Wels with Paul Lytton; Folk Music with Corsano/Smith in NY/Philly

This limited edition download and chapbook set features the first composition released from Nate Wooley's For/With commissioning series and festival. Written specifically for Wooley, Michael Pisaro-Liu has built a lush and natural bed of sinetones upon which the trumpet blends and emphasizes spectral colors through the use of different mutings before taking off in some of Pisaro-Liu's most intimate and lyrical writing to date. The trumpet returns at the end to add gravity to the sinetones, bringing the piece to a quietly exultant end.

This download release comes with a beautiful, small book featuring the trumpet score for stem-flower-root, photos from sculptor Jessica Slaven, a half-aphoristic essay by Wooley about stems, flowers, and roots, an insightful piece of writing by Pisaro-Liu on D'arcy Thompson's influence on the piece, and a conversation between performer and composer. The book is designed by Lasse Marhaug in TTE's classic minimalist design and is the first to feature works from the For/With Festival (Christian Wolff's For Trumpet Player, TTE003, is slated for 2022.)

The For/With Festival occurred in three iterations, from 2017-2019, at Brooklyn’s Issue Project Room space. Initially conceived as a commissioning series, the concerts were an outlet for Nate Wooley’s project of commissioning, performing, and documenting pieces for solo trumpet by composers that may not have seen the instrument as a viable or interesting outlet for their musical voices. The first festival, in 2017, included solo premieres of works by Christian Wolff (For Trumpet Player upcoming release as TTE003) and Michael Pisaro-Liu (stem-flower-root TTE002), as well as works by Ash Fure and Annea Lockwood. In 2018, the premieres consisted of works made in direct collaboration with Wadada Leo Smith (Red Autumn Gold upcoming release TBA) and Annea Lockwood (Becoming Air 2021 release on Black Truffle Records) as well as ensemble works by Annea Lockwood, Ash Fure, and Catherine Lamb. 2019, the last year of the For/With Festival included premieres of work for trumpet by Sarah Hennies (monologue TBA) and Eva-Maria Houben (chanting ballads TBA) as well as works by Katherine Young and Ryoko Akama. Although the festival had reached its end before the COVID quarantine, work continues on new commissions by Katherine Young and Catherine Lamb in hopes of creating an alternate literature for the future of solo trumpet.

Each Tisser Tissu Editions recording will be accompanied with beautifully designed books including information and context intended to help unspool and reconstruct the meaning of the music in the same way the reader unravels and reweaves a text. In some cases, these accompanying features will clarify: composers and performers talking directly about their work. In others they will only give a vague contextualization or will exist to purposely frustrate understanding. All of these elements are intended to goad the audience into reflection and personal study, with the best possible result being a return to the work as a way of invitingnew and individual threads into the overall fabric.