Beginning from the point of view of a passenger sitting comfortably in an airplane, composer, drummer, and Guggenheim Foundation Fellow Bobby Previte’s newest work twists and turns until the listener finally arrives on an unfamiliar shore. RHAPSODY is an acoustic sextet commissioned by the Greenfield Prize in Music at the Hermitage Artist Retreat, and the second in a three-part series exploring the experience of travel.
In the new work, the soloists from DEPARTURES, each of whom had been selected to be the focus of a fifteen-minute concerto, were treated as “found objects” and brought together into one ensemble. Thrown together and forced to forge new relationships in this “instrumentation of chance,” Previte’s Rhapsody Band “mirrors the experience of movement, of migration, of who you may find yourself next to, of venturing into the unknown because you cannot stay where you are,” he says.
RHAPSODY is Previte’s most ambitious work to date in that it marks his debut as a lyricist. “The lyrics are really at the center of this piece,” says Previte. “Having composed only instrumental music my entire life, writing words was quite terrifying. You can hide behind abstract sounds, but with words, there is no equivocating. Words have definite meanings. You cannot walk back from them. You have to own them, fully.”
Jen Shyu, vocals and erhu fiddle
Nels Cline—acoustic guitar, slide guitar
John Medeski—piano
Zeena Parkins—harp
Fabian Rucker—alto saxophone
Jen Shyu—voice, fiddle, percussion
Bobby Previte—trap drums, autoharp, harmonica, and percussion
