Terrific press release

Here’s a really good classical music press release. Faithful

readers will remember how exasperated I’ve been at bad ones (and, sadly, the

vast majority of classical music press releases I see are really bad).

style='mso-bidi-font-weight:normal'>SONY CLASSICAL PRESENTS THE ACCLAIMED

COMPOSER/INSTRUMENTALIST EDGAR MEYER

IN COLLABORATION WITH PERHAPS

HIS MOST PROVOCATIVE PARTNER YET – HIMSELF

style='mso-bidi-font-weight:normal'>CDS IN STORES TUESDAY, APRIL 25, 2006

Three-time Grammy Award winner

Edgar Meyer has won remarkable acclaim both for the music he has written and

for an inexhaustible variety of recordings and live performances with everyone

from the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center to Garth Brooks, James Taylor,

The Chieftains and Yo-Yo Ma, but his latest Sony Classical recording features

what is perhaps his most demanding collaboration yet – with himself. Aptly

titled Edgar Meyer, the recording

presents the double bass virtuoso and composer performing 14 all-new

instrumental pieces he has created for himself to perform, on an array of

instruments, through the magic of multi-track recording. Recorded in the music

room he built in his Nashville

home, Edgar Meyer will be released on Tuesday, April 25, 2006.

Hailed by The New Yorker as

"the most remarkable virtuoso in the relatively unchronicled history of

his instrument [the double bass]," Meyer plays every one of the

instruments on the new recording – bass, mandolin, guitar, piano, dobro, banjo

and gamba. He says that the album he produced makes him happiest in the way he

was able to realize the voice of the bass.

"It was immensely pleasurable

spending time at home making music," Meyer says. "When you are

dealing with an unusual voice such as the double bass, you usually have to

clear the decks for it to work. You can’t just put down some drums and some

keyboards, and then put a bass on top of it. You really have to move stuff out

of the way. I hate to ask that of people I work with, because they’re so

accomplished. So it’s nice actually not being worried about asking anybody for

anything, to be able to build a whole record around the voice of the bass

without feeling self-conscious about it…I feel it’s the happiest I’ve been with

the voice of the instrument overall."

Each of the 14 tracks on

style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Edgar Meyer evolved in a process in

which composing, playing, recording and editing were fused and did not have to

happen in a particular order, at a particular time. Meyer calls it a type of

music-making "I couldn’t have composed or planned." Some pieces are

heavily composed, others developed as they were built, voice by voice. He notes

that the first thing he recorded – a nine-minute piano improvisation – wound

up, unchanged, as the foundation for one of the tracks, with other instrumental

voices added. Just as the recording process was unpredictable, so was the music

itself, which Edgar uniquely wove with classical, jazz and bluegrass threads.\

In addition to his virtuosity on

the double bass, Meyer is a fine pianist, but working with the other

instruments – banjo, mandolin, dobro, guitar – was a bit of an adventure.

"I have stood next to a lot of my favorite players on these instruments

for 20 years, so even though I couldn’t do what they do, I had an idea of what

those instruments could do, and what a good sound on those instruments

is," he says. "So I knew what I was going for, and the trick was to

find what suited my ability level for each instrument. That meant that each

part is equally difficult. Whether it’s a super-simple mandolin part or a very

complicated bass part, I had about the same degree of difficulty playing each."

Edgar Meyer is an exclusive Sony

Classical artist, and his most recent recording for the label is Music for Two,

his acclaimed collaboration with his longtime friend and musical colleague Bela

Fleck. The two also collaborated on the Grammy-winning Perpetual Motion, also released on Sony Classical. Meyer’s

catalogue of recordings includes a solo recording of unaccompanied Bach, a

recording of the first Concerto for Double Bass and of his own Concerto for

Double Bass and Cello with Yo-Yo Ma, and original collaborations with such

musicians as Joshua Bell, Mark O’Connor, Mike Marshall and Sam Bush, as well as

his work in the traditional classical rule as composer, including Hilary Hahn’s

recording of his Violin Concerto.

The album’s pretty nice, too.

And now someone’s going to say that this was too easy, that

it’s easy to write an engaging press release for a project like this. As

opposed, let’s say, to a new recording of the last three Beethoven piano

sonatas.

To which I reply: Isn’t there something vivid and personal

going on in those Beethoven performances? Something, that is, that could be

turned into a vivid press release. And if something personal isn’t going on,

why record the performances?