

The album’s title work, Between the Kiss and the Chaos, is a chamber version of Silverman’s second concerto for electric violin, performed with the acclaimed Calder Quartet. Each of the piece’s five movements is inspired by iconic masterpieces of visual art. The piece began as music for a puppet opera with dramatic scenes about the creation of iconic artworks, with the score a sort of “Pictures at an Exhibition.” Silverman later orchestrated the music to create his second concerto for electric violin. This album’s electric violin-plus-string quartet version documents the work’s original instrumentation. As for the piece’s title, Silverman writes in the album’s extensive, engaging liner notes: “The title is from a lyric to a song I wrote about 20 years ago… I think it’s a good metaphor for the creative process, this tension between the kiss of inspiration and the compulsive chaos of the artistic struggle within people who are desperately trying to get it right on the canvas. It’s about that need to share an idiosyncratic vision. There is something innately human about the need to tell someone, to share your experience, to get someone else to see the world through your eyes.”

For the album’s companion work, Axis and Orbits, a suite of pieces for electric violin and loop pedal, Silverman explores different ways of using loop pedals, in some cases introducing indeterminacy for the sake of humanizing something inherently repetitious. “By overlapping loops of differing lengths, it’s possible to construct pieces so that there is unpredictability to the way the music unfolds. The harmonies can change in surprising new ways and I have to respond creatively in the moment, just as if I were playing with other musicians.”

Album Personnel

  • Tracy Silverman – Electric 6-string violin

  • Calder Quartet