Elliott Sharp: Tranzience

- Elliott Sharp

For nearly 40 years, Elliott Sharp (b. 1951) has created a body of work that is exemplary in both its breadth and its depth. Sharp's discography, which numbers more than 300 separate items, includes works for orchestra, string quartet, rock band, blues band, solo guitar, multiple guitars. He is constantly in search of new sounds, processes, ways to create narrative arcs, ways to find music in unexpected places. His work is fed by acoustics, mathematics, philosophy, visual arts, and history. Central sonic concerns are melodies and grooves both micro- and macro-, harmonic saturation, density and texture, the vocalistic, the hyper-real. The goal is psycho-acoustic chemical change. He consistently tries to create structures with the spontaneity and energy of an improvisation.

These four works exemplify the wide variety of approaches to the manifestation of his core concepts over a period of nearly twenty years. They reference influences and philosophies and, in addition, the diversity of their sound-worlds present sonic strategies that are unique to his compositional approach, including personalized extended techniques that extend the range of the instruments beyond notes. All are receiving their premiere recordings, stunningly realized by an array of stalwarts of the contemporary-music scene.