Composer Paola Prestini and vocalist/composer Magos Herrera present Con Alma, an operatic tableau on isolation that will be released as an album recording and live digital experience, featuring original works alongside classic songs from the Mexican and Jazz songbook. Created and recorded remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic, the project explores the question of how we can find communion and shared experience in a time of isolation. The album will be released on December 4, 2020 through National Sawdust Tracks, the in-house label of National Sawdust, and a live event will follow on December 13 under the direction of Ashley Tata. The event will present a shared educational and cultural experience to even the most remote communities in Mexico.

All compositions written and arranged by Square Peg Round Hole.

Square Peg Round Hole is Evan Chapman, Sean M Gill, Carlos Pacheco-Perez.

Recorded and mixed by Darren King in Nashville, TN.
Additional recording by Square Peg Round Hole in Philadelphia, PA.

Produced by Darren King and Square Peg Round Hole

Mastered by Ryan Schwabe

Vocals on Branches I by Gracie Coates and Rachel Ruggles (Gracie and Rachel)
Lyrics by Gracie Coates
Violin by Rachel Ruggles
Bass by George Legatos

Vocals on Branches II by members of Variant Six: Steven Bradshaw, Rebecca Myers, Elisa Sutherland
Lyrics by Sean M Gill
Saxophones by Jason O’Mara
Upright Bass by Alex Luquet

Artwork by Richard Vergez
Album Design & Layout by Carlos Pacheco-Perez

About the album:
In Willa Cather’s remarkable story “Paul’s Case” (1905), an enigmatic high school student, on the cusp of maturity with no productive outlet for his artistic energies, cultivates a dandy-esque demeanor in response to his Pittsburgh surroundings. Paul’s interaction with his teachers and his journey to New York culminate in a heartbreaking climax.

In our operatic adaptation, we tried to create an overarching mood that is reflective and expansive, as if the story were being retold in a memorial using Paul’s favorite art forms: music and theater.

About Gregory Spears:

Gregory Spears writes music that blends aspects of romanticism, minimalism, and early music. His work has been called “astonishingly beautiful” (New York Times), “coolly entrancing” (New Yorker), and “some of the most beautifully unsettling music to appear in recent memory” (Boston Globe). In recent seasons, he has been commissioned by the Lyric Opera of Chicago, the Cincinnati Opera, Houston Grand Opera, Seraphic Fire, and the JACK Quartet, among others. He has won prizes from BMI and ASCAP as well as awards and fellowships from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and he has also won the Vagn Holmboe Competition. He holds degrees in composition from the Eastman School of Music (BM), the Yale School of Music (MM), and Princeton University (PhD), and traveled to Denmark on a Fulbright Fellowship to study composition with Hans Abrahamsen. He has been an artist-in-residence at Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, the Aaron Copland House, and the Rauschenberg Residency at Captiva Island, and he was a participant in American Opera Projects’ Composers and the Voice 2007–08 season. His music is published by Schott Music and Schott PSNY.

Sticks are the most basic tools of the percussionist. They are used for striking but are also shaped and arranged into tonal bars, giving the percussion family rich melodic and harmonic components. Skins are what make drums drums. Metal in it’s varied forms — both tuned and untuned — provides a world of percussion color. And stone — the most basic of materials — struck together or shaped into pitched bars creating the most primordial yet intriguing percussion sounds. These 4 elements are the catalyst for the music contained in this record.

I’ve been fortunate to write for many truly talented and visionary percussion ensembles. This record is a compilation of many of those works, all expertly realized by the NYU percussion ensemble under the direction of Jonathan Haas and Sean Statser. I’m thoroughly grateful for their vision and for the opportunity to hear these varied pieces — ranging from solo and duo to full percussion orchestra — in one place.

Three of the pieces are arrangements of my original works: Hush, arranged by James B Campbell, is an all–acoustic version of my Drumkit Quartet #51, which was originally commissioned and recorded by Sō Percussion; Wild Sound Part 4 is the last part of an evening–length multimedia percussion work commissioned and arranged by Grammy–winning Third Coast Percussion; and Traveling Turtle was arranged by NYU graduate student Adam Kiefer, taking it from gamelan instrumentation (originally commissioned by Gamelan Galak Tika) to large traditional percussion ensemble.  

Two of the pieces, Anomaly and Ping Pong Fumble Thaw, are reimaginings of string quartets that were commissioned by Kronos Quartet and Brooklyn Rider respectively. Both of these compositions grew from sketches written on the drumset, then expanded to string quartet, and finally both heard here for the first time back on percussion.  

Eight of these ten pieces have never been recorded until now. I can’t thank the NYU percussion ensemble and its directors enough for all of their hard work, dedication, and preparation, and for instigating and believing in this project in the first place.  

It’s fascinating for me to hear these works, which were written over a ten–year span, all together. I hope you enjoy the energy, the variety of percussive timbres, and the emotional range of this record.