Separation Songs

Ever wonder what two centuries colliding sounds like? “Separation Songs” is a haunting album-length work for two string quartets. It juxtaposes and weaves together an array of 18th-century composer William Billings’s hymn tunes, altering them via real-time-generated variations as the piece unfolds. Both quartet parts are performed via overdubbing by the noted new-music-championing Eclipse Quartet. “The Eclipse [Quartet] is LA’s answer to 20th-century and present-day music.” (“HuffPost”). Composer Matt Sargent’s music has been described by critics as “a powerfully organic experience” (“Sequenza21”) that “uses bare resources to establish a bounded and essential space” (“The Wire”)