The Arching Path

"The Arching Path" is an album of piano driven, electroacoustic chamber music composed by Brooklyn-based composer Christopher Cerrone, featuring pianist Timo Andres, percussionist Ian Rosenbaum, soprano Lindsay Kesselman, and clarinetist Mingzhe Wang. The warm, resonant works on the album were inspired by Cerrone's travels to Italy and composed between 2010 and 2016. The album was produced by longtime Cerrone collaborator, Mike Tierney, who also worked on Cerrone's GRAMMY-nominated album, "The Pieces that Fall to Earth" from 2019.

The works on Christopher Cerrone's "The Arching Path" examine how we metabolize place. Drawing largely from the composer's travels, the pieces on "The Arching Path" comprise a sort of travelogue--not an attempt to inscribe experiences exactly as they were witnessed, but rather to chronicle their aftershocks long after we have returned home. "The Arching Path" is a virtuosic piano solo inspired by the vertiginous arcs of the Musmeci Bridge in Potenza in Southern Italy. "Double Happiness" is a electroacoustic duet for piano and percussion featuring field recordings of the Italian countryside. "I Will Learn to Love a Person" is a set of love songs adapted from poetry by Tao Lin. The album closes with Hoyt-Schermerhorn inspired by a subway stop where Cerrone has spent many a night of his commute.

Cerrone's longtime fascination with sound as a dynamic object--how it can transform not only as it is being produced, but also after it has been released--finds an analogue here in the process of remembrance, which is likewise a construction shaped by time. His writing situates the ensemble itself in the act of recollection, with voice, percussion, winds, and piano aping each other in pitch, dynamics, and timbre. These pieces propose a more sensuous approach to cartography, one whose contours account for how a place seeps into the mind.

Arching Path