remember by Jeremy Beck

This welcome new album of works by Jeremy Beck includes eight diverse compositions for a variety of instrumental and vocal forces. Three of the compositions, Invitation to Love, Elegy, and November Dances, were composed during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown.

Invitation to Love won First Prize in Category 3 (treble choir) of The King’s Singers New Music Prize in 2021. The text is by Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906) who was an American poet, novelist, and short story writer. Born in Ohio to freed slaves from Kentucky, he became one of the first influential Black poets in American literature. Elegy for piano and string orchestra is derived from the second movement of Beck’s early piano concerto from 1984. In its recent reimagined form, it was a finalist in the 2021 Alfred Schnittke International Composers’ Competition. November Dances, scored for flute, viola, and harp, is a one-movement work that takes the listener through a series of different moods, from pensive to exuberant. Beck writes, “The music reflects aspects of the various emotions I was feeling, whether hopeful or pessimistic, during that difficult, challenging time.”

The earliest composition on the disk is Variations for guitar and string quartet, composed in 1990. This piece was premiered at the Yale School of Music in 1992 when Beck was a graduate student there. Revised in 2015, it unfolds in one continuous movement. Rather than a series of character pieces based on a given theme, the piece opens up organically, with certain harmonic, rhythmic, and motivic ideas presented in the opening measures being re-shaped into new guises as the music progresses. Structurally, the variations increase in tempo to the center of the music and then these tempi are also subjected to the variation process before the piece closes quietly as it began.

Recorded by the Frosch String Quartet in Sofia, Bulgaria, Beck’s String Quartet No. 6 closes out the program. This work is in two binary movements; both begin with lyrical material and then progress to music that is fast and agitated. In addition to the relationship of their formal structures, the second movement reflects certain relationships to the first movement’s melodic, motivic, and harmonic ideas. For example, the sostenuto passage that begins the second movement is derived from the closing pizzicato of the first.

Jeremy Beck’s music has been called “… forceful and expressive. … concise in structure and generous in tonal language, savouring both the dramatic and the poetic” (Gramophone), while critic Jonathan Woolf has affirmed “Jeremy Beck shows, once again, that one can fashion convincing music from traditional ways and means that sounds alive and relevant.” (Music Web International).

Recorded both in the U.S. and Eastern Europe, these new works engage the listener, invite contemplation, offer pleasure, and reveal a lyrical aesthetic committed to beauty, intimacy, and animated joy.

Jeremy Beck “knows the importance of embracing the past while also going his own way. … [In] Beck’s forceful and expressive sound world … the writing is concise in structure and generous in tonal language, savouring both the dramatic and the poetic.” (Gramophone Magazine).

BeckMusic.org