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David Serkin Ludwig and Katie Ford’s

 

The Anchoress

Album Page

Album Booklet

 

August 28th Release on XAS Records | NOW: Pre-Order Launch
The Anchoress
Soprano Hyunah Yu, PRISM Quartet
Piffaro, The Renaissance Band

Three Anchoress Songs
Mimi Stillman, flute/piccolo
Matthew Levy, tenor saxophone

Self-isolation as spiritual practice

 

Online release event hosted by
Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim, Aug. 21 at 6 PM on Facebook

The premiere recording of composer David Serkin Ludwig and poet Katie Ford’s 2018 monodrama The Anchoress will be released Friday, August 28 on PRISM Quartet’s XAS label. Along with the four saxophones of PRISM, The Anchoress features soprano Hyunah Yu in the title role, plus early-music ensemble Piffaro the Renaissance Band – a strikingly original melding of timbres, yielding a sound that is rich and unsettlingly strange. The disc also includes Ludwig’s virtuosic Three Anchoress Songs for flute and tenor saxophone, played by Mimi Stillman and PRISM’s Matthew Levy respectively.

On Friday, August 21 at 6 pm, PRISM will live-stream a free release event on its
Facebook page featuring an HD video performance of The Anchoress (taped in 2018 at the DiMenna Center). The event will begin with a conversation with Ludwig and Ford, hosted by writer Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim, who also contributed liner notes to the album.
 
Anchorism, Then and Now
The Anchoress concerns the medieval practice of anchorism, i.e. extreme self-isolation as a path to spiritual purity, and its relationship to modern society. It explores struggles with faith, alienation, gender, and social power through the imagined person of a medieval anchorite, a person (usually female) who sought spiritual perfection through extreme confinement.

An anchoress would permanently sequester herself into a small cell known as an ‘anchorhold,’ attached to a church. She had one small window through which to speak to townspeople coming to her for guidance. Notes da Fonseca-Wollheim, “The medieval anchoress cuts a paradoxical figure: Buried alive, she is sought out for her wisdom. Encased in perpetual darkness, she is considered clairvoyant. Dead to the world, she becomes a pillar of her community.”

To us, it may seem baffling to choose a lifetime of self-isolation. But as da Fonseca-Wollheim observes, “Compared to the other choices – wife, nun, servant, prostitute – the life of a recluse…promised in return a level of safety few common-born women enjoyed. The anchorhold protected her from sexual assault, pestilence, and the dangers of pregnancy and childbirth. And it offered respect, and a certain autonomy.

“For the poet Katie Ford, these contradictions become a point of entry into the inner life of an anchoress who is by turns contemplative and bitter, mystical and shrewd… In certain places, Ford inserts artful redactions, like passages in a manuscript rendered illegible by censorship or time.” In Ludwig’s arresting and imaginative setting, these redactions are marked by blasts of noise from the ensemble, blotting out the Anchoress’ unsanctioned ideas.

Comments Ford, “All of us now know more about seclusion and enclosure than we likely ever wanted to know. My imagined anchoress called pandemic ‘a time of great mortality.’ When I first wrote that phrase, pandemic seemed as medieval as an anchorhold, and just as unlikely a context in which we might make our own lives. Yet here we are — chastened, humbled, and changed by the small radius in which we now live. Those not in such seclusion, essential workers the world over, are living under the duress of constant Covid-19 threat and very often quarantined away from their families. Or, they aren’t living at all — they have died, died because so many of us have not been chastened, humbled, and changed.”
The Anchoress Trailer
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About the Music
 
In The Anchoress, David Ludwig uses extended vocal techniques and a unique hybrid ensemble to connect the distant world of Ford’s protagonist with our own. Writes da Fonseca-Wollheim, “When quoting the 14th-century composer Machaut, the saxophones blend together into a soft incense haze. In combination with the recorders, shawms and sackbuts they can create unruly sonorities of gnomish exuberance, like the medieval science fiction of Hieronymus Bosch.” Piffaro’s instrumentarium for the work also includes theorbo, lute, percussion, and their voices.
 
