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Quantum Butterfly Volume 2, Ensemble Bows For Strings, Piano And Reeds

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Michael Moss

Label: Fourth Stream Records
Released: 2026
Duration: 00:58:40
Views: 22

Tracks

Abyss; Far Away; Elegy for Danny; Ain Soph

Personnel

Album Description

True to Moss’s experimentation back in the ‘third stream’ days, he founded Ensemble Bows, a rather all-star assemblage of strings, piano and reeds. The first two selections encompass the 2023 line-up of violinists Rosi Hertlein and Sunjay Jayaram, violist Melanie Dyer, cellist Lenny Mims and bassist Ken Filiano, alongside pianist Anthony Coleman and the leader on B-flat clarinet. During a Cinco de Mayo show at Greenwich Village’s Westbeth Home for the Arts. Volume opener is the leader’s “Abyss” of which the ensemble sizzles into the storm clouds of this 19+-minute masterwork that immediately conjures Igor Stravinsky as much as Dimitri Shostakovich and Hanns Eisler, with doses of the imagery of Pablo Picasso and Diego Rivera, and writers Ernest Hemingway, Bertolt Brecht, Samuel Beckett, and Yiddish theatre giant Sholem Aleichem melded into the soaring, jarring entirety of the piece.

Following this is the world premiere of “Far Away” by acclaimed Romanian composer Sorin Lerescu (his Opus 89, 2023), written specifically for Moss and Ensemble Bows. One hears traces of modernism’s own track in this slow-developing work, a chromatic invention of sorts. The strings alternate statements, with icy tutti moments to support particularly harmonic moments for Coleman’s piano. Filiano, a notoriously talented bassist whose arco is at least as strong as his pizzicato, stands out amid the dark atmosphere with groaning reality.

The last pieces in this volume are from a 2022 recording at Saint John’s in the Village Church, enacted by a different line-up of Ensemble Bows: the violins of Rosi Hertlein, Sana Nagano, Trina Basu and Liz Taub; violas of Alexandra Honigsberg and Jon Kass; cellos of Lenny Mims and Jake Charkey; the bass of Ratzo Harris, and pianist Alexis Marcelo as well as Moss’s standard B-flat and bass clarinets. This iteration is heard here in two Moss gripping works, “Elegy for Danny”, composed in honor of Daniel Canner who passed away in 2004, and “Ain Soph”, named for the Hebrew term for “infinite”, originating in the Kabballah. While the former moves through several shades of darkness and lament by way of 20th century classicism, the latter sparkles with a discordant, distant, rhythmic theme comprised of Moss’s overdubbed woodwinds, with pungi—the Indian snake charmer—clarinet, and bass clarinet thickening the harmonic space. The effect is near dizzying, but then segments of this theme are heard in splintered variations across the full ensemble beneath the leader’s bass clarinet. Within, one hears a vast, smoking desert landscape, the sun broiling new paths that remain uncharted while brandishing a hypnotic minimalist, perhaps erotic, allure, and shimmering free sections.

Album uploaded by Michael Moss