Caroline Shaw - Thousandth orange for piano 4tet | 2018
Recorded 04/21
'Thousandth Orange begins with a very simple 4-chord progression. Nothing fancy. Nothing extravagant. Just something quite beautiful and everyday, that is enjoyed and loved and consumed and forgotten. Something you’ve probably heard before, in a pop song or a music theory class. While considering my love of Brahms' piano quartets and my memory of playing them-and more generally how our memories of beloved music evolve over time-I began thinking about the history of still-life paintings. Those bowls of fruit we see framed in museums-sort of lovely and banal, at first glance, but then richer when considered in the long story of humans painting things that they see, over and over and over again. There's a reason that Van Gogh painted those vases of sunflowers again and again, or Caravaggio his fruit. Maybe after the tenth, or the hundredth, or the thousandth time one paints, or looks at, or eats, an orange (or plays a simple cadential figure), it is just as beautiful as the first time. There is still more to see and to hear and to love. More angles reveal themselves-more perspectives and corners and stories, more understanding-more appreciation of something that most would consider unremarkable. Thousandth Orange is about these tiny oblique revelations that time's filter can open up in a musical memory. The title also suggests a thousand different shades of the color orange, or the image of a thousand oranges, or perhaps a thousand ways of looking at an orange.'
- Caroline Shaw
Violin - Leon Human
Viola - Dominic Stokes
Cello - Sandy Scott-Brown
Piano - Audrey Wu
Audiovisual recording - Rafael Todes and Harry Fetherstonhaugh
Editing - Dominic Stokes
With thanks to the wonderful people of Hampstead Parish Church
As part of our debut album - IINK
Rothko Collective
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