FOLKS' MUSIC by Cassandra Miller, Laurence Crane, Linda Catlin Smith

New York Times
5 Classical Music Albums You Can Listen to Right Now

All three works on this movingly serene album are worth hearing, but one stands apart: “The City, Full of People.” Cassandra Miller — taking earlier music as her material, as she often does — transcribed herself singing a bit of Thomas Tallis’s 16th-century setting of lines from Lamentations. She then expanded the transcription into a score for 16 singers, divided into six groups meant to surround an audience in performance.

The trajectory is affecting: from the all-male vocal ensembles Tallis would have known, to a woman’s private meditation on his music, to her translation of it for a mixed-gender choir today, able to come together after a pandemic that isolated us all. On its journey with Miller, Tallis’s somber austerity has been gently blurred, taking on a circling, overlapping, dreamlike melancholy — and a surprising joy — that partakes of both hovering light and the earthiness of human voices.

Its companions are Laurence Crane’s spare, patient String Quartet No. 2, played by the Esposito Quartet, and Linda Catlin Smith’s “Folio,” luminous choral music to fragments of Emily Dickinson (like the Miller, sung by the superb Chamber Choir Ireland under Paul Hillier). “Folks’ Music” is a credit to Eamonn Quinn and his Louth Contemporary Music Society in Ireland, which commissioned these works and created this superb album. ZACHARY WOOLFE
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/28/arts/music/classical-music-albums-december.html

LCMS' commission and recording of Cassandra Miller "The City, Full of People,” performed and recorded by Paul Hillier and Chamber Choir Ireland for the Louth Contemporary Music Society is one of Alex Ross's Notable Classical Recordings of 2023." Music this uncalculatedly beautiful leaves you almost desperate with gratitude."
Alex Ross The New Yorker
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/2023-in-review/notable-classical-recordings-of-2023


Folks’ Music, the newest record from the tiny but mighty Louth Contemporary Music Society...you simply won’t find a more sublime release than this one, framing a beautifully simple string quartet by Laurence Crane with simply beautiful choral works by Cassandra Miller and Linda Catlin Smith, all offered in stereo and binaural mixes. When I tally up the recordings I cherished most in 2023 at the end of the year, I won’t be surprised at all if this one tops the list.
Steve Smith. On the Record Nov. 2023
https://nightafternight.substack.com/p/for-the-record-dec-8-2023

Chamber Choir Ireland and Esposito Quartet: Folks’ Music review — sparing and serene. Contemporary works by Cassandra Miller, Laurence Crane and Linda Catlin Smith are given expert performances
Richard Fairman The Financial Times Jan 2024
https://www.ft.com/content/f1ced48a-7370-4889-be8e-c37d58739bb6

Under the artistic direction of Eamonn Quinn, the Louth Contemporary Music Society in Dublin, Ireland has become one of the most visionary and thoughtful funders of new music. They present pre-existing works, too, including a surprisingly great interpretation of Terry Riley’s In C played on traditional Irish folk instruments. But its reputation is being made with these commissions, which have also included singular music from Jürg Frey and Michael Pisaro-Liu. This new album features astonishing work by Canadian composers Linda Catlin Smith and Cassandra Miller (the latter lives in London) and British composer Laurence Crane—all musicians who maintain a strong connection to classical tradition while deftly playing with its form. Crane’s Second String Quartet, “String Quartet No. 2,” is beautifully performed by the Esposito Quartet. It’s a slow-moving piece strewn with stark voicings and melodic shapes, taken at the most leisurely pace, pulled together beautifully, deconstructing timeless string quartet cadences and building something totally modern from them. That’s what the other two works do, too, allowing us to hear two living composers authoritatively producing sublime choral music, performed here by the Chamber Choir of Island, and conducted by Paul Hillier. In performance, the members of the choir are scattered around the audience in six clusters when they sing Miller’s “The City, Full of People,” but even without that separation the melodies she created, singing along to Tomas Tallis’s “Lamentations of Jeremiah” as made the piece, create a shimmering sonic fabric that feels simultaneously ancient and psychedelic, and her structural conceits keep the movement deliciously hard to predict. Smith’s “Folio” feels more modern with its gracefully changing landscape, deftly mirroring a weird detachment appropriate to a piece using the poetry of Emily Dickinson.
Peter Margasak Best of Bandcamp Classical Contemporary Nov. 2023

Three powerfully beautiful works feature on the latest release from the Louth Contemporary Music Society, all composed for this year’s LCMS midsummer festival. The music is various, but all of it haunting. All of it, too, creates a deep atmosphere of stillness.
Cassandra Miller’s The City, Full of People surrounds you with voices echoing from out of the sixteenth century, bearing memories of plaintive church music by Thomas Tallis.
From Laurence Crane, whose music is at once elementary and extraordinary, comes a string quartet that has one ear on the great quartet repertory and the other on the mouth organ.
Then the choir comes back for Linda Catlin Smith’s Folio, translucent and strange, finding music for the stray ventures towards poetry that Emily Dickinson jotted down.
The collection joins a sequence of LCMS recordings that have been widely acclaimed. Linda Catlin Smith’s earlier Meadow for strings, released as an EP, was chosen by Alex Ross of The New Yorker as one of the notable recordings of 2020. Steve Smith got it right: ‘a timely gift of easeful beauty’.

I would say the Louth CMS is particularly significant because of the dedication, love and devotion that drives Eamonn Quinn to seek out special musicians to bring to his corner of the world. These choices are made on musical worth regardless of their commercial potential. It is these kind of risks that keep music alive. Composer – Terry Riley

louthcms.org