My recording launches

We're releasing my three string quartets one at a time, and Quartet for Anne is the first

This week my move to fulltime composing had a big moment — the release of my Quartet for Anne, music perfect for Valentine’s Day, because I wrote it as a surprise birthday present for my wife, bringing musicians to our home to play it.

The recording is from an album of my three string quartets on the Acis label, played by the Terra String Quartet, who in December won the Naumburg Chamber Music Competition.

It’s a lovely performance, gorgeously played, and recorded in glowingly warm and clear sound. It’s on Spotify and Apple Music, and this week three classical radio stations are broadcasting it.

Why release just one quartet?

It’s because of our sequential release plan — make Quartet for Anne available now, another quartet next month, and in May the full album, with the remaining piece. That gives us a long promotion ramp, with many chances to talk about what we’re offering.

About Quartet for Anne — I wrote it with love, weaving it together from other music of mine that Anne knew. Looking back, that now seems like composing alchemy. I don’t know how I made the piece seem (at least to me) so seamless.

Briefly, about the other quartets:

• The Remembered Song is a spiritual meditation (commissioned by my friends at Classical Movements, who also hosted a live performance of the three quartets before the recording sessions).

• Mahler Variations, the longest of these pieces and the most intricate, starts (in a hush, as I’ve found) with the opening melody from the last movement of Mahler’s Third Symphony. Which, in 22 variations, I then take on a journey through many musical styles, paying tribute to things that I love, ranging (in music) from Webern to Elvis.

About how we’re promoting this:

That’s worth another post, especially since I’ve talked in the past about problems I’ve seen with classical music publicity. So it’s fair to ask how I’m doing it, with Acis and with my publicist, Josephine Hemsing.

Two things are worth saying now:

First, we made a virtue of necessity. It’s taking longer than we thought to finish final edits of all three quartets. So we accepted that reality, and made our plan to release the album in stages. To get Quartet for Anne finished in time for Valentine’s Day, and move on from there.

As I said, it’s advantageous for us to talk about this recording more than once. In part that’s because — PR reality — people may not even look at what we send them. So give them more than once chance! Making sure, each time we reach out, to promote something new about the music.

Then there’s who we’re trying to reach. We have to decide on that — to figure out who, in this wide world of ours, might like what we’re promoting, and go directly to them.

Classical radio was an obvious target. Quartet for Anne seemed perfect for them — just five minutes long, lovely to hear (or so I’ve been told), and with a sweet backstory to tell on the air.

And when awhile ago I talked to someone from classical radio, I got just that response, especially after he heard the music: “I’d put that on the air.”

So rather than send a press release out to the world (we can do that later), we began by emailing people at classical radio. And quickly got a response, three broadcasts. We’ll go back to our radio list, and see what more we can generate.

All this is thrilling for me. Which could be another post — how this feels, making myself a composer, after years of doing it just intermittently.

It feels thrilling, real, and humbling.