Aaron Larget-Caplan, Guitar • World Premieres by 15 Composers
CD Release Date: November 6, 2020

An album filled with creativity, virtuosity, and beauty. It’s more than an album release, it’s a creative project that encourages interaction between the performing artist and composers but also between the compositions themselves. Each composer approaches the lullaby in a new creative way allowing the listener to engage with the album as a conceptual whole. From colourful sensitive phrasing to virtuosic execution of soothing new music textures, Aaron Larget-Caplan’s playing is exquisite. Highly recommended. ~ This is Classical Guitar

Download the CD Booklet • LISTEN TO THE ALBUM

Lullabies transfigure our nights, so too then must they transfigure our sleep and dreams. A new lullaby has its creation tied to something we can never quite forget or remember.

Aaron Larget-Caplan is more than one of the leading classical guitarists of his generation; he is an enthusiastic ambassador for his art. Following his groundbreaking 2015 release ‘John. Cage. Guitar.’ (Stone Records), Aaron returns to his New Lullaby Project with the première recording of a second volume of contemporary lullabies in Nights Transfigured. Compositions written between 2008 and 2020 by 14 composers from Australia, Austria, France and the United States, these new lullabies give a compelling argument for the listener to examine their relationships to contemporary music, the lullaby, and how to bridge the chasm between audience and living composers.

When Covid-19 canceled touring and public performances, Aaron constructed his own studio, L’atelier des Artists Boston, and recorded the album in September 2020. It is an exhilarating representation of 21st century composition for guitar and the album demonstrates how extraordinarily welcoming Aaron is in his expansive ideas about what can be embraced in the musical idea of lullaby.

Nights Transfigured features new lullabies inspired by composers’ children, song and the intimacy of singing to another, the end of night, poetry, longing for sleep, our troubled times, gentle motion, and of course, the melding of stars and moonbeams. They are lullabies of passage and being, longing and loneliness, marking time, memory, and yet these sonorous landscapes are also inhabited by warmth, hope, and peace. On a theoretical level there is a variety of musical languages: tonal, 12-tone, contrapuntal, North Indian, minimalist, and quasi-improvisational, with many using a mix of them while requiring many extended instrumental techniques. The American Composers Alliance will publish a multi-volume anthology of new lullaby project scores beginning in 2021.

Whether a music lover, amateur or professional musician, child, or someone who wishes to doze off peacefully, there is a piece for you. A lullaby’s creation is tied to something never quite forgotten or remembered. Lullabies transfigure our nights, so, then, they must transfigure our dreams.

15-WORDS ABOUT THE NEW LULLABIES IN VOLUME II
SHATZER: A lullaby for eternal sleep inspired by a Howard Nemerov poem
CASTILLA-AVILA: Inspired by the meteor shower, full of pitch bends, tapping, & haromonics
READ: Rhythic ostinato with floating melody exploring timbres
JULIEN: loose 12-tone in 5/4 that is melodic, spacious, and breathtaking
SHENDE: Fusion of North Indian & Western, pitch bends, nut-side playing evokes a zen music
FLETCHER: Simple motive expands with counterpoint stretching the harmonic language of guitar
ÉON: Dark and a bit playful, with a dance rhythmic ostinato via harmonics over a lovely melody
MCMULLIN: Moving from awake to dream with floaty downbeats and evocative colors
TRESTER: A lullaby inspired by a poem of our time inside, melodic and spacious
DALTON: Quarter-tones and haronic with supple melodies interrupted by rhythmic climax
SPANEAS: Simple, lovely and haunting of an earlier time
BOYD: Gorgeous and exotic in its use of colors and techinques, daunting and hopeful
SCHUTTENHELM: Sparse and colorful, with interrupted rocking before dreaming more
OLIVER: Hypnotic and sonorous exploring repetition and warmth

*All compositions in the score anthology can be found on the recordings: New Lulalby & Nights Transfigured.