Mountain Songs: A Cycle of American Folk Music - Eliot Fisk, Paula Robison

MOUNTAIN SONGS liner notes

With MOUNTAIN SONGS Robert Beaser continues the distinguished line of 20th-century composers who have tapped the wellsprings of folk heritage. From Bartok to Berio composers have been fascinated by the archetypal power of the musical vernacular and have tried to fuse their own styles with the unique spirit of folk music. Beaser's approach to this delicate process yields a rich and varied harvest: eight songs inspired by American folk music, primarily lyric ballads from the southern mountains of Appalachia, freely set and adapted. Many of the tunes themselves are well known, either through performances by such important artists as Pete Seeger or from having been heard around the local campfire. In MOUNTAIN SONGS they are once again transformed, and the result is both familiar and wholly new. Considered a leading figure among a new generation of American composers, Beaser was born in 1954 in Boston, Massachusetts, and was educated at Yale and at Tanglewood. He has been the recipient of many awards, including the Prix de Rome, Fulbright and Guggenheim Fellowships, and his music has been performed through­out the world by major musicians and ensembles such as the New York Philharmonic and the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra. His output includes works for orchestra, chamber and vocal groups, chorus, and solo instruments. In describing his research for MOUNTAIN SONGS, Beaser writes: "I found myself drawn again and again to tunes of the Appalachian region. Perhaps it was because so many of them reveal a luminous spirituality vitiated by an undercurrent of darkness."