Oh hey!

I have decided, in the spur of the moment, to make freely available some of the "classical" and "neoclassical" music that I have been writing in the last couple years available for free download. For some of you this probably means nothing, but hopefully at least a few of you will find it of some small interest. In the time between finishing "What The Night Said," which was released on July 24th, 2007, and finishing "No Wonder," which will be available for purchase (or in certain circumstances, for trade) on November 3rd of this year, I wrote music of a very different nature at school in Vermont. Some of this music was ostensibly for school; some of it was for films that friends were making; some of it was solely for pleasure. I take much of this music more personally than the songs I write, as it is so easy in songwriting to hide behind a persona, especially in the months that may lapse between a song's genesis and its solidification via the recording process, and so difficult when composing as a novice to hide one's intentions. Perhaps paradoxically, this music may often seem more opaque than my "pop" music because of the lack of an overt textual component. Aside from in "On Beauty," there are no words here, and even then the words are obviously secondary to texture and harmony.

These recordings are all flawed, of course. I often would make things close to unplayable, as inexperienced composers often do at first, and so the mistakes that you might pick up on are my fault alone. Many of these recordings were first or second run-throughs, or live performances, or both. The pianos here are almost all in pretty awful shape, which I'd like to think is due to my former school's tiny endowment and all-round financial inanity. Okay, enough excuses. The people who performed these pieces were all incredibly patient and kind and forgiving. A special shout-out goes to my composition teacher, Allen Shawn, who sightread the piano miniatures on the last day of classes one term when he was absolutely exhausted from grading papers. I will miss working with him.

The improvisations for electric guitar and piano are performed by me, with overdubs.

The piano miniatures, like I said, were all performed within a half an hour by the incredible Allen Shawn.

The small suite for piano, "I dreamt I was a king," and "Wires on the Hudson," was played by the very forgiving Polly van der Linde. The first movement was largely a proto-Schoenbergian experiment but I am pleased with how the second movement came out.

"May you never be a cipher" was played by Polly van der Linde and George Lopez. This tiny piece completely falls apart but I still think it is fun and worth hearing.

"On Beauty," for voice, string quartet, and piano, is performed by the Ne(x)tworks Ensemble, which in this iteration is made up of Joan La Barbara, Kenji Bunch, Cornelius Dufallo, Yves Dharamraj, Christopher Otto, and Monica Ohuchi.

"Ulysses and the Sirens," for viola and tape, is performed by Mary Gregg.

You can download this compilation here!

Also, as a reminder, a previous free compilation album entitled "For No One: Demos, Outtakes, and B-Sides" can be downloaded here!

Enjoy! My second REAL record, "No Wonder," will be out in less than two months now, and I have almost finished writing material for my third as-yet untitled album, which I am tremendously excited about.

Thanks for reading all of this, if you bothered,

Yours,

Will Stratton