Jack Quartet - Dan Trueman: Songs That Are Hard To Sing (2019)

Songs That Are Hard to Sing is an octet composed by Dan Trueman for the JACK Quartet and Sō Percussion. This collaboration of contemporary music heavyweights unites “the nation’s most important quartet,” (New York Times on JACK) with Sō Percussion’s “exhilarating blend of precision and anarchy, rigor and bedlam” (New Yorker).

In this album a bricolage of familiar sounds become ethereal. Piano melodies lilt peculiarly through bitKlavier, a prepared digital piano invented by Trueman that would make John Cage proud that “makes all the notes between the keys become available.” The human voice becomes startling when the untrained voice of a member from Sō Percussion sings for just a few bars in the album’s closing moments.