About the Event

Kali Malone presents All Life Long, her critically acclaimed album for pipe organ, choir and brass quintet conducted by Sam Nester and performed by Malone, Stephen O’Malley, the lower voices from Roomful of Teeth and brass ensemble by Anima Brass. 

Kali Malone composes and performs with a clarity of vision. Her music is patient and focused, built on a foundation of evolving harmonic cycles that draw out latent emotional resonances; letting go of expectations of duration and breadth offers a space for reflection and contemplation. In her hands, experimental reinterpretations of centuries-old polyphonic compositional methods become portals to new ways of perceiving harmony, structure and introspection. 

All Life Long simmers in an ever-shifting tension between repetition and variation. The pieces for brass, organ and voice are alternated asymmetrically, providing nearly continuous timbral fluctuation even as thematic material reiterates. Each composition’s internal framework of fractal pattern permutations has the paradoxical effect of creating anticipated keystone moments of dramatic reverie and lulling the listener into believing in an illusory endlessness.

“Malone is a poet of attenuation. The compositions on All Life Long proceed at the considered pace of a chess-by-mail match. Each step is a marker of choices made. As a listener, you pay attention not just to those steps but to the overtones that fill the air in between. Each chord is a burr of wonderment. To listen closely is to find compositions within, as waveforms meld, tones circle, and patterns shift with a dynamism initially belied by the seeming stasis.” –Pitchfork

Artist Media

Funding

Special thanks to our partner The Greene Turtle in College Park, MD for their support. This event is supported in part by the Maryland State Arts Council and the Morris and Gwendolyn Cafritz Foundation.