Chamber Cartel is a band of gifted musicians dedicated to finding the rare, wonderful, imaginative, and beautiful in Contemporary Chamber Music. Based in Atlanta, the ensemble have been hailed as “the darlings of Atlanta’s [New Music] scene” and “contemporary classical heavyweights” by the Goat Farm Arts Center. Having a flexible instrumentation, Chamber Cartel has performed over sixty concerts of unique programming since 2012 and commissioned twenty new works. 

Program:

Cypher by Christopher Adler (b. 1972)

Caleb Herron, Vibraphone

Mirror Universes by Adam Scott Neal (b. 1981)

Andrew Uhe, Violin / Caleb Herron, Vibraphone

Sky doesn't talk by Carolyn Chen 

Andrew Uhe, Violin • Alana Bennett-Garcia, Cello • Megan Williams, Clarinet •Jennifer Betzer, Harp

Caleb Herron Percussion •Paul Scanling, Conductor

Program Notes:

CYPHER for solo vibraphone is a mathematical and musical sequel to another piece of mine for percussion, Signals Intelligence, that Caleb Herron has helped to champion over the years. I re-examined the mathematical sequences I used to make that work back in 2002, and found a new approach that yielded sequences that held both mathematical and musical interest. These led to a research paper co-authored with mathematician Jean-Paul Allouche and published in the Journal of Mathematics and the Arts, and two new musical works so far, Science Fictions for two pianos, and CYPHER. CYPHER is dedicated to Caleb with great admiration and appreciation. 

In Mirror Universes, for viola and vibraphone, both players read from the same score, which consists of short ideas scattered over two pages. Since the viola reads in alto clef and the vibraphone reads in treble clef, each idea will be heard twice, a seventh above or below where it was first played. Some of these ideas are straightforward, but some feature special effects which hopefully show similarities between these two very different instruments. The piece was composed for String Gone Deaf.