Keenly attuned to the rhythmic and expressive contours of Ford’s texts, Ludwig’s vocal writing captures the rich complexity of the title character – her skepticism, her suppressed anger, her moments of transcendence.
 
“Ludwig also gives his Anchoress a doppelgänger in the shape of a solo recorder,” notes da Fonseca-Wollheim. “Sometimes the flute hovers about the female voice, or cuts in like a shard of sunlight strafing the cell. On occasion, the recorder seems to take flight – the embodiment of a soul that cannot be confined.”
 
For The Anchoress, Ludwig has assembled a singularly gifted team of musicians. Hyunah Yu, an American soprano born in South Korea, was recently praised by The Independent (UK) for her “lustrous presence and beauty of tone.”
 
PRISM Quartet has been hailed by Steve Smith in The Log Journal as “singleminded in their pursuit of new sonic and stylistic frontiers for their mutual instrument of choice, the saxophone.”
 
Piffaro the Renaissance Band is “widely regarded as North America’s masters of music for Renaissance wind band” (St. Paul Pioneer Press).
 
Mimi Stillman, who duets with PRISM’s Matthew Levy in Three Anchoress Songs – a brief work Ludwig wrote while he was developing the larger piece – was described by the Washington Post as “a magically gifted flutist…A Breath of Fresh Air.”
David Serkin Ludwig
David Serkin Ludwig’s first musical memory was singing Beatles songs with his sister. His second was hearing his grandfather perform at Carnegie Hall, foreshadowing a diverse career collaborating with many of today’s leading musicians, filmmakers, and writers. His choral work “The New Colossus,” opened the private prayer service for President Obama’s second inauguration. The next year NPR Music named him in the world’s “Top 100 Composers Under Forty.” He holds positions and residencies with nearly two dozen orchestras and music festivals in the US and abroad.
     
Ludwig has received commissions and notable performances from many of the most recognized artists and ensembles of our time, including the Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Minnesota, and National Symphony orchestras, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, as well as Jonathan Biss, Jeremy Denk, Jennifer Koh, Jaime Laredo, David Shifrin, eighth blackbird, the Dover and Borromeo quartets, and PRISM Quartet.
     
Ludwig received the prestigious 2018 Pew Center for Arts & Heritage Fellowship, as well as the First Music Award, and is a two-time recipient of the Independence Foundation Fellowship, a Theodore Presser Foundation Career Grant, and awards from New Music USA, the American Composers Forum, American Music Center, Detroit Chamber Winds, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
     
Ludwig is the Gie and Lisa Liem Artistic Advisor and Chair of Composition at The Curtis Institute of Music, and is director of The Curtis contemporary music Ensemble 20/21. He lives in Philadelphia with his wife, acclaimed violinist Bella Hristova, and their four beloved cats, Schmoopy, Uni, Frankie, and Lili.

 
Katie Ford
Katie Ford is the author of four books of poems, most recently, If You Have to Go. Her third, Blood Lyrics, was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize and the Rilke Prize. Her second, Colosseum, was named among the “Best Books of 2008” by Publishers Weekly and the Virginia Quarterly Review, and led to a Lannan Literary Fellowship and the Larry Levis Prize. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, PoetryThe Paris Review, The American Poetry Review, and The Norton Introduction to Literature. She’s collaborated with David Ludwig several times over the past decade, and is currently under commission to write poems for the Brooklyn Art & Song Society.
 
She holds degrees in theology from Harvard University and in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is a Professor of Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside, and lives in South Pasadena with her young daughter.

Acknowledgements

 
The Anchoress was commissioned with generous support from The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage. Three Anchoress Songs was commissioned by the Awea Duo. This recording was made possible with generous support from The Presser Foundation, the Musical Fund Society of Philadelphia, and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.
 

Media Inquiries

 
Steven Swartz | steven@dotdotdotmusic.net | t. 646/206-3966
www.dotdotdotmusic.net


 

Booking
Matt Browne | browne@prismquartet.com | t. 215/438-5282

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