BMOP/sound Releases 'Masks and Machines' - Debut Recording of Paul Dooley's Orchestral Works

Performances by the GRAMMY Award-Winning Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP), Percussionist Lisa Pegher, Hornist Adam Unsworth, led by Conductor by Gil Rose

DIGITAL PHYSICAL RELEASE

TBR August 27, 2024 Available at BMOP.org and BandCamp

Hailed for its “artistic courage and technical accomplishment (The New York Times),” the Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP) led by conductor Gil Rose releases Paul Dooley: Masks & Machines (#1101). The director and founder of the Performing Arts Technology’s annual Computer Music Showcase at University of Michigan, Paul Dooley is one of the most prolific and performed composers in America today. Hailed for his cross-cultural range of contemporary music, dance, and art, it is Dooley’s exploration of technology that has enraptured new music aficionados and novices alike.

For the first time on record, four of Dooley’s orchestral scores—Point Blank, Mondrian’s Studio, Masks & Machines, and Circuits & Skins—demonstrate the quick evolution of electronics in the concert hall and its growing place in creativity. “While all of these compositions have been ‘successful’—with two of the works being among my most-performed—finishing each resulted in my asking ‘What the heck am I going to do next?’,” explains 41-year-old composer Paul Dooley. “The four works presented here became important compositional milestones between which I went through extended periods of grinding and experimentation.”

The album opener Point Blank is a fusion of “acoustic-fied” synthesizer pads, leads, and keys filled with a youthful, “kitchen-sink” energy. This exhilarating work was recognized with the 2013 Jacob Druckman Award from the Aspen Music Festival and has received global performances.

Dooley’s search for a new direction is heard in the discipline and structure found in Mondrian’s Studio, a three-movement tribute to the Dutch artist Piet Mondrian (1872-1944) featuring virtuoso solo hornist Adam Undsworth. A former member of The Philadelphia Orchestra and Detroit Symphony Orchestra, Undsworth currently serves as Principal Horn of the Ann Arbor Symphony Orchestra and crosses over into the world of jazz as a member of the Gil Evans Centennial Project, Miho Hazama’s M-Unit Band, and horn quartet Quadre. 

Inspired by another modern artist—this time Oskar Schlemmer (1888-1943) whose work merged art, technology, and performance—Dooley explores the interplay between past and present, visual and auditory, in Masks & Machines. This composition has garnered critical acclaim, hundreds of performances, and multiple awards, including the 2016 Sousa/ABA/Ostwald Award and the 2015 William D. Revelli Prize.

Finally, the album closes with Dooley’s most challenging composition project, Circuits & Skins. Showcasing Dooley’s newly discovered way to fuse digital sounds with the orchestra, Circuits & Skins is an EDM-inspired electronic percussion concerto written for Lisa Pegher. Pegher is an American percussion soloist, recitalist, and chamber musician. She has been hailed as “tremendous” by The New York Times, “forcefully balletic” by The Boston Globe, and “more than just a drummer — an alchemist of time, sound, and space, crafting visceral landscapes that penetrate the ears and mind,” by The Glass. In Circuits & Skins, she expertly weaves two carefully programmed Roland SPD-SX drum samples into the percussion battery. These electronic instruments contain field recordings and Dooley’s own synthesized instruments which balance the acoustic orchestral forces.

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About Gil Rose
Gil Rose is one of today’s most trailblazing conductors, praised as “amazingly versatile” (The Boston Globe) with “a sense of style and sophistication” (Opera News). Equally at home performing core repertoire, new music, and lesser-known historic symphonic and operative works, “Gil Rose is not just a fine conductor, but a peerless curator, sniffing out—and commissioning—off-trend, unheralded, and otherwise underplayed repertoire, that nevertheless holds to unfailingly high standards of quality. In doing so, he’s built an indefinable, but unmistakable, personal aesthetic” (WQXR). A global leader in American contemporary music, Grammy Award-winner Rose is the founder of the performing and recording ensemble the Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP), who “bring an endlessly curious and almost archaeological mind to programming…with each concert, each recording, an essential step in a better direction” (The New York Times), as well as the founder of Odyssey Opera, praised by The New York Times as “bold and intriguing.” GilRoseConductor.com 

About BMOP

The Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP) is the premier orchestra in the United States dedicated exclusively to commissioning, performing, and recording music of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. A unique institution of crucial artistic importance to today’s musical world, BMOP exists to disseminate exceptional orchestral music of the present and recent past via performances and recordings of the highest caliber. 

Founded by Artistic Director Gil Rose in 1996, Grammy Award-winning BMOP has championed composers whose careers span nine decades. Each season, Rose brings BMOP’s award-winning orchestra, renowned soloists, and influential composers to the stage of New England Conservatory’s historic Jordan Hall in a series that offers orchestral programming of unrivaled eclecticism. Musical America’s 2016 Ensemble of the Year, BMOP was awarded the 2021 Special Achievement Award from Gramophone Magazine as “an organization that has championed American music of the 20^th and 21^st century with passion and panache.” The musicians of BMOP are consistently lauded for the energy, imagination, and passion with which they infuse the music of the present era. BMOP.org 

About BMOP/sound
BMOP/sound, BMOP’s independent record label, was created in 2008 to provide a platform for BMOP’s extensive archive of music, as well as to provide widespread, top-quality, permanent access to both classics of the 20th century and the music of today’s most innovative composers. BMOP/sound has garnered praise from the national and international press. It is the recipient of a 2020 Grammy Award for Tobias Picker: Fantastic Mr. Fox as well as eight Grammy nominations, and its releases have appeared on the year-end “Best of” lists of The New York Times, The Boston Globe, National Public Radio, American Record Guide, DownBeat, WBUR, NewMusicBox, and others. Admired, praised, and sought after by artists, presenters, critics, and audiophiles, BMOP and BMOP/sound are uniquely positioned to redefine the new music concert and recording experience. Launched in 2019, BMOP's digital radio station, BMOP/radio, streams BMOP/sound's entire catalog and airs special programming. BMOP.org

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