"Law of Mosaics" Live with A Far Cry at the Gardner Museum

by Ted Gordon on April 5, 2017, 11:55 a.m.

A Far Cry's acclaimed 2014 album The Law of Mosaics pairs two works by Andrew Norman and Ted Hearne: Norman's A Companion Guide to Rome and Hearne's Law of Mosaics. Both works are synoptic: they stitch together the composer's experience with some kind of landscape (or soundscape), creating compositional wholes that are greater than the sum of their parts.

In an interview with musicologist Ryan Dohoney from the liner notes to the album, Norman writes: 

I really like the idea that music can contain layer upon layer of refer­ence, and that those references can add up to a potentially rich experience that goes beyond the notes and rhythms on the page. I think this is something I share in common with Ted, though I’m not using direct quotation and sampling to create that web of reference in the way that he does.

Similarly, Hearne notes:

I wanted to play with sampling’s ability to access our shared histories in different ways. […] And by giving the movement an arbitrary formal restraint (“Palindrome’’), I hoped to create a space where the listener could hear each sample in a new context while still interacting with their historical ramifications.

A Far Cry will perform the album in its entirety at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum on April 6th, a rare opportunity to hear what WQXR calls "an aural View-Master worth peering through". Above, check out Hearne's "Palindrome for Andrew Norman", a movement from Law of Mosaics that uses Norman's music as its source material. You can find A Far Cry's album via Crier Records.