[9mm_fan]

Stirling Newberry; a close friend of mine has just released his first CD of string quartets. I am not sure it’s within the rules for me to post it here but I love this music and just gotta pimp it here (and just about everywhere else).

http://cdbaby.com/cd/stirlingnewberry

You can listen to lower quality versions of it there as well so go and give it a look.

His latest run of string quartets have developed amazingly fast from this first bars of music written while Katrina was still a baby and its transition to being about those tragic events. It was completed a month ago and now is available from CD Baby as rendered by computer and sounds amazing.

The 7th, which I know Stirling likes best of the two works, is a deep brooding work. It starts by recalling strains of the music of New Orleans and builds to the storm its self which instead of being a storm work instead presents the storm the way most of us experienced it from satellite views and the television. All leading to a conclusion that is not entirely hopeful.

The 8th, intended as the B side and regarded by Stirling as the lighter weight work is where my heart resides. It’s simply a rollicking fun piece, more tuneful and more at peace with its self. If nothing else give the Groove for String Quartet movement a few listens and tell me you don’t find your self humming it.

I have known Stirling for many years and have gotten to listen to his music develop since the early 90s. His music has always been relentless and forceful much like the composer himself, yet to my ear he seems to have gained some measure control and maturity in these latest works. If you’re looking for some peaceful classical music to go to sleep to you might want to look elsewhere(though when he gets to releasing Paradiso you might be in luck), but if you looking for music that catches today’s turbulent and transitory feeling, even his earlier music seems to presage the now.

Or perhaps Stirling says it better himself:
“The lyric world moves on relentlessly, and it tares us loose allowing us no wallowing in sentimentality before the calendar changes. Already Katrina is being pushed aside by other events.

It is, if you will, a work etched in granite, with a figure carved of marble. With lines and letters finer and straighter than circumstances often allow. It is of a time when we watched and felt the tempest, gathered at early hours outside gas stations waiting for fuel to arrive and talked among ourselves about how our nation could have strayed so far from the proper path.”