It is finally here! Inscape Chamber Orchestra’s new album American Aggregate, the follow-up to their grammy-nominated Sprung Rhythm, was officially released on August 26th. Working with Inscape and the folks at Sono Luminus was an amazing experience: we are all incredibly proud of how it sounds, and I feel lucky to be in the same company with composers Nathan Lincoln-DeCusatis, Armando Bayolo, Joseph Hallman, Dan Visconti, Julia Adolphe, and Gregory Spears. This is a very special disc, in that it is formatted for multi-channel Pure Audio Blu-Ray playback. For those of you with a 5.1 or 7.1 speaker setup, prepare to be blown away! For those of us with a vanilla stereo playback setup, trust me, it sounds awesome. What I decided to keep, in a new arrangement commissioned by Inscape, is an homage to Bela Bartok’s 5th String Quartet. Using elements from jazz, funk, and prog rock, What I decided to keep follows a rhetorical logic similar to Bartok’s celebrated work. The piece is dedicated to Martin Bresnick, my composition teacher that first introduced me to Bartok’s quartet, whose example I try to follow in working with my own students at CUA. Check out a promo clip of What I decided to keep here. Buy the album at places like iTunes and Amazon.