Earthy Records Releases Orpheus Music

Readers may recall that one of the most memorable events of the current season (at least to date) was the world premiere performance of Lyra presented by the San Francisco Performances PIVOT Festival this past October. The production, which was basically a series of reflections on the Orpheus myth, brought together The Living Earth Show (TLES) duo of guitarist Travis Andrews and drummer Andrew Meyerson, playing a score by Samuel Adams, with the dancers of Robert Dekker’s Post:ballet performing choreography by Vanessa Thiessen. Because the choreography was created and executed in outdoor settings in Eastern California, it was captured on video by Benjamin Tarquin and projected on a large wall behind the TLES musicians and their instruments. The performance took place in the Taube Atrium Theater on the top floor of the War Memorial Veterans Building, a space with no natural acoustics. As a result, composer Adams contributed to the performance by working the control panel for “audio projection” based on the Constellation® technology developed by Meyer Sound.

Cover of the album being discussed (image by Jungjin Lee, courtesy of TLES)

Towards the end of last month, Earthy Records, the “house label” of TLES, released an album of Andrews and Meyerson playing the music that Adams had composed. The duration of the album is slightly less than an hour, only a little shorter than the length of the staged performance, which included a few episodes in silence. The best source for the recording is the Bandcamp Web page, which provides both a digital album (for streaming and/or download) and a limited edition compact disc, which is packaged with a booklet by Laura Grey and Angela Lian. The album consists of nineteen tracks, all of whose titles are provided on that Web page, giving Bandcamp a significant leg up on the paucity of information found on Amazon.com.

The operative word in that first paragraph above is “reflections.” Lyra is not so much a narrative as it is a series of perspectives on the legend of Orpheus and Eurydice, which has assumed so much attention through opera, ballet, and even song cycles. For the most part the titles of the individual tracks guide the listener through reflections on the different episodes of that legend. However, there are also three tracks identified simply as Interludes, as well as one entitled “Gymnopédie,” which basically serves as a reflection on a musical form that is primarily associated with Erik Satie, who seems to have had almost no interest in narrative in his own compositions. (The closest he got to narrative involved setting French translations of excerpts from the dialogues of Plato for his “symphonic drama” Socrate.)

Lyra is the first album devoted entirely to Adams’ music. However, there have been a variety of opportunities to listen to his compositions that “share space” with the works of other composers. These include TLES recordings as well as a solo album that Meyerson released in 2015. There is much to engage the attentive listener in the music he composed for Lyra. Indeed, that listener may better appreciate the composer’s talent without contending with all the other media involved when Lyra was first performed!