Cellist Ashley Bathgate releases her third solo album featuring her performance of Steve Reich’s Cello Counterpoint alongside three new works that take advantage of the versatile format of soloist with layered tracks. Composers Emily Cooley, Alex Weiser, and Fjóla Evans wrote works that expand on Reich’s template, exploring harmonic, dramatic, and gestural contrasts. The homogeneity of timbre inherent in works for layered tracks of the same instrument gives the listener a sense they are hearing a hyper-cello; the compositional strategy both echoes studio techniques that are ubiquitous in commercial music while also amplifying more Romantic impulses of extroverted expression and immersive textures.


The structure and motivic material in Fjóla Evans’ Augun is inspired by the traditional Icelandic song, Vísur Vatnsenda Rósu. Evans organizes overlapping motives taken from the traditional song and creates a shimmering, undulating texture, pushing and pulling between dissonant and consonant voicings. The atmospheric quality of the work tells a non-linear story, painting a complex mix of mournful and resolute emotions.


Emily Cooley’s approach to the layered ensemble was to focus on various groupings of the eight celli as they take on shifting roles in the overall texture. She writes of Assemble, “The title describes what I felt like I was doing while composing: assembling a sort of puzzle. Only at the end of the piece do the eight parts truly assemble into one voice. They all play a slow, resonant chorale that fades into silence." The work ventures through moments of insistent pulse, poignant anticipation, and exuberant lyricism, expanding beyond the bounds of mere assemblage.


Alex Weiser’s Willow’s Song is an arrangement of a William Carlos Williams setting included in a larger work of his, Three Epitaphs, and here serves as a prelude to his longer work on the album. Shimmer opens by extending the final ascending scalar gesture of Willow’s Song, weaving it into luminescent sound masses amongst the cello ensemble. The piece takes advantage of the physical space in performances, calling for spatial organization of the playback of seven pre-recorded cello parts which accompany the live soloist. Weiser writes, “Shimmer explores this sound world through changes – both gradual and dramatic – in melody and range, as well as through a waxing and waning canonic relationship between each cello and the soloist. As the work develops, the appearance of the opening melodic fragment slowed down in augmentation adds a lyrical and sustained element to the texture.”


Steve Reich wrote Cello Counterpoint in 2003 for cellist Maya Beiser and it is the fourth work in his counterpoint series. In performance, the piece is played by a single live cellist playing along with seven pre-recorded tracks (or in an alternate version, by Cello Octet). This innovation of expanding a soloist into a large ensemble through pre-recorded layers augments the sonic palette of a solo instrument while maintaining the simplicity and personality of an individual performer. Reich writes, “The first and last movements are both based on a similar four chord cycle that moves ambiguously back and forth between c minor and Eb major. This harmonic cycle is treated extremely freely however, particularly in the third movement. As a matter of fact, what strikes me most about these movements is that they are generally the freest in structure of any I have ever written. The second, slow movement, is a canon in Eb minor involving, near the end of the movement, seven separate voices.”


–Dan Lippel