DESCRIPTION:
Played by Sybarite5: Sami Merdinian, violin; Sarah Whitney, violin; Angela Pickett, viola; Laura Metcalf, cello; Louis Levitt, double bass at the Kosmos in Albuquerque, NM on July 25, 2010.

Black Bend begins with a collage of distant, mournful sounds, or perhaps a languid summertime landscape populated by the chatter and drone of rural insects; from this texture a slow blues emerges and accelerates in a wailing frenzy, only to dissolve into nothing as quickly as it materialized. This imagery was inspired, in part, by certain local legends surrounding the collapse of a railroad bridge over a meandering stretch of the Cuyahoga River. From the composer: While I don't particularly believe in ghost stories, the thought of the deceased victims' moans rising up from the river suggested to me the painful, almost supernatural power of expression which often inhabits the voice of the blues singer. Yet at the same time, certain details of the scene (i.e. the relentless "click-clack" rhythm of the doomed train) stood out to me as almost grotesquely comic. I reacted to the emotional complexity of the story with a musical language flagrantly lifted from the American blues tradition but persistently shrouded in an ominous aura that foreshadows the piece's inevitable conclusion. Dan Visconti (b1982) composes concert music infused with the directness of expression and maverick spirit of the American vernacular. His compositions often explore the rough timbres, propulsive rhythms, and improvisational energy characteristic of jazz, bluegrass, and rock—elements that tend to collide in unexpected ways with Visconti's experience as a classically-trained violinist, resulting in a growing body of music one reviewer describes as "both mature and youthful, bristling with exhilarating musical ideas and a powerfully crafted lyricism." Visconti studied composition at the Cleveland Institute of Music and the Yale School of Music, primarily with Margaret Brouwer, Aaron Jay Kernis, Ezra Laderman, and Zhou Long. He is a member of BMI and currently resides in Washington, DC.